The turf
November has never been my favourite month, not since the time when as a Rugby-playing student my face was rearranged…
Autumn round-up
This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic…
Un-Beaton
The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was…
Australian Diary
‘Australia – love it and leave it’ says my t-shirt. The good news is that kindly sponsors are flying me…
Goodman’s Garden
Where did they all go? Thickets of love and pain rustle in a dry light and skeins of corvidae traipse…
Title Stories: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
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You shouldn’t watch Dapper Laughs. But you really shouldn’t let the likes of me stop you
As you’ll know by now, I’m big on thinking the right things. Should a thought strike me that m’colleague Rod…
The lost pleasures of reading a proper newspaper
Liverpool airport is a curiously unreal place in the half-light before dawn on a cold November morning. Out across the…
The Tories are paying the price for underestimating Ukip
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_Nov_2014_v4.mp3 In a corner of the Ukip campaign office in Rochester, a light-up orb is spinning, with the words…
Australian Notes
Right and proper that generous tributes are paid at a memorial service, even if sometimes undeserved or exaggerated. But what…
The Tories are paying the price for underestimating Ukip
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_Nov_2014_v4.mp3 In a corner of the Ukip campaign office in Rochester, a light-up orb is spinning, with the words…
Portrait of the week
Home Fiona Woolf, the Lord Mayor of London, resigned as the head of an inquiry into historical child sex abuse…
Pain, brains and space planes
The ancients would have found the idea absurd. And they proved it wrong
From the archives
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 7 November 1914: On Wednesday next the King will open Parliament in state,…
Miliband needs a plan – and soon
You can't run a '35 per cent strategy' when the Greens have knocked your vote into the low thirties
Ukip is a party for people who hate London. That’s why Labour should be scared
Labour is perhaps more a party of London, these days, than either the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives
The sermon that taught me what’s happened to Birmingham
Discovering a parallel culture in my old home town
Our prosperity is rising, but our start-up entrepreneurs need much more fertiliser
Plus: Our place in the Prosperity Index, and polishing a pedestal for Michael O’Leary
No safe haven
There is a global crisis on a scale not seen for 20 years. And all we do is throw money at the problem
Let the right ones in
It’s the dishonest debate on immigration that poisons the atmosphere for refugees
