Columnists

Columns

James Forsyth

Terror is the toughest issue facing the Tories

A prisoner is released early and just days later attacks people. It then emerges that he was known to still be a danger to the public before he was let out. Normally at this point in the story one would be expecting ministerial resignations. But in the case of Sudesh Amman, the Streatham attacker, we

Wanting to kill us all is madness, not religion

Sudesh Amman was singularly unsuccessful in his wish to kill kafirs, as he put it, and thereby find himself surrounded by the hoor al ayn — beautiful handmaidens who’ll do anything you want, frankly — in the afterlife. He had perhaps not followed the instructions in the book he had about how to stab people.

The concept of Evil is an evasion

A week of remembrance marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last month had me thinking hard about what we mean by Evil. ‘Evil’, that is, when used with a real or metaphorical capital letter. You cannot join discussion of the Holocaust without hearing the word again and again. And indeed, what other

The Spectator's Notes

Any other business

Is it worse to be an environmental polluter or a moral one?

So farewell Bernie Ebbers, former chief executive of WorldCom, the long–distance phone operator that became America’s biggest-ever bankruptcy case in 2002. Ebbers has died aged 78, having been released on health grounds in December from a 25-year jail sentence for his part in an accounting fraud that concealed the perilous state of WorldCom’s finances, misleading