The Spectator
14 July 2018 Aus
The real Brexit drama is just beginning
Australia
GST money for nothing
Paul Keating once warned about never getting between state premiers and a bucket of money. Since 1999, that bucket has…
Australian Columnists
Latham’s law
Have new communication technologies suddenly become dangerous? I always thought texting on whiz-bang iPhones was a good thing.If my daughter’s…
Brown study
You may not realise it, but you are walking with history, for a Political Scandal of the Third Kind is…
Australian Features
An inconvenient truth about child abuse
In debates about child abuse and neglect, truth normally becomes the first casualty. ‘A quarter of Australian children had witnessed…
May day for Brexit
I confess to being incredibly naive. After the 23 June 2016 Brexit referendum when 1.7 million more Britons voted for…
Thinking versus doing
The Australian National University’s rejection of the Ramsay Centre’s Western Civilisation degree has ignited a debate about university education in…
Revolt against collectivism
If politics is the robust exchange of ideas, there are certainly times when one must look beyond personalities to see…
Black mass
That Dark Mofo, the Tasmanian festival dedicated to the dark arts, has courted controversy once again is no surprise. Just…
Tin foil hats and the top end of town
You have to wonder what Paul Keating will be thinking as the invitations to attend Labor fundraisers and campaign events…
Letter from Russia
The Football World Cup was a winner for Russia; tourists like me flooded in (to cheer a reasonably performed Australian…
Anti-Abbott galahs just lying or incompetent?
Tony Abbott has the politicians, the commentariat and other elites very worried, and not just about energy.They know that what…
Features
The real Brexit drama is just beginning
‘The numbers just don’t stack up,’ one cabinet minister wearily declared to me on Monday night. This is, perhaps, the…
The agony of World Cup penalties
Last week, for the first time since 1996, and for the second time in nine attempts, England won a match…
The World Cup has made us proud to be English
Buying fish at Cambridge market on Sunday, I found myself chatting to the fishmonger about the prospects for England in…
Get rid of the Dangerous Dogs Act and more people will die
When I was a child in the 1950s it was unheard of for someone to be killed by a dog.…
The lost art of patience
I’m losing my patience. Not so long ago I’d happily wait ten minutes for a bus, or even whole days…
Donald Trump is coming to Blenheim – and the protesters are ready
For more than 40 years we’ve lived in a beautiful, listed, Cotswold stone, Stonesfield slate-roofed farmhouse in Oxfordshire. The trouble…
Alpacas – the latest must-have wedding accessory
Of all the window displays in Amsterdam this spring there was just one that stopped me in my tracks. I…
The Week
What Britain needs is a disruptor-in-chief like Donald Trump
It is appropriate that the 45th President of the United States has come to Britain this week on a working…
This is what happens when you put Brexit in the hands of unbelievers
Well, we did it. No, not Brexit, the World Cup or my (somewhat less) ambitious scheme at Legal & General…
Portrait of the week: Theresa May’s Brexit deal in doubt as Boris Johnson and David Davis resign
Home Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary the day after David Davis resigned as Brexit Secretary, both in reaction to…
Where does authority really lie in the UK? The ancients would have known
Forget David Davis, Boris, the cabinet, the commentariat. It’s time to concentrate on the big picture and the central question:…
Letters: Matthew Parris’s marriage proposal is absurd
Marriage proposal Sir: Matthew Parris’s proposal that marriage be abolished, and civil partnerships installed in its place, is absurd (‘The…
Columnists
Why did Theresa May ‘clear’ the EU deal with Merkel before consulting her colleagues?
Why do the British turn to the Germans in their moments of European trouble? It never works. When Jacques Delors…
This is Brexit in name only to keep the plebs happy
My wife has decided she likes Dominic Raab, the latest poor sap to be despatched from a hamstrung, spasticated government…
Ukip’s on the verge of a spectacular comeback – and it’s all thanks to Theresa May
Paul Joseph Watson, Count Dankula and Sargon of Akkad have joined Ukip. Let that sink in. This is an in-joke…
Why do so many women feel such a strong urge to paint?
Why do so many women feel such a strong urge to paint? It has been troubling me for years now.…
Data breaches show we’re only three clicks away from anarchy
An IT glitch afflicting BP petrol stations for three hours last Sunday evening might not sound like headline news. A…
Books
Portugal’s entrancing capital has always looked to the sea
Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half…
Beautifully out of sync: All the Lives We Never Lives reviewed
‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist,…
Chopin’s Piano is an eclectic trip through 19th-century romanticism
It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a…
Nothing doing
There is a long and noble history of books about doing nothing. In the 5th century bc the sage Lao…
First Novels
Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, £12.99)…
Caryl Phillips’s new novel manages to make Jean Rhys boring!
The problem with writing about writers — and a particular blight on the current vogue for autofiction — is that…
The Stuart supremacy
Few twists of political fortune are as discombobulating as the youngest child making off with the family inheritance. Richard III,…
Arts
Aida
Aida was commissioned from Giuseppe Verdi to celebrate the opening of the Opera House in Cairo in early 1871, the…
Life
Why I am not drinking for the rest of the year
What a week this has been! What a great mood I’m in! Why, it’s almost like being in bed… with…
The anatomy of a Spectator summer party
I flew from Marseille to Gatwick, rode the Gatwick Express to Victoria, and walked down the thoroughfare of Victoria Street…
Is EE fantastic after all?
This was going to be about how a major phone company surprised me by delivering a fantastic service. I was…
Leningrad Lip
This description of Viktor Korchnoi was coined (an oblique reference to Muhammad Ali’s nickname of Louisville Lip) by Ian Ward…
no. 514
Black to play. This is from Karpov-Korchnoi, Dortmund 1994. In this unusual position Karpov has two queens but Korchnoi’s forces…
Closed shop
In Competition No. 3056 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the High Street. Your…
2367: When pigs fly
Five unclued lights form a quotation from a work concerning the 18 of 19, 15A and 23. The 18’s name…
to 2364: Frolicsome Threesome
WEIN (2D) suggests 21, 35 and 37 (German wines); WEIB suggests 10, 25 and 42 (Germanic female names); GESANG suggests 14,…
Video games like Fortnite are fun — so they must be bad
It was only a matter of time. The headteacher of a primary school in Ilfracombe in Devon has banned ‘Flossing’,…
The true winner of this World Cup? Russia
Like most people with any taste, I like the odd vodka, I love Crime and Punishment, I enjoy Turgenev and…
Dear Mary: How do you deal with a monologuing fellow guest on board a yacht?
Q. A long-standing friend has an admirer of some means. He has invited her to borrow his fully staffed and…
A Wimbledon-themed tea has little to do with tennis, but I loved it: Claridges reviewed
Claridge’s is a toff sanctuary and one of the best hotels on earth. It specialises in its own myth, which…
Has Boris brought ‘turd’ back into polite society?
I have never lost my admiration for Boris Johnson’s summary of British ambitions over Brexit as ‘having our cake and…
