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Columns

Freddy Gray

Kamala chameleon: the many faces of Biden’s running mate

Kamala Harris, the new Democratic vice-presidential nominee, certainly looks the part. Barack Obama once called her ‘the best-looking attorney general in the country’, though he later decided that was a sexist remark and apologised. She’s half-black, half-Indian and she has a charismatic Californian smile. If a director were casting for someone to play America’s first

My pronouncement on the BBC

Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed into a woman. A woman who was enjoying a lesbian ‘marriage’. Of course they did, you will be muttering to yourself. If the BBC can transgender a rabbit in Watership Down they can certainly put

When everything is ‘racist’, nothing is

Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get back the whirlpool bath she charged us on her parliamentary expenses. But the officers skipped the boot and went straight to the passenger side, where they found the member for Brent Central recording them with

The dismal rise of the modern elopement

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on

The Spectator's Notes

Is Chris Packham finally facing facts on shooting?

Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting forfeit the impartiality required of a television nature presenter. So it is bold of the excellent new magazine, Fieldsports Journal, to give Mr Packham lots of space in its issue designed for the start of

Any other business

The battle to tackle excess boardroom pay may already be won

At a low moment in late March, I suggested that all large companies should consider temporary cuts in executive salaries ‘both as a gesture of immediate solidarity and as a move to avert a longer-term backlash against wealth, privilege and the pillars of capitalism’. Latest research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and