All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
There are many reasons why a majority of people in the UK voted to leave the European Union. Among them was certainly not a wish to be inhospitable and uncooperative with our fellow Europeans (Leading article, 23 July). Now it is even more important that EU nationals in Britain should have their status respected and
I’m standing at the edge of a financial precipice. I’m a 32-year-old woman doing a job I love. I’ve been beavering away solidly for 10 years and I’ve been working hard to climb my way up the career ladder. After starting out in London surviving on a pitiful cub journo’s salary, I now earn enough
Although George Osborne is now on the backbench, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer is keen to make sure that he remains a busy bee. As well as jetting off to New York this week to attend Tina Brown’s Brexit bash, the MP for Tatton is now considering putting pen to paper for a book. However, readers
For the frontline in a Cold War which has been rapidly heating up in recent years, Narva certainly does not look it. The small Estonian town on the border with Russia has a mainly ethnic Russian population, settled after the Soviet Union annexed Estonia at the end of the Second World War. However the closest
In his essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell famously exhorted writers to be cautious of allowing ready words or prefabricated phrases to affect whatever it was he or she wished to articulate. ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about,’ he wrote. Seventy years on, Whitehall Mandarins have spoken. ‘We
Jonathan Ray looks back on a fine Spectator Winemaker Lunch with Vega Sicilia. An excellent lunch in the Spectator boardroom today as Antonio Menéndez, managing director (sales and marketing) of mighty Vega Sicilia hosted the latest in our series of Spectator Winemaker Lunches. Vega Sicilia in Spain’s Ribera del Duero has an extraordinary reputation and
This 8 week course has now begun. If you are interested in joining another one of our Wine Schools please email wineschool@spectator.co.uk. The Spectator Wine School is a chance to be tutored by the best in the wine business. It is aimed at enthusiastic beginners and anyone who wants to know more about the main wine regions. Over eight
We had some very fine answers in our competition to find the perfect collective noun for a group of wine bores. You might recall that the best my confreres and I could come up with during the wine bores’ dinner that kicked off the initial discussion [see: Struggling to serve wine in the right order]
I always feel sorry for Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol.’ He wore a heavy chain he had unknowingly forged in life. Unlike Scrooge, Marley had not received ghostly visitors to warn him of his future burden. Marley’s chain was made up of ‘cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in
It is still a little too early to say for sure that George Osborne’s gloom-laden economic forecasts for post-Brexit Britain were bunk. But never mind the future, it now emerges that he wasn’t much good at telling us what was happening in the present. Throughout the referendum campaign he could barely disguise his contempt for
Oh dear. Owen Smith’s decision to go off piste in his leadership speech today has not worked out all that well. While discussing the need for a stronger opposition than the one currently provided under Jeremy Corbyn, Smith said Labour could not allow Theresa May to claim Labour’s centre ground. Alas he used a rather
You have to admire Bernie Sanders’s chutzpah. For almost the entirety of his over 40-year career in politics, Sanders pointedly abstained from joining the Democratic Party. He is a ‘democratic socialist’, officially registered as an independent, and has never been elected to office as a Democrat, seeing that party as insufficiently collectivist. Sanders only affiliated himself
It’s a difficult business being Prime Minister. On top of running the country, they are regularly open to criticism from those they admire. Mention a band and there’s every chance the lead singer will blast you for austerity policies in the next day’s paper. Today Theresa May has felt the heat from one of her favourite designers.
Real earnings have fallen by 10.4 pc since the credit crunch began in 2007 says the Guardian – making Britain equal bottom on the wages growth table, alongside Greece. The Trade Union Centre found that over the 2007-2015 period wages have grown by 23 pc in Poland, 14 pc in Germany and 11 pc in France.
So there we have it: Bill has backed his ‘best friend’ and wife Hillary Clinton for President. That he would do so was never in doubt, of course, but the words he used are what matters. He started his yarn with a tale of courtship: ‘In the year of 1971, I met a girl’. Bill
Politicians, it seems, aren’t so dissimilar from the rest of us in their obsession with celebrities. Indeed, not even Hillary Clinton can resist the allure of Snoop Dogg, who’s set to perform at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this week. Forget the Oscars, this event has become the hot ticket for the A listers.
One of the great joys of travelling is happening upon a restaurant or bar that quite unexpectedly brings a beaming smile to your chops. A place about which you had the lowest of low hopes that unpredictably turns out to delight you. In truth, such a spot might even be on your doorstep rather than
Today’s attack was the 7th Islamist terrorist atrocity in France since January 2015. Two hundred and thirty six people have been killed by Islamist terrorism there in the last 18 months. This attack might only have killed one innocent person but it was a particularly brutal event: an 84-year-old priest had his throat slit while celebrating
As many people have pointed out, if someone had awoken from a coma after 30 years and learned that one US political party was in thrall to Wall St and the other to Russia, they would be confused by 2016. But then right is the new left and liberalism, being the prestige faith, is bound to attract
In Saturday’s Guardian, Natalie Nougayrède, the former managing editor of Le Monde, wrote that in the days following the slaughter of 84 people in Nice by an Islamic terrorist ‘incidents of open, blatant, anti-Muslim hatred have sparked a new, worrying phase’ in France. She didn’t elaborate on what form this hatred took, nor come up
On the bright side, the elderly priest who was murdered during mass in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen, had pretty well a perfect ending in Christian terms: celebrating the eucharist and targeted precisely because he was a priest. Two men took him hostage during mass, along with a couple of nuns and a couple of members of
Fr Jacques Hamel, murdered today by Islamists in Normandy, was 84, and in his life would have seen his country transformed, from the Occupation to the Thirty Golden Years and through to this modern unhappy age. I can’t imagine that a young priest in the age of the Piuses would have expected to end his life
Following a hostage situation at a church in northern France, two armed men and one hostage have been killed. The slain hostage was Rev. Jacques Hamel, an elderly priest, and Le Figaro reports that the hostage takers ‘slit’ his throat while he was giving mass. The other hostages included two nuns and two worshippers. The French president, François
With nominations for the Ukip leadership contest set to close at the end of the month, today Suzanne Evans called a press conference to make a ‘significant announcement’ about the future. However in light of the current hostage situation in France and Labour’s upcoming court battle, her speech failed to make it onto the news channels. Perhaps
It might seem as though houses are priced in monopoly money these days – but don’t assume the roof over your head will be your ‘get out of jail free’ card when it comes to saving for a pension. It’s not hard to see why so many are lulled into a false sense of security.
It’s less than a month since Andrea Leadsom bowed out of the Conservative leadership contest, leading to Theresa May’s appointment as Prime Minister. Now Leadsom’s campaign manager Tim Loughton had given an interview to the Times in which he conducts a post-mortem on the failed bid. While the Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham is
RBS and Natwest customers could be charged negative interest rates, reports the Independent. If the Bank of England cuts the base rate to below zero, 1.3 million business and commercial banking customers could be charged for investing with these banks. ‘Global interest rates remain at very low levels and in some markets are currently negative. Dependent
So after the glorious disunity of the Republican convention, now is the chance for the Democrats to pull together and show their rivals what unity is all about. If only. As with so much of politics at the moment, the script is there to be broken and that much was clear when Bernie Sanders was
Although Theresa May has repeatedly assured us that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, we’re still no closer to finding out what that actually means. The Prime Minister has done her best to play hardball in talks with other European leaders, having told Angela Merkel that control over free movement was an issue she would deliver on. But the
Nicola Sturgeon still believes in Scottish independence. I know, who knew? That’s the point of the SNP, a party Ms Sturgeon joined as a teenager back when she felt, or so she has said, that Neil Kinnock was busy leading Labour into the wilderness. That, remember, is when she says it all started going wrong
Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, was one of the Labour frontbenchers who resigned in an attempt to force Jeremy Corbyn to quit as Labour leader. But today, she has asked for —and been given — her job back. Now, Champion was just a frontbencher, not a full member of the shadow Cabinet. But
Although George Osborne was passed over for the role of Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s Cabinet reshuffle, the MP for Tatton is still keen to show that he can fly the flag for Brexit Britain. It follows that the former Chancellor of the Exchequer is set to be guest of honour at Tina Brown’s Brexit bash
It turns out rock didn’t die when Elvis joined the Army in 1958, or when the Beatles accepted their OBEs in the 1960s, or when Vivienne Westwood went from making filthy t-shirts for punks to being dressmaker-in-chief to the filthy-rich bourgeoisie. No, it died last Thursday, outside Liverpool St, when an NME distributor shoved the
The wheel has turned full circle. Financial advice from an agent tied to a provider is making a comeback, after years in which conventional thinking dictated that the only way forward was independent financial advice. As first revealed last week in the trade magazine Money Marketing, Aviva, one of Britain’s biggest insurers, is to restore
