coronavirus
Make America Normal Again
To win in November, Trump should seek inspiration from President Alexander Lukashenko, the 65-year-old autocrat who has ruled Belarus since…
What percent of Covid deaths were directly from Covid?
Just how many people have died of Covid-19, as opposed to having died with the virus? It is a poignant…
Why isn’t Joe Biden being tested for COVID-19?
Joe Biden has faced questions on his mental and physical acuity throughout his presidential bid. For example, he first said…
Illegal raves
Every time I read that Britain’s anti-coronavirus measures are being jeopardised by a ‘small minority of senseless individuals’ holding illegal…
Diary
It’s three days since rumours swirled around France that President Macron was going to impose a ‘tit-for-tat’ quarantine on UK…
China disappears at the DNC
Members of media hailed the all-digital Democratic National Convention and convention coordinator Stephanie Cutter, the former Obama adviser famous for…
In many ways, Andrew Cuomo is just a metaphor
With the United States lurching from crisis to crisis, the Democrats want their convention to present them as the tough,…
Portrait of the week
Home In fine weather with calm seas, 565 migrants in four days crossed the Channel in small craft. French officials…
Grubby thumb prints and peeling glue
Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete…
I’m helping lockdown sceptics find love
I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of…
Barometer
Some like it hot Are heatwaves becoming a devalued currency? Last year the Met Office defined a heatwave as three…
False economy
Britain is losing the race to recovery
‘Theatre is back!’
So the madness continues. Planes full of passengers are going everywhere. Theatres full of ghosts are going bust. My first…
There’s nothing ‘wild’ about elopement
I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business —…
Exclusive: half of Americans support Trump bypassing Congress for COVID relief
More than half of registered voters support President Trump using executive action to bypass Congress and extend coronavirus relief measures,…
Cuomo’s nursing home death blame game
A major Associated Press report this week dove into New York’s nursing home COVID-19 death count and found the numbers…
How Covid spread in Sweden’s care homes
Why did Covid prove so lethal in care homes? Between 2 March and 12 June, there were 66,112 deaths of…
Why are black Americans likelier to die of COVID than Latinos?
Only part of the dramatic racial differences in age-adjusted COVID-19 death rates can be explained by racial differences. The remainder reflects a substantially lower black…
Diary
It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after…
A taste of the continent
Is it safe to visit the continent? On the one hand, abroad is likely to be less crowded this August…
Mood shift
Throughout the past few months the government has appeared to face an unenviable choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods.…
Living with
T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what…
How will we handle the next contagion?
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
Portrait of the week
Home Some 2.7 million people in Greater Manchester and parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, where many Muslims live, were…
Soho moonwalk
Back to the West End at last. After a four- month lay-off, I grabbed the first available chance to catch…
