All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I am not surprised that Jamie Oliver is closing twelve of his twenty-seven branches of Jamie’s Italian, and his flagship restaurant on Piccadilly, Barbecoa, which I reviewed last year, and damned, because the food was bad and the atmosphere non existent. (Well, it was almost empty; you cannot create joy in a void). I knew
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If you read Brendan O’Neill’s Coffee House article on Our Future, Our Choice! OFOC! – the campaign group of which I am co-president – you are left with the impression that we are a bunch of young fascists seeking a teenocracy. Brendan seems to believe that Britain’s youth see themselves as Nietzsche’s young warriors, and want
That the Tories are having to shift their policymaking far left even of the Milibandesque positions that Theresa May took before the snap election is quite obvious. Today’s education speech by the Prime Minister involved an admission that the current system, drawn up by the Conservatives in coalition, isn’t working. The problems that the Tories
There are two competing theories about how the Soviet Union collapsed. One holds that Ronald Reagan’s moral leadership against communism and bolstering of US defences weakened Moscow’s will and buried them economically. The other contends that Mikhail Gorbachev’s domestic reforms and wise diplomacy brought down the Iron Curtain in spite of the cowboy in the
What does Theresa May want post-18 education to look like? The Prime Minister’s plans for tuition fees are getting the most attention today, but her big education speech has a lot more in it than just the cost of university degrees. Indeed, May is criticising the ‘outdated attitude’ that university is the be all and
Democratic debate functions best when it is accepted that there are people of good will and good arguments on both sides. In the Brexit debate, this sense has too often been missing. There’s plenty of blame for this to go round. To put it crudely, too many on the Leave side have been too quick
After last month’s purge of the Department for Education and following months of speculation among Tory MPs, No 10 have finally showed their hand on university education. The Prime Minister is to launch a year-long review of university and adult technical education. The aim is to de-toxify the party among young voters who are worried about
The row over Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged contact with a Czech spy rumbles on. In its editorial, the Sun condemns the Labour leader, who it says has questions to answer over his ‘dealings with foreign spies and diplomats’. Labour is no stranger to ‘dodging basic questions’, the paper argues. But while it can get away with
This letter was first printed in this week’s issue of The Spectator. Sir: Matthew Parris is correct (10 February). There is no shortage of housing stock, and no feasible programme of housebuilding will fix the housing market. The generations endowed with housing wealth through tax and lending policies continued by all parties since 1959 have no
Oh dear. We’re only two months into 2018 and already the winner for ‘headline fail of the year’ appears to have been found. The Irish Herald today publishes a report on a man who ‘lived’ in a flat with his ‘dead wife’s body in a wardrobe for 48 hours’. Rather unfortunately the accompanying half page
The never-ending churn of stories explaining why it is awful to be a woman has a new focus. A survey of workplace ‘decision-makers’ published this week has exposed the shocking news that some employers think maternity leave can be a bit inconvenient. That’s right: some sexist and uncaring bosses do not feel delight when mum-to-be
It took only a few hours for hope to turn to fresh despair. At lunchtime on Friday, the German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel was freed after more than a year in detention. An image of Yucel embracing his wife – who he had married while he was incarcerated – outside the concrete and razor-wire gates of
Fake news of the week, I suggest, was the sudden warming of relations on the Korean peninsula following the visit to the Winter Olympics of cute little Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korea’s nuke-waving Kim Jong-un — not only attracting positive coverage for the games but driving a splinter between South Korea and the US
Theresa May hasn’t had many opportunities to talk about domestic policy since the snap election. It’s probably fair to say, too, that the Prime Minister hasn’t exactly seized what opportunities there have been, either. This week, though, the Tories are talking about education, offering their response to Labour’s very attractive tuition fee pledge, and letting
Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief representative in the Brexit negotiations, sat down with Andrew Marr to discuss at length the UK’s future relationship with the EU. Verhofstadt told Marr that a trade deal between the United Kingdom and the European Union will not be finalised before the 29th of March 2019. Instead, Verhofstadt hinted
Although it’s the Conservatives nowadays who are best known for in-fighting, this weekend we were offered a reminder of the divisions in Labour. At a meeting of the National Policy Forum (NPF), a row broke out between the Momentum contingent and the moderates. The subject of the row was – once again – Ann Black,
For this year’s Valentine-themed challenge you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘The Love Song of [insert name of a well-known figure here]’. There was no obligation to write in the style of Eliot, but a few brave souls did so. David Shields’s ‘Love Song of Kim Kardashian’ (‘I have measured out my life
The Queen is Head of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is headquartered in London, in the splendour of Marlborough House. The Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Lady Scotland, is British (and also Dominican). Britain is about to take the chair of the Commonwealth for the customary two years, and so the next Heads of Government Conference —
Since Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo was crowned queen of the I’m a Celeb… Get Me Out of Here jungle, the (majority of) Conservatives have been on a mission to hug their celebrity supporter close. In that vein, Toff was the centre of attention at this month’s Black and White ball, where she attended as Stanley Johnson’s
When I saw the photo of Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black holding a photo of an ultrasound, and all the subsequent headlines proclaiming ‘Tom and Lance are having a baby’ I thought one thing above all: ‘That’s strange’. Not ‘eww’, or ‘gross’, or ‘what a way to get over certain negative recent publicity’, but
Jeremy Corbyn began the 2017 election campaign 20 points behind the Conservatives in the polls; he ended it just two per cent behind in the actual vote. The remarkable turnaround has been attributed by many to his effective use of social media, which allowed him to broadcast his message to people whom traditional campaigning fails
Peter Oborne, The Spectator’s associate editor, is something of a legend in Pakistan — as least among the defence establishment types we met there. That’s because every year he takes a cricket team on a tour of the country. Last September, in Miranshah, they played a ‘Peace Cup’ match against an XI consisting of current
Theresa May was pushing at an open door in her Munich speech when she warned against ‘rigid institutional restrictions’ harming security cooperation after Brexit, I say in The Sun today. Member states are reluctant to follow the Commission’s tough line on this as they know how valuable the UK’s contribution in this field is. I
The success of the military campaign against Isis in Syria and Iraq has left behind a diplomatic and legal problem: what to do with the British citizens who travelled to join and fight with Isis, but who have survived hostilities. The problem has been brought to a head by the capture, by a group of
Beijing is starting to worry that the rest of the world will steal its advanced technology. The Chinese military is calling for stronger protection of the country’s intellectual property, particularly in sensitive defence areas. Supercomputers, drones, rocket launchers and the like, were singled out as areas where ‘generations’ of Chinese research cannot be allowed to
The stories about Donald Trump’s sex life keep coming. First, it was Stormy Daniels who stated that she had an assignation with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006. Now it appears that Trump also met another woman in 2006, this time at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. In an expose published today, the New Yorker’s Ronan
Emmanuel Macron’s vow to press ahead with plans to bring back national service for France’s youth has taken many by surprise. The French president’s insistence that the scheme would be mandatory is also something of a shock, contradicting remarks made last week by Florence Parly, the minister of the armed forces, who appeared to suggest the
I am a rock ‘n’ roller by origin and inclination. I started off in rock journalism writing about bands and song and gigs. I wrote a book vaguely about U2, though not really. I loved the blues, where the whole thing started: the cry of the slave waking up to the theft of his life.
There was a cold front in Berlin today as Theresa May took to the stage for a joint press conference with Angela Merkel. The Prime Minister is in Germany to discuss post-Brexit security – with a speech scheduled tomorrow in Munich – but all anyone wanted to talk about today was Merkel’s Davos joke. The
The case of Jeremy Corbyn and the Czechoslovakian diplomat has taken another turn today. The officer who met Corbyn has alleged that Corbyn took money from them and was a paid informant. The Labour leader’s office has vigorously denied the charge, citing the director of the Czech security force archive who has said that their
Since Gavin Williamson was appointed as Defence Secretary, the Conservative MP has been in a rush to prove his credentials. From battling the Treasury over proposed military cuts to posing with rescue dogs, Williamson certainly seems a man in a hurry. However, with speed comes mistakes. Today’s Financial Times reports of a diplomatic gaffe committed
George Freeman doesn’t have the best record with regards to the Glastonbury music festival. The Conservative MP found himself the subject of light mockery this summer over his plans for a ‘Tory Glastonbury’. Freeman organised the Big Tent Ideas Festival to try and reinvigorate his tired party. Now, he has tried to take aim at
Jeremy Cobyn has been condemned by a former head of MI6 for reportedly meeting a Communist spy in the House of Commons. Richard Dearlove says that the Labour leader – who denies the accusations as a ‘ridiculous smear’ – was either ‘incredibly naive or complicit’. The Sun condemns Corbyn in its editorial this morning, saying that