democracy
We let Hong Kong down: Chris Patten on the end of colonial rule
After 13 years in parliament, rising star Chris Patten had the bad luck to be one of the few Tory…
The rise of the new autocracy
Gstaad Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over:…
Glasnost merely confirmed Russia’s deep-seated suspicion of democracy
Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating…
Ella Pamfilova and the dismantling of Russia’s democracy
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is hardly known for its free and fair elections. But a purge of the field ahead of…
Why voters should have to show photo ID
This week’s publication of the Elections Bill has given pressure groups and others a fresh opportunity to complain about what…
The urgent case for voting reform
By now, The Spectator knows better than to say that Donald Trump has been definitively beaten. The President’s final defeat…
A cautionary tale about how democracy can subvert itself: Bunga Bunga reviewed
Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy…
What on earth has happened to Simon Schama: The Romantics and Us reviewed
‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us.…
Why I won’t vote
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece titled ‘The battle cry of the politically homeless’ in which I…
How the Athenians would have handled the Lords
Arguments about the purpose or indeed very existence of anything resembling the House of Lords would have struck classical democratic…
It’s voter suppression time, again — this time it’s pandemic!
Is Trump a reckless idiot who didn’t take the coronavirus seriously and thus endangered hundreds of thousands of lives? Or…
Covid-19 shows us that virtue trumps freedom
Look at it this way: we’re all doing Desert Island Discs nowadays, and unless you’ve got the bug, it’s a…
The director of Persepolis talks about her biopic of Marie Curie: Marjane Satrapi interviewed
The director of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, talks to Sarah Ditum about her new biopic of Marie Curie, exile from Iran and her fears for the future of democracy
Let’s choose our politicians by random selection
Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to…
Why 1919 wasn’t the year it’s cracked up to be
Gstaad The funny thing is that I was at school with a man called Ted Widmer, and I recently read…
Corbyn’s false democracy
At the Labour party conference, Jeremy Corbyn said that he would do whatever his party members told him to. This,…
Put your trust in Hungarian wine (yes, really)
The wines of Tokaji run like a golden thread through Hungarian history. There are references to their nectar-like quality in…
East vs West: the new battle for Europe
The occasion was a central European conference on the subversive disinformation campaigns of Putin’s Russia (which, incidentally, are real, subtle,…
Animal or vegetable?
Against by Christopher Shinn sets out to unlock the secrets of America’s spiritual malaise. Two main settings represent the wealthy…
High life
I’ve stayed far away from the new barbarians with their choppers, tank-like cars, home theatres on board, and fridge-shaped super…
A democratic future for the 75 per cent
You needed only to look at the headlines to realise things had not gone to plan. They were damning; Time…
A lesson from Italy on the futility of referendums
As we prepare in Britain for our momentous referendum in June, Italy has just had one. It happened last Sunday…
Long may we Brits laugh at our absurd demagogues
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of…
Tax avoidance and the wisdom of pitchfork-waving crowds
In a way the headline to my fellow columnist Dominic Lawson’s Sunday Times commentary on 12 April said it all.…
Whoever invented the referendum deserves a kicking
My favourite quote of the year so far comes from the author Fay Weldon. ‘If this were an all-woman society,’…
