The Spectator
2 March 2019 Aus
Breaking point: can either Labour or the Tories survive Brexit?
Australia
Labor is beatable
Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen is pretty darn sure of himself. What he wants out of May’s election: a clear mandate…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
The appointment of Ita Buttrose as the new Chair of the ABC is another step back from making it truly…
Australian notes
Let’s emulate Jordan Jordan Peterson’s much-hyped performance on Q&A was a model of reasonable discussion. As long as the ABC…
Kiwi notes
What ScoMo should have said to Jacinda ‘Thank you Prime Minister Ardern for those blunt comments just now in which…
Australian Features
Royally irresponsible
Over the past year, a belief has taken hold that the main driver of wrongdoing in our banking and financial…
The tyranny of the minority
When police accused actor Justin Smollett of staging a hate crime, his left-wing cheer squad threw down their pom-poms and…
Business/Robbery etc
It’s like the farcical Fawlty Towers admonition not to mention the war; in the real world it could not be…
Footballers have rights, too
There’s a good chance that because of the charge against Jack de Belin, the right to the presumption of innocence…
Deep State steps out of the shadows
One of Sherlock Holmes’ enduring tropes is the dog that didn’t bark in the night, giving away the fact that…
For whom the Pell tolls
As the author of a book on Vatican corruption, I know there are almost no depths to which the progressive…
Gaia’s Juniors
Grumpy adults who complain about the fecklessness of youthful ‘snowflakes’ will be gladdened that at least some of the young…
Features
Breaking point: can either Labour or the Tories survive Brexit?
The only certainty in the Brexit process is that there is no certainty. Brexiteers had long sought solace in the…
Lying with science: a guide to myth debunking
‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be…
My evening with Jacob Rees-Mogg — live at the London Palladium
A woman dressed as a nun is standing outside the London Palladium with a placard, warning about ‘an evening with…
The art, beauty and joy of videogames
By day, I’m a mild-mannered book-world hanger-on; by night, I roar through the streets of Gotham in my heavily armed…
No deal? No problem
Britain, we’re led to be believe, is heading for the worst catastrophe in its history. Officialdom is warning that a…
My husband was a citizen of nowhere. Where can he rest in peace?
It is cold, dank and muddy and I’m contemplating a barely defined path from the paved road into an ever-darkening…
Bernie Sanders is back – and terrifying the Democratic establishment
Washington, DC Bernie Sanders likes private jets. That, at least, is the malicious word being put about by Hillary Clinton’s…
‘Too English, bizarre, and what are the rules again?’: Cricket in Buenos Aires
For most Latin Americans, who are themselves no strangers to sporting eccentricity, cricket remains a baffling proposition. The game is…
The Week
Who will safeguard our democracy if local news dies?
The announcement this week that Capital, Heart and Smooth radio are cutting back their local news shows might not in…
Portrait of the week: More Brexit discussions, Trump meets Kim Jong-un and India launches strikes on Pakistan
Home Theresa May said in the Commons that if MPs voted on 12 March against her draft withdrawal agreement with…
Alan Johnson’s diary: I’m not sure I’d have had the guts to join a new party
The separation between ‘members’ and ‘strangers’ always struck me as being one of the most archaic aspects of the House…
How much do you think it costs to travel from London to Manchester?
Success of the SDP The breakaway Labour MPs would have an uphill task emulating the SDP’s early success. It fought…
The aim of the Games
The Olympic Committee has added surfing, skateboarding and break-dancing to the events for the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020.…
Australian letters
CO2 Sir: Will you or a politician please explain to the people the thermodynamics of how .038% of CO2 can…
Columnists
Corbyn’s handling of Brexit has been magnificently opportunistic
Jeremy Corbyn never ceases to attack Mrs May for trying to run down the clock. She has certainly done that,…
Women’s sports may one day soon consist entirely of men
Congratulations to Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood for sweeping all before them in the Connecticut girls’ high school track races…
Why we must make an example of Shamima Begum
The three most popular justifications for punishment under the law all (as it happens) begin with R. They are retribution,…
Why I hate ‘the n-word’
One of the depressing aspects of writing a column attuned to social hypocrisy is so rarely running short of new…
What’s the worst line of business you could be in, if we’re heading for no deal?
What’s the very worst line of business you could be in, if we’re heading for a no-deal Brexit? Not finance,…
Books
A clear vision of Walter Gropius the man is hard to come by
Walter Gropius (1883–1969) had the career that the 20th century inflicted on its architects. A master of the previous generation…
Angels through the ages
A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at…
Love, death and loss in a small village – Lanny reviewed
Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways…
The world according to Charlotte Bingham, Spies and Stars reviewed
Charlotte Bingham has had an extraordinary writing career. She wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds (newly republished by…
I Will Never See the World Again, Ahmet Altan’s fourth book written from prison
There’s no getting away from that title. I will never see the world again. It catches your eye on the…
Mister Miracle, the cheesiest of all superheroes, reviewed
Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of all costumed super-heroes. Created by Jack Kirby…
Playing mind games: Let Me Not Be Mad reviewed
The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he…
’I know it when I see it’ – anti-Semitism for dummies
Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped…
Arts
David Cairns explains how we learned to love Berlioz
According to his friend and fellow-composer Ernest Reyer, the last words Berlioz spoke on his deathbed were: ‘They are finally…
The only way to avoid Ariana Grande’s drivel is to move to Iran
Grade: D Among the many reasons for moving to Iran is this vapid, talentless, derivative, hyperbolically oversexed drivel aimed at…
I always come away more confused after listening to Moral Maze
Is it me or are we now faced (or perhaps I should say fazed?) much more often by stories in…
Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural wonderland reigns supreme at the Royal Academy
‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ If there’s an exception to prove Shaw’s rule, it’s Phyllida Barlow. The…
A torpid seminar on why Trump is the Antichrist: Shipwreck reviewed
When reviewers call a work ‘important’ they mean ‘boring’ and ‘earnest’. And in those terms Shipwreck is one of the…
I’ve never seen Coogan better or Partridge funnier: This Time with Alan Partridge reviewed
Steve Coogan is back as Alan Partridge but frankly who cares? Like Ali G, I’ve long thought, he’s one of…
Odious, endless dross: Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch reviewed
Please believe that I try to give every production my full attention, to do due diligence, to blink and miss…
Opera North’s Rite of Spring shows the advantages of confining the music to the pit
It was Stravinsky himself who suggested that, in order to preserve its difficulty, the opening bassoon solo of The Rite…
Peculiarly mesmerising: Hannah reviewed
Hannah stars Charlotte Rampling in a film where not much happens and not much happens and not much happens and…
Pinchgut Artistic Director Erin Helyard
A rarely performed sacred work by J. S. Bach and a masterpiece by Telemann that has never been performed in…
Life
I’ve contributed greatly to animal welfare, via the casino
A rare British species, a womanising ex-foreign secretary, kissed and told about his brief affair with a yellow-eyed temptress last…
My life as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer for my mother
My fifth week confined to barracks as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer. I drive to the supermarket about twice…
Farmers get treated like terror suspects by the RSPCA
‘What do you mean, you have no ID?’ I asked the farmer, starting to feel dizzy with the mind-boggling convolution…
Why we need to support middle-ranking trainers
Owner Phil Simmonds from Rochdale was 17 when he first went racing, joining a friend’s stag party at Haydock Park.…
Playing the blues
This Saturday (2 March) sees the annual varsity match between the teams of Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford are strengthened this…
no. 543
Black to play. This position is from Wagner–-Eckersley-Waites, Varsity Match, London 2008. How did Black make effective use of the…
Haikick
In Competition No. 3087 you were invited to submit haikicks. We already have short-form hybrids such as the clerihaiku (here’s…
2397: Obit V
We recently lost a fine 13, whose legacy includes 10 (two words) and 9 (two words), and four other unclued…
to 2394: Opening time
‘Never eat an oyster unless there’s an R in the month’ (Brewer). Eight unclued lights (in appropriate order) start with abbreviations…
We thought having four kids would be idyllic. What were we thinking?
You’d think the little buggers would be grateful. Caroline and I had just shelled out for our two middle children…
We put a man on the moon before wheels on suitcases. What else are we missing?
The Romans never invented the stirrup. It took 50 years after the invention of canned food for someone to invent…
Dear Mary: Plastic or wooden loo seats?
Q. Please advise on how I can move on from a social impasse. My best friend of 50 years claims…
Twenty years on, the Walbrook is still an enchantment
Early last century, an impoverished youth emerged from the East End. Able and hard-working, he discovered — as many had…
Where on earth does ‘kibosh’ come from?
‘What is a kibosh?’ asked a German medical friend of my husband’s, when the word cropped up. No one knew,…
