The Spectator
6 March 2021 Aus
Australia
Presumed innocent
Scott Morrison has famously declared that he has no time for fighting the culture wars and that ‘free speech never…
Australian Columnists
Australian notes
Smiling Prince of Victoria Even in these authoritarian times, life can still be unpredictable. I was in Melbourne recently and,…
Australian Features
Sex, lies and the spirit of Salem
Pitchforks and pyres as a miserable ghost fans the flames
Re-thinking Covid-19
It’s time to recognise the destruction caused by the politicisation of the virus
Turning conservatives into sub-humans
The Left, aided by the media, has embarked upon a sinister crusade
Trump: best yet to come (part 2)
The question of legitimacy clouds the Biden and Harris administration
Features
Rishi’s nightmare: will inflation crush the recovery?
Fear of inflation is stalking the Treasury
Devil of a job: the curious occupations recorded in the census
Even before the first census was made in 1801, the plan was regarded with fear, hatred and ridicule. And this…
Did I give Russ Abbot Covid?
For the past few weeks there’s been a 7 p.m. curfew in Barbados as part of what the government calls…
Is this a once-in-a-generation chance to invest in central London?
Is now the time to invest in commercial property?
A quick fix: how Boris and Carrie can bring Dilyn to heel
How Boris and Carrie can bring Dilyn to heel
The provocative writer who could be the next French president
The French journalist who could unseat President Macron
The Week
Portrait of the week: A Covid Budget, a Cotswold meteor and Angelina Jolie sells Churchill’s painting
Home First-dose coronavirus vaccinations totalled more than 20 million. A study suggested that in the over-eighties, a single dose of…
Which countries still haven’t had a single case of Covid?
French lessons France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to three years in jail, with two of them suspended, for…
Letters: The key to Scotland’s future
The key to the Union Sir: ‘Love-bombing’ the Scottish electorate with supplemental spending in devolved areas (‘The break-up’, 27 February)…
Cicero knew that we should study the past, not cancel it
Modern historians, excoriating the past evils of e.g. slavery and imperialism are taking the understanding of history back to its…
The Sturgeon case exposes the fatal flaw in Scottish devolution
The campaign for a Scottish parliament was rooted in the notion of a ‘democratic deficit’. Scotland kept voting Labour but…
Hollywood can’t believe Harry’s dissed Queen Oprah
Santa Monica is a soothing place to be locked down. I moved here from New York for four months in…
Columnists
Emmanuel Macron’s vaccine muddle
In 2000, this magazine dipped its toe in murky Irish water. Stephen Glover wrote three articles, one provocatively entitled ‘The…
The war on cars is backfiring
For most London-based politicians, there’s a threat that’s worse than Covid. You’ll begin to notice it as we ease out…
The case for keeping business taxes low
Why should business pay tax at all? That’s a provocative but forlorn question to ask in Budget week. Business pays…
The real reasons children are going hungry
‘We’re idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.’ I listened to The Food Programme on Radio 4…
What Rishi Sunak could learn from the vaccine rollout
Barely a year has passed since Rishi Sunak’s first Budget. Its centrepiece was a £30 billion stimulus designed to calm…
There is no justification for supporting the IRA
Roy Greenslade held a number of prominent positions in Fleet Street over the course of a long career. But he…
Books
Chips Channon’s diaries can read like a drunken round of Consequences
Chips Channon was conceited, snobbish, disloyal, voyeuristic and wrongheaded – all qualities most helpful to a great diarist, says Craig Brown
Walls go up after the Berlin Wall comes down
In her 2017 travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, the writer and poet Kapka Kassabova meets Emel,…
The robot as carer: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, reviewed
The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is…
Why autocracy in Russia always fails in the end
Churchill was wrong: Russia is neither a riddle nor an enigma. Russians themselves concoct endless stories to glorify their country’s…
My father, the tyrant: Robert Edric describes a brutal upbringing
In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels,…
Ghosts in a landscape: farming life through the eyes of Thomas Hennell
Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of…
Why the first self-help book is still worth reading: The Anatomy of Melancholy anatomised
Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to…
‘Britain’s Dreyfus Affair’: a very nasty village scandal
It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji…
Arts
Christopher Plummer
A few weeks ago that great Canadian actor Christopher Plummer died. Everyone knows him as Captain Von Trapp opposite Julie…
Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London
Saint Zenobius was a Florentine nobleman who was converted to Christianity and baptised as an adult, ultimately becoming the first…
It'll please small kids, but they're never to be trusted: Raya and the Last Dragon reviewed
Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine,…
Unhappy blend of melodrama and allegory: Southwark Playhouse’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice reviewed
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a musical fantasy set in a Nordic town near the Arctic circle. Johan is a magician…
Claudia Winkleman’s new Radio 2 show gets off to a brainless start
Last Saturday on Radio 2 Claudia Winkleman was inaugurated as the host of what was formerly Graham Norton’s mid-morning spot.…
Astonishing, relentlessly pleasurable rediscovery – tantric opera: Luigi Rossi's Il Palazzo incantato reviewed
I don’t say this lightly, but after 20 years of opera-going, Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato might just be the…
How stupid do the script writers of Sky’s Devils think we are?
Here’s a worried question I want to plant in your head: when is TV drama going to start depicting the…
How Algernon Newton made great art out of empty streets and dingy canals
Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had…
In Chet Baker's albums you can hear America’s romantic self-image curdling
The thing to remember about Chet Baker, an old acquaintance says of the errant jazz musician in Deep In A…
Life
Aussie Life
If you asked a roomful of Poms to list Winston Churchill’s greatest achievements, few would put ‘introducing the minimum wage’…
Aussie Language
The expression ‘unconscious bias’ is back in the headlines. First came the good news that Oxford’s Somerville college had rescinded…
Raymond Chandler and his contrarian cat Taki
Gstaad That’s all we needed in a great year: copyright has expired on The Great Gatsby. Some Fitzgerald wannabe has…
In defence of horse racing
Rugby has enough problems — from baffling rule changes to concussion — without the referees muddying the pitch even more.…
Dear Mary: How do I tell my neighbour she’s let herself go in lockdown?
Q. Recently an old acquaintance, notorious for never penning a ‘thank you’ note, emailed me telling me he was being…
Cornwall, but not as the locals know it: Stein’s at Home reviewed
The Stein’s at Home steak menu box (£65) says ‘Love from Cornwall’: it is not for people who live in…
The word ‘like’ is in crisis
‘Blame Kingsley Amis,’ said my husband, with the carelessness of one defying a man out of earshot. The blame, such…
The curse of semi-invisible road signs
‘We’re sorry your experience with us has not been a good one,’ said the press officer at Surrey Police. ‘You…
Bridge | 06 March 2021
This is a great time to be a young bridge player. When I took up the game in my twenties,…
Play from home
Is working from home the future of a productive society, or a fleeting aberration? Nobody knows yet, but a significant…
No. 643
White to play. Garcia Ramos–Maurizzi, -Barcelona 2021. Black has just played Kg8-h7, to attack White’s queen by unpinning the knight…
2493: Opposites - solution
‘I WANT TO BE ALONE’ (1A) and ‘COME UP AND SEE ME SOMETIME’ (49/27) were supposedly said by Greta GARBO…
2496: Depart Paddington
Clockwise round the grid from 3 run seven dramatis personae; unclued lights give anagrams of two more. The play’s title…
Spectator competition winners: the hell of a foreign holiday
In Competition No. 3188, a challenge designed to make us all feel better about the looming prospect of another enforced…
The conservative appeal of drug gangs
According to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, the easing of lock-down will be accompanied by a rise in crime…
The beauty of French nurses
I was supine on the slab and a nurse was rigging me up via wires and tubes to machines and…
Ireland’s love affair with horse racing
With the Cheltenham Festival close, the quest for serious punting money intensifies. I had one potential contributor identified at Kempton…
