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The Spectator

23 May 2026 Aus

Snouts in the trusts

Albo’s animal farm

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Hubris is here

We have now entered the beginning of the end for the Albanese government; certainly the worst ‘gummint’ in Australia’s history…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

Here at the Free Enterprise Centre for Law Reform, we have been slaving away on some long-overdue improvements to the…

Australian Features

Features Australia

How Tickle v. Giggle happened

One man’s discrimination is another girl’s protection

Features Australia

Too many devil-worshippers in the Liberals’ broad church

Thanks to Labor’s deception, One Nation’s rise is here to stay

Features Australia

Business/Robbery, etc

Let’s hear it for Taylor’s good old free-enterprise capitalism

Features Australia

The return of Jew-hatred

An ancient evil has been rehabilitated

Features Australia

Bolt from the blue

Mysterious outbreak of Taylor Derangement Syndrome strikes Sky hosts

Features Australia

Follow Menzies: vote One Nation

A grand alliance to save Australia and avoid death duties and taxes on the family home

Features

Notes on...

Forties’ love: tennis serves me a perfect midlife crisis

There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon?…

Features

Burnham’s fate will be decided in the Strait of Hormuz

In the last few days, the government has performed two extraordinary about-turns. On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Treasury…

Features

‘Being a Labour mayor in Manchester is playing politics on easy mode’: Is Andy Burnham up to the job of PM?

When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won…

Features

The performative hypocrisy of the pro-Palestine mob

You haven’t really made it in life until you’ve addressed the Oxford Union. That’s how I feel upon reading the…

Features

The National Garden Scheme is the perfect antidote to Chelsea’s vanity

Shortly before the New Gardens Organiser at the National Garden Scheme (NGS) is due to arrive at our farmhouse in…

Features

No one recognised me on the Cannes red carpet!

‘We are taking the picture to Cannes,’ said John Gore, the producer and financier of My Duchess, my new film…

Features

What lists of our greatest novels get wrong

‘Where are all my favourite parts?’ Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica…

Features

Cultural amnesia explains our fury at the past

I was in Newcastle the other day and found myself standing beneath Lord Grey’s Monument. The column is 135 feet…

The Week

Leading article

Labour must be honest with voters about the coming crisis

So far, Labour has staged a contested leadership election in government only once – 50 years ago, in 1976. The…

Diary

My first act as prime minister

If I were prime minister for a day (which is looking like an increasingly realistic prospect for all of us),…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Streeting resigns, HS2 stalls and ebola spreads to Uganda

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, found his position challenged after Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary. At the…

Ancient and modern

Did Plato invent women’s lib?

One could go on endlessly about what the ancients have done for us, but one of the most interesting things…

Letters

My late husband’s insatiable appetite for ‘sticky willies’

Labour’s just deserts Sir: Last week’s leader hit the nail on the head (‘Desperate retreat’, 16 May). You have to…

Columnists

The Spectator's Notes

The £10 pint explains the rise of Reform

I bought my first pint of bitter, in a pub in Slough, in 1972. It cost 12 pence. The Bank…

Columns

Kemi has saved herself – but can she save the Tories?

Instinct matters in politics. Overthink and you can underperform. Try to box too clever and you get punched in the…

Columns

My encounters with Wes Streeting

The Labour party seems to have ignored the advice I gave it in last week’s column, and so we are…

Columns

The secret shame of being ‘Reform-curious’

As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I…

Columns

If you think your bills are bad now, just wait

Forgive the doom-mongering, but the US, and especially the UK, may be dangerously on course for a sovereign debt crisis.…

Any other business

Manchester won’t raise a statue to Andy Burnham

Already heard enough of ‘Is Manchesterism a thing and did Andy Burnham invent it?’ I’m afraid you’ll hear a great…

Books

More from Books

Another heroic freethinker is wiped from Russian history

Vera Gedroits, the world’s first woman professor of surgery, inevitably fell foul of Stalin, despite supporting workers’ rights and saving hundreds of lives in the Russo-Japanese war

More from Books

Macbeth in Swahili? There might even be improvements

In his invigorating book on Shakespeare in translation, Daniel Hahn explains how in certain languages entire Shakespearean phrases can be rolled into a single word

More from Books

The punishing gluttony of Georgian high living

Even in the grandest country houses guests were expected to eat and drink to excess, on chairs covered in wipe-clean leather and with chamber pots handy

More from Books

Highland noir: The Grey Coast; The Serpent; Blood Hunt, by Neil M. Gunn, reviewed

The Clearances underlie Gunn’s vision like a skull beneath the moorland’s skin in the haunting historical novels he is best remembered for

More from Books

A weary trek in the steps of Garibaldi and his Redshirts

Tim Parks and his wife struggle over scrub and scree in Sicily following the march of the Thousand in May 1860

More from Books

It’s grim up north: Malc’s Boy, by Shaun Wilson, reviewed

In this work of autofiction, shocking violence is meted out to a small boy by his father in Wigton - leaving one wondering how the two are getting along these days

More from Books

What does it say about Britain that the Palace of Westminster is crumbling?

Jan-Werner Müller explores the ways in which both politicians and the electorate are conditioned by their built democratic environment

More from Books

How Rupert Murdoch destroyed the innocent enjoyment of watching sport

Since the emergence of Sky Bet in 2001, the ‘casinofication’ of sport has ensured that innumerable ‘micro-events’, along with major fixtures, are now firmly in the grip of gambling

More from Books

The global revolution sparked by a vegetarian schoolteacher in Helsinki

After Hilda Kakikoski and 18 other women were elected to the Finnish parliament in 1907, female politicians emerged worldwide to challenge the patriarchy

More from Books

Stay within the lines to realise your full creative energy

Narrow boundaries can lead to focus and innovation, argues David Epstein, whereas total freedom can be paralysing and result, paradoxically, in conformity

More from Books

Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?

The ‘readymade’ sculpture, signed R. Mutt, may have been the brainchild of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and only claimed by Duchamp after her death

Lead book review

A glimpse of the extremes of Emily Brontë’s imagination

Confined spaces as well as open ones preoccupied Emily, with dungeons and graves filling her poetry as much as the unbounded landscape of the moors

Arts

Australian Arts

Sex symbol or respected actor?

You don’t have to be any specific age to thrill to the Opera Australia production of La Traviata. It is…

Television

I’m done with Rivals

Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring.…

Theatre

Why is this Tudor drama full of swearing?

1536, by Ava Pickett, is set in a wheatfield near Colchester during the final months of Anne Boleyn’s life. Three…

Pop

Joy and melancholy from Tame Impala

About 15 years ago, I spoke to a relatively unknown neo-psychedelic musician from Western Australia called Kevin Parker. It was…

Cinema

What have they done to Tom & Jerry?

Time was you knew where you were with Tom and Jerry. He chases the mouse; catches the mouse; the mouse…

Opera

The Arts Council’s bleak vision for the future of opera

English National Opera’s first production created in Manchester is Angel’s Bone, a one-act opera by Du Yun and the librettist…

Exhibitions

The Venice Biennale was just that bit worse than usual

The 61st Venice Biennale arrived freighted with portent. To cut a long story short: Russia and Israel were invited to…

Arts feature

Derek Jacobi on playing Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud almost had a second career in the cinema. He acted as an extra in a couple of films…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

Visitors have a licence to offend, and some visitors offend more than others, and it was reasonable to assume that…

Aussie Life

Language

Speccie reader Tim writes: ‘I’m interested to know when (and why) “partner” took on its new meanings. Years ago, I…

Dolce vita

Our local nudists are running wild

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It was midnight, more or less, and my middle daughter, Magdalena, 18, said with all the untroubled…

Food

‘It’s all small plates because the girls are the main course’: Rhino at The Windmill reviewed

You don’t go to a strip club expecting to put something in your mouth unless you’re an incorrigible roué. So…

Real life

We’ve lost our only anti-vaxxer friend in the village

‘Can I go now?’ said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I…

Crossword solution

2750: Lincoln Memorial – solution

Solvers had to highlight the BINARY (101010111110) and HEXADECIMAL (ABE) forms of the PUZZLE NUMBER (2750), thereby both filling in…

No sacred cows

AI Armageddon has replaced climate change hysteria

How worried should we be about AI? Absolutely petrified, according to a new documentary called Chasing Utopia. Billed as the…

The Wiki Man

A foolproof way to pick a leader

Our esteemed editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. ‘The people of this…

Dear Mary

Is it ‘common’ to look at a restaurant bill before paying?

Q. My sister has married in later life and we all like her husband. They have moved nearby and now…

Crossword

2753: Rapid sea

The 23D 41A, stirred up by 3D and 6A 26D the mother of 29A. Unclued lights identify the protagonist and…

Competition

Spectator Competition: One way

For Competition 3450 you were invited to submit a short story written in words of one syllable. This challenge produced…

Chess

Clash of Generations

At the start of May, 14-year-old Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus became the youngest player in history to cross the symbolic 2700…