‘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
This is a bleak version of looking on the bright side, but what’s astonishing about last week’s vicious stabbing in upstate New York is that such an attack didn’t occur decades ago. However sickeningly incapacitated at present, Salman Rushdie himself would doubtless agree. Having survived unharmed for 33 years under a death sentence – endorsed
I do not doubt that hot weather occasioned by climate change is the primary cause of the many wildfires we have seen in the UK this summer. But I wonder if they have also become more profuse as a consequence of various authorities desperately attempting to make the countryside more ‘accessible’ to people who, in
It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the artist’s frame reflects in his glistening eyes; reflects in the moist redness of his almost girlish lips; reflects in the folds of his turban and silky grey sash. It glows too from an inner radiation,
In those moments when I most fear that the West is on the skids, I find it helps to make a list of end-time signs, phenomena that indicate decay, like sparks along a piece of faulty wiring. So far my list goes like this: NFTs; babyccinos; liver-flavoured ice-cream for dogs; the fashion for encouraging children
I was intrigued to learn from Tom Daley – that young man who became famous for jumping off a platform into some water – that homophobia is a ‘legacy of colonialism’. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, begs to differ. He believes that it is homosexuality which is a legacy of colonialism and had been brought
It’s possible that I owe Joe Biden some sort of an apology, however mealy-mouthed it might be. Last week I mentioned here the weird prevarication from the US government and its supporters over whether or not the US is technically in a recession. It arose from the news that the US had two successive quarters
Between 1992 and 2002, the UK experienced a period of benign economic growth. Known as the Nice (non-inflationary constant expansion) decade, it feels like a very long time ago. According to the Bank of England’s latest forecast, Britain today faces the opposite: high inflation and a recession. This grim prediction is why the Tory leadership
‘Truss’s campaign to be Britain’s next prime minister,’ wrote one political commentator this week, ‘seems to have unstoppable momentum. She has won the backing of heavyweights Tom Tugendhat, Brandon Lewis and the Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi.’ Across a range of commentary you will see that word ‘momentum’ used in this sense in the weeks ahead. I
Most push notifications that pop up on my tablet concern impending catastrophe. But last week, one newsflash made my day. Glory hallelujah, the NHS is closing the Tavistock. A clatter of tattletales have warned since 2005 that the UK’s only clinic for minors confused about which sex they are – having been encouraged to be