The Spectator
23 February 2019 Aus
Reassessing Bill
Australia
The Internationale
The number of significant political events that have taken place over the past week or so should, when taken together,…
Australian Columnists
Simon Collins
Queensland may have thrown in the towel in its wars with the cane toad, the rabbit and the crown-of-thorns starfish,…
Australian Features
The march of Europe’s nationalists
Brexit will be the defining event for Europe in 2019. But another big story will also hog the headlines: the…
On the cultural reappropriation of long sleeve dresses
As a rule, I do not write articles calling out the stupid things I’ve seen on the internet. There are…
Morrison, Dutton and the Coalition
Over here in London, politics is boiling down to a battle between perfidity (of Theresa May, her Remainer-stacked Cabinet and…
Whitewater, Lewinsky, Clinton and, er, Trump
This month marks the 20th anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate in the Whitewater-Lewinsky bogus scandal. It…
Reassessing Bill
The renewed talk about refugees and border protection, brought on by the passage of the bill for medical evacuation from…
Tipping point of hysteria
Since the dawn of the climate debate in the late 1980s, any number of tipping points for the earth’s ecosystem…
Where is GetUp’s ‘Drugs Kill’ campaign?
In their latest attempt to dupe Australians, GetUp! has enlisted both a ‘big lie’ and a hip online shopping site…
No borders, no country
If we don’t have borders, we don’t have a country’. Not many Western leaders would join Donald Trump in declaring…
Features
A divided Labour could hand the Tories another 12 years of power
In September 2016, the Labour party reached a turning point but then failed to turn. The re-election of Jeremy Corbyn…
Westminster’s splitting headache: who will quit next?
The first thing to note about the ‘South Bank seven’ is that they are nothing like the four former Labour…
Who’s really to blame for Pakistan’s terror attacks?
Islamabad Six months into Imran Khan’s premiership and the new Pakistan prime minister has been plunged into his first major…
Ignore the science fiction: AI isn’t out to get us
Every ten to 15 years there is a technology breakthrough that really changes what it means to be human. The…
Clucking hell – hen parties are just awful
‘Last fling before the ring.’ ‘Buy me a shot, I’m tying the knot.’ ‘Keep calm and bridesmaid on.’ If you…
There’s only way out of this Brexit nightmare – revoke Article 50
Brexit was a mutiny. Like all mutinies, it was driven by anger at authority rather than by a strategy for…
There’s no programme in the world like Desert Island Discs
At the end of January, I had the honour and pleasure of being on Desert Island Discs. I liked Lauren…
Everyone hates Maggi Hambling’s ‘Scallop’ – but I love it
Benjamin Britten was adamant that he did not want any memorial sculpture of himself in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk coastal town…
The Week
Female unemployment has just hit an all-time low. So yes, Britain is working
At any other time, news that Honda intends to close its Swindon plant in two years’ time with the loss…
Portrait of the week: Resignations galore, Honda’s announcement and Islamic State’s brides
Home Seven MPs resigned from the Labour party and sat in the Commons (next to the DUP) as the Independent…
Maybe I should get naked during the next Brexit protest, too
A choppy week sitting in for Piers Morgan again on Good Morning Britain. One nude studio guest, a sprinkling of…
May needs to get dramatic over Brexit – and fast
It is becoming clearer by the day that Mrs May was right not to consult her colleagues, let alone the…
Letters: the history of centrist parties does not bode well for the ‘breakaway seven’
The breakaway seven Sir: ‘In both parties there are fools at one end and crackpots at the other, but the…
Columnists
Carrying cash is becoming a minority occupation like smoking
The BBC reported on Tuesday that the proposed closure of Honda’s plant at Swindon was largely caused by the prospect…
How to solve Europe’s Nato problem
There are four major power blocs in the world — the United States, Russia, China and the EU. Of these,…
The Independent Group can’t survive just on anti-Corbyn hatred
I once came up against Mike Gapes in a fraternal game of five-a-side football played at the Elephant and Castle…
The full Delingpole: why I stripped naked and posted the video online
It was a bright Sunday afternoon and I was harmlessly at my desk, minding my own business, when from the…
The UK car industry is reversing back to the 1970s
When I wrote a fortnight ago, in the context of Nissan’s decision not to build its new X-Trail model at…
Books
Discover your inner wolf and lead a better life
For a practical at medical school on the subject of the nervous system, it was thought unwise to wire students…
What the Ancient Greeks did for us
I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would…
An exposé of high-ranking gays in the Catholic Church bears the fingerprints of the Pope’s closest advisors
The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed…
How my mother survived the Nazis, but took her own life
When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left…
Tolkien in Africa: Black Leopard Red Wolf, by Marlon James, reviewed
Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit,…
Arts
Here’s what I want from modern architecture, explains housing tsar Roger Scruton
The creation of a commission to examine beauty in new building created a stir in the media, with the chairman…
The first great English artist – the life and art of Nicholas Hilliard
When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left a religiously divided country to a young iconoclast who erased a large…
Few soldiers have seen as many terrible sights as Don McCullin
Diane Arbus saw mid-20th century New York as if she was in a waking dream. Or at least that is…
How good really was Berlioz?
Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803 in rural Isère. ‘During the months which preceded my birth my mother…
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter eschewed the cosy fireside for the great…
Forget the Don – come for the Mataphwoar Ryoichi Hirano: Royal Ballet’s Don Quixote reviewed
The trouble with Don Quixote is Don Quixote. Whenever the doddering, delusional Don is onstage, tilting at windmills, riding his…
Enjoyably contrived: BBC1’s Baptiste reviewed
What’s the best way to start a six-part thriller? The answer, it seems, is to have a bloke of a…
The terrifying genius of Leonardo
A cataclysmic storm is unfolding. Dense, thunderous lines of black chalk sweep rapidly around the paper in frantic curls of…
‘Lock him in a motel & he’d do something astonishing’: Hockney on the genius of Van Gogh
Being in the south of France obviously gave Vincent an enormous joy, which visibly comes out in the paintings. That’s…
Crackles with nylon, self-regard and unearned privilege: On the Basis of Sex reviewed
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too ill to sit on the Supreme Court. When she saw On the Basis of Sex,…
Why wasn’t Poetry Please in the Radio Times’s top 30 greatest radio shows of all time?
With the upsurge of listeners to Classic FM (now boasted to be 5.6 million listeners each week) and the imminent…
The worst Arthur Miller play I’ve ever seen
All About Eve is Cinderella steeped in acid rather than sugar. Eve, or Cinders, is a wannabe star who uses…
Bangarra 30th Anniversary
A year of 30th anniversaries; the latest is Bangarra Dance Theatre founded in 1989 by a South African Cheryl Stone…
Life
I’m all for abolishing flying: first-class on a liner is far more fun
Gstaad It’s party time here. From the richest billionaires down to those impoverished souls with only a few million…
The strange people who keep a nightly vigil over my mother
To begin with it was mice. The house was overrun with them. She saw them out of the corner of…
From Swarfega to cleanse and polish: my long path to perfect skin
‘Is it for your daughter?’ said the sales assistant as I pointed to an expensive skincare product. She had glided…
Rock solid
This year’s Gibraltar Masters saw some surprising results at the top, chiefly the victory by the young Russian, Vladimir Artemiev,…
no. 542
White to play. This position is taken from Galinsky–Gunina, Gibraltar 2019. How can White finish off in this complicated position?…
Writer’s block
In Competition No. 3086 you were invited to submit a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem. In…
2396: Reader…,
Unclued lights are a set of literary 40s. Their creator is hidden in the grid and should be shaded. Elsewhere,…
to 2393: Monster Mash-up
HORROR FILM (1D) ACTOR (15) BORIS (10) KARLOFF (26), né PRATT (21A) died on 2 February 1969. Most famous for…
There’s space for a new party in Britain, but not for another SDP
I was 17 when the Labour party last split, in January 1981, and for a variety of reasons got quite…
We football romantics love the fifth round of the FA cup
And so we say farewell to the round of 16 in the FA Cup, traditionally a viscerally thrilling process that…
Dear Mary: how can I hide that I’m no longer drinking?
Q. I have given up drink except on certain occasions when it would be really rude to refuse. What’s the…
A temple to small food in a room for rich people: the Ledbury in Notting Hill reviewed
A serious restaurant for serious times: the Ledbury in Notting Hill. It’s a good time to do it, as the…
There’s a lot of interrogating going on – and not just by policemen
My husband sat in his usual chair, interrogating the contents of his whisky glass with his old, tired nose. In…
