It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying a legal product. Little objection was raised thereafter when these same companies were banned from promoting their wares at all. Broadly shamed, even smokers have mutely accepted confiscatory taxes on cigarettes. As laws to protect
An idea gains ground that we shouldn’t go abroad any more: that the very act of travelling without urgent reason is somehow irresponsible. I don’t subscribe to this. To me, travel has always been such an important and productive part of life, a source of knowledge and happiness. So while I can travel, I will.
The news that residents of Liverpool are not allowed to visit any other cities in the UK is a hammer blow not just for the Scousers themselves, but even more so for the rest of us, who will be forced for an indefinite period to abide without their famous cheeky wit. I am not sure
‘Who am I? Why am I here?’ That was how Vice Admiral James Stockdale began the 1992 televised vice-presidential debate. It’s now regarded as a famous gaffe, yet Stockdale’s questions reflect the way most viewers feel about ‘veep’ debates. Who are these people? Why am I watching? Four years ago, 37 million Americans tuned in
Should we wear our masks? The question has been on my mind as I have been battered that way and this by a variety of people with stronger feelings than mine on the matter. The week before last, while I was walking down Oxford Street, police outriders began to emerge. Like most of the public
It took me several weeks, after returning to the Spectator office, to work out what was missing. It wasn’t the people — though Westminster is a zombie town these days, and even Pret A Manger, once hectic as a trading floor, is calm. I like the calm. What’s missing, I realised as I walked past
There are two striking things about the new book, 100 Great Black Britons, which was compiled to celebrate the achievements of British people from an African or Caribbean heritage. The first is the sheer number of people included who are ghastly or mediocre or both. The second is the number of truly brilliant black Britons
I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach wealthy prospective donors with a begging bowl. How much more delicious, I imagined during his tenure, to instead be the widely welcomed party that doles out the dosh. But as the administrators of Australia’s Ramsay
In a non-Covid world, next week would be the Tory party conference. Boris Johnson would march on to the stage in Birmingham to receive the adulation of his grassroots supporters. The biggest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher’s final victory in 1987 would have been celebrated. There would have been cheer after cheer for the new
There’s something about Dominic Cummings I will always like, and perhaps partly it’s the danger. I hardly know him well — perhaps at all, really — but will never forget an evening many years ago after a Times debate, when a few of us participants repaired to a restaurant called Fish near London Bridge. We
We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of it. In fact, the sharpest pens of the right seem to stab at more or less nothing else these days. Stab, stab, stab, they go. Many incisions are made and much ink and sawdust is
I’ve never been a great fan of public demonstrations. When I was at university, one of the great causes du jour involved a bus company owned by a man accused of not much liking the gays. My generation were short on causes, so intermittently there would be a call for direct action against the bigoted
Within hours of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Democrats and Republicans began fighting over how to fill her seat — and when. The stakes are high because the Supreme Court is so important. It can invalidate any federal, state or local law by ruling that it violates the US Constitution. And its decisions
In the light of recent articles in The Spectator, I think it is vital I should point out here and now that I thought Boris Johnson was crap long before Toby Young and our editor, Fraser Nelson, did. I remember suggesting more than a year ago that the entire Johnson clan was a bit thick
The government is bracing itself for a second wave of coronavirus. Everyone knew the autumn and winter would be more difficult than July and August. But what is depressing ministers is how new restrictions have had to be imposed before the summer is even out. ‘It is going to be a long, hard autumn,’ warns
Readers may recall a column last month that laid out powerful evidence for the proposition that the ethnic and racial disparities for dire Covid outcomes are overwhelmingly due to obesity. While I also read the piece aloud for posting online, fewer of you will have listened to the audio rendition. That’s because YouTube took it
I had my first doubts about Lord Hall, the former director-general of the BBC, when he addressed a group of us BBC editors back in about 1999 in his role then as head of news. A pleasant, emollient man, he revealed that he was thoroughly enjoying reading the second Harry Potter book, which had recently
Last week we broadcast my BBC radio Great Lives episode on Kenneth Williams. The effervescent comedian and presenter Tom Allen chose him. It was just enormous fun. You don’t, as a presenter, need talent to lead a programme on Williams: you just play archive clips and everybody falls about laughing. We certainly did. Funniest of
I have become allergic to ‘cute’, bad-tempered biddy that I am. Cuteness and the requirement to be cute have spread like pondweed across children’s TV and out into the adult internet. Cute culture is a way of worshipping youth — cute characters by definition have babyish features: big heads and eyes, fat cheeks and clumsy
Backbenchers are discussing when to give Downing Street a bloody nose, a former prime minister is on the warpath and the government is fighting on multiple fronts. All of this is contributing to the heated atmosphere at Westminster. But one thing is keeping Tory tempers in check: the party’s poll lead. As long as the