The Spectator
3 February 2018 Aus
Australia
Shorten’s integrity trick
Now that same-sex marriage is out of the way, the banking royal commission hastily agreed to, and the Australia Day…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
I have been thinking about the wash up from the same-sex marriage issue and what we can learn about the…
Latham’s law
One of the strange reactions to the 17th Century Enlightenment was the concept of the Noble Savage. In the backlash…
Australian notes
18C for Tarneen? Last Friday marked the 230th anniversary of a penal colony being founded on the shores of Sydney…
Australian Features
Thatcher’s lefty
Chris Patten claimed many of the glittering prizes in British politics and society: cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher and John…
The feminist two-step
Feminism is in crisis. It’s in a crisis of its own making because it’s been an echo chamber for so…
Balhatchet job
Just when you think the cowardice of those highly-placed in the West (with the exceptions of Trump and Netanyahu) can…
OK, I’m a conservative comedian
Whenever I meet a fellow conservative—at the Opera, or at the Latin Mass, or at the hush hush child-sacrificing soirées…
Features
Theresa May must lead or go
The Brexit ‘inner cabinet’ met on Monday. It was meant to be an important meeting, one which made some real…
In the face of strongmen, conservatives are letting their principles vanish
In 1989, the year Soviet communism collapsed, John O’Sullivan, Margaret Thatcher’s former speechwriter, gave the world O’Sullivan’s First Law of…
In chaotic Venezuela, life is better in prison
‘I murder people!’ says Elanger matter-of-factly in response to my question about what he does for a living. From the…
Can I be taught how to become a #MeToo Man?
These are tough times for what I call the #MeToo Men — those white, liberal, high-minded men who pride themselves…
What will it mean for mankind when robots start caring for us?
‘I gotta be me,’ Sammy Davis Jr. croons as the android Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) steadies her horse, stands…
Boris Titov doesn’t want to be president but he’s still taking on Putin
Boris Titov is running to be president of Russia, but he’s eager to talk himself out of the job. ‘I…
Playful, adorable – and with a real nose for trouble: In praise of the beagle
Harvey’s finest moment, he would tell you, was the chicken kiev. I’d just made the garlic butter and inserted it…
The Week
Donald Trump has a genius for damaging his own reputation
It’s easy to see why Donald Trump gets angry. He is presiding over a robust economy, growing at the fastest…
A Brexit transition period is ‘a new Norman Conquest’ says Jacob Rees-Mogg
Home The EU published its negotiating position on Britain’s period of transition, from 30 March 2019 until 31 December 2020.…
Why women are still fuming over my Desert Island slips
It never occurred to me, when I was interviewed for Desert Island Discs back in November, that I’d actually be…
Ikea’s founder was a billionaire skinflint – but others were even worse
Tight money Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, was worth an estimated £40 billion. Yet the eighth richest man in…
Outsourcing has a long history
The outsourcing business Carillion has gone bust because its bids for government work have been far too low. The problems…
Australian letters
Onward Christian soldiers? Sir: Hal Colebatch contemplates the revival of the religious military orders to protect Christianity from the attacks…
Columnists
Conservatives gave women the vote – but you won’t be reminded of this
A hundred years ago on Tuesday, King George V assented to the Representation of the People Act. Women got the…
I wanted Ted Cruz to be President, but Donald Trump is working
In London last week I had the opportunity to talk about President Donald Trump with several politically mature friends. Most…
Stop trying to make football perfect: it’s the errors that make it fun
They’ve got this new thing in football. It’s called the Video Assistant Referee and it is designed to make the…
Ikea’s real genius is making furniture disposable
By all accounts, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was my kind of guy: may he rest in peace (on an Askvoll…
The real reason hospitals threw back that Presidents Club cash
I visited St Thomas’ Hospital on Monday, to discuss fundraising for a cardiology research project. On the way in, I…
Books
Do the Americans know who they’re fighting in Afghanistan — or why?
Early every morning through the spring of 2002, US troops at Bagram airfield on the Shomali plains north of Kabul…
Is the bubble about to burst in the absurdly inflated contemporary art market?
I always suspected I disliked Jeff Koons, until I saw one of his monumental pieces at Frieze London a few…
Denis Johnson: where pain and comedy collide
The death of Denis Johnson last May marked the loss of a great original who catalogued the lives of junkies,…
Trying hard to be somebody in Trump’s America
For Horace Hopper, the half-breed protagonist of Willy Vlautin’s bleak new novel, essential truths come slowly, and usually too late…
Crime and puzzlement in Tony White’s Oulipo-inspired novel
Tony White’s latest novel begins for all the world like a police procedural, following the delightfully named sleuth Rex King…
Nick Coleman hears better with half an ear than the rest of us do with two
If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple…
Richard Jefferies: a naturalist under the microscope
Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have…
The way to dusty death
In the words of Dad’s Army’s Private Frazer: ‘We’re all doomed.’ Life remains a dangerous business whose outcome is always…
Risking all for the perfect mocha coffee
‘This guy’s crazy,’ says a taxi driver, listening to a BBC interview with a man who has decided to become…
The Cambridge spy ring and the myth of an upper-class cover up
It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of…
How electronic dance music took over the world
It was approximately 4.50 a.m. in Ibiza: peak time on the dance floor. I was on the decks in one…
Classic whodunnit
How many readers know the answer to the question, ‘After the Bible and Shakespeare, who is the biggest selling author…
Arts
What’s it like being the only right-wing comic?
Geoff Norcott is lean, talkative, lightly bearded and intense. Britain’s first ‘openly Conservative’ comedian has benefited enormously from the Brexit…
The joy of buses
It’s a pity Will Self didn’t embark on his bus tour round Britain before the Brexit vote. If he had,…
Gursky’s subject is humanity: prosaic, mundane, extremely messy His colossal, panoramic pictures are brilliant and lowering at the same time
Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me…
Celebrating Carter was one of the most energising musical occasions in years
Das Rheingold at the Royal Festival Hall was, all told, a disappointment, but it might not have been had there…
The worst thing about Piers Morgan is that he deserves his success
Perhaps you missed the fuss because there has been so little publicity about it. But last week, at Davos, the…
There are many scenes in this overlong play that consist, literally, of drivel: John reviewed
The NT’s new production, John, is by a youngish American playwright, Annie Baker. We Brits tend to assume that ‘john’…
Wonderfully fixating and wholly non-formulaic: Phantom Thread reviewed
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a lush psychosexual drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a pampered, tyrannical, pernickety 1950s couturier…
Morning Star, 2017
President Macron is lending the Bayeux Tapestry for exhibition in the British Museum; the medieval tapestry masterpiece The Lady and…
Life
Why I am hanging up my crystal ball
Gstaad I caught a whiff of it as it rolled in from the east, the smell of hypocrisy being different…
My Burns Night haircut
At three o’clock I took half a bottle of Glenmorangie with me to Jimmy’s. That it was Burns Night, and…
Hell is a dental hygienist
‘Please, could you just clean my teeth?’ I want to say, only I don’t. I go along with it, praying…
Everyone is talking about the little girl from Devon
If there hasn’t yet been a hurricane called Bryony there should be. The impact of Bryony Frost, just 22, this…
no. 491
White to play. This position is from Goriatchkin-Bosiocic, Gibraltar 2018. How did White finish off? Answers to me at The…
Presidential patter
In Competition No. 3033 you were invited to take as your first line ‘I am the very model of a…
2344: I’m away
A word suggested by the title can either precede or follow each of the unclued lights to form phrases listed…
to 2341: Durum, durum
The unclued lights are varieties of PASTA. First prize J Cookson, Cheltenham, GloucestershireRunners-up Margaret Shiels, Edinburgh; D King, Leeds
My dislike of Blue Peter made me into the man I am today
When I tell my children about my own childhood, they often express disbelief about how wretched it was. No Xbox?…
Let’s face it: the Presidents Club was on to something
There exist in the annals of salesmanship certain ideas that are both highly immoral and wickedly clever. Before P. T.…
Dear Mary: I keep needing the loo during formal dinner parties – help!
Q. My wife and I have been invited to a small but formal dinner in the presence of some impressive…
Tasting the true island spirit: single malts from the Isle of Arran
Arran, in the Firth of Clyde, is an island whose charms vary with the seasons. In summer, the hills are…
How did the same word come to describe the activities of stable lads and sexual predators?
Grooming is a horrible phenomenon of modern life when it happens to abused children. Yet a magazine such as GQ…
