All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I’m just going to say it: I’m Team William. In that scrap that Prince Harry says happened at Nottingham Cottage, where Prince William allegedly lost his rag and pushed Harry to the floor, I’m cheering Will. Everyone who has a brother — I have five — knows they sometimes need a clip round the lughole.
Earlier this week, I was asked to list the three biggest threats to the media. Aside from the general sales decline of newspapers, I said, the threat of bot censorship – and the lack of accountability from the firms who apply it. We at The Spectator have just come across a classic example of this,
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Kevin McCarthy’s hopes to be voted House Speaker reaches day four still without a resolution. How much will he have to concede in order to win over the Republican rebels? Freddy Gray speaks to Amber Athey, The Spectator’s Washington Editor.
‘War is the realm of uncertainty’, said the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, and this would seem to apply very well to affairs in Russia at the moment. Following September’s shock ‘partial mobilisation’, rumours have swirled around since of another mass-mobilisation due imminently. Having got Russian New Year (the country’s main December celebration) out
How many people in Britain are transgender? Until today, there hasn’t been an official answer to that question. New census data give us a number: there are 262,000 people living in England and Wales in March 2021 who ‘identified with a gender different from their sex registered at birth’, in the words of the Office
Sex, drugs and Nazi costumes: Harry’s memoir certainly had it all. And Fleet Street has gone to town on the revelations in the book, dedicating acres of space to rural romps behind Windsor pubs and two dozen dead Taliban fighters. Unfortunately all that coverage means poor old Sir Keir’s long-awaited big speech has been knocked
Vladimir Putin’s 36 hour ceasefire in Ukraine, which came into effect at noon today, didn’t last long: less than two hours in, the Russian army broke it. The temporary truce had been announced yesterday by the Russian president to allow soldiers and civilians to celebrate Orthodox Christmas and attend church. But shortly before 2pm local
The Sussexes’ self-promotional tour is up and running: interviews with Tom Bradby and Anderson Cooper for Harry this weekend, ahead of the official release date on Tuesday. And there’s no sign of the circus slowing down any time soon, with three further books for the happy couple in the pipeline plus their Netflix commitments and
You thought Isis was old news. The world celebrated its territorial defeat nearly four years ago. The group that once controlled an area the size of the UK had been battered by more than 30,000 airstrikes, and tens of thousands of its militants had been killed. It was over. Really, though, the war against Isis never
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Prince Harry describes losing his virginity, taking drugs, and scrapping with his brother in his upcoming book, Spare. Will Buckingham Palace have anything to say about it? And junior doctors are threatening to stage a walkout for three days in March. Can the government stop them? James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman.
And still it keeps on coming. We had barely absorbed the first wave of revelations – jewellery mashed, dog bowls smashed, a brother trashed – before the new tsunami of tattle related to Prince Harry’s imminent book Spare broke over our fevered faces. Dissing duchesses getting aerated over hormones, teenage deflowerings in desolate fields, cocaine
If you haven’t seen Simon Pegg’s viral video about Rishi Sunak yet, you’re in for a real treat. It’s a genius bit of satire, a brutal send-up of left-leaning, self-righteous. middle-class midwits. In it, the cult Brit comic actor turned bona fide Hollywood star does a pitch-perfect impression of the sort of unkempt craft-beer botherer
Suella Braverman sparked a backlash last November when she described the number of small boats crossing the Channel as an ‘invasion’. The chattering classes objected to the ‘inflammatory language’ of the Home Secretary rather than the fact that 45,756 people entered Britain illegally in 2022. The provocative word this month is ‘infinite’, used by a
In his new memoir, Prince Harry claims that he regarded the 25 Taliban fighters he killed as ‘chess pieces’ not human beings. Yet Mr Steerpike can’t help but wonder if the young soldier prince didn’t learn something useful from his adversaries in war – the art of suicide-bombing. At least, in a literary sense, that
Asked why he robbed banks for a living, the legendary American bank robber Willie Sutton allegedly replied, ‘because that’s where the money is’. Not any more, it isn’t. In Denmark, where only twenty of the country’s 740 bank branches still hold cash in their vaults, 2022 was the first year without a bank robbery. There
Years ago I was, like Prince Harry, an army officer. Since then I have spent a lot of time with long-serving professional soldiers. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody talk publicly about how many people they’ve killed. Yet in his new book, the Duke of Sussex reportedly details that he flew on six missions
Fraternal relations rarely run entirely smoothly. But the degree of animosity revealed in reports of the physical clash between Princes William and Harry in the latter’s book Spare is nothing new in the turbulent history of Britain’s royals. In fact, the alleged spat between the brothers pales in comparison to the murderous hatreds between past
Dr Jordan Peterson, the renowned clinical psychologist, is being ordered off to re-education camp. The regulatory board in his Canadian home province – the College of Psychologists of Ontario – has demanded Peterson undertake a social media ‘coaching program’. All for the very 21st century crime of tweeting the wrong opinions. What exactly were the
It’s safe to say that most Conservative MPs will want to forget about 2022: three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors and nose-diving polls to boot. But for one MP at least, it wasn’t all bad. The Tories’ fortunes may have taken a drubbing, but unlike her party, Theresa May had a pretty successful year. Accounts published
Novelists can often be disappointingly unremarkable as people but occasionally one, like Fay Weldon, is a force of nature. She seemed to pack dozen larger than life women into one, in every sense. She used to say ‘that was after I became a fat girl’, and that she chose to write most about the sort
The Spectator is the world’s oldest magazine. More people than ever are reading us, online and in print, and they’re listening and watching our broadcast output too. Our podcasts now get downloaded more than two million times each month, and Spectator TV often gets more than a million views a month. We are looking to hire a
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Keir Starmer said this morning that communities would ‘take back control’ under a Labour government. In a speech delivered just down the road from where Rishi Sunak spoke yesterday, the Labour leader promised to expand devolution. Is his vision radical enough? Max Jeffery speaks to Isabel Hardman and James Heale.
Oh dear. The stage was all set this morning for Sir Keir’s big speech, responding to yesterday’s Blairite tribute by Rishi Sunak. His sleeves were rolled up, the podium looked reassuringly solid and the factory backdrop was suitably metaphorical. But then came the technical issues: the curse of any aspirant Prime Minister hoping to show
Keir Starmer’s new year speech was better than Rishi Sunak’s. It’s easier to give a speech about fixing problems when you’re in opposition and someone else has caused them. But it was just more interesting than what the Prime Minister had to say yesterday. There was the politically audacious decision to pick up Vote Leave’s
It was inevitable, with a book as highly anticipated as Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, that there would be a leak of its contents ahead of its release next week. Given the Duke of Sussex’s antipathy towards his family, it is fitting that the newspaper that landed this exclusive is the republican-leaning Guardian. Nonetheless, it is
The battle of the New Year launch speeches enters its second day, with Labour leader Keir Starmer giving his own address in East London. Rishi Sunak said yesterday he had five ‘immediate priorities’ for fixing Britain. The Labour leader is offering a similar repair job this morning, while also trying to reassure voters this won’t
Labour’s leaders do not rate Rishi Sunak. I don’t mean by this that they think his policies range from the wrongheaded to the disastrous – we can take these opposition criticisms as a given. I mean that as professional politicians they look at the Prime Minister and see a rank amateur. ‘He’s rubbish,’ a member of
The clash that has led to the historic abnormality of a House of Representatives without a speaker is fascinating in part because of the odd combination of factors at play. Rather than a battle over a single policy or ideological issue, the frustrations of the chaotic 10 per cent of House Republicans who voted against
In his speech today, the Prime Minister gave five targets: ‘Halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut [NHS] waiting lists and stop the boats.’ But are these real targets, or are they the old politician’s trick of promising what will happen anyway? Sunak’s job is made easier by the way economics is reported: everyone
In one particularly excruciating scene in The Office, manager David Brent tells everyone that they are about to lose their jobs, but ‘the good news is I’ve been promoted’. When challenged, he says, ‘Well I couldn’t come out and say I’ve got some bad news and some irrelevant news.’ A similar exchange seems to have
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Rishi Sunak made five pledges to fix Britain in a speech in London today. Inflation will halve, the economy will grow, debt will fall, NHS waiting lists will be cut, and the government will pass laws to tackle the small boats crisis. Is the PM promising too much, or not enough? Max Jeffery speaks to
Mike Tyson is said once to have claimed the best punch he’d ever thrown was one he landed on actress and model Robin Givens, when she was his wife. ‘Man, I’ll never forget that punch’, his biographer quoted him as saying in 1988. ‘She really offended me and I went bam, and she flew backward,
At one minute past midnight on 1 January, as Putin uttered the last words of his new year’s address, Ukraine sent six Himars rockets into the Russian-occupied territory of Donetsk. Four landed on a vocational school in the town of Makiivka, which had been acting as a temporary Russian military base, reducing its buildings to rubble. The domestic fallout for