The Spectator
3 August 2019 Aus
Who’ll blink first – Boris Johnson or the EU?
Australia
Flat White & the NSW Libs
When a political party ignores its base, it will turn elsewhere. The base, that usually is. But, innovators always, the…
Australian Columnists
Latham’s law
If only all Australians had the same intellectual luxury available to them as the Victorian Labor Premier, Dan Andrews. Earlier…
Canadian notes
I’m a virtue-signaller and I’m OK We have left Britain behind on this year-long sabbatical and are now in my…
Australian Features
When the music stops
Slowly, Australians are awakening from their deep 28 years slumber. For nearly three decades, they have slept secure in the…
Business/Robbery etc
ScoMo, please steer clear of anything to do with superannuation. Your unfortunate experience when Treasurer should have shown you that…
Political correctness eats at the soul of the West
I first wrote about political correctness in 1993 after buying a copy of The Official Politically Correct Dictionary & Handbook…
Boris’s second D-Day
The chances of the UK freeing itself from EU control improved no end last week. In his first statement to…
End of the world, again
Is it just me, or does the Apocalypse seem to roll around earlier and earlier each year? We’re supposed to…
Quigley has a duty to quibble
Community safety requires competent law-making by parliament, robust law enforcement by government and wise decision-making from the judiciary. If one…
Eat the chefs
The offenderati have been baying for blood ever since it was revealed that MasterChef Australia judge George Calombaris had been…
Certify the political class?
‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.’ The truth of this ancient proverb has been demonstrated by the…
Features
Who’ll blink first – Boris Johnson or the EU?
On Sunday, Boris Johnson’s cabinet ministers were summoned to a conference call for an update on his Brexit strategy. The…
Europeans have started to change their minds on Brexit
The conviction has been spreading among French people in recent days that les Britanniques have just elected Donald Trump. The…
Edible insects are not the future of food
I’ve lost track of the number of features I’ve seen joyfully hailing the edible insect revolution, entitled ‘Grub’s up!’ Barclays…
Labour can’t cope with Boris’s BAME cabinet
I’ve never voted Conservative and I never will. Having been raised in a working-class home, I can’t get past the…
There is a far better option than HS2 – and it already exists
Just 48 hours before the conclusion of the Conservative leadership contest, Allan Cook, chairman of HS2, wrote to the government…
Lebanon: the world’s best failed state
Look down from the mountains outside Beirut and, on most days, you’ll see a grey blanket of smog choking the…
Just do it: the advertising industry should embrace its right-wing roots
Am I allowed to mention Nigel Farage? Of course I am, this is The Spectator, and its readers enjoy analysing…
The grim magnificence of Gisborough Priory
Gisborough Priory was founded in 1119, although the gothic chunks which remain of it today — including the grimly magnificent…
The Week
If politicians are still in denial about Boris’s Brexit, the currency markets are not
In his first week as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has shocked those who had assumed that he is a joker…
Portrait of the week: Britain meets its new cabinet
Home The Conservatives’ poll ratings went up and the pound went down after a week of the prime ministership of…
Penny Mordaunt: I’m fired. Job done
I begin the week in Bamako, Mali, with a crackly telephone call to Commodore Dean Bassett, UK Maritime Component Commander…
Persia’s lessons for the PM
Stanley Johnson suggests his son, the PM, will easily deal with Iran because he is well acquainted with Persian history…
The need for a poll of the people
The Need For A Poll Of The People, 2 August 1919: ‘It is not to be wondered at that during…
Hot topic: How many of us own fans?
Growing fanbase A photograph of the Queen meeting Boris Johnson revealed that she uses a Dyson electric fan. How many…
Australian letters
Hearing voices Sir: I imagine that John Stone (“Dis-con notes”, July 27) would, like me, have no objections to an…
Columnists
What would you save, Marmite or the planet?
In his very long letter to Jeremy Corbyn about why, after all, he will stay out of the Labour party…
Boris may end up delivering Corbyn
Alastair Campbell has written a longish ‘open’ letter to Jeremy Corbyn, helpfully explaining why he has decided not to contest…
I’ve started talking like a hardline Leaver
Our involuntary responses know us better than we know ourselves. As I left King Charles Street in Whitehall last week…
All money is dirty – but it can still be used for good
Whitney museum: no space for profiteers of state violence // dismantle patriarchy // warren kanders must go! // supreme injustice…
Why Rishi Sunak is the one to watch in parliament
‘Turbocharging’: sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Two weeks ago, I noted that our incoming PM had deployed this power-word — with…
Books
Web of deceit: disinformation could prove the most powerful weapon of all
We could begin almost anywhere. But let’s start in Ukraine, with Babar Aliev. Babar is a former gang leader who…
Head to Berlin to hear nightingales sing
In a sense, the song of the bird in the title of this short, hugely thoughtful and fascinating book is…
The Orwellian horror of the Mr Men books
It is bad enough when we learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But later in life there comes another trauma,…
Capers in crime: Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, reviewed
Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and…
Alas, poor Hamlet — now presumed to be overweight
Do you regard fat as a noun, a food substance all humans eat and need? Or as an adjective, denoting…
A picture of rural Kentucky: Stand by Me, by Wendell Berry, reviewed
Anyone picking up a book by Wendell Berry, whether it be fiction, essays or a collection of his lucid and…
How to interrogate a murderer
This is horrible. But it’s a book by Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, so it’s…
Will Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ ever be finished?
Robert Caro, at the age of 83, continues to work full-time on his grand inquiry into the nature of political…
Searching in vain for the ‘soul’ of modern Russia
It would be hard to have better travel-writer credentials than Sara Wheeler. Here the author of The Magnetic North and…
Arts
Why haven’t we heard of the extraordinary Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck?
Last year I found myself giving a lecture in Helsinki. When I came to the end, I asked the audience…
The woman who wrote Afghanistan’s electoral laws lives on a houseboat in Bristol
By the age of eight Vaira Vike-Freiberga had learnt that life was both ‘very strange and very unfair’. Her baby…
It’s not fair – I liked Il segreto di Susanna before it was cool: OHP’s double bill reviewed
Should a secret pleasure ever be shared? Spoiler alert: Susanna’s secret, unknown to her husband Gil, is that she smokes.…
So sloooooooow: Photograph reviewed
Ritesh Batra had a smash hit with his gentle romance The Lunchbox (2013) and then made a couple of less…
The reason Gomorrah is one of the best series ever shown on TV is its fidelity to truth
My favourite epithet about my favourite TV series was the headline in a review by the Irish Times: ‘Gomorrah. Where…
Can computers compose?
In 1871, the polymath and computer pioneer Charles Babbage died at his home in Marylebone. The encyclopaedias have it that…
These obscure Tennessee Williams scripts are classics of the future: Southern Belles reviewed
Games for Lovers feels like a smart, sexy TV comedy. Martha is still in love with her old flame Logan…
Dominic Smith
He’s an Australian-born international best-selling author. Dominic Smith was born in Brisbane in 1971 to an Australian mother and an…
Life
Chatting to Bob Geldof about Boris and Brexit
Coronis We are steaming on Puritan towards the private isle of Coronis for a long Pugs weekend and the…
A trip to Dartmoor Prison with my grandson and his cousin
My grandson Oscar (nine) shares a bedroom with his cousin Lucas (eight) and sits next to him at school. Before…
The village fête has been cancelled due to an ‘unauthorised incursion’
The village fête had to be cancelled because of what they called an ‘incursion’ on to the green. The way…
Saturday’s King George was the finest contest I have ever seen on a racecourse
It is stupid to become attached to inanimate objects but when modern technology finally forced me to ditch the Olivetti…
no. 565
White to play. This position is from Capablanca-Lasker, Havana 1921. Capablanca was another great champion famed for his ability to…
To bee or not to bee
In Competition No. 3109 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Last Bumble Bee’. The buff-tailed bumblebee,…
2419: Figures in place
The unclued lights (individually or one pair) are of a kind. But, before entry into the grid, all but one…
to 2416: Silence
Each unclued light contains a SILENT letter (with 11 containing two). First prize P.L. Macdougall, London SW6Runners-up Sir Graeme Davies,…
I’m considering joining the police – they need me
I was driving to Gunnersbury Park last Sunday for my weekly 10K run when I caught the tail end of…
Is the future of work flexible?
Today we suffer disillusion, not because we are poorer than we were — on the contrary, even today we enjoy,…
A wine of Boris’s vintage
My host twinkled sardonically. ‘We’re bound to be discussing Boris. So what’s the right wine?’ I suggested a bunker-busting Australian…
Is the term ‘Esquire’ U or non-U?
‘I’m a learned doctor,’ cried my husband, pulling at the hems of his tweed coat and doing a little jig.…
Dear Mary: What can I do about the vexatious racket of windchimes?
Q. I took an old friend to Bellamy’s for lunch. We were just settling in for a proper gossip when…
