All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
In recent weeks, Labour’s Sadiq Khan has faced flak over his decision to share platforms with extremists. In a recent Evening Standard article, Khan was criticised for sharing a ‘platform with five Islamic extremists’ at an event organised by Friends of Al-Aqsa. At the 2004 conference titled ‘Palestine — the suffering still goes on’, both Khan
You may this weekend have attended one of hundreds of events around the country to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Willliam Shakespeare’s death in 1616. Few writers have ever caught our imagination like the Bard of Avon. Many of you will have studied his plays at secondary school, examining their universal themes of love, revenge,
Now that Jeremy Hunt has rejected a proposed cross-party pilot scheme for new junior doctors’ contracts it seems this week’s strike looks certain to go ahead. The industrial action is due to start tomorrow morning and junior doctors will walk out again on Wednesday, but the war of words for this week has already begun
As Sadiq Khan continues to lead the polls in the mayoral race, the Labour candidate has managed to brush off much criticism over his links to unsavoury characters by putting it down to ‘dog whistle’ politics. However, the MP for Tooting may have greater difficulty fending off the latest line of attack to come his way. Writing in
I suppose it’s inevitable that Brexiters will angrily reject Obama’s intervention, especially his line about Britain being left ‘at the back of the queue’ when it comes to trade. But if they let their annoyance spill over into a general criticism of the president, they will harm their own case. For most Brits still rate
In last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, I mentioned how outside candidates for civil service and public appointments feel ill-used by the system. My piece prompted more correspondents. One tells me that little effort was made, when he applied for a permanent secretaryship, to give him the information about the post which was available to insiders but
Something very strange and rather disturbing appears to be happening to the British right. Or at least to a large and noisy segment of it. It seems to have decided that the Republican party is something to emulate. Of course Ukip has always had a Tea Party tendency but this once-niche persuasion appears to be going
There was something odd about Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ Brexit comment yesterday — and it wasn’t just that he felt he could dictate US trade policy for a time when he wouldn’t even be in power. The thing that struck Mr S was the phrasing of his message: ‘I think it’s fair to say that
Another day, another instruction manual is published on how to be female. ‘Girl Up’ by Laura Bates, author of ‘Everyday Sexism’, is out this week. It is intended to be a handy guide for women on all the ‘lies they told us’. Who are they? ‘They’ means anyone who disagrees with the contemporary feminist line: that
Ministers from 34 countries met in Brussels this week in the vain hope of a quick fix for the steel crisis that everyone blames on dumping by China — which responded, through a state news agency, by calling its critics ‘lame and lazy’. Our own Sajid Javid, desperate to avert the fallout from a closure
The Netherlands was one of the six original founders of the European Union. We, the Dutch, have always been internationally orientated, progressive, tolerant and open, and as a nation and a people, we still are. But our attitude towards the centralistic, expansionist, and undemocratic EU has become increasingly sceptical. For us, the EU no longer
Well the entries have been flooding in for the ‘Insult Erdogan Poetry Contest’. Thousands and thousands of them in fact, with entries from all over the world. The volume is quite extraordinary, particularly the number that are being submitted in Arabic. Next week there is going to be a major development as I unveil the international
Downing Street is more confident than it has ever been that the EU referendum will be won. It is not just Barack Obama’s full-throated warning against Brexit that is responsible for this, but—as I say in my Sun column this morning—the sense that they have got the argument back onto their home turf of the
To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Is Barack Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate a welcome one or should he keep his nose out of our business? Tim Montgomerie says in his Spectator cover
The latest competition sees us leap unashamedly aboard the bandwagon du jour with an invitation to imagine what characters from Shakespeare’s plays would have made of this year’s fulsome celebrations of the 400th anniversary of his death. How would the Bard himself have reacted to all the fuss, I wonder. In the expert opinion of
Barack Obama’s decision to visit Britain during an election campaign was controversial enough. His writing an article against Brexit in the Daily Telegraph was more controversial still. But to stand in Downing Street and threaten his host country with being dumped ‘at the back of the queue’ for trade talks should it choose to leave the EU is,
David Cameron and Barack Obama arrived at the Foreign Office for their press conference today with two clear aims. The first was to impress upon everyone how well they get on, and in a rather cringeworthy manner. Cameron in particular was desperate to mention in almost every sentence the jolly good friendship that he had
Nick Cohen is predictably over-the-top in his response to Boris Johnson’s piece about President Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate in today’s Sun. He begins by claiming he’s approaching this subject ‘with the caution of a lawyer and the deference of a palace flunkey’. He then goes on to reprimand Boris for suggesting Obama has
As Barack Obama urges the UK to stick with the EU on his final official trip to Britain, there has been a security clampdown ahead of his arrival. Large parts of London have become no-go zones for drones while the President is in town. Happily, Obama appears to be taking no chances himself either. Mr
On Eurovision night, the best and most heartfelt performances always come from the countries imprisoned behind an Iron Curtain not so long ago. Since Romania joined the comity of Eurovision in 1994, its entries have always impressed. It has always known that Eurovision is a rare chance for the peoples of Europe – and its environs –
It’s the rage I struggle to comprehend. There is, I am sure, an entirely reasonable case to be made for leaving the European Union, it’s just that, for the most part, we’ve not heard it. Instead, the dominant feature of the Out campaign has been its anger. Many of these people really do seem to
As Sadiq Khan continues to face flak over his links to unsavoury characters, even a night at home in front of the television could now prove problematic. In this week’s episode of the BBC’s American Crime Story: The People v OJ Simpson, John Travolta acts out a scene about a man who Khan would no doubt like
The Government spent over £9m on a pro-EU leaflet to be distributed to every household before the official campaign began, backed up by a major social media campaign. This is deeply unfair. But it’s no surprise to me. I’ve seen it all before, running up to the 1975 referendum, when I was the National Agent for
‘Who thinks the UK is the best place in Europe to start a business?’ asked Spectator editor Fraser Nelson. Almost everyone at the table raised a hand. ‘So that’s a pretty good start…’ In the dining room of Drummonds Bank — a fine example of 18th Century entrepreneurship — The Spectator and NatWest brought together
Barack Obama has waded into the Brexit debate but should he be lecturing us about the EU referendum? On this special edition of the Coffee House podcast, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson is joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth to discuss whether the President’s intervention is a welcome one and whether it will actually work.
Boris Johnson is a former editor of this newspaper, and as such has the right to be treated with a courtesy Spectator journalists do not normally extend to politicians who do not enjoy his advantages. I am therefore writing with the caution of a lawyer and the deference of a palace flunkey when I say
More women than ever face old age in poverty after a report this week revealed that they were sacrificing their pensions to accommodate the rising cost of childcare. The Fawcett Society, which campaigns against gender inequality, found that women were significantly under-saving and worryingly, many were relying on their male counterparts to make up for
In agreeing to visit the UK midway through an election campaign, Barack Obama guaranteed controversy. As Tim Montgomerie makes clear in his Spectator cover piece this week, many Eurosceptics are angry at the thought of listening to a President with a clear track record of foreign policy failures. Boris Johnson, writing in The Sun this morning,
[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Janet Daley and Freddy Gray discuss Obama’s overreach” startat=27] Listen [/audioplayer]Nobody could describe Donald Trump as lacking in self-confidence, but the billionaire egomaniac is emotional jelly compared with King Barack. Even before he won the Nobel peace prize, Obama was telling America that his elevation to the presidency would be remembered as ‘the
A rush by landlords and second home buyers to beat the deadline for a new three per cent stamp duty surcharge on additional properties saw mortgage lending in March soar 59 per cent higher than a year ago. The Council of Mortgage Lenders said it had seen the biggest stamp duty distortion of the property market
If there was one piece of advice the Foreign Office was going to give to British citizens travelling to the USA you might think it would be to wary of lunatics armed to the hilt with semi-automatics. But no, our civil servants do not regard the possibility of having your ass shot off as you
[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Janet Daley and Freddy Gray discuss Obama’s overreach” startat=27] Listen [/audioplayer]You don’t like Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Fine, I don’t either. You are impatient to know who the next president will be? Me too. But if you think that the current American president’s trip to the UK this week is some kind of
Although Julian Fellowes recently promised to take a backseat in the EU debate after growing tired of celebrities telling people what to do, he is still able to grace us with his thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. In an interview with BA High Life, the Conservative peer — and Downton Abbey writer — discusses the current state
Tory MPs remain confident that they will force the government into a U-turn over forced academisation. Though departmental sources are pushing back against reports in today’s Financial Times that ministers are putting the brakes on the reforms, they cannot answer the question of how the changes would actually get through the House of Commons. And
