As I write, the sneering at Nick Clegg has started. The first cuckoo I’ve heard in this chorus is calling from the left. Last week Nesrine Malik in the Guardian launched a scornful attack on Mr Clegg’s decision to quit public life in Britain and join Facebook in America. ‘Thanks for nothing,’ she says. I
I am not sure that Melania Trump had the introduction of Henry IV Part 2 in mind when she sat down for her free and frank discussion with the jackals of the — er, with a respected ABC correspondent during her recent trip to Africa. But time and again she dilated upon the ‘unpleasant’, erring
We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to put this right a little by drawing your attention to last week’s 2018 Maste rs Track Cycling World Championship — in particular the sprint category for 35- to 44-year-old women. The gold medal was won,
Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we
Before every Budget, George Osborne would tell his aides to prepare for it as if it were their last. His thinking was that chancellors only have so many opportunities to tilt the country in the direction they want it to go. Osborne’s Budget record was far from perfect, but that mindset did at least mean
Following Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony about being sexually assaulted by the US Supreme Court nominee when he was 17, numerous women on American news reported that listening to her terrible story made them cry. I didn’t cry. Indeed, my reaction to Ford’s statement was at such odds with the garment–rending anguish of my fellow
I met the late Darcy ten years ago, and wrote about him. I was 59 and he was 12. I was a Times columnist, and he was an Australian sheepdog. ‘Kelpies’ they call them: black and tan, in build and temper not unlike our border collies, energetic, intelligent, irrepressible but trainable, and occasionally neurotic. Darcy
There is a new book out about the sun — the bright thing in the sky, not the newspaper. It sounds very interesting. ‘Science Museum The Sun — One Thousand Years of Scientific Imagery’. You can get it from that place ‘Science Museum’, which I seemed to remember was once called the National Science Museum
Jeremy Corbyn used to be a punchline at the Conservative party conference. Tories believed that his election as Labour leader guaranteed them electoral success. But the picture that emerged from this year’s conference is of a Tory party that is desperately trying to work out how to counter Corbyn, and how to win a fourth
One morning a long time ago, when the Spectator offices were still in Bloomsbury, I hopped my bike up onto the kerb outside the new Pret a Manger on Theobalds Road, locked it to a post and went in. A man followed me, his face vacuum-packed with fury. He shouted: ‘No bikes on the PAVEMENT’,
There are no necessary truths any more. Everything is contingent. And those contingencies are the consequence not of what happens in the real world, but of the derangement in our own minds. Some will insist it was ever thus. Well, if so, it’s never been more evident. Take just two examples. We will never know
I’m on a no-alcohol, no-caffeine, no-sugar, vegan diet. It’s less fun than it sounds. Occasionally I cheat, but mostly I don’t, because I don’t want to upset the lovely doctors at the Infusio clinic in Frankfurt who gave me my stem cells for the Lyme disease treatment and who insist they need the right anti-inflammatory,
I took part in a debate organised by the Times this week about reform of our divorce laws. Well, I say a ‘debate’. There wasn’t much of that. Not much in the way of dissent. The four other panellists, who included a government minister, all wished to liberalise our divorce laws. And it was chaired
‘There are two sides to every story’ is an aphorism you don’t hear often lately. Ask anyone amidst a family row: most stories have more than two sides. But in the take-no-prisoners world of #MeToo, there’s only one side. All women are victims and all women are truthful. Any man who’s had a shadow of
‘Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness,’ wrote the Conservative Scottish journalist Colm Brogan, ‘grass never grows again.’ But Roundup has its uses. When Brogan made this comment, Sir Stafford was Britain’s postwar ‘austerity’ chancellor of the exchequer, a post he held from 1947 to 1950. Dry as dust, Cripps had
Brexit won’t be over by 29 March 2019. Britain will legally leave the European Union on that date. But that won’t tell us what Britain’s future relationship with the bloc will be, or how closely aligned the UK will be to the EU. Those are questions for which we will have to wait for the
I was delighted to see Claire Foy win an Emmy award for her portrayal of the Queen in the fine Netflix series The Crown. It may have helped assuage her annoyance at initially being paid £200,000 less than her co-star, Matt Smith, who did a fairly good impersonation of a young, brooding Duke of Edinburgh.
Things I learned about the Germans after a fortnight living as a non–tourist in Frankfurt: 1. Germans, and Germany generally, are among the world’s most underrated things. True they are not so adept at wit, snark, banter, jocularity or general frivolity. But they are kind, welcoming, generous and unlike, say, the French, charmingly grateful
[Update: Mark Knight, the Australian cartoonist accused of racism for drawing Serena Williams, has deleted his social media accounts after receiving death threats to his family. References to his social media accounts have been removed from this article]. I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being
I’ve always respected Alistair Darling and cannot imagine him saying anything ill-considered. But listening to him interviewed last Monday on the Today programme I heard him offer, as though it were obvious, an assumption so much less obvious than he appeared to recognise, that it set me thinking: not about the admirable former chancellor but