Society

It’s no real surprise that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have both secured victory in New York overnight and the only real question was what margin they would win by. With most of the votes now counted, it looks to have been convincing in both cases: Trump got more than 60 per cent of the vote whilst Hillary Clinton got around 58 per cent. Primaries like these are the kind that both Trump and Clinton would wish could be replicated over the whole of America. The sense of belonging needed to get voters on side was there automatically for Trump in his home state and also for Hillary as New

Do you eat lunch at your desk or work into the night? The Telegraph reports that all those skipped lunch breaks and late evenings in the office accumulate over time – adding up to 39 days worth of unpaid work a year, on average. Britons clock up almost eight working weeks worth of overtime each year without being paid for this extra work, according to TotallyMoney.com. The finance comparison site calculated that the average British employee works for free for 6.6 hours every week, rising to 7.4 hours in London, or 43 days of unpaid labour per year. The capital is surpassed only by East Anglia, home of Cambridge and Norwich, where residents clock up 8.2 hours of unpaid overtime per

Ted Cruz once suggested – it feels like years ago but was only January – that Republican voters would not choose Donald Trump because of his ‘New York values’. The idea behind the diss was that Trump’s elite social liberalism would not play well with the conservative majority. Well, Cruz was wrong – and New Yorkers repaid him last night with a giant slap in the face, as the Donald swept to victory in his home state. Poor ol’ Ted came in a distant third. Everybody knew Trump would win in New York, but the extent of his victory is staggering. He won almost two-thirds of the Republican vote, which meant

With hindsight maybe it was silly for me to bleat, ‘As everyone knows, the Johnsons are neither posh nor rich’ on Newsnight just before my older brother published his tax returns showing the impressive sums he’s made in journalism and publishing. I can only imagine how the antlers of rival 12-point stags such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts must have drooped as they calculated how many copies the full-time Mayor and MP and bestselling ‘popular historian’ must have shifted to earn royalties running into the hundreds of thousands. Having heard him toot about his eye-watering advance for his forthcoming Shakespeare, I felt only admiration that he paid almost a

Quietly, patiently, tentatively, scientists are revolutionising the way we see human nature, a breakthrough that may be as earth-shattering as Darwin’s discovery 150 years ago. Or to put it this way, scientists went looking for genetic influences on human behaviour – and what happened next will blow your mind. Last month psychologist Oliver James published a book with the self-explanatory title, Not In Your Genes, which sought to minimise or deny the effects of genetics on a wide range of conditions. As intelligence specialist Stuart Ritchie observed in The Spectator: ‘To open the book is to step into a parallel universe. In James’s neo-Freudian world, DNA has no effect on

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or follow us on SoundCloud. After the row over tax returns, are political scandals not what they used to be? Richard Littlejohn asks in his Spectator cover piece this week whether we’ve come a long way from the days of Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair. Have we forgotten what a scandal is really about? Isabel Hardman is joined by Matthew Parris, author of Great Parliamentary Scandals, to discuss. As he puts it:- For quite a long time, sex was very delicious. I think we’re beginning to find tax and financial matters delicious too.’ Also on the Spectator podcast, Political Editor James