Real life
Being told by the Tories not to put a local election poster in my window because it will only remind…
Designer’s notebook
Zut alors! The court of King Boris gets more like Versailles each day. With some talcum powder on that ramshackle…
The turf
Want to know the winner of the Grand National in 2023? You heard it here first: when the ante-post books…
Welcome to the Office of the First Girlfriend
One of the least attractive aspects of American politics is epitomised in the ‘Office of the First Lady’. The office…
Low life
‘Willie or bum?’ I said to Catriona on the motorway. Everything in my recent medical career has been introduced via…
Who’s really to blame for the Post Office scandal?
The alleged frauds for which the Post Office prosecuted no fewer than 736 of its sub-postmasters has turned out in…
Answering back
In Competition No. 3196, you were invited to supply a reply to the poet from Frances Cornford’s fat woman or…
The Spectator’s Notes
Like almost everyone else writing on the subject, I have no idea whether Boris Johnson told colleagues in October that…
2504: Collectors’ items
Clockwise round the peri-meter go two lines of a topical verse, thirteen words altogether. (The barred off square divides the…
High life
New York What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned breakaway…
to 2501: Delightful
The ‘Transport of Delight’, in the song by Flanders and Swann, was that ‘big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, diesel-engined, London Transport, ninety-seven…
Transported
The St Pancras Brasserie and Champagne Bar by Searcys is as expansive as its name, but ghostly. It is an…
Racism has become a kind of theory of everything
‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden.’ So said writer and academic Yascha Mounk in the Atlantic in…
Andrew Cuomo will get away with it all
Andrew Cuomo could murder thousands of senior citizens in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter.…
How Tory MPs plan to clip Cummings’ wings
On 26 May, Dominic Cummings will give evidence to MPs grouped on the health and science super committee, chaired by…
Alexei Navalny’s big gamble
Alexei Navalny seems to undergoing a metamorphosis. Yesterday, we saw him attending another trial by video, looking gaunt after 24…
Our Aussie contenders for the 2022 Oscars in full
It’s Academy Award time and the votes are in for best female black actor in a male Latino role. Meanwhile…
Vaccine passports create a two-tier society
Let us be blunt and upfront. The idea of implementing vaccine passports in Australia would surely be anathema to most Australians. A…
What ever happened to good old fashioned innuendo?
Where did innuendo go? That is the question that has been bugging me recently. I listen to a lot of…
Tim Scott’s rebuttal marches the GOP towards obscurity
Before the bombs and bullets of World War One reshaped life as we know it, for ‘the vast majority of…
Does ‘anti-racism’ also mean slurring black conservatives?
The latest target for online mobs is South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott. His ‘crime’ is apparently being a black…
Is Nicola Sturgeon in for a scare in her own seat?
Political geeks of a certain vintage are still nostalgic for that Portillo moment when, at 3.10am on 2 May 1997,…
If you want peace, prepare for war
This past weekend, Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton suggested that a conflict with China over Taiwan could not be discounted. However,…
