I’d never noticed that there aren’t any tits on Facebook. The place always seems brimming with right tits to me. But no. According to this week’s mumbling bien-pensant scandal, the world’s largest social network has decided to allow newsy videos of murder and beheading and all the rest, but still not tits, and this is
‘Well, you’re arguing facts against opinions. OK, I mean, the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has rocketed up since the Industrial Revolution, and continues to rocket up, is a fact. Now, it’s so much a fact that even the climate change deniers look away from it and don’t deny it.’
Ten days before polling day in 2010, it was clear that a hung parliament was the most likely result of the election. But when interviewed by The Spectator at the time, David Cameron refused to discuss what parts of the Tory manifesto were up for discussion in any possible coalition. He said simply that ‘all
Trying to get good, healthy, nutritious food down the ungrateful throats of the lower orders, especially northerners, has become a serious national problem. At the moment these awful people eat nothing but fat coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried in engine oil, and so as a consequence they are gargantuan, slobbering masses of compacted lard, so
I wish I were a religious conservative: the field’s wide open. It must be dispiriting for believers to encounter so little intelligent support for belief. It’s certainly infuriating for us non-believers, because there’s hardly anyone left who seems capable of giving us a good argument. In search of a stimulating conversation about religion, we are
Reshuffles are meant to demonstrate the power of a leader, to show that they are in command of their party. But what Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg all revealed this week was not their strengths but their fears. It was clear that Ed Miliband’s great worry is that in 2015 Labour will look
It is a peculiar alliance, when you think of it, which wishes to bring to an end 300 years of press freedom in this country. The handsome actor Hugh Grant would rather the press didn’t find out about him being ‘noshed’, as I believe the term has it, by a prostitute on some Los Angeles freeway.
I’ve often thought it might be interesting to meet Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Lennon, or whatever one is supposed to call the erstwhile English Defence League frontman these days. Because, well, he’s not an idiot, is he? Or at least, not to the extent you’d like him to be. And it bugged me. I remember
I’ve been racking my brains to think what I might have in common with Kim Jong Un and Piers Morgan. But apart from owning a spectacularly tiny penis, I simply cannot think. Certainly, when Kim is getting it in the neck for having one of his ex-girlfriends executed by firing squad to please his wife,
Manchester The Tory party has been at peace with itself this week. Eurosceptic backbenchers have given Nigel Farage a verbal kicking on the fringe, Cabinet ministers have stuck resolutely to the ‘hardworking’ conference script, and even Boris Johnson has behaved himself. Gay marriage, which so divided the leadership from the grassroots, has barely been
Such is my respect for Spectator readers that I offer you a column whose subtext is in Latin. Ours is one of the last mainstream magazines among whose readership the phrase mutatis mutandis will be very widely understood. But the little test you and I are going to try concerns a live issue, not a
Ring, ring goes the telephone every minute God sends. Sometimes I pick it up and say hello, sometimes I don’t. I know who is calling, anyway. It is one or another media representative from the bien-pensant absolutist liberal left, and they are all in a dither about a man called Ralph Miliband, of whom they
There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at the time, we were being governed by people who were mentally ill. It is yet another furious, bitter, gut-churning row involving Campbell, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and concludes with Mandelson stamping his little feet
Oh, but life’s easier if you’re American. Each and every last way the state meddles with your life is an outrage. Whether it’s forcing you to have health care, or denying you the right to own the gun that Al Pacino has in Scarface, or making you wear a seat belt, or taxing you, or
I’m trying to imagine what Britain would look like under a Ukip/Conservative coalition with Cameron as PM and Farage as his deputy. The idea fills me with horror. I think, for example, of the runaway economic boom which would result from the sudden dash to exploit our superabundant shale gas resources; I think of the
What strategy should we adopt to cope with the British Medical Association? Its members kill more people each year than President Assad — 72,000 is the latest estimate, from the House of Commons health select committee. Perhaps it is at last time to sit down and negotiate with them, much though this will stick in
I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches that after a general election, the party that comes third (should it have cohabitation in mind) must first approach the party that won the most seats. But there is no such rule. Our unwritten constitution
His party may be struggling to reach double digits in the polls, but Nick Clegg is entitled to feel smug as he heads to Glasgow for this year’s Lib Dem conference. This gathering, the penultimate one before the general election, has long been circled in Westminster diaries as the moment when a challenge to his
The RSPB has come out against fracking and urged the government to ‘rethink its shale gas policies’. And of course the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would know. After all when your skill set ranges from identifying Little Brown Jobs through your binoculars at 10,000 yards all the way to differentiating a Greater
The Syrian rebels who liberated the mountain village of Maaloula apparently immediately set about converting the predominantly Christian population to Islam, using the gently persuasive techniques we have come to associate with this dynamic and expanding religion. ‘Allahu Akbar! Either you will convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,’ rebels allegedly told some villagers.