The Spectator’s Notes
Few leaders could be as different in character as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, but one can compare their predicaments…
Desire paths
Pause in a park or field in summer and look out across the grass and you’ll see a multitude of…
Nepo’s playbook
Ian Nepomniachtchi is back for more. The former world championship challenger left his rivals in the dust at the Candidates…
The turf
Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was…
The truth about life as a gay Tory MP
Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a…
Low life
All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those…
Barometer
Blooming huge Botanists discovered the largest species of giant water lily at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with leaves more…
Real life
The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. This year once again my company took a small group of clients to lunch at Royal Ascot. Our guests…
High life
Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky.…
Toby Young, I salute you
It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert…
The happiness paradox
In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of…
We’ll always have wine
‘Club’ is a four-letter word. Whenever a club is mentioned in the press, it will inevitably be portrayed as a…
Diary
It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt…
Pinch
Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking,…
Where’s the art attack fightback?
One problem of being mugged, I am told, is not just the event itself but the dreams of violence that…
‘It’s just about him’
Westminster has always been run more by convention than by rulebook. Prime ministers are seldom forced out: they are persuaded…
Bridge
In one respect, it would be so much easier to play a game like poker or chess than bridge; if…
Can you feel the empathy?
This week the newly minted Teal Member for Kooyong Monique Ryan gushed on social media about meeting New Zealand Prime…
Japan mourns Shinzo Abe
Cruelly gunned down at a political rally, Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister lost his life in a senseless act of…
The (expensive) brave new world of ‘clean energy’
The market was working pretty well 20 years ago and is not expected to be much larger by 2030. It…
