Columns

The biggest threat to Trump is Trump

Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with our money. After Donald Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums have sent markets lurching, who knows how much stocks will have spiked or tanked between the typing of this paragraph and it seeing print. Some 62 per

Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been given the right to remain here by an deputy Upper Tribunal judge called Rebecca Chapman. The women insisted that they would face persecution in Albania for their sexual preferences. This is despite the fact that

Katy Balls

Reform vs Labour: who’ll win the battle for the north?

When MPs and peers were recalled to parliament for an emergency debate on renationalising British Steel, one man was the talk of the terrace: Nigel Farage. Out by the river, a Labour peer congratulated the Reform leader for ‘leading on everything’. After all, Farage had been in Scunthorpe days earlier calling for steel nationalisation.  Since

What if Trump is just bonkers?

‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial politician Talleyrand. Whenever a person behaves in ways we had not anticipated, it is a Darwinian and often useful human instinct to suspect a rational motive, and seek it out. So it’s unsurprising that in

Where the young rich flee to

If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people who emigrated there would be rather like the Pilgrim Fathers – ascetic, homogenous, insular and highly religious. The sort of group that has historically had the psychosocial qualities necessary for withstanding a long voyage to

Rod Liddle

The lunacy of Gillian Mackay’s abortion bill

I had spent my life so far in blissful ignorance of a woman called Gillian Mackay. I mean, I knew she existed – but how she existed and what she did with her existence did not impinge because she was safely sequestered in that booby hatch of methadone, lady-men, corruption and pies which we know

Katy Balls

How Starmer plans to weather Trump’s storm

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Keir Starmer has struggled to set the agenda. The latest attempt came with the Spring Statement, but events soon overtook that when the US President announced his mass tariffs, which could derail Rachel Reeves’s spending plans. It is not yet 100 days into Trump’s secondterm, and ministers

The hypocrisy of the Heathrow Nimbys

Some readers may have noticed that it takes rather a long time to get anything done in Britain these days. For example, if you added them all together, I wonder how many hours of Prime Minister’s Questions and BBC Question Time – under consecutive governments – have been taken up by a discussion of HS2.

Lionel Shriver

How to find your perfect man

My late parents perpetually promoted their marriage as the best in the history of the universe. Because this cult of two was hardly subtle, others readily detected what they wanted to hear, so fawning social admiration of what lovebirds they were made them even worse. For us kids, this Trumpesque superlative (how they’d hate that

Rod Liddle

Who’s in charge here?

I heard the self-important whine of a police siren so pulled back the curtains a little to see what was happening. I was in a bed and breakfast in Royston, Herts, so I assumed the rozzers were on their way to handcuff someone who had been mildly disobliging about their child’s school on a social

Katy Balls

Robert Jenrick is the talk of the Tory party

In Westminster, politics is often a zero-sum game. There is a winner and a loser. But this week, two politicians from opposing sides found themselves being praised for the same thing: the Sentencing Council climbdown. After a long standoff with the government, the independent body stalled plans to bring in new rules on sentencing criminals

America is a moral idea or it is nothing

Harold Wilson once declared that the Labour party ‘is a moral crusade or it is nothing’, a proposition whose logical consequence is troubling. Returning now from the United States, the comparable proposition both haunts and comforts me, because America is not nothing. Travelling through several Midwest and western states, I’ve been struck by how many

Mary Wakefield

The Met’s misogyny

My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or four times a year, when the weather warms up, she stands on her doorstep, smashed, and yells at the world. I don’t blame her. Rose has been through the mill. She’s a slight woman and

Rod Liddle

Americans are right to hate us

In an Appalachian high school, the kids were set the task of writing about Europeans as part of their history curriculum. When the day came to hand in their work, the teacher took one boy aside and expressed displeasure about the sheer lack of effort he had put into his homework. ‘You have had three

Katy Balls

Labour’s popularity contest

A few months ago, over a plate of bone marrow, a Tory adviser was considering how best to kneecap Labour. With the government’s working majority at 168, opposition debates could only go so far. Viral attack videos were hard to come by and CCHQ was depleted. Then the adviser hit upon something: a league table

Something is rotten in Stratford-upon-Avon

Almost every nation has a national poet. The Russians have Pushkin. The Persians have Ferdowsi. The Albanians have Gjergj Fishta. But it would be a very odd thing if any of these peoples had their national poet taken away from them or were forced to have their national poet insulted. Indeed, it might be considered

Lionel Shriver

Don’t write off literary fiction yet

I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good riddance to literary fiction’, I agree with. It’s true that the high-flown heavy hitters of the book biz get far less attention than in yesteryear – though ‘litfic’ has never been a big money-maker in

Rod Liddle

The shape-shifting Labour party

It is difficult to gauge who is the more discombobulated by the Labour government’s recent Damascene conversion to a political viewpoint roughly approximating to common sense – the Labour left, Reform or the Tory right. It is equally difficult to believe that the current administration is the same one which took office on 4 July