All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Easter is, of course, the time of year when Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but don’t expect to learn that on the English Heritage children’s Easter trail. ‘Did you know Easter started as a celebration of spring?,’ children who take part in the trail are told. Any mention of Christ or
The admission by Toby Carvery that it chopped down an ancient oak tree overlooking one of its pubs has outraged anyone who cares about arboreal preservation, British heritage and decent food and drink – not necessarily in that order. The Mitchells and Butlers group, which owns Toby Carvery, issued a statement saying that the tree
The persecution of Nigeria’s Christians is medieval in its horror. Villages are surrounded in the dead of night by bandits who rape and kill the inhabitants. No one is spared: women and children are among those butchered. The Makurdi Diocese, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt Benue state, has been hit badly by this savage violence. In
Harvard is in trouble, but I’m finding it hard to have any sympathy. In the aftermath of October 7th, Jewish students at what is supposedly the United States’s most prestigious university were intimidated, vilified and silenced. It was an intolerable double punch after the trauma of Hamas’s brutal massacre in Israel. The ugly scenes at
The plight of Russell Findlay reveals a lot about how politics works. Findlay was elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives in September 2024, by which point the party’s vulnerability to Reform was already clear. The Holyrood Tories were not made for a populist era. They are a patrician party of the cosy centre, chiefly concerned
With the war in Ukraine now in its fourth year, Trump administration officials, including Donald Trump himself, have spent the last month dialling their Ukrainian colleagues, jetting to foreign capitals to meet with Ukrainian and Russian officials and huddling with European ministers in an attempt to bring the conflict to a conclusion. The latest meeting
‘As if we didn’t have enough to argue about!’ exclaimed the gentleman in front. We were standing just off a busy road adjacent to a looming wall. The road wasn’t any road, and the wall wasn’t any wall. It was Shankill Road, and this was one of Belfast’s infamous peace walls. The man wasn’t picking
It is an unfortunate truth that the picturesque Maundy Thursday service celebrated today in Durham, in which the King distributes Maundy money to deserving individuals, is a watered down version of the original. It started out in abbeys and churches when clerics would wash each others’ feet in imitation of Christ washing the feet of the Apostles before the Last Supper. Bad King John adopted the
On Monday evening, The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove and Spectator columnist and associate editor Douglas Murray sat down for a live event at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. In front of a packed auditorium with 1,500 guests, they discussed the October 7th massacre; Douglas’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West; and
Those who have won a great victory after years of struggle are entitled to enjoy a modest triumph, a single victory lap. But to crow too loudly is unseemly, and it is the mark of a small victor to pursue former opponents vindictively, taking vengeful advantage of new-found power to do so. An ugly object
It is the eternal question for UK policymakers: America or Europe? For the past nine months, Keir Starmer has sought to follow his 17 post-war predecessors in maintaining an uneasy balancing act between the two. But the Prime Minister’s tricky task has been made even more difficult by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The National Education Union has accused private schools of exploiting staff to save money. ‘Staff working in the private education sector,’ said Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, ‘report that workload is being increased… in response to the cost-of-living crisis and increased cost of VAT and national insurance.’ It is of course true that
Back to the Reform fallout, which has escalated this afternoon. Now the party’s former MP Rupert Lowe has said he will sue his old party for defamation over what he claims is a ‘concerted smear campaign’ against him. He was suspended in March after party chairman Zia Yusuf and the chief whip Lee Anderson released
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Michael Gove and Katy Balls join James Heale to discuss their interview with the Health Secretary Wes Streeting included in this week’s special Easter edition of The Spectator. Michael identifies three key reasons why Streeting’s fate is key to the success of the government: immigration, the cost-of-living crisis and faith in the NHS. Seen as the
Sir Keir Starmer may not be polling all that well with the British public but he’s managed to garner some overseas admiration. It transpires that the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has penned an enthusiastic piece in Time magazine on the UK Prime Minister, lauding his previous work in the courts
The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court justices’ unanimous judgment on Wednesday – confirming that ‘woman’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex – before Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot were out there touting their long-term advocacy of that very position. Education Secretary Bridge Phillipson even claimed in response to the ruling
The White House reportedly expects that a trade deal between the United States and the UK could be signed within the next few weeks. This should be a big deal, at least for the small island if not for the world’s biggest economy. There could be a grand signing ceremony at Buckingham Palace. Or at
It’s official: Robert Jenrick is running. Rarely a week now goes by without the Shadow Justice Secretary causing some sort of stir. Whether it is his impressive weight loss or his triumph over the Sentencing Council, the Newark MP is an ever-present in the headlines of the Tory press. But, in their latest initiative, it
Why do so many people rail against the trade barriers erected by Donald Trump and yet have so little to say about similar barriers erected by the EU? Where is the liberal outrage against the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) which from next January will add tariffs to imports of ferrous metals, aluminium, cement
France has overtaken Germany as Europe’s top destination for asylum seekers. During the first quarter of 2025, France registered more than 40,000 applications, just above Spain (39,318) and Germany (37,387). This is a 41 per cent drop in German applications for the same period in 2024; Interior Minister Nancy Faeser attributed the fall to a
Labour’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch have clashed on many things – from Chagos to the NHS. But it transpires that they do have at least one thing in common: a love for Game of Thrones’ House Targaryen. When The Spectator’s Katy Balls interviewed the Leader of the Opposition at
We are about to see how significant a politician Giorgia Meloni really is after she arrived in Washington yesterday evening for bilateral talks today with Donald Trump. Tariffs will be top of the agenda but they are also expected to talk about Ukraine. She then flies immediately back to Rome to meet Vice President J.D.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made a lot of promises about the NHS. Before he got into power, he talked about slashing bureaucracy, introducing AI and improving patient autonomy. While he claims to have made progress in the last nine months, is it enough? As Katy Balls and Michael Gove say in their interview with
Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is in many ways an uncomfortable and ephemeral spy chief, but an enthusiastic information warrior. In recent talks with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, he accused Nato of threatening Moscow and Minsk by increasing the size and activity of its forces on the border – or
As a UK-US trade deal moves closer, an age-old fear is rearing its head once more: that Britain will be forced to accept imports of American chlorinated chicken. Ever since Brexit, politicians of all parties have decried the prospect. The Labour manifesto ruled it out and even Rishi Sunak promised farmers in 2023 that there
It’s a big day for women’s rights campaigners, after the Supreme Court this morning backed the biological definition of a woman. After justices unanimously agreed this morning that the terms ‘women’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refer to biological sex, public and private workplaces alike are trying to figure out exactly what today’s move
The Supreme Court has unanimously backed the biological definition of a woman. Women’s rights campaigners across the country are celebrating at the news while author and Sex Matters campaigner Helen Joyce told Spectator TV that she feels ‘vindicated and amazed’ by the decision. But politicians in the Scottish National party won’t be feeling quite as
It is difficult to describe the emotion felt by lesbian and women’s rights campaigners when Lord Hodge announced the outcome of For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers at the Supreme Court this morning. It was the culmination of a struggle for justice which has lasted years and during which we have been vilified as bigots and
When the UK’s biggest school debate competition told us to declare our gender pronouns, I knew my team had lost the contest before it had even begun. Hundreds of children are told to do this every year. Things were already uncomfortable. When I took part in regional rounds for this competition in 2018, run by the prestigious
The highest court in the land was set the task of determining: what is a woman? Today it gave its answer: sex in the Equality Act 2010 is biological and immutable and cannot be altered by a gender recognition certificate (GRC). The Supreme Court should be commended for securing women’s sex-based rights – rights to
How did it come to this? How did we arrive at a situation where it fell to a court of law to tell us what a woman is? That’s my overriding emotion today. I’m delighted the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is legally defined as a person with female biological characteristics. But I’m
In a landmark judgment, after years of controversy, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers today. The issue the court had to determine was enormously significant, namely the meaning of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010. In a detailed and compelling ruling, the
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With just over two weeks to go until the May elections, the latest national polling suggests an almost three-way split between Reform, Labour and the Conservatives. But will this translate to the locals? And, given these particular seats were last contested in 2021 amidst the ‘Boris wave’, how will the parties judge success? The Spectator’s