The Week

Leading article

The prying game

One of the marks of a good Home Secretary is a healthy wariness of those in authority who come begging for ever-greater powers. The former Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke failed on that score. Just over a decade ago, the police persuaded him that they needed the freedom to lock up terror suspects for 90

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week | 3 March 2016

Home An official analysis by the Cabinet Office said that if Britain left the EU it would lead to a ‘decade of uncertainty’. Opponents of Britain remaining in the EU called the report a ‘dodgy dossier’. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the economy would suffer a ‘profound economic shock’ if Britain

Diary

Diary – 3 March 2016

Just as the presidential race in America started to get really crazy, I left for India. On the morning of the South Carolina primary, I interviewed Donald Trump from a restaurant near the state capitol. By the next afternoon I was dodging mopeds in a traffic circle in Mumbai. I’d imagined the trip as a

Ancient and modern

People power then and now

It does seem extraordinary that the increasingly puce-faced Mr Cameron offered us an ‘in-out’ referendum and is now telling us that ‘out’ would mean the end of the world as we know it. What on earth did he think he was doing? His reaction is to eviscerate MPs who support ‘out’, and intentionally deprive us

Barometer

Barometer | 3 March 2016

You can’t do that there ’ere Some of the things which have been banned under Public Spaces Protection Orders, according to a report by the Manifesto Club: Kettering More than four people standing within vicinity of a motor vehicle. Guildford Shouting. Hillingdon Gathering in groups of more than two unless waiting for a bus. Blackpool Engaging

From the archives

The last of Henry James

From ‘Henry James’, The Spectator, 4 March 1916: Englishmen are not likely ever to forget the generous thought which inspired the late Henry James to become a naturalised Englishman at the moment of England’s greatest distress… Henry James was good enough to say in substance that he was proud of England and her cause, and

Letters

Letters | 3 March 2016

What might have been Sir: Harry Mount points out that Boris Johnson is two years older than David Cameron (Diary, 27 February). Both, however, began their careers in the same year. On 15 June 1988 I interviewed David Cameron for a post in the Conservative Research Department; on 26 July it was Boris’s turn (‘Johnston’