Status anxiety
A time to live, a time to diet
I hadn’t noticed how much weight I’d put on during lockdown until I went out for a business lunch a…
Tried and tested
Rather miraculously, my daughter managed to leave the country last week to go on holiday with a group of friends.…
Knee-jerk reactions
Before the television presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air — which cost him his job at GB…
Football’s never coming home
I failed a moral test last weekend. A friend offered me a free ticket to the Euro 2020 final and…
My life as a dogsbody
Even a small dog can be quite high maintenance. No, I’m not talking about Mali, our one-year-old cavapoochon, but Bertie,…
My problem with the Euros
I’m struggling to work up much enthusiasm about England’s progress in the Euros. I know, I know, Tuesday night’s victory…
Sense and sensitivity
‘Whatever you do, don’t call them snowflakes,’ Caroline said the last time I spoke to Oxford students. ‘That’s not a…
We’re all in favour of lockdown, darling
I’ve just written an essay for the People’s Lockdown Inquiry, a new collaboration between Buckingham University, the Institute of Ideas…
Dartington, the utopian experiment
I spent last weekend in south Devon at Dartington, the former estate of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, and now a…
Relative merits
Meritocracy, a word coined by my father, gets a bad press these days. Two recent books — The Meritocracy Trap…
Where free speech is a matter of life and death
Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of…
Reading between the lines
Scarcely a day passes without a major British institution announcing it is ‘decolonising’ itself. Most recently it was the turn…
I’ve paid the price for the supplementary voting system
Some 114,201 ballots were rejected in the first round of the London mayoral election, approximately 5 per cent of the…
Time to dust off my old records
In the introduction to an anthology of his jazz record reviews, the poet Philip Larkin imagines his readers. They’re not…
Dramatically wrong
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of…
Let me out
Has it ever been more difficult to plan a family holiday? At the time of writing, it is illegal to…
A certifiable plan
As I’ve written before, the thing I’ve missed the most in the past 12 months is going to see QPR…
The facts about race and education
Judging from the reaction to last week’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, you’d think it had been written…
A creature of habits
Along with many other people, I gave up drinking for the month of January and then resumed with gusto on…
It’s a dog eat dog world
I was walking with our one-year-old cavapoochon on the way back from the baker’s in Acton on Sunday morning when…
How I’m making up for lost time after lockdown
The last time I went to a football game was on Saturday 7 March last year when my 12-year-old son…
How I learned to love audio books
According to a charity called Fight For Sight, 38 per cent of people who’ve been using screens more during lockdown…
The conservative appeal of drug gangs
According to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, the easing of lock-down will be accompanied by a rise in crime…
The secret code of the ruling class
I naively hoped that last year’s statement by the Equalities Minister explaining why unconscious bias training was being phased out…
My advice for the next ‘free speech champion’
I was delighted to hear the government plans to appoint a ‘free speech champion’ to the board of the Office…
