Status anxiety
‘Retain and Explain’ won’t end the culture wars
I’m sympathetic to Oliver Dowden’s formula for defusing culture-war disputes about statues of controversial historic figures: ‘retain and explain’. That…
Who let the dog out?
Caroline and I are just back from a weekend break in Scotland and, nice though it was, I hadn’t realised…
The thrill of running late
‘Dad, why is it that whenever we go anywhere, we’re always running to catch a train?’ asked Charlie, my 13-year-old.…
My wife is caught in a web of fear
Even in my shed at the bottom of the garden I can hear the screams coming from the house. Shrieks…
Has Boris Johnson given up on free schools?
For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a…
The stories that are too good to check
Last weekend, Rolling Stone ran a story about an interview an emergency room doctor had given to a local news…
Why Gove’s night on the dance floor is good news
I was pleased to see pictures of Michael Gove at a nightclub in Aberdeen last weekend. According to press reports,…
My eye-opening mini-break in Hull
Given how difficult it is to arrange an overseas holiday, I thought I’d take Charlie and Freddie, my two youngest,…
The Orwell Foundation has let George Orwell down
George Orwell would not have been surprised by the brouhaha surrounding Kate Clanchy. Two years ago, Clanchy published Some Kids…
I took my wife to a Millwall match – and it didn’t go well
The fighting started just as Caroline turned right on to the Uxbridge Road after emerging from QPR’s stadium on Loftus…
Have my suits shrunk in lockdown?
I hadn’t noticed how much weight I’d put on during lockdown until I went out for a business lunch a…
The true cost of my week in Wales
Rather miraculously, my daughter managed to leave the country last week to go on holiday with a group of friends.…
In defence of footballers taking the knee
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 battle to be top dog
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…
What would ‘sensitivity readers’ have made of my student scoops?
‘Whatever you do, don’t call them snowflakes,’ Caroline said the last time I spoke to Oxford students. ‘That’s not a…
The luxury of being pro-lockdown
I’ve just written an essay for the People’s Lockdown Inquiry, a new collaboration between Buckingham University, the Institute of Ideas…
The curious parable of Dartington
I spent last weekend in south Devon at Dartington, the former estate of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, and now a…
The rise of the pluto-meritocracy
Meritocracy, a word coined by my father, gets a bad press these days. Two recent books — The Meritocracy Trap…
For journalists like Protasevich, 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…
The problem with decolonising Shakespeare
Scarcely a day passes without a major British institution announcing it is ‘decolonising’ itself. Most recently it was the turn…
Our confusing voting system has cost me £25
Some 114,201 ballots were rejected in the first round of the London mayoral election, approximately 5 per cent of the…
We Lumas have the weight of the world on our shoulders
In the introduction to an anthology of his jazz record reviews, the poet Philip Larkin imagines his readers. They’re not…
The problem with Equity’s anti-racism guidelines
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of…
