The Week

Leading article

May’s mistakes

On the eve of the US presidential election, experts at Princeton university decided that Donald Trump had a 1 per cent chance of being elected. Before the last general election, Populus, the opinion poll firm, gave David Cameron a 0.5 per cent chance of winning a majority. Much is made of the need to look at

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week | 1 June 2017

Home The Conservatives grew restive when polls, for what they were worth, indicated a closing gap between their support and Labour’s. In a generally uneventful 90 minutes of television, in which Theresa May, the leader of the Conservative party, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, were questioned, Jeremy Paxman said to Mrs May:

Diary

Diary – 1 June 2017

In such gorgeous weather the best part of Scotland to visit is not (as so many seem to think) the West Highlands but my native north-east. Moray, a region of whisky and white beaches, has long been the country’s best-kept secret, but it has become rather spoiled of late by its new status as a

Barometer

Barometer | 1 June 2017

Afrodisiac Diane Abbott likened her rejection of earlier pro-terror sympathies to losing her afro hairstyle. To African-Americans in the 1960s, the afro was a rejection of black attempts to ape white styles. Yet 100 years earlier it was seen as an epitome of white beauty. In 1864, a P. T. Barnum show in New York,

From the archives

Our flying machines

From ‘News of the week’, The Spectator, 2 June 1917: There has been a lull on the Western front. It is sure to be succeeded by another storm, but this week there is little to record measured by the standards with which the titanic fighting in France has made us familiar. One fact, however, must

Letters

Letters | 1 June 2017

Ignoring the hadith Sir: Douglas Murray and Jenny McCartney (‘The known wolf’ and ‘A war on joy’, 27 May) are correct to cite hatred of women and young girls and fear of their independence as a trigger for terrorist violence — witness Malala Yousafzai. But it is of course not the only trigger since, denial