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The Spectator

12 April 2025 Aus

The Dullists

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Australia

Leading article Australia

The Dullists

Has Peter Dutton got what Paul Keating used to describe as ‘the mongrel’ in him? That was the question left…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

On present indications, the Coalition is heading for a loss in the coming election. The big excuse for this debacle…

Australian Notes

Australian notes

I can well remember the elation I felt when Donald Trump was re-elected in November last year. I knew it…

Australian Features

Features Australia

The legacy media is broken

We’re the problem, not Trump’s tariffs

Features Australia

Poor white trash

We were warned our living standards would crash

Features Australia

The persecution of Marine Le Pen

The European elites have a selective love of democratic freedoms

Features Australia

Shag on a rock

Australia is running on empty

Features

Features

In defence of benzos

In the latest series of The White Lotus – a moral fable about the narcissism and toxicity of the privileged…

Notes on...

Why I said no to marrying my cousin

There’s a joke that does the rounds about a Pakistani couple who get a divorce. After their union is dissolved,…

Features

Saviour complex: Jonathan Powell is still trying to change the world

In 2011, the Hampstead theatre put on an autobiographical play about a marriage strained by lies, betrayal and, as the…

Features

Bring back gory book covers!

Looking for a light, breezy read? If you happened to be browsing the bestseller bookshelves this summer your eye might…

Features

How Birmingham became the epicentre of Britain’s opioid crisis

Rats grown fat on refuse prowl the streets of Birmingham. Mounds of rubbish pile up outside houses. Desperate to avoid…

Features

Confessions of a middle-class jobseeker

Having been made redundant from a job in the City, I could have afforded not to sign on at all.…

Features

Has the Kremlin talked Trump out of sanctions?

After a two-hour phone call last month, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin announced that an improved bilateral relationship between the…

Features

Eco warriors are driving themselves to extinction

It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth…

Features

Would you steal from a restaurant?

‘You wouldn’t steal a car…’ began the early noughties anti-piracy video. ‘You wouldn’t steal a television… You wouldn’t steal a…

Features

Trump shock: is there method behind the madness?

A ‘black swan event’, as defined by the risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, is a surprise occurrence that…

The Week

Letters

Letters: The case for ‘raves in the nave’

Reality check Sir: While I share Mr Gove’s diagnosis of lodestar-less Starmerism (‘Cruel Labour’, 5 April), I cannot share the…

Diary

Heaven is an oeuf en gelée

The cherry blossom was at its finest as I made my last early morning trip through Regent’s Park to Broadcasting…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Trump’s tariffs, a theme park for Bedford and a big bill for Big Macs

Home In response to President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘This is not just…

Leading article

Labour has once again betrayed grooming gang victims

Parliament’s last day before recess is usually a dull affair. A one-line whip allows MPs to return to their constituencies…

Ancient and modern

Cicero’s case against astrology

The young in Canada are said to be taking up astrology. But why? Do they think Mark Carney is a…

Columnists

Columns

Where the young rich flee to

If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people…

Any other business

Why it might be best if US stock markets go on falling

It gives me no pleasure to say I told you so. ‘If [Donald Trump] is prepared to cause mayhem in…

Columns

How Starmer plans to weather Trump’s storm

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Keir Starmer has struggled to set the agenda. The latest attempt came…

The Spectator's Notes

Who’d be a bishop today?

In his recent interview with our American edition, The Spectator World, Donald Trump is reported to be faced by a…

Columns

The secret to great friendships

A few years back, a friend from Newcastle was down in London and I was giving him a tour of…

Columns

The lunacy of Gillian Mackay’s abortion bill

I had spent my life so far in blissful ignorance of a woman called Gillian Mackay. I mean, I knew…

Columns

What if Trump is just bonkers?

‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial…

Books

More from Books

What did John Lennon, Jacques Cousteau, Simon Wiesenthal and Freddie Mercury have in common?

They were all stamp collectors, and feature among Robert Irwin’s oddball fraternity caught up in a collecting mania spanning centuries

More from Books

A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed

With clear parallels to Angelica Bell at Charleston, young Ivy believes herself a constant disappointment to her family of avant-garde writers and artists

More from Books

‘I felt offended on behalf of my breasts’ – Jean Hannah Edelstein

When misguided well-wishers suggest to Edelstein, post-mastectomy, that she might now have ‘the breasts of her dreams’, she wants to reply that those had always been her own

More from Books

Marriage, motherhood and money: Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Funny, smart stories explore the ‘stale’ married state, the anxieties of parenthood and the sweet-sour nature of female friendship. But do they go far enough?

More from Books

The great explorers of the past dismissed as mercenary opportunists

Simon Park follows the current trend of accusing Columbus, Magellan, Da Gama and other famous navigators of seeking personal enrichment above all else

More from Books

Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany

Even in retreat in August 1944, a German posse carried out a particularly brutal triple murder at a hillside farm outside Florence in a vendetta against the Einstein family

More from Books

The psychiatrist obsessed with ‘reprogramming’ minds

William Sargant’s controversial treatments of troubled young women in the 1960s included prolonged induced comas, ECT and, in extreme cases, lobotomies

More from Books

Urban gothic: I Want to Go Home, But I’m Already There, by Roisin Lanigan, reviewed

A rented London flat starts to exude hostility and malevolence – or could our impressionable heroine just be imagining it?

More from Books

Petty, malicious and tremendous fun – the Facebook office drama

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s gleeful dissections of former colleagues’ foibles were met with furious denials and the threat of legal action – guaranteeing maximum publicity for her book

Lead book review

William Blake still weaves his mystic spell

Philip Hoare considers the ageless, hypnotic appeal of the painter, poet, visionary and ‘one-man utopia’

Arts

Australian Arts

The zenith of art

Last week your columnist cut a paragraph stating that the original Melbourne Higgins in My Fair Lady, Robin Bailey, and…

Pop

Van Morrison is sounding better than ever

There is a website called setlist.fm which allows its users to vicariously attend pretty much any concert. Search the name…

The Listener

Sunny Schubert and iridescent Ravel: album of the week

Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about…

Television

Surprisingly good: Amazon Prime’s Last One Laughing reviewed

‘What will it take to make Richard Ayoade laugh?’ If you find this question about as enticing as ‘Whose turn…

Radio

Impeccable history of the free market – and from the BBC too

The launch of Radio 4’s Invisible Hands series has been both blessed and cursed by timing. It tells the story…

Theatre

A horribly intriguing dramatic portrait of Raoul Moat

Robert Icke’s new play examines one of the least appetising characters in British criminal history. Raoul Moat went on a…

Classical

The liberating, invigorating music of Pierre Boulez

‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive…

Cinema

Dry retelling of the Odyssey – but Fiennes is ripped: The Return reviewed

Uberto Pasolini’s The Return stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in a retelling of the last section of Homer’s Odyssey.…

Exhibitions

Absorbingly repellent: Ed Atkins, at Tate Britain, reviewed

In the old days, you’d have to go to a lot of trouble to inhabit another person’s skin. Today you…

Arts feature

The unnerving world of Erik Satie’s 20-hour composition

Once Igor Levit starts playing Erik Satie at 10 a.m. on 24 April at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, he can…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

Like every country whose peace and prosperity has depended, for as long as most of its population has been alive,…

Aussie Life

Language

In a recent post-budget interview Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed his tax cuts (worth about a Mars Bar a day) are…

Food

Smart even for Chelsea: Josephine Bouchon reviewed

Josephine is a Lyonnaise bistro on the Fulham Road from Claude Bosi. It is named for Bosi’s grandmother and is…

Park life

Why the Japanese flock to Battersea Park

They weren’t familiar park visitors, but a couple with a specific purpose, laden down with camera equipment. They unpacked carefully,…

Sport

The Premier League is rubbish

Of the 73,738 benighted souls who pitched up at Old Trafford on Sunday for the Manchester derby – presumably even…

Mind your language

‘Trillions’ doesn’t add up

‘Oh no, darling’ said my husband, stirring from torpor in his armchair, ‘only about seven ounces of you is bacteria…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: Should weddings be ‘no ring no bring’?

Q. An old friend who is extremely generous and loyal has the most infuriating habit. Despite being efficient in other…

Real life

I’m more convinced than ever that Ian Bailey was innocent

Over coffee in a seafood restaurant in the harbour, I talked with the most notorious accused man in Ireland and,…

No sacred cows

Leave our Lords alone

Within a few months, the constitution that has served this country so well for hundreds of years will yet again…