Everyone agrees the Grenfell Tower disaster must usher in a new era of social housing in the UK. The danger is that it sends us back to a very old era, when the council owned, managed and controlled community housing. There is another way forward, one which meets the rightful sense of injustice felt by
The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction – judged by a very impressive panel headed by Lisa Appignanesi and including Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Helen Oyeyemi and our own Tim Martin – is out. Special props to super-translator Frank Wynne, who has translated not one but two of the thirteen books on
Labour’s internal complaints body looks set to have a busy few weeks. After Debbie Abrahams was effectively suspended as Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary over allegations of bullying, the Labour MP made a bullying allegation of her own. Abrahams claims she’s the one being bullied – accusing unnamed figures in the Leader’s Office of behaving in an
Martin Selmayr’s power grab, elevating him to the post of Secretary-General and putting him in charge of 33,000 staff, was a brilliantly-executed Brussels coup. As Jean Quatremer reveals in The Spectator, the double promotion of Juncker’s chief of staff was over in nine minutes flat, and was described by one of those present as an ‘impeccably prepared
This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any other business’ column, in this week’s Spectator. Unilever, the consumer goods conglomerate formed in 1929 by the merger of Margarine Unie of Rotterdam with Lever Brothers of Port Sunlight, is a model of cross-Channel collaboration that pre-dates the European Union we’re about to leave. So the
Everyone, understandably, is focusing on the white ‘nostalgia’ bit of Vince Cable’s speech to the Lib Dem conference. His slur against older Brexit voters, whom he thinks voted against the EU because they want to go back to a world where ‘passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’, has
There was much excitement last week when Susan Michie told Communist Party members – at a meeting at the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell – that they should work ‘full tilt’ to propel Jeremy Corbyn into No 10. Her claim that such a stance could act as ‘a potential springboard for strengthening organic ties with Labour’
Marina Litvinenko: ‘Lessons have not been learned’ The case of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, who has been hospitalised alongside his daughter after a suspected attempt on his life, has been dominating news headlines since it happened. Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the one-time Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who is believed to have been
Theresa May came under fire last year when she appeared to dodge a question on whether – if there was a referendum tomorrow – she would now back Brexit. Since then, the Prime Minister managed to set tongues-wagging once again when asked in a Q&A after her big Brexit speech whether Brexit was worth it.
The latest assignment was to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Long before Twitter, so urban legend has it, Ernest Hemingway crafted this mini-masterpiece in response to a bet that he couldn’t write a novel in half a dozen words. This turned out to be a load
On the matter of President Trump’s imposition of a 25 per cent tariff on US imports of steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, I cannot improve on the comments of the sage of Washington, the former Bank of England monetary policy committee member Adam Posen, who called it ‘straight-up stupid’ and ‘fundamentally incompetent, corrupt
The moment that has defined my approach to politics came when my mother told me the proudest moment of her life: buying her council house. Growing up in Consett, a former steel town in the north east, that house seemed to be like any of the other identikit terraced properties in the area. But to
‘Any fool can commit murder, but it takes an artist to make it look like suicide’ the KGB used to say. But whoever put Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in hospital was rather less subtle: police have identified 240 potential witnesses, according to Amber Rudd, and have extensive CCTV coverage to go through. I
Our road was closed last July so that pipes could be installed underground, a mundane bureaucratic procedure that, for my children, led to the most memorable summer of their lives. For weeks they played in the street with friends while our front door was left open, strangers instinctively smiling at kids being able to run
So Stonehenge was built for the communal fun of it. Maybe. Some archaeologists now wonder whether the main point of the monumental erection was the mass participation involved in getting it up. There were years of feasting and frolicking at the site’s construction, as well as lots of head scratching and mansplaining about whether wax-treated
Paolo Gentiloni, who may now have to step down since his Democratic party got only 18.7 per cent of the vote in the Italian elections, is the fourth Italian prime minister in a row not to have been chosen by the electorate. Voters have shown a repeated disinclination to support the candidate of Brussels, so
How did it come to this? Here we are, in 2018, in modern, democratic, fair-minded Britain, and what happens when it turns out the leader of the Labour Party was a member of a secret Facebook group awash with anti-Semitic comments? Not a lot really. As the political editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I have
There are plenty of things you could say about Labour’s All-Women Shortlists (AWS). Tony Blair called them ‘not ideal at all’ in 1995. In 1996, Peter Jepson and Roger Dyas-Elliott – two men who’d been rejected as Labour candidates – called them sex discrimination. An industrial tribunal agreed with them, and Labour was forced to
It’s an exciting day at the office. We’ve just launched Spectator USA, a new website from the world’s oldest weekly magazine. For 190 years, The Spectator has been producing some of the sharpest, funniest and best-written journalism. Now we want to do more of the same for an American audience. Spectator USA will cover politics,
You would have to be quite odd not to approve of the sudden surge of solidarity amongst Hollywood stars of the female persuasion. (Though I did wonder, when Frances McDormand called so movingly during her Oscar-winner speech ‘Meryl, if you do it everyone else will!’ whether she meant ‘Suck up to Weinstein for years’ or
