Politics
Portrait of the year: Subpostmasters scandal, Rishi in the rain and Syrian rebels topple regime
January After an ITV drama, the government suddenly proposed to do something about the unjust prosecution of sub-postmasters. Junior doctors…
‘Was I cast because you couldn’t get anyone else?’ Cate Blanchett discusses Rumours
At last, a film about the G7. There have been more movies than you can shake a stick at set…
The Ginger Rogers theory of information
I had a friend whose approach to entrepreneurialism was to take two separate things that seemed stupidly popular and somehow…
Can Labour’s reset see off Reform?
Arriving on stage to accept ‘Newcomer of the Year’ at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards, Nigel Farage gave…
The origin of The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards
Forty years ago, a whisky company, Highland Park, which advertised its Famous Grouse in The Spectator, approached us with a…
How Aesop’s fables apply to today’s politics
Aesop’s animal fables, as Robin Waterfield points out in his new translation, were certainly not written for children: the animals…
‘We want to put common sense into Irish politics’: inside Ireland’s new populist party
When the Taoiseach Simon Harris called a snap election for 29 November, Ireland’s electricity board asked political parties not to…
The chilly charm of Clarissa Eden
Glamorous, enigmatic and well read, Anthony Eden’s wife was a discreet but unmistakable influence in Downing Street in the mid-1950s
Assisted dying is becoming Starmer’s mess
In the months before the general election, the Labour party had an internal debate about starting a ‘national conversation’ on…
I listened to a solid week of Woman’s Hour…
I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and…
Does being right-wing make you violent?
I notice that the police are not treating the killings of those children in Southport as a terrorist attack. While…
Playing Monopoly is not such a trivial pursuit
Games are politics you can touch, says Tim Clare, and a well-designed boardgame can provide a critical experience of society’s systems
The OnlyFans model, the milkshake and me
What better start to a Monday than to attend Westminster Magistrates’ Court? I was there for the trial of the…
Iran is playing a dangerous game
A drone exploded in a sleepy Israeli seaside town yesterday. The target of the attack was Benjamin Netanyahu. By luck,…
Confessions of a political gambler
What could be more exquisite than the life of the professional gambler? I began my career in 2016 with a…
My plans for The Spectator
Shortly after Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley, he invited me to lunch at The Spectator.…
Can Morgan McSweeney reboot the government machine?
The Queen is dead: long live the King. This week brought an end to Downing Street’s unhappy experiment in dyarchy.…
The world is on fire – yet navel-gazing still reigns in pop
There is no better cultural weather vane than pop. It’s not that pop singers possess incredible analytical skills – they…
Inside an MP’s inbox
There is nothing so ex as an ex-MP, Tam Dalyell used to say. Now that parliament has returned from recess,…
Falsifying history can only increase racial tension
Frank Furedi argues that historic memory is the key to the identity of any coherent community, and that attacking it undermines a population’s solidarity
Farage’s next move in his plan to destroy the Tories
On Tuesday afternoon, a familiar figure pulled up at a Westminster café to plot the Tories’ downfall. Nigel Farage beamed…
A romantic obsession: Precipice, by Robert Harris, reviewed
In the build-up to the Great War another drama unfolds, as the Prime Minister H.H. Asquith is seen to be distracted from politics by his infatuation with the beautiful Venetia Stanley
Keir Starmer’s mission impossible
Labour backbenchers have spent years dreaming of the day they are in power and get ‘the call’ from the Prime…
Starmer’s first big test
During the election campaign, Keir Starmer confessed to taking Friday nights off. ‘I’ve been doing this for years – I…
Has the term ‘racist’ become devalued through overuse?
Adam Rutherford 4 January 2025 9:00 am
Quite possibly. But racism remains all too real today – even though half the British population deny it exists