Police
Barometer
The death of Diesel The Volkswagen scandal has brought into question the future of the diesel engine. A century ago…
Barometer
How many cheats? More data on members of extramarital dating site Ashley Madison were put online. How widespread is adultery?…
Powder to the people
Fierce competition is forcing drug dealers to adjust their sales methods
Tacitus on Edward Heath
The press and police have been condemned for the way they fall on mere rumour and plaster it across the…
Machetes and the middle classes
Another stabbing in my new neighbourhood, not with an axe or with a samurai sword this time, but a machete.…
LA runs riot
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after…
Real life
Aren’t the police getting younger nowadays — and ruder, and scruffier and more intolerant of middle-class women? In other words,…
High life
This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking…
In praise of the pit bull
Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains…
The jihadi bride and her astonishing dad
Like you, I suspect, I have been terribly worried these last few weeks over the plight of 15-year-old Amira Abase.…
Barometer
Deadly to dogs An Irish setter was allegedly poisoned at Crufts, using beef containing slug pellets. Some other substances with which dog-show rivals…
PCs gone bad
We like to think we have the cleanest police in the world. We may no longer be right
Long life
I was listening to the radio the other morning to hear people complaining about the huge cuts in the number…
When did we become a nation of narks?
There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that.…
Un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
Incident
I had thought that the saying ‘Accidents will happen in the best regulated families’ was a vulgar reference to children…
All guns blazing
Once, both police and criminals in Britain routinely did without guns. How did that happen? And why did it change?
Letters
Nothing to fear Sir: So long as we are not breaking any law, we have nothing to fear from the…
Licence to snoop
Police are using an anti-terror law to run wild in the public’s mobile phone records
Escalated
Shaun Wright, the police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire, spoke to Sky television last week about how little he…
Set our footie fans free!
‘Bubble matches’ sound like something quaint. In fact,they’re an outrage against civil liberties
Squaring up
In Knightsbridge and Chelsea, tension simmers between Sloanes and super-rich Arabs
The Spectator’s notes
I write this before the results of the European elections, making the not very original guess that Ukip will do…
The joy of being hated
I know it’s not for everyone, but an online bitch-fight is so bracing
Neknominations – this is what the internet is for
Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers…
