Two batons better
The morning after the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra failed to elect a music director, I took a call from Bild-Zeitung, Berlin’s…
Happy Retirement
Retired persons are not necessarily retiring or withdrawn although we are entitled to feel tired and/or rejuvenated by our superannuated…
Can the new Northern Powerhouse supremo make Leeds and Manchester work together?
A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer,…
Calling all British tourists – Ukraine needs you!
Kiev ‘What the hell’s going to happen to your poor country?’ I ask the man in the flea market not…
A small majority means big challenges
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/michaelgovesfightforjustice/media.mp3 In ancient Rome, when a general rode in triumph through the city, a slave would stand behind him…
The Spectator’s Notes
Who benefits from Prince Charles’s handshake with Gerry Adams? Not the victims of IRA violence, including the 18 soldiers who…
Strange ways
BBC One’s 2015 choice of Sunday-night drama series is beginning to resemble the career of the kind of Hollywood actor…
Antwerp
Napoleon didn’t think much of Antwerp. ‘Scarcely a European city at all,’ he scoffed. If only he could see it…
Let’s set the cops on barbaric fox-hunters
Among those deeply disappointed with the Conservative party’s victory on 7 May was Britain’s diverse and vibrant community of wild…
Australian Diary
At the end of the week of Treasurer Joe Hockey’s second Federal Budget, I recalled the caustic observation about the…
Getting it wrong
Could our progressive elites have got it more wrong? Far from being derided by the ‘enlightened’ countries of Europe and…
Australian Notes
The latest conflict of Church and State in New South Wales began when the state’s education department banned the use…
Cameron’s new mission
To fulfil his one-nation mission, there must be a reshuffle inside No. 10 itself
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, soon got used to the surprise of the Conservatives being returned in the general…
Barometer
Plus: The careers of ex-MPs; Scotland’s fiscal balance; and Muslim attitudes to homosexuality
Cicero’s advice for election-losers
Humility and service have always been the secrets of winning over an electorate
A war crime – and a president’s dilemma
From ‘Germany and the United States’, The Spectator, 15 May 1915: The text of President Wilson’s Note to Germany on the…
Labour must estrange its awful voters
If it doesn’t, it will be left as the party of the affluent, achingly liberal metropolitan middle class, plus a handful of minorities
The Spectator’s notes
Plus: the BBC licence fee; Mrs Thatcher and the Jimmys; and Etonians in the Cabinet
We columnists have never been more useless
There was something appallingly sterile about this whole very 21st-century election
Why won’t the lefties show London a little more love?
Let ‘champagne socialist’ become a slur, and you give a free pass to those who want to drink it all themselves
Full employment, Prime Minister? What exactly do you mean by that?
Plus: The lessons of a post-poll bender
Making Labour work
Four candidates, in two camps, chasing a vote scattered in at least three directions. This could be messy
