Has deporting illegals become illegal?
The circus around Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – whose full name the New York Times likes to trot out as…
Rachel Reeves, the Iron Chancer
Gordon Brown may not be every teenager’s political pin-up. But as an Oxford student, Rachel Reeves proudly kept a framed…
The BBC’s Israel problem
Intrepidly, the BBC dared recently to visit Dover, Delaware – source, it implied, of starvation in Gaza. I listened carefully…
What happened to Piers Morgan
‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ asked a Spectator writer last weekend. The answer, according to slavishly pro-Israel commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti,…
Portrait of the week: Spending review, LA protests and Greta Thunberg deported
Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was the last minister to agree funding in the government spending review. Once the…
Britain needs reform
This week’s spending review confirms that where there should be conviction, there is only confusion; where there should be vision,…
Can Pope Leo end the liturgy wars?
Last weekend, under windswept banners depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, nearly 20,000 young pilgrims marched…
A lament for the lads’ mags
Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously…
Why is the MoJ making life so hard for prison charities?
For 15 years The Clink charity has run commercial restaurants in prisons, training inmates to cook and teaching them front-of-house…
OnlyFans is giving HMRC what it wants
Fenix International occupies the ninth floor of an innocuous office block on London’s Cheapside. The street’s name comes from the…
The guest who robbed me of my five-star rating
Bolting down the back hallway, I realised I was running away from the guests. I shut the door marked private…
Channel 4’s Beth is a sad glimpse into the future of terrestrial TV
On the face of it, Beth seemed that most old-fashioned of TV genres: the single play. In fact, Monday’s programme…
Why disaffected actors often make excellent playwrights
Actors are easily bored on long runs. Phoebe Waller-Bridge once revealed that she staged distractions in the wings to amuse…
Darkly comic samurai spaghetti western: Tornado reviewed
Tornado is a samurai spaghetti western starring Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Takehiro Hira (among others). Samurai spaghetti westerns aren’t…
The Renaissance master who rescued polyphonic music
Last month I watched conductor Harry Christophers blow through what sounded like an arthritic harmonica but in fact was a…
How do you exhibit living deities?
The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a…
Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?
What to hold on to and what to let go of is Samantha Ellis’s dilemma when trying to explain the complexities of their Judeo-Iraqi heritage to her young son
No escaping mother: Lili is Crying, bv Hélène Bessette, reviewed
A daughter longs to flee her parent’s boarding house in 1930s Provence, but her bid for independence fails in a story of thwarted love and shattered dreams
A love letter to lonely hearts ads
Published in Britain for at least 330 years, lonely hearts ads are now a rare sight – driven to the…
Wild horses
Magnus Carlsen slammed the table with such force that the pieces jumped from the board. Immediately, he resigned his game…
In praise of camels
Laikipia, Kenya For decades now I have kept only cattle, goats and sheep on the farm, but for the first…
Pride continues to crumble
In the canteen of the House of Lords last week, a friendly server asked me if I’d like some ‘Pride…
