It must be about 25 years since the Rat first made an appearance in The Spectator. He started out as my girlfriend’s six-year-old boy, then became my stepson and featured here quite often over the years because, being a scaly-tailed creature of evil, he was always good for some copy. This new year, with his
I hope you are enjoying the BBC drama series Hard Sun. It is described as pre-apocalyptic science fiction, set in the present day UK. The head of MI5 is a Nigerian woman and everybody else in it lives in a mixed-race family — so, if you are a racist, you might well query that aforementioned
‘They are not as strong as they thought they were,’ one Whitehall source remarked to me on Monday night as he contemplated the fallout from Theresa May’s attempt to reshuffle the cabinet. No. 10 had come to believe that a successful Budget and ‘sufficient progress’ in the Brexit talks meant that much of May’s political
I once asked Michael Gove, when he had just been appointed Education Secretary, if he would mind awfully appointing me as chairman of Ofsted: I had one or two vigorous ideas, such as reversing the grades awarded to schools for ‘cultural diversity’ so that they more closely represented what the overwhelming majority of parents actually
In the churchyard by the church near my grandmother’s house, there’s a tombstone with an inscription that’s haunted me since I was a child. It marks the grave of a woman called Elizabeth who died, as I remember, in the 1920s. Elizabeth married young, had five babies in five years, then died well before she
Hard cases make bad law. The release on parole of the ‘black cab rapist’, John Worboys, is a hard case. But ministers should not be panicked into throwing open parole board decision–making to public inspection. The police have blundered, the sentence was surely too lenient, and the failure to inform his victims was disgraceful. But
Since it’s the first week of the New Year I’m going to pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening and focus on the lovely, life–affirming things I learned (or relearned) last year. Here are some of them. 1. There is hope for the youth. Yes, I know we think they’re all grisly little Marxist snowflakes
The craze for cryptocurrency can be explained by a host of factors: the allure of getting rich quick; the attraction of off-the-grid accountancy for malefactors like tax evaders and drug dealers (though Bitcoin is traceable); the glamour of the new. Despite blockchain currencies’ wild volatility thus far, I’d still posit that the more underlying attraction
Ten years ago, I had a strange debate about faith with a famous Jesuit and an agnostic psychoanalyst in a monastery on a cliff-top in Syria. At the time I thought I’d made some valuable additions to the discussion. The notes I took then record my own contributions with horrible precision. Looking back on it,
Every year in British politics seems to be more surprising than the last. Few predicted in 2015 that the Conservatives would win a general election outright for the first time in 20-odd years. Fewer still realised that Theresa May would become the most popular Prime Minister since records began. And almost no one foresaw how
Having thoroughly enjoyed Graham Norton’s recent forensic cross-examination of Hillary Clinton on BBC1, I’m thrilled that the corporation intends to use Graham for yet further heavyweight political interviews. Here’s an exclusive preview of one coming up soon: GN: ‘Halllllllo! How lovely to see you all! I hope you’ve been behaving yourselves. [Audience titters.] Well, do
Isn’t Meghan fabulous? Hasn’t she totally brought the monarchy into the 21st century? Doesn’t she make Kate look like such a square? We were so bored of Sloaney English roses, weren’t we? Meghan Markle is widely considered to be the best thing to have happened to the royal family — and Britain — in a
However we keep ourselves amused over the holidays this year, two sources of entertainment are off the docket. Amid the deluge of sexual misconduct allegations last month, the BBC dropped an Agatha Christie drama from its Christmas line-up after one of the actors, Ed Westwick, was accused of rape and sexual assault — which Westwick
I return often to Cambridge and was there recently. Julian Glover, my partner, was talking to the History Society at Trinity about his new biography of Thomas Telford, the 18th-century roads, bridges and canals engineer. We spent the night at Trinity, and I had time to update my acquaintance with this fast-changing city. ‘Fast’ hardly
I first viewed pornography at the age of 12, when a school friend showed me a magazine called, I think, Razzle. The centrefold was a naked lady with what appeared to be a large and potentially ferocious rodent between her legs — a coypu, perhaps, or a capybara. I had never seen anything like that
Prince Harry does not exist and soon Meghan Markle will cease to exist too. None of the royal family exist. This truth, which has come to me rather late in life, has taught me how to stop worrying and love the monarchy. Despite my boyhood admiration for King Sobhuza II of Swaziland, I was always
How do you defend Donald Trump without coming across like a rabid lunatic? This was my challenge as the only ‘out’ Trumpophile on a panel at the Dublin Festival of Politics last weekend. What made me especially trepidatious is that Ireland is even more painfully right-on than we are these days. It has ditched most
How will the Tory party remember 2017? Will it be the year it lost its majority, alienated key sections of the electorate and paved the way for a Jeremy Corbyn premiership? Or the year when uncertainty about Britain’s future relationship with the European Union peaked, when debt finally began to fall and the Tory party
The deaf are beginning to annoy me. They seem, paradoxically, more voluble than the blind. Perhaps this is because, understandably, deaf people suspect that their voices are not being heard. Which of course they are not, literally, by other deaf people — and in some cases this must lead to a state of suffocating paranoia.
A ‘bill’ is not commonly subject to negotiation. It arrives after a customer has contracted for the purchase of goods or services, whose price — with the unique exception of American health care bills, which are more like muggings by gangs on mopeds — has been established in advance. For the average upstanding Briton, a
