It’s one thing for the Reserve Bank board to set monetary policy independent of government. It’s entirely something else when…

Please stop scaring the children

Mark Latham had me at ‘rainbow cake-cutting’

The dumbing down of our culture is now on steroids

Time to face reality

Don’t say we haven’t been warned

When will the lying stop?

Even Elon Musk’s millions may not be enough to save free speech

Time to put net zero on ice

Rock dinosaurs still not knockin’ on heaven’s door

Freedom fights back... over lunch

Iranians adore a picnic. During the country’s most ancient festival, Nowruz, the Persian new year, they brandish baskets of food…

The monarchy has a race problem. And it has much more to do with Theresa May and Boris Johnson than…

Sinn Fein’s growing appeal

The fate of Russia’s émigrés

Boris’s plans for a new Brexit clash

A school at war with itself

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is on manoeuvres

Australia’s departing high commissioner on what really happened in the trade talks

The ex-dictator’s son is clear favourite in the Philippine elections

As Boris Johnson faced the possibility of a no-confidence motion earlier this year, a large number of Tory MPs decided…

The right to buy The Prime Minister floated the idea of granting housing association tenants a blanket right to buy.…

It has been wonderful to welcome seven refugees – and their four dogs – to my home in Suffolk. I’ve…

Wrong is right Sir: Having spent most of my working life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), I never pass up an…

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced £300 million more in military aid for Ukraine. Speaking by video to the…

Whatever one thinks of her politics, Angela Rayner is clearly a pretty sporting party, and the joke she made about…

As we get back into Roe vs Wade, prompted by the leak of what is said to be the US…

A ghastly tragedy Ukraine may well be, but it is coming to the rescue of a number of British Conservative…

BP’s ‘underlying’ first-quarter profit of $6.2 billion, compared with $2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021, was a direct…

I grew up in the golden age of forensic science, at a time when expert witnesses were becoming celebs, each…

There are two things non-Americans can almost never understand about America and should probably never speak about. The first is…

Attacks on British elitism usually talk about Oxbridge, but Simon Kuper argues that it is specifically Oxford that is the…

Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…

The Philippines is the odd man out in Asia, a predominantly Catholic country colonised first by Spain, then the United…

In October 1897, the grandees of the Royal Horticultural Society gathered to bestow their highest award, the Victoria Medal of…

As I’ve occasionally come to think is the case with The Spectator, this book is perhaps best begun at the…

This is the kind of novel that will be discussed jubilantly in the book clubs of places like Lib Dem…

Jean Rhys lived a vagabond life – but she wrote about gloom and squalor with luminous purity and a poet’s care, says Lucasta Miller

Mark Twain conquered almost every challenge that came his way except old age. Living well into his seventies, he was…

It’s a strange thing the way we keep interpreting and re-interpreting the different aspects of our culture that have become…

In Rus, which we now call Ukraine, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) begins his pursuit of revenge. A sea captain who later…

Keith Burstein recalls a key moment in the battle for emancipation from the ivory tower of atonalism

In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s…

Have you ever taken a piece of advice? I’m not asking a rhetorical question. Have you ever once in your…

In theory, it should be a perfect match. John Morton – the man behind the brilliantly assured sitcom W1A which…

The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look…

Dua Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia, was released at the least promising moment possible: 27 March 2020, the day after…

In The Australian Ugliness, published in 1960, the architect Robin Boyd remembered a meal in a hotel dining room in…

Now a new and (I think) much needed expression: ‘disagreement consent’. It’s a play on a more familiar expression I…

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and…

The four-letter word was BAND. Unclued lights suggest bandicoot (7A),bandh (11), banda (41), bandana (1D), bandoneon (3), bandook (7D), bandar…

You might have missed this but something very big is happening in women’s sport. The sheer numbers watching are sensational:…

Are we living in a new pornocracy? The first one spanned six decades of the 10th century, during which there…

‘Missing Dog, Please Do Not Call, Chase or Try To Grab Her!! She Will Run!!’ This notice, featuring the face…

In Competition No. 3247, you were asked to submit the reflections of a well-known writer on a career path they…

The unclued lights, including one of two words, are of a kind, all confirmed in Chambers. A further example (4)…

White to play. Reshevsky-Savon, Petropolis 1973. Reshevsky played the awful 1 Qxg6+, and resigned after 1…Bxg6. Many moves win, but…

There is a video in which a small group of students amble about passing a basketball back and forth. The…

So that’s it. Is a third world war possible? It’s already begun, opined a retired US general in the newspaper.…

Amid the bronze cladding of Soho, with its pop-up, suck-down restaurants – the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Café was a nadir…

Q. We went for lunch over the bank holiday with the parents of one of my son’s schoolfriends. We had…

My teammate Thor Erik Hoftaniska is having a bit of a moment. He won last year’s (online) Gold Cup (on…

I welcome Jacob Rees-Mogg’s recent announcement that he intends to reignite David Cameron’s ‘bonfire of the quangos’ in his capacity…

New York Back in the good old days the Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the hotel for…