The Spectator
6 April 2019 Aus
Simon Collins
Australia
Labor’s electric road to nowhere
It’s like déjà vu all over again. The economy, although slowing, is growing at a respectable 2.3 per cent. Unemployment…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
What do the ABC and the New Zealand terrorist horror have in common? Apart, I mean, from the fact that…
Simon Collins
There are two kinds of political figure who cannot be effectively satirised. One is the kind of leader who makes…
Australian Features
Doomed yoof
Asians need not fear the Australian Labor party, but they should lock up their kids. Labor ‘yoof’ is on the…
Features Australia, New Zealand
Black and white clouds over New Zealand
The Christchurch mosque massacres of March 15 brought out the best and the worst in New Zealanders. The best was…
Vale Peter Coleman
William Peter Coleman (15 December 1928 – 31 March 2019) was that increasingly rare creature in contemporary Australia, a great…
Useful idiots at the ABC
ABC’s Four Corners remains proud of Sarah Ferguson’s three-part nothingburger last June about President Trump’s Russia collusion – its ‘story…
Sneak peek
When Rone first conceived of Empire – his vast sensory installation in an abandoned Dandenong Ranges mansion – he never…
Electric fantasies
A looming Australian federal election and the increasingly bitter carbon wars have resulted in a series of campaign promises that…
Features
If there’s no deal, there’s no Brexit
Iraq, the financial crisis, the expenses scandal — all of these undermined trust in politicians. They created an impression of…
Johnny Mercer: the Tories would be wiped out in a snap election
A few weeks ago, Johnny Mercer spoke in Westminster on the future of conservatism. At the end, the audience was…
Matteo Salvini: the man reinventing populist politics
While Britain continues to try to struggle its way out of the EU, perhaps it is wise to consider what…
Ireland’s strange decision to become a French colonial outpost
Seventy years ago this month, a prime minister led a divided nation towards the exit from what was then one…
Fraser Nelson: The biggest myth is that editors have control over their columnists
The power of editors is comically overstated. I’m struck by the number of politicians who imagine that there’s a hierarchy:…
There’s little difference between Question Time and Britain’s Got Talent
The contestants for the 13th series of Britain’s Got Talent, the variety show which starts on Saturday, certainly showed variety:…
Men are playing with fire by having drunken sex
It is late, on a wet Tuesday evening in November, and I am driving home, listening to endless talk of…
Charity muggers are no longer on the streets — they’re your friends
There was a time when you couldn’t walk down your local high street and not be set upon by a…
Newmarket, where the fastest horses in the world thunder past
Standing on Warren Hill in the morning mist, watching Britain’s finest thoroughbreds thunder past, you realise what makes Newmarket so…
The Week
If the EU refuses an extension, voters want a no-deal Brexit. MPs should listen
One of the many tragedies of Theresa May’s premiership is that, having come up with a coherent policy on how…
Portrait of the week: Brexit complications, avocado woes and London knife crime
Home Brexit exerted ever stranger effects on politics. After an eight-hour cabinet meeting, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said she…
Piers Morgan: why, as a former Remainer, I’d now back Leave
I voted Remain, and still don’t think Brexit is a good idea. However, if there were to be a second…
Supreme but not respected
From ‘The disconsideration of the House of Commons’, 5 April 1919: The House of Commons is legally supreme in the…
Can ancient Greek comedians tell us how to leave the EU?
Since comedians these days seem to be the authorities on all matters spiritual and temporal (puts on funny voice, knife-crime…
How is the country split over Brexit?
German customs The original customs union, or Zollverein, was established by Prussia along with 17 other states which make up…
Letters: The Brexit chaos isn’t David Cameron’s fault
About the Bible Sir: I was confirmed by Richard Holloway as a schoolboy at Fettes College, and then taught by…
Columnists
The logic behind Theresa May’s late move to Labour
There is a logic in Mrs May’s late move to Labour. It is the same logic by which both parties,…
In what possible way was Nick Boles ever a Conservative?
Who is your favourite brave Remainer Conservative MP? Anna Soubry has to be near the top of the list, for…
How I know the Conservative party is doomed
Gosh, it’s depressing watching the natural party of government committing slow-motion suicide. It’s depressing even if you’re not, as I…
UK business investment has nosedived – what’s to blame?
Business investment in the UK declined in all four quarters of 2018 to complete a year-on-year dive of 2.4 per cent,…
Books
It was pretty good for me: Joan Bakewell on the Sixties
For me this book evokes a Gigi duet moment: ‘You wore a gown of gold.’ ‘I was all in blue.’…
Greece is not just for Greeks — it belongs to the world
It often proves difficult to talk about modern Greece. Not just because of the relentless stream of news coming at…
The Bears v. the Rabbits: The Feral Detective, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
Jonathan Lethem’s new book is billed as ‘his first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn’, which won America’s national book critics…
Barefoot in the park: Tokyo Ueno Station, by Yu Miri, reviewed
In 1923, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 struck Tokyo and Yokohama. A huge area of Tokyo burned. But,…
Can anyone get away with murder anymore?
When the 24-year-old Angela Gallop started working at the Home Office forensic science service, her boss lost no time in…
The vast human cost of the Panama Canal keeps unfolding
There is nothing new about Latin America’s fractious relationship with her northern neighbour. In 1900 the Uruguayan writer José Enrique…
‘Where every vice was permissible’: Graham Greene’s Cuba
Cuba meant a lot to Graham Greene. Behind his writing desk in his flat in Antibes he had a painting…
Bloodbath at Baisakhi: the centenary of the Amritsar massacre
On 10 April 1919, the peppery governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, ordered the immediate arrest of two leaders…
Into oblivion
Moribund for about nine years now, Clive James has released his newest transcription of the Grim Reaper’s call. You might…
Arts
Why were the Victorians so obsessed with the moon?
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of slightly ramshackle workmen decide to put on a play. The play…
Is now a good time to talk about Jews and money?
Is now a good time to talk about Jews and money? The Jewish Museum in London thinks so, and perhaps…
Art is often best experienced on the radio
At its best audio can be a much more visual medium than the screen. Making Art with Frances Morris (produced…
ENO’s Jack the Ripper needs to decide if it wants to be a gore-fest or social history
Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his…
The mob is right about Line of Duty – it remains unmissably exciting
On Sunday a drama began with ED905 being stolen by an OCG who’d faked an RTC that required IR, little…
Aurora Orchestra’s Brexit concert nearly turned me into a Leaver
Back when the UK was assumed to be leaving the European Union on 29 March, the Aurora Orchestra was invited…
A masterclass of menace and magnificence: Romeo and Juliet reviewed
Two households, both alike in dignity. Capulets in red tights, Montagues in green. Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet opens in…
An exceptional dystopia that’s made for TV: The Phlebotomist reviewed
The Phlebotomist by Ella Road explores the future of genetics. Suppose a simple blood test were able to tell us…
Intriguing and beguiling but God know what it adds up to: Happy as Lazzaro reviewed
Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro sets out as a neorealist tale of exploited sharecroppers, but midway through the story it…
Self portrait 1934 Nora Heysen
In his new biography of Winston Churchill, Andrew Roberts notes that ‘it was said of Emperor Napoleon III that he…
Life
Mortimer Sackler and me
New York It was 51 years ago, in the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes, that I first met the man…
Am I about to be usurped by Philippe, our handsome French gardner?
We have a gardener, Philippe, who comes once a week. He lives in a ruin a little way down the…
The builder boyfriend and I have left the EU – and it’s great
After all that waiting and arguing, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed leaving the EU. The builder boyfriend and I…
My time in Somalia with Michael Meacher, Tony Benn’s ‘vicar on earth’
East Africa The late Michael Meacher represented almost everything I loathe in a politician. Before his death in 2015,…
Advance planning
One way to improve your results is to develop a specific opening repertoire and learn it thoroughly so as to…
no. 548
White to play. This position is a variation from Mamedyarov-Li Reufeng, PRO League 2017. This game also started with White…
Spring villanelle
In Competition No. 3092 you were invited to submit a spring villanelle. The villanelle lends itself to themes of loss…
2402: Test pilots
Eight unclued entries are of a kind. A 9-letter word for their position must be highlighted in the grid. …
to 2399: Lines of Work
The unclued lights form the folk rhyme ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief’. A.A. Milne (MILNE…
Now – as in the Soviet Union – making a joke can be a dangerous, life-changing mistake
I was surprised to learn that the novelist Milan Kundera celebrated his 90th birthday on Monday. I had no idea…
Have referees just given up?
Sometimes you fear for Neil Warnock. The embattled Cardiff manager is 70 and operates at level 11 all the time;…
Dear Mary: how can I stop my husband from hijacking my punchlines?
Q. A woman I’ve known for years is getting divorced and rings me every day to talk about it. I…
The joy of garlic and easy listening: Pucci in Mayfair reviewed
I grew up in south-west London in the 1970s when Italian restaurants had exposed brick walls and paper tablecloths in…
‘Shame’ is no longer one’s greatest fear, it’s offence culture’s default response
In 1663, just before Samuel Pepys visited the stables of the elegant Thomas Povey, where he found the walls were…
