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The Spectator

30 October 2021 Aus

Promising the world

Will COP26 actually achieve anything?

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Australia

Leading article Australia

All for nothing

Perhaps a future synonym of ‘net zero’ will be ‘all for nothing’. For surely that is what the last three…

Australian Columnists

Australian Notes

Australian notes

Glasgow: where frail nations go to die I know a thing or two about terminal illness, and it seems to…

Australian Features

Features Australia

COP26 to flop

Chaos awaits at the climate cult’s conference

Features Australia

Xi – home alone!

On China keeping her word and the latest Beijing rumours

Features Australia

‘Fake unions’ are the real deal

Competition within the union movement? Yes, please.

Features Australia

Business/Robbery, etc.

The Nationals go ‘net zero’

Features Australia

Off with their head-of-states

As a monarchist, I fear it is time to end the Australian monarchy

Features Australia

Go to gaol, not to Glasgow

Feeling betrayed? You have been.

Features

Features

The stolen children

My family still bears the scars of the forced adoption scandal

Features

Fight club

When book groups turn nasty

Notes on...

Halloween turnips

You see them everywhere in vast orange mounds: pumpkins, piles of pumpkins, large enough to be turned into a coach…

Features

In good faith

Why I’m bribing my daughter to get confirmed

Features

Promising the world

Will COP26 actually achieve anything?

Features

Letter from Israel

From an Israeli army base on the border with Lebanon, I can see the village of Maroun al-Ras. An Iranian…

Features

Dirty green giants

What’s really behind the net-zero zealotry of big businesses?

Features

Nuclear option

It’s time we conquered our fears over the safest power of all

Features

The blame game

Anxiety among Tory MPs is growing

The Week

Letters

Letters

Hard to reconcile Sir: Although not an Anglican, I appreciate Michael Nazir-Ali’s dilemma (‘A change of mind and heart’, 23…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home The Queen will not attend the COP26 meeting in Glasgow next week; she had resumed light duties after having…

Leading article

Sunak’s surprise

The Conservative party has always sold itself to voters as the party of low taxation, but it has now pushed…

Diary

Diary

Rishi Sunak had a pre-game Twix and a Sprite to prepare for this week’s impressive Budget. I used to have…

Ancient and modern

Plato the censor

The Globe theatre’s project to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, as if that would make plays like The Tempest ‘acceptable’ to them and…

Barometer

Barometer

Filming fatalities The actor Alec Baldwin accidentally shot a cinematographer on set when mistakenly given a gun loaded with real…

Columnists

Columns

My conflicted loyalty to Newcastle United

The second thing I learned about football, after moving to London, is that you can never, ever switch your allegiance.…

Any other business

My COP26 message: pay more dividends to save the planet

Climate emergency demands action, not rhetoric. So, on the eve of COP26, which UK news item promises to deliver the…

Columns

What this Budget tells us

The Budget and the spending review gave the clearest indication yet of what the post-Covid government might look like. During…

Columns

Who owns the language?

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is giving local residents £25,000 grants to enable them to change the names of…

Columns

Could a truthful Clinton have saved the US?

What if Bill Clinton had told the truth? Would America’s sexual and political history be different? The thought occurs because…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

When I went to Poland not long before Covid, I found a country more bitterly divided by a culture war…

Books

More from Books

The changing face of war

The strategic bankruptcy of the West has twice so far this century demanded that our brave soldiers risk their bodies…

More from Books

Doomed youth

Long before Ernest Hemingway wasted his late career playing the he-man on battlefields and in fishing boats, or Norman Mailer…

More from Books

On borrowed time

I write this in a garret a few doors down from the public library in Muswell Hill, north London. It…

More from Books

Much ado about nothing

Andrew Mitchell, as he readily admits, was born into the British Establishment. Almost from birth, his path was marked out:…

More from Books

Tongues will wag

One September day in 1649, in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts, Anthony Dorchester returned from church to the house…

More from Books

Thoroughly hooked

Trying to catch fish with rod and line is a pursuit that, for many, goes far beyond the pleasant passing…

More from Books

Forging a new life

At Intelligent Life, the Economistmagazine where I worked for some years, it was easy to feel intellectually challenged. Even the…

Lead book review

Double vision

Charlotte Hobson describes the complicated relationship of two artists who championed simplicity

Arts

Australian Arts

Keith Michell

So the lockdowns end, even in Melbourne, and we get a glimpse of what artistic performance may loom in a…

Arts feature

To Di for

Jasper Rees talks to the Chilean director Pablo Larrain about his new film, Spencer, which makes The Crown look like royalist propaganda

Dance

Sin and salvation

Where does the artist end and their work begin? Like 2015’s Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s new ballet swirls creator and…

Theatre

How to stop another Grenfell

Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry is a gripping, horrifying drama. Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor have sifted through the public…

Radio

The art of listening

There’s a great documentary film on Netflix at the moment about the late artist Bob Ross, he of the happy…

Film

Take two women

Passing is Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Nella Larsen novella (1929) about two biracial women, one of whom chooses to…

Classical

Satisfaction guaranteed

‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…

Film

Dutch courage

The Forgotten Battle is a Dutch feature film commemorating the desperate and relatively little-known Allied assault on the Scheldt estuary…

Pop

Running on full and empty

The bigger the next big thing, the smaller the room you want them playing in. You want the people who…

Exhibitions

Small but perfectly formed

Haydn is looking well — in fact, he’s positively glowing. The dignified pose; the modest, intelligent smile: it’s only when…

Life

Kiwi Life, New Zealand

Kiwi Life

Lorde vs Lana People who live in glass houses really shouldn’t get changed with the lights on. Doubly so, one…

Aussie Life

Aussie Language

When New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet announced the re-opening of the state he said: ‘We can’t remain a hermit…

Real life

Real life

‘My phone says I can’t go out until Tuesday, so I can’t come and meet you,’ said my friend. And…

High life

High life

New York I find most films nowadays as fascinating as a lengthy history of orthodontics but then I’m spoilt rotten,…

Competition

Group think

In Competition No. 3222, you were invited to supply a dystopian short story that incorporates as many collective nouns for…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q. Our two daughters often bring friends down for the weekend. These friends are more than welcome; we enjoy their…

Spectator sport

Why the Reds have got the blues

Not so much the hair dryer: more a gentle home perm. Contemplating the increasingly less youthful visage of Ole Gunnar…

No sacred cows

Why lockdown sceptics lost the argument

I’m optimistic that the government won’t implement ‘Plan B’, let alone impose another lockdown — but not because sceptics like…

Food

Faking it

Whitcomb’s is in The Londoner hotel on the south-west corner of Leicester Square. The Londoner calls itself ‘the world’s first…

Mind your language

Witch

‘No, darling, I certainly wouldn’t call you a witch,’ said my husband. ‘You’re not thin enough.’ The Oxford English Dictionary…

Crossword solution

to 2527: The main dilemma

The question posed by the song is 11A/ 22A/37A. Suggested by 37A, other unclued lights were anagrams of words meaning…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle no. 677

Black to play. Turner–Jackson, Hull 4NCL GM Tournament 2021. Which move did James Jackson play to ensure a decisive advance…

Crossword

2530: Ups and downs

Clockwise round the grid from 2 runs a quotation (5,3,3,5,6,4,3,4,3,3,4,5) followed by the poet’s first name. Her second name is…

Chess

The Varsity match

Anyone who has attended the Varsity chess match knows that an online version just wouldn’t be the same. The annual…

Low life

Low life

Earlier in this run of glorious October sunshine I was languishing on the bed in the middle of the afternoon…

Bridge

Bridge

It was great to be back playing live bridge at the Portland Club last week. I was lucky enough to…

The turf

The turf

In 1986 a young Mark Johnston, having acquired a derelict yard on the Lincolnshire coast, phoned the Jockey Club to…