Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra
I was asked on Tucker Carlson Tonight only once, while in New York about two years ago, and I turned the invitation from America’s most popular cable news commentator down. Did I worry that while discussing my previous Spectator column, I might put my foot in it? The subject of immigration is always a minefield.
One of the best ways to work out that somebody has not thought deeply about anti-Semitism is if they say that they wish to destroy it once and for all. When in a corner, even Jeremy Corbyn could be found saying that we must end anti-Semitism for good. Though he was of course unable to
I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life and I only properly realised this when she came back, gloriously, to fill it again. Hitherto I had been going about my business, writing columns, cooking for my family and so on, and perhaps to
‘Democracy,’ said H.L. Mencken, ‘is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ As we approach 2024, America seems to be proving his point. On Tuesday, a highly unpopular octogenarian President announced that he would be running for re-election next year. Most of Joe Biden’s supporters don’t want him to run and a vast
I was having tea with my neighbour in her second-floor flat when a man, a stranger, appeared in the room. This is quite a regular occurrence at Alice’s. She’s deaf and she can’t really walk so any number of agency staff have access to her front-door key. They materialise wearing gloves and usually a face
A seized luxury campervan, a raid on a politician’s home and two arrests. The latest twists in Police Scotland’s investigation into how the SNP spent £600,000 of IndyRef2 donations wouldn’t seem out of place in an Ian Rankin novel. Just a year ago, Nicola Sturgeon looked invincible. Now the SNP is in freefall and Humza
It was from the Northern Ireland conflict that I first learned how language – like everything else – can be warped utterly. Take the late Martin McGuinness, not to mention his still-living, libel-hungry comrades. For almost three decades they put bombs in public places, shot random people in the head and tortured others to death.
For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers. Gloating in
In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward
On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for a world religion. In online posts beneath my column came hundreds of comments from Christians protesting that I’d misunderstood the Crucifixion’s meaning, which was (they said) the ultimate victory. Triumphantly, Jesus redeemed our sins. Or
When Rishi Sunak became Tory leader, the party was 30 points behind Labour: that kind of deficit has historically been terminal for a political party. But since then, inflation has slowed, the Northern Ireland Protocol has been resolved and a deportation deal with Albania meant small boat arrivals fell for the first time on record.
The journos weren’t very impressed with Nicola Sturgeon’s house. Never mind the plod staring like morons at her barbecue or heaving out sacks of half-completed pools coupons to their summer marquee on the front lawn – the southern hacks were more interested in the paucity of this real estate. Her house was, we were assured,
I am actively contributing to the decline of the West and to the collapse of our civilisation. I realised this last week when I found myself standing behind a metal turnstile in the French Alps watching my smallish son, on the other side of the turnstile, step into a bubble lift going up the mountain
‘Well, they can’t cancel Picasso.’ That was my optimistic take some months ago when a friend in the art world said: ‘Watch out, they’re coming for him next.’ It doesn’t really matter that, like Paul Johnson – late of this parish – I don’t feel unadulterated admiration for Pablo Picasso’s work. The late period seems
Two years ago when the Tories won the Hartlepool by-election at the local elections, the political mood was summed up by a 30ft inflatable blow-up of the then prime minister Boris Johnson looming over the town. He was photographed in front of it as part of his victory lap. The message was clear: under his
In June 1999, I described on this page jameitos, tiny, blind, albino crabs on the sea bottom in a cave in Lanzarote, occasionally caught in a shaft of sunlight they couldn’t see. ‘Might there be searchlights moving across the surface of our world, too,’ I wrote, ‘catching [us] within their purview, and we the objects
It is with great sadness that I must report the departure of the world’s only female head of state who is as fit as a butcher’s dog, Sanna Marin of Finland. Sanna’s Social Democrats – plus her allies in various awful left-wing parties – have seen their votes slump as the Finns turn to the
Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of an even more prominent fat man seems a big win for Donald Trump, regardless of how the case is decided. If convicted, Trump is a martyr, managing to portray himself once more as a persecuted Washington outsider, a status that’s quite a feat for a politician to retain
I don’t know what your plans are for Easter. Mine generally include a nice walk in the English countryside. There is something incalculably consoling about our landscape. I might even find myself leaning on a stile and looking at some Easter lambs while they do that sudden vertical jump thing, as though they have suddenly