Theresa May’s Home Office record is normally off limits at cabinet. But when ministers discussed the government’s strategy for reducing violent crime on Tuesday, Boris Johnson took issue with what the Prime Minister regards as one of her key legacies: the dramatic reduction in stop and search. He argued that more stop and search was
‘No one wants to send their son to Eton any more,’ I learned from last week’s Spectator Schools supplement. It explained how parents who’d been privately educated themselves were increasingly reluctant to extend the privilege to their offspring; some because they can’t bear for their darling babies to board, others because the fees are way
My friend’s ten-year-old daughter has a new hobby. Like many of her school pals, she hopes to become a video blogger — a ‘vlogger’. She has started to record clips of herself for others to watch, share and ‘like’. She showed me a few, then gave me a list of famous vloggers to watch: JoJo
There was a growling Russian maniac on the BBC’s Today programme last week, an MP from the United Russia party called Vitaly Milonov. Breathing rather heavily, as if he were pleasuring himself, Mr Milonov likened our country to Hitler’s Germany for having accused Russia over the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
For almost as long as I can remember, Eurosceptic Tory MPs have been defined by the media as ‘head-bangers’. As a result, few notice that they scarcely bang their heads at all these days. The European Research Group (ERG), now led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, is surprisingly united, and makes most of its arguments blande suaviterque.
My decision to vote Remain was driven in part by an exercise in which I tried to identify anyone close to me in Yorkshire — family, neighbour, business owner, farmer — who was worse off as a result of UK membership of the EU. The only people uncontestably in that category, I concluded, were the
