All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Sir Roger Scruton has died. Diagnosed with cancer last summer, he passed away peacefully on Sunday surrounded by his family. There will be a lot of things written and said in the coming days. But perhaps I could say a few things here. The first is to reiterate something that the Scruton family have said
Sir Roger Scruton died today at the age of 75. In an article for the 2019 Christmas issue of The Spectator, republished here, he looked back on his year: January My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. But the new year
Rebecca Long Bailey: Labour ‘didn’t win the argument’ in December… Sophy Ridge interviewed Rebecca Long Bailey, who launched her campaign for the Labour leadership earlier this week. The shadow business secretary is thought to be the preferred choice of outgoing leader Jeremy Corbyn and she has the support of the Momentum grouping inside the party.
The latest challenge invited you to add to Sam Leith’s lines about Boris Johnson, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’: ‘Mayor of London Boris Johnson/ Much admired the lady’s pole-dance/ Mentored well her start-up business…’ Though Longfellow has long fallen out of fashion, in his day he was a poet celebrity,
The biggest news of the week, obviously, is the conclusion of the drama which has rocked Britain for the past 12 months: the moment the EU Withdrawal Bill finally made it through the Commons. Blanket coverage of Thursday night’s vote may have led to some readers being unaware of some of the other news stories
It is easy to construct a scenario in which tit for tat actions by the Americans and Iranians lead to all-out war, close off the Gulf, send oil prices soaring, crash the global economy – and, if you are really going to go for it, end in nuclear conflagration. But what about the alternative outcome:
This week has shown how much the election has changed. The withdrawal agreement has sailed through the Commons and in Northern Ireland, there has been an agreement to get the assembly and the executive back up and running. As I say in The Sun this morning, ministers were struck by how Brexit got only the
Not so long ago, you could judge the stability of the Middle East by looking at the oil price. Now: not so much. In the last week, we’ve seen American drones kill an Iranian general and Tehran fire missiles at two American bases in Iraq, yet the price of oil remained relatively stable. It climbed
There is anxiety at the BBC, where the Cummings effect is thought to threaten the Today programme. If ministers are told not to appear on it, people ask how it can survive. Although a supporter of the Cummings frost towards the BBC, I feel it would be perverse if Today were the victim. It is well-edited, with a much
It is actually fitting that Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave the UK is being referred to as Megxit. Because this royal temper tantrum, this flouncing out of the UK by the most painfully PC couple in monarchical history, has much in common with Brexit. Like Brexit, it has exposed the vast moral divide that
Just before Christmas, Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former Chaplain to the Queen, converted to Catholicism. But that’s not the main subject of my interview with him in the first Holy Smoke episode of 2020. In it, he deplores the Church of England’s surrender to secularism under Archbishop Justin Welby, who won’t enjoy his former colleague’s
What do you do if you are an outsider in the Labour leadership race and need to grab some extra attention fast? Answer: come up with something eye-catching that you think will go down well with party members even if it is not necessarily a realistic proposition. First we had Jess Phillips suggesting that she
There’s one thing to be said for the possibility of the reconvening of the Stormont Northern Ireland Assembly: it makes a fool of those of us who take a cynical view of these institutions as mere talking shops, opportunities for gamma politicians to sound off to their own side. Wrong. The thing has been out
Flailing leadership hopeful Clive Lewis has weighed in on the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle debacle, telling those at his campaign launch this morning that Britain needs another referendum – this time on the existence of the monarchy. Unsatisfied with the degree of discord sown in the wake of 2016, Lewis has decided that we
‘Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I don’t think so.’ Back in 2017, when Meghan Markle was ‘girlfriend’ and not yet ‘Duchess of Sussex,’ Prince Harry was already expressing doubts about his future role. In a lengthy interview with US magazine Newsweek Harry explained, ‘I sometimes
Ever since he entered the White House, Donald Trump has been trying to isolate Iran diplomatically. But in the week since the killing of Qassem Soleimani, it seems that the opposite has happened. John R Bradley argues in this week’s cover piece that Trump’s move has united the Sunni Arab states, from Saudi Arabia to
Drama and tragedy continue to envelop Iran. Just hours after the regime struck two US bases in Iraq on Wednesday, Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 crashed after taking off from Tehran en route to Kyiv. All 176 passengers and crew members on board were killed. Iran almost immediately claimed that the plane had suffered a
Five years on from the horrific Charlie Hebdo massacre in which a dozen people lost their lives, politicians have been busy showcasing their sanctimony. Socialist mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo urged people ‘never to forget’ the price the cartoonists paid for the courage. Yet only last week, Hidalgo used Twitter to express her ‘profound shock’ at
A few hours into the new year, pro-Assad forces targeted a school in southern Idlib with a cluster bomb. The bombing took place at 11am when it was clear the school would have been busy. Five children were killed. Two of those who died were just six years old; the oldest child victim was only thirteen. Four adults
At present, it seems like the bells of the Elizabeth Tower will remain silent at 11pm on 31 January, as Britain leaves the EU. Although the new Speaker Lindsay Hoyle vowed at the end of last year to not block Big Ben ringing on Brexit day, an attempt to legislate the matter, by amending Boris Johnson’s Withdrawal
If you needed an illustration of why short-termism in politics is a very bad thing, look no further than the report from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact today into the UK government’s preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative. This is more popularly known as William Hague and Angelina Jolie’s drive to end rape as
As we know, carbon emissions are going to have to be eliminated in the coming decades to prevent us suffering from fire, flood, tempest and plagues of locusts. But in one important respect is the cure actually worse than the disease? That’s the surprising implication of a statement on deaths from last year’s heatwave by
In the Queen’s Christmas message, she observed that 2019 had “felt quite bumpy” at times. Her implication was that a new year could well bring happier, more stable times. Unfortunately for Her Majesty, it isn’t how 2020 is panning out. The pseudo abdication of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from the Royal Family, just
Will Barry Gardiner enter the race to become leader of the Labour party? The Shadow international development secretary certainly thinks he has what it takes. Following reports last night that he was mulling a shock late entry into the leadership contest, Gardiner appeared on Victoria Derbyshire’s BBC show this morning, live from Abu Dhabi, where
Nicola Sturgeon’s reshuffle of her Westminster team is more than a post-election shake-up of the Nationalist front bench. For one thing, it represents a shift to the next generation. Mhairi Black (25), who became something of a political superstar upon her election in 2015, has been promoted to Scotland spokeswoman; freshly elected Stephen Flynn (31)
Let’s not get carried away. The Queen’s younger grandson may be decamping to North America with his lovely wife and baby but the Queen herself is very much in business; life goes on. It may certainly have been odd, not to say ill advised, for this headstrong couple to have announced their departure from Britain
As a general rule, neoconservatives and hawkish Republican foreign policy officials don’t respect President Donald Trump’s capacities as commander-in-chief. They view him as impulsive, unwise, short-sighted, and buffoonish—the kind of guy who doesn’t do his homework, spends more time on Twitter than reading briefing books and would rather pull up America’s drawbridge than act as
What a difference a day makes. When I went to bed on 2 January what seemed to be the most important issue in the Middle East was the long-term impact of the brave – if desperate – mass protests in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. Many were trying to extract some positive meaning: were they the
Is Barry Gardiner running for Labour leader or not? The question is almost as confusing as whether Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have resigned from the Royal Family. In the former case, two journalists had the story that Gardiner was standing and would be backed by Len McCluskey, who has become unhappy with Rebecca Long
In all the madness of last year, we had to delay The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards until later this month. The first step is to agree the categories. Last time, we had “Resignation of the Year” – such a hotly-contested category that it had to be shared between David Davis and Dominic Raab, the
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about the life and loves of the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Professor John Haffenden joins me to discuss the impact of the opening of an archive of more than 1,000 of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale — his Harvard sweetheart and the woman who for
Prime Minister’s Questions might be shorter now that Lindsay Hoyle is the Speaker, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality of the session is any better. There are still MPs who don’t really see it as an opportunity to ask the Prime Minister a question, preferring instead to compliment him. Today’s worst offender was
New year. New parliament. New speaker of the House of Commons. The change was palpable immediately. Former speaker John Bercow found it impossible to say nothing even when he had nothing to say, which was most of the time. His successor Lindsay Hoyle has the contrary virtue of terseness. He got through the session without
Greggs’ sausage rolls are part of the national conversation. The smart shift to offer a vegan variant caught the mood and bragging about your love of Greggs is an easy way for politicos to signal their down-with-the-proles ordinariness. In fact, political types should be paying more attention to the company behind the sausage rolls, because