Features
Why British diplomacy needs the royals
Watching David Dimbleby watching the royal family, I am instantly reminded of the BBC’s other royal David. It is pure…
Bring back the album
Usually when my tweenage sons ask about relics from my 1990s adolescence – ‘What’s a landline?’ ‘What’s a phone book?’…
Labour is now the party of welfare, not work
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have gone into bunker mode. The pair – whose political fortunes are so tightly bound…
The great climate climbdown is finally here
Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed…
The ‘Crewkerne Man’ is reviving political satire for the AI age
You’ve probably seen the videos. Kemi Badenoch delivering her Budget response in the form of a rap to a sobbing…
An apology to Hope Not Hate and Harry Shukman
In August, The Spectator began to investigate allegations that Harry Shukman, a 33-year-old freelance journalist, had used a fake British…
The art of the party trick
I’ve decided I need a party trick. This thought occurred to me at a recent dinner party as I watched…
How I bonded with Tom Stoppard over the classics
Many years ago, and well retired, I was working in my study when the phone rang and a voice said:…
Nick Thomas-Symonds: ‘The Brexit architects essentially ran away’
With his owlish expression and affable manner, Nick Thomas-Symonds looks more like the academic that he was, rather than the…
Bring back the Budget tipple!
Of all Gordon Brown’s mistakes, perhaps the most sobering was his decision to end the tradition of drinking at the…
My life as a writer
It was roughly 55 years ago, at the tail end of the 1960s, that I took the monumental decision to…
The path to peace in Ukraine will be tortuous
In order to impose peace terms, you first need to win the war. That fundamental principle seems, for the moment,…
Are you too cool for marriage?
The term ‘spinster’ doesn’t seem to scare young women like it once might have. In fact, it is rarely heard…
Marriage is the real rebellion
Jonathan Swift had a suitably unromantic attitude to holy matrimony. Once, when sheltering under a tree during a storm near…
The scientific case for marriage
‘Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ With this stern admonition, the Church has long been…
Why are we so suspicious of magpies?
I started counting magpies during my brief, doomed time as a history teacher. Trudging in every morning, the grim prospect…
The art of owning up
Though Rebecca Culley is obviously a wrong ’un – having stolen £90,000 from her dear old gramps while pretending to…
Would you pay £65 for toothpaste?
Time was, you didn’t look forward to going to the dentist. Even for routine stuff, your highest aspiration would be…
How the hyphen turned political
When Buckingham Palace announced that its errant prince, Andrew, would be known as boring old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, some surprise…
The catastrophic dumbing down of German education
German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We…
Ukraine is on the verge of political collapse
Defeat, political implosion and civil war – those are the jeopardies that Volodymyr Zelensky faces as Ukraine heads into the…
Are we finally about to crack fusion energy?
Imagine dropping a pea-sized capsule through a spherical chamber and hitting it with a colossal bolt of laser energy as…
Britain’s national security must not be sacrificed to net zero
Those who, like myself, experienced life behind the Iron Curtain understand instinctively that centrally planned economies beholden to an ideology…
It’s time to dispose of the Budget
Denis Healey’s ‘caretaker Budget’ on 3 April 1979 is an odd focus for Labour nostalgia. It came a week after…
My teenage brush with a micropenis
Like Adolf Hitler, I have been involved in a Channel 4 documentary about penises. I also share a love for…
