As I have said many times in recent years, if you import the world’s people you import the world’s problems. Which is not to say that you do not also get some upsides. The upsides of ‘diversity’ are focused on all the time. But we have a curious habit of downplaying the downsides. Just one
In the face of American snark about the Queen’s death, many a British newspaper reader was disgusted. With bad tidings imminent on Thursday last week, an academic at Carnegie Mellon tweeted: ‘I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.’ An assistant professor in Rhode
When something starts to be said with such frequency that it fast becomes the conventional wisdom, one should pause, step back and give it a second thought. In almost every ‘Advice to King Charles’ column I’ve read, and in broadcast commentary too, the same piece of wisdom is being repeated: the new King must now
I suppose it was inevitable that with the death of HM the Queen certain floodgates would open. During her reign it often felt as though there were forces that she was single-handedly holding back. As Lionel Shriver has noted elsewhere, they have come in particularly malicious form from parts of the US. But there is
My dog was bitten by an adder last week. Jessie had been snuffling around in bracken a few yards from where I was walking when I suddenly heard this anguished yelp, followed by still more disquieting, even harrowing yelps. I knew immediately exactly what had happened. I have been boring my family for months with
Politics is in suspended animation. The only proceedings in parliament are the tens of thousands of mourners moving through Westminster Hall as the Queen lies in state. Party politics was always going to pause after the monarch’s death. But what the planning could not have anticipated was the moment at which the politics would halt.
I am becoming terribly worried about the people of Sunderland with regard to how they will cope in this coming winter. The greatly increased fuel bills will affect all parts of the country, of course – but none more so than the Mackems who, I suspect, will largely die as a consequence. Their particular problem
Until last month I hadn’t seen a hedgehog for close to 30 years, though they were part of everyday life when I was a child. In the school holidays, we’d rush first thing to the nearby cattle grids to check for animals who’d fallen in overnight. It’s what passed for fun back then: picking damp
How 10 Downing Street works – or doesn’t – always reflects the character of the prime minister who inhabits it. Boris Johnson’s No. 10 was chaotic and scandal-ridden. Theresa May’s indecision meant that hers was led by the will of her strong-minded advisers, not by her own agenda. David Cameron’s was slick, but last-minute. Liz
‘Great offices of state set to contain no white men’ was the way one national newspaper reported the formation of the first Truss cabinet. In addition to Liz Truss, the positions of Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary would respectively be held by Kwasi Kwarteng, James Cleverly and Suella Braverman. Of course, all this was
Boris Johnson has so dominated politics for the past few years that it is hard to imagine things without him. His premiership, though relatively brief, has been both eventful and consequential. With him in Downing Street, there was a constant – and exhausting – sense of drama, with frequent cast changes and plot twists. But
Last week’s Spectator interview with Rishi Sunak conveyed the anti-science ‘science’, the paucity of even fag-packet cost-benefit analysis and the ideological lockdown of Boris Johnson’s cabinet that brought forth calamitously extensive lockdowns of everyone else. Ever since, numerous politicians and institutions implicated in this rash experiment have had a vested interest in maintaining the myth
I wonder how many people in the country are bitterly disappointed that Liz Truss pulled out of her exciting one-to-one interview with Nick Robinson? I can think of only two. First, of course, Nick Robinson. Nick was very much looking forward to it. His ideal assignment would be to interview himself for an entire afternoon,
When Liz Truss said ‘the jury’s out’ on whether France was a ‘friend or foe’, Emmanuel Macron publicly corrected her: of course Britain was a friend, he told a TV camera, adding with a grin: ‘Whoever its leaders are, and sometimes despite and beyond its leaders.’ As a British journalist who has lived in Paris
How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that
Taking a short break from persecuting Roman Catholic faith schools for ideological reasons, Ofsted has stuck the boot into the Abbey School in Kent. This school, in Faversham, has been given the lowest possible ranking of ‘inadequate’. The report bemoans the fact that pupils are expected to do as they are told, be polite and
Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and read Chinese. Some question my English accent, almost suspiciously posh given that I didn’t speak a word of the language until the age of ten. Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. My podcast, Chinese
Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, like the recent attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, our society falls into the usual platitudes. The attack gets condemned, by most people. The ideology behind the attack is fudged so that it becomes as non-specific as possible. What almost never gets any time in the discussion is the question of
Liz Truss has always been more popular with Tory party members than with Tory politicians. The moment of greatest peril for her in the Conservative leadership race was when MPs were whittling down the final two candidates. After being knocked out in the second round, Suella Braverman urged her Brexiteer backers to get behind the
‘Whatever else you do, don’t step backwards,’ a man in the crowd shouts to Rishi Sunak as he stands on the edge of a swimming pool in the garden of a Tory councillor’s home in Bushey, Hertfordshire. About 100 party members have gathered to hear Sunak’s pitch. It’s the first of three stops he’s making
