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John McCain on David Cameron

In this exclusive interview, the Republican presidential front-runner tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is speaking at the Conservative conference, and says that Cameron has the youth, exuberance and determination to be a Tory JFK David Cameron was only one year and 17 days old on 26 October 1967, when John McCain was shot down in

Complete the Thatcher revolution

Simon Jenkins says that the Iron Lady’s work will not be complete without the devolution of power to local communities. Is the Tory leader ready to embrace this mission? The Tory party still has to come to terms with Margaret Thatcher. As she broods this week in Chester Square, the revolution associated with her name

Let us leave the ‘centre ground’

Maurice Saatchi says that the dull terrain of modern politics is the breeding ground of voter apathy and cynicism: the Tories must ‘climb the hill’ of idealism once more All proponents of ‘the centre ground’ in politics take satisfaction from analogy with the game of chess. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world chess champion, on

The genetic code genius failed to kill faith

On one day last year, when I was in Princeton to give a lecture, I separately bumped into three scientists writing books about God. Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature is about the parallels between Christian fundamentalism in America and eco-fundamentalism in Europe; Dean Hamer’s The God Gene was written (he told me) to pay off a

A handshake with Clinton on the golf course

It was all there at the K Club last weekend — just what it had always said on the tin It was all there at the K Club last weekend — just what it had always said on the tin. The passion, the best golf and golfers in the world, a glorious setting, rain, sweat

A miserable waste of space

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the