Columns

Why reawaken the IRA?

When politics goes round in circles, the columnist inevitably revisits issues that would have been sorted if only everyone read The Spectator. So: back to the Irish border — a demarcation that takes up no geographical space, but has still mysteriously dominated a dozen years of my life. Oh, well. What’s one more afternoon, then?

Even in moderate Malaysia, anti-Semitism is rife

The question I had hoped to pose this week was this: ‘Do people dislike Diane Abbott because she is black and a woman, or because she is useless?’ But then I worried that we would come to a fairly definitive conclusion a long time before my allotted 1,000 words had been used up. ‘The latter,

James Forsyth

Back to the backstop

As the prime minister walks up the main staircase in No. 10, he or she must pass the portrait of every previous occupant of the office. It is the British equivalent of the slave standing behind the Roman general and whispering ‘Remember you are mortal’ because the career of nearly every prime minister, no matter

James Delingpole

Gove vs the wood-burning stove

When I first heard rumours that Michael Gove was planning to go round the country with his environmental Gestapo, ripping out our wood-burning stoves in order to heal the planet, greenwash conservatism and reduce an imaginary 36,000 deaths a year, I must admit that a small part of me felt ever so slightly relieved. Of

Mary Wakefield

Is cannabis driving us crazy?

Fewer people are smoking cannabis these days, down to 1.4 million from two million, they say. I say, if you believe that, you’re high. Arrests, prosecutions and the issuing of ‘cannabis warnings’ might be down — but then, I’ve seen the police quite deliberately look away from dope smokers on the street. Weed is everywhere.

Sturgeon and Salmond’s fight to the death

Amid the wreckage of a Brexit process that has disrupted every aspect of British political life, it is easy to forget that it is not the only drama currently playing. Nor is Theresa May the only political leader who has no need to go searching for trouble. Michael Gove openly warns that ‘winter is coming’

Lionel Shriver

Publishers must stand up to the mob

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts

Matthew Parris

Leavers don’t actually want to leave

When intelligent, informed and rational people make a choice that onlookers can see confounds their own declared interests, we are wise to look to psychiatry for an explanation. This is where my thoughts turn, now that Tory Brexiteers have conspired to block Theresa May’s road from Chequers to the deal the Commons so spectacularly rejected

Rod Liddle

On Nobel Prize winners and Mastermind losers

I once worked my way through two whole books of IQ tests devised by Hans Eysenck and by the time I had finished I was much cleverer than that self-publicising ass Einstein, according to the helpful chart, and quite possibly the cleverest person ever to have walked on the face of the earth. So I

The National Trust and the evils of heteronormative history

There is a satirical website called ‘Guardian headline generator’ which purports to offer a service to aspirant journalists who wish to be published in the floundering, godawful rag. Press a button on the site and it will give you your subject matter for a typical article, such as: ‘Islamophobic white men will soon be widening

James Forsyth

Does May even have a Plan B?

Cabinets these days are fractious affairs. Ministers take increasingly unsubtle digs at each other as they rehearse the same old arguments. But this week, Theresa May chose to have a pop at someone who wasn’t there. ‘We’re still suffering from George,’ she told her colleagues — a reference to the former chancellor George Osborne. Her

What have migrants got against France?

Pitching your tent for weeks on end in the cold and mud, with no power or plumbing. Running in a pack after accelerating lorries and clutching frantically at the back door handles. Risking not only your own life but even the lives of your children by crowding into unseaworthy dinghies, in which to drift precariously

Rod Liddle

Save the rabbits from the predatory BBC

For a while, as a 13-year-old, I was obsessed with rabbits — the consequence of having read Watership Down by Richard Adams. I tried to share my enthusiasm for the book with my parents, but my father told me that he thought the scenario depicted by Adams was ‘improbable’. However, they did consent to take

Katy Balls

Will 2019 be Corbyn’s year?

It’s hard to think of a time when an opposition leader has had such a promising start to the new year. Jeremy Corbyn finds himself up against a prime minister who barely survived a confidence motion, with more than a third of the Conservative parliamentary party voting against her. The Tories have no majority of

Never trust the people

It was late, and a friend and I were left to talk Brexit. He’s a keen and convinced Tory Brexiteer MP but to stay friends we have tended to steer off the topic. This, however, felt like a moment to talk. The conversation taught me nothing about Brexit, something about him, and a lot about

James Forsyth

Parliament and power

Who should govern Britain? This has always been the most contentious question in British politics. Magna Carta, the Reformation, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution and the Reform Acts were all struggles over this fundamental point. Brexit asks this question twice over, so we should not be surprised by how divisive an issue it has

Rod Liddle

My foolproof recipe for a better world

It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not

James Delingpole

A few of my favourite things

It’s that time of year again when I put aside my wonted snark and share with you a few of my brown-paper–packages-tied-up-with-string moments so as to gladden the heart and remind ourselves that life is about more, oh so much more, than Theresa May’s crappy Brexit deal… Best friends: Michael and Sarah Gove. Many harsh