Philip Hammond’s refusal to spend money preparing for a Brexit no deal has not gone down well. Now, one of his predecessors as Chancellor – Lord Lawson – has called on Theresa May to get rid of Hammond. On the Daily Politics, Lawson said it was ‘grossly irresponsible’ for the Chancellor not to prepare for a
On this week’s episode, we discuss Trump versus technology, the ‘new normal’ with Calamity May, and whether jargon is polluting the English language. First up, in this week’s magazine cover piece, Niall Ferguson writes on the battle between networks and hierarchies for supremacy in a digital world. The biggest fight is between the American President
In this week’s Books podcast I’m joined by Alan Hollinghurst, the Man Booker prizewinning author of The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. His remarkable new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, tells a story of three generations of a family from the Second World War to the present day. We talk about agonising over prose,
For all the talk of a new ‘momentum’ to the Brexit talks since Theresa May’s Florence speech, today’s press conference between Michel Barnier and David Davis certainly had a whiff of déjà vu to it. The EU’s chief negotiator spoke severely of his concerns over a lack of ‘progress’ while the ever-optimistic Brexit secretary played
The Department for Education has just released some provisional data showing that English schoolchildren are making more progress in secondary free schools than any other type of school, save for academy convertors, with whom they share the top spot. This is according to Progress 8, a relatively new accountability measure which is a little complicated,
A reader in the FTSE boardroom world told me sternly the other day that I should resist the temptation to join the Corbynist mob and most of today’s media in sniping at corporate capitalism, and instead celebrate its positive achievements. So, here’s a parable designed to do just that. The Kensington Aldridge Academy is a
Britain will now almost certainly have to wait until Christmas for the start of trade talks with the EU. This wasn’t the original plan, with the initial timetable suggesting these discussions could start in October. So what’s going wrong? Some are blaming the EU – and it’s true that the leaders of France and Germany
Theresa May had wanted Ofgem to introduce a energy price cap: it said this would require new legislation and today the Prime Minister will promise to create them by capping the Standard Variable Tariff. The case for the prosecution is simple: about 70 per cent of energy users are not on cheap tariffs, but the
‘Worst week ever’ is one of those phrases that journalists are, perhaps, too quick to use. Alastair Campbell once quipped that if you added up all Tony Blair’s worst weeks, you got a full year. The real worry for the Tories, however, is not that last week was Theresa May’s worst ever, but that it
It was World Mental Health Day this week — and it drove me mad. I don’t have ‘mental illness’. I have bipolar disorder, and I feel as possessive about my diagnosis as Gollum did his precious ring. One term. One label. To lump the manifold terrors of the mind together under the monolithic ‘mental illness’
During a riveting session at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with sporting brainboxes Mike Brearley and Matthew Syed, discussion touched on the Ringelmann effect. This is the tendency for members of a group to perform less well together than individually. Old Ringelmann observed it in tug-of-war in the early 20th century. On their own the athletes
As readers know, The Spectator is a famously broad church. All manner of opinions are held and expressed here, and it’s impossible to find common ground, be it on Brexit, Trump and May, or even on the relative merits of Marmite and Bovril, say, or how to pronounce ‘controversy’ correctly. No one agrees about anything.
The first railway line in Spain, from Barcelona to Mataro a few miles up the coast towards the French border, was built in 1848 by British workers and with British expertise. I was reflecting on this, and the huge difference today between the services provided by our two countries’ railways, as the train passed through
‘Bombardier exposes post-Brexit realities’ was the FT’s headline after the Trump administration imposed a 300 per cent tariff on sales of the Canadian manufacturer’s C Series aircraft into the US, threatening 4,000 Bombardier jobs in Northern Ireland. Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar weighed in: ‘There’s been a lot of talk of a new trade deal between
I am not a bad friend. I enjoy my mates, and I am generous, showering them with fun, money and sympathy. But I do not crave their company when I am without it, for whatever length of time, and should we lose touch, I do not miss them. In fact, I find there’s a profound
It’s been nearly two weeks since Stephen Paddock committed mass murder in Las Vegas and the FBI is still casting about pitifully for clues. Why did he do it? Not even his girlfriend knows, though it’s said he claimed to have been simply ‘born bad’. Plans are afoot to put up billboards urging anyone who
A car driver ploughs into a bunch of people outside the Natural History Museum in London and lefties are furious mostly because the right-wing columnist Katie Hopkins thought it was another jihadi attack. For thinking this she is a racist bigot and consummately evil — despite the fact that I suspect most Londoners thought precisely
As from the Manchester conference hall I watched Theresa May’s big moment falling apart, as I buried my head in my hands while her agonies multiplied, I suppose I thought this could spell the end for her premiership. But even as I thought that, then reminded myself that the same failure of the larynx has
The Sunday Times’s literary editor Andrew Holgate recently tweeted the news that Robert Harris’s latest thriller had entered the bestseller list at No. 2: ‘Pipped to the post by Ken Follett.’ Harris retweeted it: ‘Well done Ken. You bastard.’ Pipped to the post only by Follett. That’s the level Harris is at now. Even before it
Since the EU referendum result last June our nation has been divided: not only by the vote but also by language. If 62 per cent of Britons (many of whom undoubtedly voted for Brexit) now say Britain ‘sometimes feels like a foreign country’, it’s not anti-foreigner prejudice so much as a feeling that people in
