The Week
Letters: why do we put up with bats?
Scottish hearts and heads Sir: Alex Massie ignores the evidence when he espouses the assumption that economic concerns no longer…
Joe Biden should not take victory for granted
There is a great mystery lying behind the 2020 US presidential election: how come a country of 350 million, which…
The Romans welcomed migrants with open arms
The kind of arguments raging about migrants crossing the Channel to enter Britain illegally never raged in the Ancient Roman…
Portrait of the week: A-level chaos, quarantine confusion and revolution
Home The government seemed to be taken strangely unaware by the frenzy of recrimination that came its way when results…
Why Turkey Twizzlers are back on the menu
Pink and twisted Bernard Matthews, which stopped making Turkey Twizzlers in 2005 after criticism about unhealthy school dinners from Jamie…
Joan Collins: my face mask fight with the gendarmerie
It’s three days since rumours swirled around France that President Macron was going to impose a ‘tit-for-tat’ quarantine on UK…
Inflated exam grades let the government ignore its own failures
It was obvious that closing schools would hit the poorest hardest, inflicting permanent damage and deepening inequality. While many private…
How the Athenians would have handled the Lords
Arguments about the purpose or indeed very existence of anything resembling the House of Lords would have struck classical democratic…
Portrait of the week: Employment falls, exam failures and a roundabout rigmarole
Home In fine weather with calm seas, 565 migrants in four days crossed the Channel in small craft. French officials…
How hot does a ‘heatwave’ have to be?
Some like it hot Are heatwaves becoming a devalued currency? Last year the Met Office defined a heatwave as three…
Nicholas Coleridge: The Ghislaine Maxwell I knew
I have known Ghislaine Maxwell for more than 40 years, since she was a student at Balliol. I always liked…
Letters: Will office workers ever want to return?
The future of offices Sir: I agree with much of Gerard Lyons’s article about the future of the capital (‘London…
What we can learn from Sweden
It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after…
Economies run on confidence – the government mustn’t undermine it
Throughout the past few months the government has appeared to face an unenviable choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods.…
Portrait of the week: Local lockdowns, busy beaches and an explosion in Beirut
Home Some 2.7 million people in Greater Manchester and parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, where many Muslims live, were…
Mixed messages about body weight are nothing new
Tackling obesity is the latest government initiative, universally condemned as nannying. Ask a Spartan. From an early age, Spartan children…
Letters: How to slim down the nation
Peer review Sir: A neat solution to the levels of inactivity of some members of the House of Lords (‘Peer…
How busy have restaurants been this summer?
The other Argos The Argos catalogue, known as the ‘Book of Dreams’, is no longer to appear in printed form.…
How Boris should pick his peers
It is no credit to British democracy that we have the second largest legislative chamber in the world. The only…
Letters: What cycle helmets can tell us about face masks
Masking the truth Sir: Matthew Parris is right to laud the importance of embracing the scientific method (‘Why should opinion…
If curiosity doesn’t kill the cat, what does?
The first nanny state The Prime Minister’s strategy on obesity has been labelled a work of the ‘nanny state’ —…
The brilliance of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan
Four years ago, I bought a ranch in Wyoming. Not that I was tired of New York, but I’m fascinated…
Portrait of the week: Second wave fears, cash for cyclists and a cat catches Covid
Home At a few hours’ notice, the government removed Spain from the list of countries from which it was possible…
Letters: Why is the problem of working-class white boys not considered worth solving?
Left-behind boys Sir: Christopher Snowdon’s perceptive and informative article (‘The lost boys’, 18 July) reflects perfectly my own experiences in…
New fault lines are appearing in the EU
Anyone who imagined that the departure of Britain would make for more harmonious EU summits in future will have been…
