The Spectator
16 March 2019 Aus
Judge dread
Australia
Labor goes coal turkey
Opinion polling last week provided chilling evidence that Australians are planning to elect a Shorten Labor government – the Greenest…
Australian Columnists
Australian notes
On academic freedom The dismissal of Tim Anderson from his academic post at the University of Sydney has triggered a…
Diary
It was well before sunrise on a February morning at Bondi Beach. A handful of walkers, joggers and runners were…
China notes
Australia’s China obsession: get over it The Chinese economy is slowing, and everyone except the Chinese Communist Party knows it.…
Australian Features
Business/Robbery etc
Is it $8.5 million of BHP’s shareholders’ money wasted on a directors’ virtue-signalling frolic to further their climate change credentials…
In praise of Justice Fagan
One sombre fact of life in contemporary Australia is the steady flow of terrorism prosecutions in which individuals have been…
Germany’s schizoid approach to Israel
One would have thought that, for certain historical reasons, Germany today would show extra-sensitivity in avoiding appearances of anti-Semitism. However,…
My pencil knows best
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial ‘Who’s Afraid of Socialism?’ laid out the case that much of the US Democratic…
Super Justice Warriors
Captain Marvel, released to cinemas this month, is more than just another addition to the already saturated superhero film market.…
Judge dread
Let me talk about an example of an undemocratic trend from my home state of Queensland. A fortnight ago the…
Newspeak, translated
‘There’s not a good enough reason for Adelaide to be there,’ quipped ALP grandee Graham Richardson on Sky TV, inadvertently…
Features
Meltdown: three years on and we are no closer to a Brexit resolution
Almost three years have passed since Britain voted to leave the European Union, and yet we are still no closer…
How likely is an imminent general election?
When a British government loses control over parliament, the natural remedy is to hold a general election. Why prolong everyone’s…
The way to change anti-vaccine campaigners’ minds
What a baffling group of people anti-vaxxers are. They rail against one of the miracles of modern medicine, peddling scare…
The case for prosecuting Bloody Sunday ‘Soldier F’
It is more than 15 years since the Bloody Sunday soldiers last appeared in public. For months I sat in…
Never Mind The Bollocks: a punk’s view of Brexit
One of the great things about touring with a band is that it gets me away from my little west…
Who could have predicted tarot cards would be back in vogue?
I first met a tarot reader in a hotel lobby in central London on my birthday four years ago. I…
What happened when an innocent Christian preacher was accused of Islamophobia?
Being a street preacher can be a thankless business. Since moving to Britain from Nigeria nine years ago, 64-year-old Oluwole…
The unique, bittersweet beauty of Irish ruins
The Celtic Tiger has come and gone. Over the past 30 years, billions of pounds poured into Irish houses and…
The Week
The Tories are squandering the opportunity of Brexit
In all the madness of the Brexit voting, it’s easy to forget that Philip Hammond revealed a mini-Budget this week. Even…
Portrait of the week: government defeat, the spring statement and a fatal airplane crash
Home The government was defeated by 149 votes — 391 to 242 — on the EU withdrawal agreement presented by…
George Osborne: My campaign to Make Hancock Great Again
The best thing about the Evening Standard going to print at lunchtime is that we can be first to a…
Will no-deal Brexit fears lead to cheaper flights?
Cox’s codpiece Attorney general Geoffrey Cox returned from Brussels without even a ‘codpiece’, the name used by some Tories for…
As the Romans knew, eternal life is hopeless without eternal youth
A research professor has pointed out that lengthening human lifespan threatens to turn us into living zombies unless we can…
Australian letters
Virulently proportional Sir: James Allan’s rhetorical assault on Jacinda Ardern suffers from a plethora of boringly familiar trans-Tasman prejudices. To…
Columnists
Leadership requires imagination, but Theresa May has never displayed any
I had forgotten, until I checked this week, that Mrs May timed the general election of June 2017 in order…
Can the Republican Party finally win over minority voters?
Washington, DC Republican strategists have long complained about how, every election, the Democrats mobilise minority groups against them. Now they’re…
Why I’ve joined the SDP (and why you should, too)
I was down the pub with my wife last week, out in the tiny smoking section, when a woman with…
What you learn standing on a street corner in Beirut
A pale sun had emerged from wintry clouds and the hillsides were topped snowy white. But all around me was…
If you forgive the IRA, then you must forgive the Parachute Regiment too
In my 2010 short story ‘Prepositions’, a woman has lost her husband not in 9/11 but on 9/11 — when…
What shares would a post-Brexit ‘Optimist Fund’ include?
The nation certainly needs optimism this week, so what better moment to start building our ‘UK Optimist Fund’ of shares…
Books
Richard Sorge: the Soviet Union’s master spy
Interviewed on the Today programme on 7 March, a former executive of the gigantic Chinese tech firm Huawei admitted: ‘It…
Who was the real St Patrick: an evangelist or a tax dodger?
St Patrick’s Day, on 17 March, is now regarded as a prime opportunity for Irish politicians to travel abroad on…
The subversive, Austenesque wit of ‘Late in the Day’, by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’…
The uphill task of judging whether Tony Blair was a villain or hero
On the day that Tony Blair left the Commons chamber for the last time (to a standing ovation led by…
Has Dave Eggers finally found his voice?
The Parade, Dave Eggers’s eighth novel, is a slim, strange book, another unpredictable chapter in the career of this hard-to-pin-down…
The cheerful manifesto of anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite
Ashton Applewhite is a leading American ‘inspirer’ on how to make the most of being over the hill. She has…
Arts
Toby Jones on the allure of the everyman – and the glamour of coach-driving
Toby Jones shuffles into the café in Clapham where we are meeting. He’s wearing a duffle coat and a hat…
Wicked, humorous and high-spirited: Dorothea Tanning at Tate Modern reviewed
Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s…
Scala Radio is a real threat to Radio 2
It’s not surprising given the way that electronic communication has taken over so much of our daily business, minimising human…
Still far from perfect but chaps will like it: Royal Ballet’s Frankenstein reviewed
Choreographer Richard Alston is now 70 and his latest outing at Sadler’s Wells is a greatest hits medley. As with…
Almost triumphs over the absurdity of its premise: Northern Ballet’s Victoria reviewed
Blame Kenneth MacMillan. The great Royal Ballet choreographer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s was convinced that narrative dance could…
Deft humour and daft imagery: WNO’s Magic Flute reviewed
Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always…
Slow-moving tale with a strong echo of Brideshead: Alys, Always at the Bridge reviewed
Nicholas Hytner’s new show, Alys, Always, is based on a Harriet Lane novel that carries a strong echo of Brideshead.…
Tender, sweet, affecting: Simon Amstell’s Benjamin reviewed
Simon Amstell’s Benjamin is a romantic comedy about a young filmmaker whose second feature is about to première, and he’s…
It’s shocking how many Michael Jackson fans are still determined to take his side
Halfway through the first part of Channel 4’s extraordinary documentary Leaving Neverland (Thursdays), I flicked through the comments on social…
Aurum by Alice Topp
Such a wonderful word: ‘verve’. Not used much now, it’s one of the words we owe to the French. We…
Life
The four times I have lied in 42 years writing this column
Gstaad As Emperor Maximilian told his convulsed-by-tears servants as he was about to be executed by the Mexicans: ‘Who…
The travesties competing in the Terrier category at Crufts
Does the BBC suppose that it will convert the public to a belief in equality if it does not, in…
From a solar-powered bin to HS2: the destruction of my childhood home
My mother is a classy lady. I have always known this, but it still affected me in a way I…
While some bookies behave admirably, the BetBright debacle is a disgrace
Encountering a generous-hearted bookmaker is normally as rare an occurrence as finding a picture of the Duchess of Sussex without…
Oxford win
The annual Varsity Match between Oxford and Cambridge ended in a surprisingly narrow victory for the dark blues. Their team…
no. 545
White to play. This is from Finn-Abbas, Varsity Match 2019. A strategic puzzle rather than a tactical one. White has…
Climate change
In Competition No. 3089 you were invited to put your own spin on a weather forecast. The seed for…
2399: Lines of work
Eight unclued entries (two of two words, one hyphened) form a folk rhyme used as the basis for the first…
to 2396: Reader …,
Unclued lights were husbands (40A) of Jane Austen’s heroines. First prize Alison Hinder, Sholing, SouthamptonRunners-up Janet Dibley, Polegate, East Sussex;…
Why is it only privately educated women who get to lecture people about ‘oppression’?
Scarcely a week passes without a privately educated young woman with a successful career in journalism publishing a book about…
Are IQ tests really the best way to measure nature vs nurture?
I have a dim memory from 1970 of a primly dressed distant relative visiting in a Baby Austin. This, I…
Dear Mary: what’s the polite way to ascertain someone’s gender?
Q. When my mother was widowed ten years ago she decided to take in lodgers to pay the gardener’s bills…
Red meat and red wine: the ideal way to spend the first Sunday of Lent
Life is far too important to be taken seriously. At least, that was the conclusion which we meandered towards as…
Why the OED says ‘coloured’ is offensive
‘The term coloured, is an outdated, offensive and revealing choice of words,’ tweeted Diane Abbott last week in response to Amber…
