All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
How nice to hear Sir Mike Penning, chairman of something called the all-party parliamentary group for Roadside Rescue and Recovery, condemn ‘smart’ motorways as the death traps they are. The motorways use a variety of ‘smart’ methods to vary traffic flow, including part-time hard shoulders managed from a central control room and enforced using electronic
This afternoon Boris Johnson finally approved the use of equipment made by Huawei in building parts of Britain’s 5G network. The decision is a long time coming, having initially been kicked into the long grass by Theresa May last year, but it is also important. The decision will have profound strategic implications for the UK
Nicholas Parsons died this morning at the age of 96. In 2011, he was interviewed by William Cook for The Spectator, who noted that Parsons’ enduring success lay in his ability to laugh at himself: When I was a kid, watching Sale of the Century on my grandma’s colour telly, Nicholas Parsons used to seem
What will the UK’s immigration system look like after leaving the EU? During the general election campaign, Boris Johnson committed to an Australian-style points based system. He also committed to bringing immigration levels down. But besides these two points, little is currently known about the specifics of how the new system will operate when it
There’s been a shocked, wounded response on the part of pundits to the Church of England’s statement last week in response to the introduction of heterosexual civil partnerships. The Church observed that: ‘for Christians, marriage – that is, the lifelong union between a man and a woman, contracted with the making of vows – remains
Last Friday marked the signing of the Withdrawal Agreement. I know that some people in our country are still a bit upset. But what happened last week matters. We all know that we’ve just had three and a half difficult years. But we had them together – we shared them. Three and a half years
The Spectator is the world’s oldest (and Europe’s fastest-growing) magazine and is read by more people than ever. But our podcasts now get over 1.5 million downloads a month: demand is pretty big and we need a podcast producer to help the expansion. We currently have a one-person podcast team, Cindy Yu, who produces nine
There are many characteristics that make a good leader. Honesty, eloquence, and charisma are traditionally high up on the list. But Labour’s leadership elections have shown that one attribute is now prized above all else – loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn. Almost all of the candidates have tried to present themselves as Corbyn’s natural successor. The
To paraphrase Shakespeare, the whirligig of time brings in… more whirligigs. Four years ago, few people thought that Donald Trump had a real prospect of becoming President of the United States. There were suggestions that Mr Trump himself did not take his chances too seriously. He might have seen the campaign as a way of
Remoaners are having the mother of all meltdowns. What’s rankled them this time? The Brexit 50p, of course. Yes, they’re now raging against a coin. I’m genuinely starting to worry about these people. To clarify, I’m not talking about Remain voters. There were 16.1m of those and the vast majority of them are perfectly normal
If there is one thing that could yet save HS2 it is the ‘letting down the North’ argument. Didn’t Boris make a speech in the early hours of 13 December promising the party’s new-found voters in the north that he would never take their votes for granted and never forget them? How, then, would he
For those who claimed Boris Johnson would be Donald Trump’s poodle, the past month has been corrective. Far from bowing before American power, he is defying it. Johnson is considering rejecting America’s demand to ban Huawei from supplying parts of a new UK 5G network. His government is willing to override Trump’s objections and ensure
This is a short piece on Holocaust Memorial Day, and what it means to be descended from Holocaust survivors. Many, many people could write a story like this, but this one is mine. All parts of my family lost people in the war. My grandfather, though, lost pretty much his whole family. They were in
It’s decision time in No. 10. This week ought to be the week in which a decision is made on whether HS2 should proceed – and whether Huawei should be given access to the UK’s 5G network. Whichever way the government moves on these issues, a chunk of the Tory party will be left unhappy.
Priti Patel – No confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK Niall Paterson took over the reins from Sophy Ridge this morning and began by speaking to the Home Secretary Priti Patel. The first item on the agenda was the outbreak of coronavirus in China, which has so far claimed the lives of 56 people and
An open letter to Boris Johnson: People, even including your opponents, are getting used to the idea that you are not only the Prime Minister, but likely to remain so for some time to come. Yet before we settle down under the new regime, we should remember just how incredible this would have seemed, well
I start the week by going through my iPhone to delete the numbers of former friends. It sounds depressing, but it’s actually quite cathartic. I suppose it all started with Brexit. I’m not a confrontational person, so it was surprising to find so many friends turning against me over their newfound devotion to a neoliberal
‘No one disagrees with what the government is trying to do but what they do worry about, is the capacity of the state to deliver it’, one Tory grandee tells me. As I wrote in the Sun, the concern is that the government sees infrastructure as the way to boost Britain’s growth rate, but these
Tony Blair’s election anthem “Things Can Only Get Better” was infectious, even for those like me who were not from the same political tribe. It was impossible not to get swept up in New Labour’s era of Cool Britannia. At the 1997 Labour party conference, just a few months after the Labour landslide, I was
Until recently, those expressing scepticism about climate-change catastrophe have been hauled over the coals (or the renewables equivalent) for not understanding the difference between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’. The lack of global warming at the beginning of the 21st century was not to be taken, chided the warmists, as evidence that climate change was not happening.
‘Cancel culture’ is a horrible term because outside of a dictatorship nobody can actually be ‘canceled’ or otherwise ‘disappeared’. All that can happen is that people can be found to have trodden across one of the orthodoxies of the age. A small number of bullies then come for them. And a larger number of otherwise
A while ago, Laurence Fox referred to “the oddness in the casting” of a Sikh soldier in film 1917 – a daft thing to say given how many Sikhs did fight in that conflict. He said the inclusion of a Sikh soldier (played by Nabhaan Rizwan) in a scene alongside a British regiment was ‘incongruous’
Hands up if you have ever heard of Brian Moles? No? Then what about Anne Sacoolas? Yep, I bet that is registering a bit more. Sacoolas, as pretty well the whole country now knows, was spirited out of the country by US authorities after allegedly causing the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn by driving
Anyone who tunes into Prime Minister’s Questions these days ought to be prepared to hear the issue of Scottish independence raised multiple times. Since winning seats in the snap election from the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems, SNP MPs have been keen to say that the case for IndyRef2 has never been stronger However,
In contrast to prophets of doom, who get invited to Davos, asked to address the UN and are able to build entire careers around their scaremongering, there are few rewards for those who play down fears – even if they turn out to be correct. If there were, then perhaps I wouldn’t have to draw
More criticism of the infamous HS2 high-speed rail project emerged today, as the National Audit Office published their findings of serious mismanagement and rocketing costs, implicating both HS2 limited and the Department for Transport. From the NAO watchdog: ‘The Department, HS2 Ltd and government more widely underestimated the task, leading to optimistic estimates being used
‘You can’t change sex – biologically, that is impossible.’ That, by most people’s standards, is a simple observable truth. But by the standards of campus activists, it is tantamount to hate speech, deserving of merciless retribution. The quote above is from Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. And for
Is Jeremy Corbyn attempting to foment the abolition of the House of Lords? His recent peerage nominations suggest so. Corbyn has put forward a former Speaker mired in bullying allegations who facilitated a parliamentary revolution. A failed apparatchik under investigation for her handling of anti-Semitism. And Tom Watson. The former Labour deputy leader is perhaps
Roger Scruton’s funeral takes place in London today, and he’ll be in the thoughts and prayers of his admirers worldwide – many of them in Poland. We Poles owe him an unusual debt, one he mentioned in his Spectator diary last month when he wrote about his journey to Warsaw. Andrzej Duda, the Polish president,
Now that the Withdrawal Agreement Bill has received royal assent and become law, the UK will leave the EU at the end of the month. Attention in Westminster has turned to the next stage of the Brexit negotiations. In No. 10 there is a desire to de-dramatise the upcoming trade talks and avoid a day-to-day
Can Boris Johnson really cut violent crime by 20 per cent? James reported recently that the Prime Minister has set his Cabinet this target, and is demanding that every department get involved in realising it. Most people have focused on the most salient political problem, which is knife crime. But if the Prime Minister is
Love him or hate him, you can’t deny that John Bercow had an outsized political impact in 2019. The former Speaker was instrumental in the battles to block Brexit through legislation and parliamentary procedure, and his decision to delay his departure probably changed the course of British history. So it was perhaps unsurprising that Bercow