Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Competition: Reunion blues

Spectator literary competition No. 2837  This week let’s have a poem about the horrors of a reunion dinner. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 26 February. The recent invitation to give a classic of children’s literature the hard-boiled treatment produced a flood of entries that were a joy

Steerpike

Hacks get a royal handbagging from princes over sandbags

Prince Harry’s disdain for the media is well documented; but it was William who got grumpy today, telling Guardian journalist Robert Booth: ‘Why don’t you put your notebook down and give us a hand with the sandbags?’ Booth offered to help: ‘But when your reporter agreed to help, aides stepped in and said it would

Isabel Hardman

MP tries to remove the poison from the food debate

One of the more unpalatable news stories of the week was the survey by West Yorkshire councils that seemingly innocuous food was made up of all sorts of things that either weren’t what they claimed to be, or weren’t very much like food at all. It’s another sign of the food problems that this country

Ed West

25 years after the Rushdie fatwa, are we more or less afraid of Islamism?

It’s 25 years since the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued history’s worst Valentine’s Day message to author Salman Rushdie, during that momentous spring when communism began to topple in Poland and Hungary, the world wide web was invented, and the Iranian leader issued in a new age of religious tension. The background is full of paradoxes

What is Alex Salmond’s plan for the currency now?

Alex Salmond is now a man without a plan. He is offering Scots a future of uncertainty and instability. Threats of a debt default leaving Scotland and Scots with a bad credit rating. No idea which currency we would be transitioning to. By contrast if Scots want to know the benefit of remaining in the

Isabel Hardman

Boris and ballots: what might happen to the Tory party in 2015

What are Boris Johnson’s real chances of becoming Tory leader? I examine the Mayor of London’s standing with Conservative MPs in my Telegraph column today – and it is fascinating how polarised opinion is about the Mayor in the Tory party. His supporters insist he is the only hope for the Conservative party, while those

Isabel Hardman

Ukip beats Tories in Wythenshawe as Labour hold seat

So Ukip did come second in the Wythenshawe by-election (and Labour won, of course). David Cameron says the 4,301 votes (17.95% of the vote and a 14.5% swing) that John Bickley won wasn’t ‘the sort of break through that people were talking about’. The Prime Minister, who saw his own party pushed into third place

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2013 H2

It’s that time of year again, where The Spectator‘s circulation figures are out – and our success continues. In October, I announced that we had more than one million unique visitors in a month. This week, we passed the 1.3 million mark with more than 3.2 million pageviews — something even I didn’t expect. Here’s how

Cheat sheet: George Osborne’s speech on the pound

‘If Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the pound’, the Chancellor said this morning. In a speech aiming to blow a hole in the SNP’s campaign, George Osborne has set out why sharing the pound isn’t on the cards for an independent Scotland. Here are the key points from his speech,

Isabel Hardman

Paul Nuttall interview: I don’t want to lead Ukip

Ukip’s autumn conference made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It was supposed to be a showcase of how grown up the party is these days, but it ended up being about Godfrey Bloom calling women ‘sluts’ and hitting a journalist. In the conference hall, Nigel Farage bounded onto the stage to a strange

Steerpike

Delingpole quits Telegraph ahead of UK launch of Breitbart.com

Green-baiter James Delingpole has quit his blog at Telegraph with customary flair: ‘Today is the sad day when I must bid you all farewell. I have been appointed Chief Sustainability Consultant at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, working directly to one of my all-time-heroes Ed Davey, with a juicy, taxpayer-funded salary, a ring-fenced pension

Camilla Swift

Will China kill all of Africa’s elephants?

In 2010, Aidan Hartley, our ‘Wild Life’ columnist and Unreported World presenter, asked in his feature below: ‘Will China kill all Africa’s elephants?’ And, as I type, politicians from over 50 countries are discussing this very issue at the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Meanwhile, David Beckham, Prince William, and the Chinese basketball player

Nick Cohen

Why are Rupert Murdoch’s men damning Andrew Mitchell?

If you want to picture Rupert Murdoch imagine an old man on a tight rope. On the one hand, his newspapers must pursue his interests – say that everyone but the rich must pay the price of austerity, for instance. But as he wobbles over the void, Murdoch must also balance his rather brutal class

Rod Liddle

One Yorkshireman’s commendable bid for freedom

Richard Milburn, a burglar, broke out of Kirkham Prison near Preston because he was sick to the back teeth of the Scousers in the place. And the Mancs. And the Scallies and the La’s (not my apostrophe; I think it’s a local peculiarity). Richard is a Yorkshireman, even if his surname suggests a still better

Lara Prendergast

The dream pill may not always be worth it

A couple of years ago, I was put on the third-generation contraceptive pill Yasmin. ‘It’s good for your skin and stabilises your weight,’ the doctor said. And it’s true. I’ve found it to be wonderful. Most of my friends are on similar types of third–gen pill, like Femodene and Marvelon; many swear by them. Out of

Jonathan Ray

February Wine Vaults – Private Cellar

We’re planning to go seriously upmarket with our briefer offers this year, with each merchant tasked to rootle out exceptional wines that you cannot find elsewhere. This first offer is a cracker. The 2005 Bordeaux vintage was a remarkable one — so sought-after that much has vanished from the market. But Private Cellar has kept two

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Floods dominated everything

Wellies off, gloves on. The party leaders greeted each other with forced displays of warmth and mutual esteem today. Outside, the gusts blew, the rivers rose and the heavens wept. Floods dominated everything. The PM has spent so much time with emergency committees that he’s adopted their can-do battlefield vocabulary. He talked of ‘Gold Commanders

Steerpike

Norman Baker’s liberal input

Norman Baker was dispatched to the Home Office at the last reshuffle in order to have a strong liberal voice in the department; it was felt that the Tories’ favourite Lib Dem, Jeremy Browne, had been too ‘right wing’. Baker promised to give a ‘clear, liberal input’ from day one. Funny, then, that he is

James Forsyth

PMQs: Miliband won’t put politics away over the floods

PMQs today started with a more genteel tone in deference to the floods. But Ed Miliband showed that he has no intention of putting politics away entirely, effectively needling David Cameron on cuts at the Environment Agency. Tellingly, at the end of their exchanges, Cameron rebuked Miliband for seeking ‘to divide the House’. When a