All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
While in the West, the debate seems to be about which statue to topple next, in Russia it’s rather different. Felix Dzerzhinsky – ‘Iron Felix,’ founder of the Bolshevik secret police – looks like he may be coming home, thirty years after his statue was pulled down from its place in front of the KGB’s
The announcement of the Brexit deal at the end of 2020 alleviated concerns over food supplies to the relief of many, not least the government. But while it is clear that food will continue to appear on shop shelves, what has been less clear, however, is how we want to feed ourselves now that we
A man is filmed dying under a policeman’s knee in Minneapolis. Riots break out, statues are toppled and the Western world erupts with civil unrest. More than 50,000 people are massacred, tortured and raped, leaving orphaned children to forage for food and find their drinking water in puddles. Some of it is caught on camera.
Former President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate today, in what has turned out to be the shortest impeachment trial in American history, after the House of Representatives voted to impeach him last month after the riot at the Capitol building. Despite being the first president impeached twice during his time in office – this
17 min listen
With the government facing a backbench revolt over how to fix the pressing issue of unsafe cladding on high rise buildings, Katy Balls asks Conservative MP Bob Blackman and the Spectator’s assistant editor Emma Byrne about the government’s response so far.
It’s hard to believe in these early weeks of 2021, when the country is grappling with an unprecedented national health and economic crisis, that anyone could contemplate willingly throwing into the mix a constitutional crisis. Issuing a clarion call to break apart, when it could not be clearer we need to pull together. Yet that
Being at the launch of the 1997 Labour manifesto and watching the shadow cabinet take to the stage is one of my abiding memories from more than 20 years spent as a lobby journalist. Even setting aside the star-turn Tony Blair, it was a veritable march of the big beasts — Gordon Brown, Robin Cook,
In the dramatic ‘reveal’ of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the lead character, private dick Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) violently extracts the identity of the young girl hidden in the house of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Evelyn, after being beaten and thrown across the room by Gittes, explains, ‘She’s my sister and my daughter’. The penny drops
It’s great that Britain’s high court has ruled that children can’t give informed consent to receive puberty blockers. I only wish that we had made that sort of progress here in Australia. But we haven’t — we’ve gone the other way. Not only are we still handing out puberty blockers to children, we have also introduced
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not an easy person to cancel. She has survived the brutal murder of her colleague Theo van Gogh, lived through more than two decades of serious threats to her life and fled more countries than many people have visited. Perhaps it is for these reasons, rather than in spite of them,
25 min listen
Freddy Gray talks to Republican political consultant Luke Thompson about the demise of the Lincoln Project, the political action committee set up to oppose Donald Trump’s re-election.
The Spectator’s legal action in the Alex Salmond affair has prompted the Holyrood inquiry to rethink its approach. The magazine went to court to argue the media’s right to publish and the public’s right to read evidence from Salmond which the inquiry is refusing to publish. A redacted version has already appeared on The Spectator
France has become the first country in the world to recommend a different vaccine regime for those who have recovered from the virus. The country’s public health authority has recommended that people previously infected with Covid-19 only receive one jab, rather than two. The advice is based on preliminary data, including two studies from the
Earlier this week, the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon boasted that 99.9 per cent of older people in care homes had been vaccinated. An impressive figure, one that she deserves to boast about — providing, of course, she acknowledges the successful vaccine drive has been thanks to the whole United Kingdom. Now though it seems
The purpose of the Northern Ireland protocol was meant to be to square the circles of simultaneously protecting the single market and stability in Northern Ireland. But, as I write in the magazine this week, there are signs it is beginning to undermine stability there. The fundamental problem is that Unionists are increasingly against it.
Meghan Markle hailed her victory in a high court privacy case as a ‘comprehensive win’ over the Mail on Sunday’s ‘illegal and dehumanising practices’. But is that right? If you dig beneath the headlines and read the judge’s ruling, it becomes clear that her victory has much to do with a burgeoning expansion of privacy
Sir Richard Henriques, the former High Court Judge who published a devastating report on Operation Midland – the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into a fictitious ‘VIP paedophile ring’ made up by Carl Beech and others – has called for a criminal investigation into the officers who botched the investigation. Amongst a catalogue of other failings, officers
Yoshiro Mori the 83-year-old former Japanese prime minister has resigned from his position as president of the Tokyo Olympic Organising Committee less than 6 months before the games are due to start. Mori’s crime? Making spectacularly unwise comments during a discussion of how to increase women’s representation on the committee. ‘When you increase the number
18 min listen
Despite the GDP figures from the ONS today, the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane has written an optimistic commentary today, arguing why he thinks the British economy will bounce back after Covid restrictions end. Katy Balls talks to Kate Andrews, the Spectator’s Economics Correspondent, and James Forsyth about that possibility.
Well, that’s alright, then — we’re not going to have another recession. True, the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee expects the economy to shrink by 4 per cent in the first quarter of this year — following a fall of 9.9 per cent fall last year, itself the deepest plunge in economic growth in
When the third lockdown was voted on in the House of Commons last month, there was a smaller Tory rebellion than the previous two votes. A combination of the arrival of an exit strategy through vaccines, the new Kent variant and the sharp increase in hospital admissions meant that many MPs previously critical of lockdown as a tool
You have to navigate the tricky etiquette of what to wear for Zoom meetings. That little black box in the corner has to be rebooted from time to time when the wi-fi goes wonky. You have to make your own sandwiches instead of popping out to Pret. And there is a severe risk of hand
These are dispiriting times for France. The 6pm curfew and the closure of bistros and theatres have taken all the fun out of life. What is there to do in the evening but watch television? Last night viewers were subjected to a live political debate, what was regarded as the opening salvo to the 2022
A leaked email from Keir Starmer’s director of policy that hit the headlines this week contained an interesting line: that Labour must become ‘unashamedly pro-business’ in order to ‘be the party of working people and their communities’. This has caused predictable outrage on the left of the party. At the other end of the political
It’s been no mystery that the UK economy took a severe beating in 2020: two lockdowns, a host of circuit-breakers and fire-breakers, Christmas cancelled for millions of people. The experience of an economy forced to hibernate for months on end last year is reflected in today’s GDP update from the Office for National Statistics, showing
Last week, Indonesia banned schools across the country from forcing girls to wear the hijab, after the parents of a 16-year-old Christian schoolgirl uploaded a video of their daughter being forced to wear the headscarf in Padang, in West Sumatra. According to the Education Minister, schools that now fail to comply with the order will
18 min listen
After a brief winter hibernation, it seems that the lockdown-sceptic wing of the Conservative party is returning in force. Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth about the increasing clamour to reopen society and whether the government really has shifted the goalposts for easing lockdown.
Godwin’s Law has become a way of life in our polarised political times. Go on social media any given day and you’ll find someone comparing their political opponents to the Nazis. But the case of Gina Carano is the first I can think of in which someone has been fired for suggesting as much. Carano,
Among the Scottish parliament’s many crucial roles, there is none more important than its ability to scrutinise government and hold it to account. The same is true of a free press. Both are at their best when they hold power to account on behalf of the public. But neither can do this essential duty when
London is Europe’s major financial centre and one of the world’s two leading financial hubs. This is unlikely to change following Brexit. Its main competition is with New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and other centres like Shanghai that will emerge in the coming years. However, the headline of today’s main story in the Financial Times proclaimed, ‘Amsterdam
There was all this talk about Covid, claiming that chaps who were over seventy and not underweight were vulnerable. I would nod sagely, never thinking that this could apply to me. Like a lot of men, when it comes to physique or romance I have a secret appeal court, to override the harsh judgments of
I quit the ‘poor people scholarship’, also known as the University of Oxford’s Crankstart scholarship, halfway through my first year. I was only four hours into my 25 annual hours of volunteering, tediously spent peeling vegetables for a charity roast dinner – a requirement set by the university itself that I had to fulfil in