If you happen to be reading this column at breakfast, I’d recommend you skip to something more agreeable like Dear Mary and save mine till a bit later. It concerns the ugly details of one of the most revolting mass murderers in US history. His name is Kermit Gosnell — a doctor who ran a
I took my youngest son to a football match on Easter Monday. It used to be something I wryly called a ‘treat’ when the kids were younger, but we usually lost in such depressing circumstances each time that I would then feel the need to give them another treat immediately afterwards, to alleviate the misery.
I liked the generic title ‘Another Voice’ that The Spectator used to give this column, because it seemed to loosen the shackles imposed by more rigorous classification. The sort of journalism I tend to go in for is usually classified as ‘comment’ or ‘opinion’; but all too often these days my strong interest in what’s
Last weekend, in a small New Jersey suburb, I found myself in a liquor store. Never been anywhere like it. The walls were lined with single malts of rare and impressive varieties, and the clientele both knew their whisky and spoke of little else. Yet they were all, also, to a man (and they were
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson discuss politics and religion” startat=636] Listen [/audioplayer]If Ed Miliband wins the next election, he’ll be Britain’s first atheist Prime Minister. It is a sign of how social attitudes have changed that Miliband feels comfortable wearing his atheism on his sleeve. He has not received the kind of criticism
You may remember this little gem of a story from a month or so back. Justifiably worried at the ramping up of rhetoric by western politicians over the crisis in Ukraine, Blackpool ‘beauty technician’ Gemma Worrall took to a social media site to ask the — presumably rhetorical — question: ‘Why is our President Barraco
Conviction politics is back. The two men making the political weather at the moment, Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage, both serve their politics neat. They have no interest in any ‘third way’. They stand for big, simple, defining ideas. They are both far closer to success than the establishment ever imagined they would be. Now
When I heard that the television pundit and all-round nepot Kelly Osbourne had gone into ‘food rehab’ upon gaining weight, I fair choked on my cronut. Crumbs! Is there any pleasure, weakness or habit that isn’t pathologised these days, even stuffing oneself out of sheer molten gluttony? I read on; incredibly, people were praising ‘strong’
One fine morning early this year I had tea with Stephen Greenhalgh, Boris’s pleasant if perspiring deputy mayor for policing, and discussed the two great crime mysteries of the 21st century. First: the weird fall in crime. For the past 15 years, all manner of crimes have been on the wane, even violent ones: carjacking,
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Delingpole and Peter Robins discuss the Vikings exhibition” startat=1656] Listen [/audioplayer]Have you managed to book tickets to the Viking exhibition at the British Museum yet? If you haven’t, my advice is: don’t bother. I know what the critics have been saying: that it’s an unmissable treat. But it’s only an unmissable treat
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss how electioneering is changing” startat=1229] Listen [/audioplayer]This is a unique moment in British politics. All three major parties have a realistic prospect of being in power after the next election, but they are all acutely aware that they’re won’t be swept to power. Success will have to
Might there ever be in this century, anywhere in Europe, a case for serious political interference by an hereditary monarch? Spaniards can surely imagine it. In 1981 the (then) recently crowned King Juan Carlos II decisively rebuffed an attempted right-wing coup and in doing so secured the country’s newly instituted post-Franco democracy: a transition in
Regardless of how many brains David Willetts has got, it’s not surprising that tuition fees are a mess. They’re a mess because they are a tax, and intended to do the sort of job for which taxes were invented, yet are also pretending not to be one. It’s like needing a dog but buying a
What attitude should we take towards women who wish to breastfeed their babies in public? Older, more conservative readers may feel a little squeamish about this sort of thing and would prefer mothers to do their breastfeeding in private; it is as much the hideous slurping noise as the sight of a female breast which
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_March_2014.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss whether Miliband’s luck has run out” startat=802] Listen [/audioplayer]Ask anyone in Westminster about the obstacles to a Tory victory in next year’s election and you’ll hear a well-rehearsed answer. The constituency boundaries are so ancient that Labour can win on a far lower share of vote; Ukip
We live in a recriminatory age, one in which we are only ever a step away from the cringing, self-abnegating apology. Take the case of BBC Newsnight’s latest appointee, as economics editor, a chap called Duncan Weldon. Duncan is doing the tail between the legs thing right now, desperately attempting to excise part of his
I think the ancient English art of self–deprecation may be dying. I don’t mean self-deprecation in its distorted and most exported form: pug-eyed rogues like Hugh Grant getting away with murder — more usually infidelity — by grinning and rubbing their hair. That’s different. That’s ‘bogus self-deprecation’, as my friend Stuart Reid used to say.
Just as every child now thinks he’s going to die of global warming, so those of us who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties all thought we were going to die of nuclear war. We knew this because trusted authorities told us so: not just the government and our teachers but even the author
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_March_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the 2014 budget” startat=749]The old Budget traditions are dying off. No Chancellor has observed Budget purdah, the tradition of not speaking about the economy for two months beforehand, since Norman Lamont. These days, the Chancellor even appears on the BBC on the Sunday before the
It was Shetland that tipped me over the edge. Not the place, but the TV series. Although that’s set in the place. So both, really. It’s a crime drama, see, and people keep getting murdered. Roughly speaking, so far, there’s been a corpse every episode. Which by the end of the series will mean eight