Features
Britain’s cities are descending into a San Francisco-style nightmare
One morning a few months ago I was walking past St James’s Park station when a dishevelled man with his…
The inconvenient truth about cannabis and mental illness
Mash’s older brother was the same age as Anthony Williams when he slaughtered a stranger in a brutal and random…
China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths
China’s naked weaponisation of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s ‘four pests’ campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to…
Gilded age: the lessons from Trump’s second term
Washington, D.C. When John Swinney, the SNP leader, and Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few…
Is Zack Polanski our Zohran Mamdani?
Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Zack Polanski offers the thrill of cost-free rebellion. Mamdani leapt to prominence at the…
Save England’s apples!
On a grey autumn morning, the apples in the National Fruit Collection look vivid. They pile up in pyramids of…
Confessions of a reformed polyamorist
There is an adage, attributed to author Robert Heinlein, that every generation thinks it invented sex. This often means finding…
Why are psychiatrists scared of sectioning dangerous patients?
The police initially treated last weekend’s stabbings on a train near Huntingdon as a possible terror attack, before confirming it…
How not to train a truffle dog
For the first time in decades, King Charles has a new pet dog, a lagotto Romagnolo called Snuff. Queen Camilla…
Datageddon: Britain’s stats have become dangerously unreliable
There were cheers in the Treasury last month as the nation’s statisticians discovered a spare £3 billion down the back…
Trump should beware of backing regime change in Venezuela
Few Americans find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention in Libya. Regimes were successfully changed, but…
How the Northern line brought T.E. Lawrence to The Spectator
If only the Northern line could get its act together. Last week saw further buffing of its reputation as the…
‘People can’t take a joke these days’: Michael Heath on wokeness, The Spectator and turning 90
When I joined The Spectator, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-storey Georgian house, and the further down the…
Hex appeal: the rise of middle-class witches
In King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, written in 1597, he vigorously encourages witch-hunting and, in particular, the tossing of…
How the occult captured the modern mind
The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968:…
Satanic verses: the origins of Roman Catholic black metal
In his youth in the early 2000s, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s ‘most evil…
The gym, the hairdresser, the campaign trail: the inside story of Kemi’s first year
On the day of the local elections in May, when the Tories suffered a historic setback, Kemi Badenoch went to…
My debt to the teacher who introduced me to Wagner
We saw the world end in Berlin, again. Another Ring Cycle – hurrah! – in the beautiful Staatsoper theatre on…
The irreplaceable Lady Annabel Goldsmith
During Jane Austen’s time, their roles would be reversed. Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who left us last week at 91, would…
The Ultras: meet Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance
Ayoub Khan seemed delighted. Last Thursday, it was announced that fans of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv would…
The westerners helping Hamas win the propaganda war
After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield, Hamas can also claim a kind of…
The battle for Farage’s mind
If New Labour was Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, then Reform UK is perhaps Tony Blair’s. Distaste for the three-time election…
‘Trump isn’t easy’: Piers Morgan on his friends – and foes
When I meet Piers Morgan, he warns me he’s glued to the ‘moment in history’ happening on his TV screens…
The sheer joy of nighties
One of the many problems with the internet is that it’s increasingly difficult to know if something has become ubiquitous…
Prince Andrew: from playboy to PlayStation
Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Prince Andrew’s current travails…
