They still have to eat their broccoli, but are free to choose their sex
Exciting news on the gender front. NBC News discovers a new trend: Shhhhhh, I’ll let you in on a little secret:…
Post-modern conservatism? Yes, it’s a thing
The other day I was notified about a recent Spectator Australia article by Andrew Urban mocking a recent piece I…
The Big Public Health donkeys
Public health Pooh-Bah bullies are at it again. With the Victorian and federal elections heaving into sight, this week a…
May’s Brexit plan has failed. She needs a new one – and fast
Handling Brexit was never going to be easy for Theresa May, given that the Tories have been fighting a civil…
Portrait of the Week: Brexit votes and Trump’s double negatives
Home The administration of Theresa May, the Prime Minister, staggered on, as Conservative MPs exchanged angry words in the Commons,…
What Uber rides taught me about immigration
It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else…
Why is the Trump balloon known as a ‘blimp’?
Blimpish beginnings Protesters flew a ‘blimp’ depicting President Trump as a baby in central London. Why are balloons known as…
Strangers and brothers
Everyone talks about the importance of ‘charisma’ in a politician. But while it may take one a long way with…
The sense of betrayal feeds the demand for a no-deal Brexit. Watch this space
The collapse of Mrs May’s Chequers plan, followed by Tuesday’s failure of the Tory Remainers to defeat the government, creates…
May’s summer delusion: the recess won’t solve anything
The summer holidays couldn’t come soon enough for Theresa May. So desperate was she to get MPs away from Westminster…
Real football fans don’t care about race
It’s middle-class commentators – not supporters – who seem obsessed with the number of black players There were altogether too many darkies in England’s World Cup…
Brexit is in chaos. It’s time to delay it – then stop it
Omissions can be as instructive as inclusions. I noted a curious example in a column Nick Timothy wrote last month…
In the end, the Remainers will win. The powerful always do
Before the referendum, I predicted behind closed doors that even if Leave improbably prevailed, Britain’s political establishment would ensure that…
An amoral money world needs ethical campaigners more than ever
When I first visited Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, I was struck by a set of black-and-white posters in…
Assad is back for good in Syria – and with Trump’s blessing
Amid the confusion and the almost deafening cries of treachery and collusion over Donald Trump’s relations with Russia, few noticed…
Jean-Claude drunker
The atmosphere in Brussels has become, of late, reminiscent of the late Brezhnev era. We have a political system run…
Hitler’s would-be assassins were, themselves, Nazi war criminals. Why celebrate them?
On 20 July, Germany’s political elite recalls the day in 1944 when Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg exploded a…
The EU is sending migrants home – into the hands of people smugglers
What to do about illegal migration from Africa into Europe? The EU’s repatriation programme seems at first like a great…
Let funerals be sad
My wife died earlier this month. We knew it was coming. A lump in the breast begat bone tumours, begat…
British men shouldn’t go topless in public. Ever
England didn’t just lose the World Cup. When it comes to male nudity, the country has also lost its sense…
How easy is it to break into the Bank of England?
‘Safe as the Bank of England.’ So goes the old phrase. And yes, with walls 8ft thick, the Old Lady…
Adam Smith analysed human behaviour, not economics, says Simon Heffer
Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons.…
Kyoto is all that is left of Japan – more’s the pity
‘Much of what I say may turn out not to be true.’ Hardly the ideal beginning to a guided tour.…
Who needs a plot? asks Anne Tyler
Willa Drake’s second husband calls her ‘little one’, even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown…
‘T’ is for Trotskyite
Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as…
