The Spectator
12 April 2025 Aus
The Dullists
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
On present indications, the Coalition is heading for a loss in the coming election. The big excuse for this debacle…
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
The persecution of Marine Le Pen
The European elites have a selective love of democratic freedoms
Features
In defence of benzos
In the latest series of The White Lotus – a moral fable about the narcissism and toxicity of the privileged…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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: 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…
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: 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…
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…
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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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
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
‘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
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?
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
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
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
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?
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
William Blake still weaves his mystic spell
Philip Hoare considers the ageless, hypnotic appeal of the painter, poet, visionary and ‘one-man utopia’
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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
Like every country whose peace and prosperity has depended, for as long as most of its population has been alive,…
Language
In a recent post-budget interview Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed his tax cuts (worth about a Mars Bar a day) are…
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…
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,…
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…
‘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: 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…
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,…
Leave our Lords alone
Within a few months, the constitution that has served this country so well for hundreds of years will yet again…












































































