The Spectator’s Notes
The utter utopian unwisdom of AI bros
In my belated quest to develop a faint sense of what AI is doing, I have just read Sebastian Mallaby’s…
Burnham’s solutions must not lie in the 1970s
Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT…
Burnham’s bogus toughness
The horrible murder of Ann Widdecombe is being used both by Reform and its critics as a means of fighting…
Prince Harry and Nigel Farage have more in common than they might like to admit
At about 2 p.m. on Tuesday, two cases with a common characteristic coincided. One was Nigel Farage’s long statement about…
‘No. 10 North’ won’t work
It would be dangerously premature to say that Ukraine is winning the war with Russia, but Russia is undoubtedly doing…
Even Andy Burnham doesn’t know what Andy Burnham stands for
The British constitution is an admirably flexible thing, so I would not claim that Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign, and the…
Don’t avoid the right questions about Preston Davey’s murder
It is now retrospectively acknowledged that great harm was done by the refusal to investigate serious crimes and dangerous mental…
The posh are persecuted for their accents
Mark Nowak, father of the murdered Henry Nowak, spoke powerfully in public after Vickrum Digwa was convicted of the crime.…
Devolution makes corruption likelier
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, stands explicitly in the tradition of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum 135 years ago.…
The £10 pint explains the rise of Reform
I bought my first pint of bitter, in a pub in Slough, in 1972. It cost 12 pence. The Bank…
Cling on, Sir Keir
People laugh at Sir Keir Starmer for failing to acknowledge that he has almost no hope of survival. This is…
Keir Starmer is downplaying the Islamist threat to Jews
At Tuesday’s anti-Semitism ‘summit’ in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word ‘Islamists’. But…
Can you answer this quiz intended for seven-year-olds?
‘Modernity’ is often behind the times. On Wednesday, parliament pushed out all remaining hereditary peers, although we live in an…
No one seems sure about why Olly Robbins had to go
This session of parliament is due to end between 29 April and 6 May. Now the government is desperate for…
How nice it is we no longer have to think about John Bercow
On Tuesday, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport approved the sale of my employers, the Telegraph Group, to Axel…
The only ‘civilisation’ Trump will destroy is his own
If, as Donald Trump had threatened, ‘a whole civilisation’ had died on Tuesday night, the whole civilisation concerned would have…
The Christian grace of Jimmy Lai’s prison drawings
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Peter Brookes’s fox, who normally tops this column, is absent. They can be reassured. He…
Does it matter if Prince William believes in God?
The Prince of Wales seeks to assure us that, as a friend puts into his mouth, ‘I might not be…
The only living being on our banknotes should be the monarch
This Middle East conflict ought to be much easier than the oil embargo which followed the Yom Kippur war of…
Will books soon become extinct?
I am glad that Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate…
Tracey Emin should remake her bed
Sir Keir Starmer’s position on the US bombing of Iran is inglorious, but one should suspend disapproval to understand how…
Am I a Zionist?
The death of Quentin Deranque is strangely under-reported here. He was a 23-year-old beaten up in Lyon on 12 February…
Does Sadiq Khan approve of colonising?
How to report Iran? It is a huge story. Perhaps as many as 30,000 people were recently murdered there by…
How Keir Starmer might still hang on
A government minister and I dined just after the fiasco of the 2017 general election, with Theresa May clinging to…
Why did Peter Mandelson want Jeffrey Epstein to read my column?
Last Saturday, a friend in Washington emailed to say he had been studying some of the latest 3.5 million pages…
