Leading article
The right balance
When lockdown was first proposed in March, one of the many arguments against it was that people would tolerate being…
Sir David Barclay, 1934-2021
When Sir David Barclay, along with his twin brother Sir Frederick, bought The Spectator in 2004, the magazine came as…
What have we learnt?
So great have been the government’s failures over Covid that it would be easy to forget to give credit where…
Ring out, wild bells
Save for those old enough to have lived through the second world war and its immediate austere aftermath, it would…
A shot of optimism
At the beginning of the Covid crisis, some expressed the hope that a pandemic might at least bring a divided…
High and dry
Does it matter that Debenhams and the Arcadia group have gone under this week, taking 25,000 jobs with them and…
Comfort spending
Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures…
The wrong reset
The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and…
A deal to be done
It now looks increasingly likely that lockdown will end on 2 December, after all. The decision to impose further restrictions…
A lockdown too far
The benefit of having a lockdown announced some days in advance is the ability to savour what is about to…
What America needs
It is remarkably uncommon for a US president to fail to be re-elected. It has happened just twice in the…
End the Sage secrecy
At the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis it was easy to see why the Prime Minister was so keen to…
A united kingdom
When the Black Lives Matter protests struck London in the same week that Public Health England published a report into…
Boris’s second wind
The centrepiece of Boris Johnson’s speech to Tory party conference this year was his Damascene conversion to the merits of…
Lockdown fatigue
From the vantage point of Downing Street, Boris Johnson may feel reassured that the further measures against Covid-19 he imposed…
Don’t arm Iran
Hard though it is to remember now, 2020 began with a very different dark cloud on the horizon. For a…
Identity crisis
On the face of it, there could scarcely be better conditions for a revival of the Labour party. Even before…
The case for restraint
One of the many ironies of the past few months is that young people, while least affected by the virus,…
A question of competence
This week was built up by the Prime Minister to be the moment that would mark the return of economic…
The economy of tanks
That an abundance of tanks is no guarantee of a happy and secure nation was evident from the Soviet Union’s…
Biden’s complacency
There is a great mystery lying behind the 2020 US presidential election: how come a country of 350 million, which…
Exam failures
It was obvious that closing schools would hit the poorest hardest, inflicting permanent damage and deepening inequality. While many private…
Mood shift
Throughout the past few months the government has appeared to face an unenviable choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods.…
Peer pressure
It is no credit to British democracy that we have the second largest legislative chamber in the world. The only…
The EU’s new fault lines
Anyone who imagined that the departure of Britain would make for more harmonious EU summits in future will have been…
