Until about six months ago, it would have been hard to find a more inoffensive politician than the Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater. A well-liked, upbeat, down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman, she entered politics because of a personal tragedy, the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox, in 2016. When asked on a Spectator podcast what was the
A satellite picture shows six American B-2 Stealth bombers parked on the runway at Diego Garcia. The planes – each with a distinctive flying-wing shape, like a bat – are sinister, otherworldly, and seem like a portent. Surely that’s the idea. Donald Trump has warned the Iranian leadership there ‘will be bombing the likes of
A copy of a leading article from The Spectator is stuck to the wall of Wes Streeting’s office in the Department of Health. ‘Is Wes Streeting the Hamlet of the Health Service?’ we asked in October, warning against the perils of inaction. ‘We were so riled by it we stuck it there to hold ourselves
It’s spring and in this corner of rural Sussex, the bluetits are at the window, newborn lambs are bleating in their pens, and all the rabbits are dead. The burrows are still there, but the chewed grass, the little collections of brown pellets, the white bobtails scattering before your headlights at night, they are gone.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has a new book out, a slim, thoughtful introduction to Christianity. But that’s not quite why I went to Cardiff to visit him. I went because, although I admire the superstar culture warriors of the right, there’s something Williams is witness to which they lack. Like many readers, I
On this great map our churches lie spires approaching London’s grey sky from steeple to steeple they finely trace a journey of faith through time and place
I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So
I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs,
Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are falling out of love with lamb. Meat consumption in Britain is at its lowest level since records began, and according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), lamb has been in particular decline for
Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite Easter egg’. Its popularity sometimes verges on cultlike. In 2016, when Cadbury opened a pop-up café in Soho called Crème de la Creme Egg Café, people queued down the street to eat something they could
