Cameron’s heading for a hollow victory
Listen http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3 ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won,’ wrote the Duke of…
The Spectator’s notes
The ‘remain’ campaign is having some success with the line that the ‘leave’ camp cannot say what Britain outside the…
Special delivery
Five Star Babies: Inside the Portland Hospital won’t, I suspect, have been a hard sell to BBC2’s commissioning editors. Childbirth…
Moderate Muslims are not particularly moderate
‘What’s in the news this week?’ I asked my wife as she browsed the first newspaper we had seen for…
Fit to print
Anti-free-speech conspiracy theories are impossible to reconcile with the sorry state of Fleet Street
Portrait of the week
Plus, teargas fired at migrants trying to escape Greece and the Austrian government seizes Hitler’s birthplace
Diary
Plus: The V&A’s knicker exhibition; categories of holidays; John Whittingdale; my shaggy hair problem
Barometer
Also in our Barometer column: the cost of tax evasion, the lives of farm animals, and aid for tax havens
Tax returns to boast about
There was hardly a street corner without a sign about some benefaction or other
Cameron’s plan for a graceful exit all hinges on the referendum
The Prime Minister aims to hang on until 2019 and be the first Tory leader since 1937 to leave of his own volition
The Spectator’s notes
Also in The Spectator’s Notes: Obama’s policy on the Middle East; behaviour of banks; titles for spouses
The wisdom of pitchfork-wielding crowds
Better an enraged mob than the enervating national cynicism that prevails in some European countries
Cameron and Mugabe: spot the difference
The Prime Minister is behaving with conciliation to the point of deference. Plus: MPs’ tax returns
Let’s refocus the Panama story on the bad stuff that really matters
Also in Any Other Business: footballers’ taxes; care homes’ wages; negative interest rates
Sex, lies and tax returns
All this confected outrage over tax is part of a concerted and sinister attempt to shift the definition of privacy
The devil in footnote 351
Did he cunningly sanction Communion for the divorced in a hidden corner of his latest pronouncement? Nope
The politician’s daughter
Ted Cruz’s daughter ruins photocalls by making bunny ears behind her dad’s head and refusing to hug him for the cameras
Caught in the tourist trap
If beautiful places are to survive when the whole world is affluent, they’ll have to be reserved for a fortunate few
The tragedy of Arabia
Lawrence’s vision was betrayed in a shabby colonial carve-up — and the Middle East has been paying the price ever since, according to Neil Faulkner’s biography
Britannia rued the waves
The British won many sea battles in the American War of Independence but were defeated by America’s countless rivers, lakes and creeks, according to Sam Willis’s ‘liquid history’
Out of the depths
After her partner drowns rescuing their son in the Caribbean, Decca Aitkenhead finds her only hope is to write about it
