I miss Issie. I am waiting outside in the Orangerie in the Parc de St-Cloud, in Paris, where the Chanel show is about to begin. The incessant driving rain, the clouds, thick, and black with purpose, as another deluge begins. The huge white bright spotlights shining undiminished give a silvery magnificence to the scene. The
Monday What a day! Just back from Service of Thanksgiving in the All-Faiths-And-None Prayer Room. Jed read an excerpt from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural speech about having nothing to fear but fear itself (I thought J.F.K. said that but never mind). It was v moving. Just like the American people in 1933 the citizens of
As Spectator readers would have expected, this magazine was an early and enthusiastic backer of Boris Johnson as the next Mayor of London. On 4 July we gave him our official endorsement and urged him to run on our Coffee House blog (new.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse). Now that he has thrown his bandana in the ring, we shall
Beneath the dynamic surface, Brown is dismantling Blair’s public service reforms When ministerial limousines line Great Smith Street in Westminster it is normally a sign that the Cinnamon Club is doing brisk trade. This upmarket Indian restaurant has become so popular with MPs that it has wired up a division bell in its foyer to
Dr Andrew Wakefield, if he is still a doctor by the time you read this, seems to be a baddun. A disciplinary panel heard that when children arrived at his house for a birthday party he grabbed a syringe and extracted blood from each one of them, giving the kids five pounds in exchange. Some
Public affairs vex no man, said Doctor Johnson, and I know what he meant. He, however, did not live as we do in an age of information in which, without retiring entirely to bed, it is next to impossible to dodge the headlines altogether. Besides, there’s something extraordinarily tonic in vexation: it is to my
Why Russia’s defensive Sir: The only pertinent fact from Fraser Nelson’s anti-Russia diatribe last week is that the country’s defence budget is 5 per cent that of America’s. (The New Cold War, 14 July). The rest of the article is scaremongering. An evening spent in Moscow should convince anyone that Russia has not left ‘the
