Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio certainly has chutzpah. This week she demanded the Australian Energy Market Operator be given stronger…

Team Morrison presided over the worst abuses of our rights in our history

It’s a long road back for conservatives who lost the culture wars

Police persecute Covid critics without oversight or accountability

From Sri Lanka to Holland, the road to hell is paved with emissions reductions

Problems with the Greens real agenda

Big business, unions and government cut cosy deals to suit themselves

It was Shinzo Abe who nudged India into the Quad

Shinzo Abe sought to militarise Japan to defend democracy

Our leaders have forgotten the sacred promise: ‘Never Again’

What’s behind Africa’s love affair with country music?

Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of…

What the new PM could learn from Lee Kwan Yew

The leadership candidates on taxes, net zero and freedom of speech

Is he about to stage his comeback?

Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

The death of bad-taste humour

There’s surely not a more despised creature in Britain than the hornet. They have long been viewed as yellow jacketed…

Home In the contest for the leadership of the Conservative party, Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi were the first of…

Hot topic Last week’s Barometer detailed past UK temperature records. Those were broken by this week’s heatwave. On Monday a…

When I was a teenage Tory activist in the mid-1990s, I hoped one day I’d be part of a leadership…

Procurement profligacy Sir: In response to Susan Hill’s query ‘Who allows the profligacy in NHS hospital procurement to continue?’ (‘Best…

Trains were running even more slowly than usual. Schools were closed again. Offices were empty. No one would deny that…

I was listening to a rich bastard on the radio explaining why he was feeling disinclined to give any more…

The late Senator Lloyd Bentsen was 26 years older than the young Senator Dan Quayle when in 1988 they crossed…

To govern is to choose. So leadership contests for a party in government tend to come down to a key…

Whitehall is telling ministers that this is a ‘caretaker’ government and so, by convention, cannot take decisions. This is not…

In the news recently, we’ve heard from multiple Britons who’ve lost family members or sacrificed their own health to Covid’s…

Airports are on my mind, since I’ve just stepped off an on-time early-morning flight from East Midlands to Bergerac –…

It is hard to love the Conservative party. But one reason it has at least always commanded a certain amount…

There may have been irregularities in the processing and counting of ballots that warranted official investigation

We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…

To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to…

In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…

What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…

In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…

Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for…

Angela Hui was born into a life of service: Chinese takeaway service. Her parents had fled mainland China, where they…

A ‘global’ history of Scotland must, by its very nature, be one of Britain and Empire too, says Alex Massie

It’s fascinating to hear that Warwick Thornton––who took the world by storm some years ago with that knockout indigenous film…

Mary Wakefield on Katia and Maurice Krafft, who loved volcanoes and each other

Where the Crawdads Sing is based on the bestselling book (by Delia Owens) that I picked up from one of…

Many years ago a man on the end of my cigarette stole my soul. Mr Migarette (for such was his…

I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…

There are composers who are known for a single opera, and there are operas that are known for only a…

Patriots, by Peter Morgan, is a drama documentary about recent Russian history. And though it’s a topical show it’s not…

Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…

Sport has always played a big part in Australian life, but in the interests of diversity it would be wrong…

No sooner had the words ‘blue murder’ appeared on the cover of this august journal than a Speccie reader was…

Q. I was billeted for a party in Norfolk with a couple previously unknown to me. They were more than…

Here come the global elites. They love it here. Their spiritual second home. The heat, the rosé, the food, the…

Hello, and welcome to episode one of What’s in My Frunk?, the first in an occasional Spectator series of news…

The latest heatwave reminded me of my brief career as a marijuana farmer. This wasn’t in the summer of 1976,…

In the battle of ideas, it is sometimes necessary to make a tactical withdrawal. That is now the case over…

‘Come on, old girl,’ said my husband as though encouraging a cow stuck in a ditch, ‘you must know.’ It…

Michael Beloff, QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford, has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and…

My phone buzzed and rang while I was doing the horses until I thought, fine, I’ll call the Defence Secretary…

I was very sorry to learn of the death of the legendary American player and author Eddie Kantar – he…

President George W. Bush used to quote his fellow Texan Robert Strauss who famously declared: ‘You can fool some of…

White to play and mate in two. Composed by Philip Hamilton Williams, British Chess Magazine, 1895. Answers should be emailed…

Modern chess computers, like the program ‘Stockfish’, are treated as oracles. Plug in a position, start the engine, and within…

In Competition No. 3258, you were invited to submit a postcard sent while on holiday in a well-known fictional destination…

The unclued lights (two single words, one a proper noun, four pairs and one trio) share a certain feature.  …

The title resolves into CL RVW which suggests the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The unclued…