Before even writing this I know what response it will meet. Some who fought for Leave on 23 June will be contemptuous. ‘Bad loser’, ‘diddums’, ‘suck it up’, ‘go and live somewhere else’. From the online Leave brigade who stalk the readers’ comments section beneath media columns I’m already familiar with the attitudes of the
There’s something a little-dispiriting about waking up one morning to find that our elected politicians are even more psychopathic, deranged and-disloyal than one had always suspected. I don’t just mean Gove and his cackling, somewhat ambitious missus. Charming though Michael undoubtedly is, and agreeably owlish in-public, I have imagined him in-darker moments standing in a
A few hours after voting started in the European Union referendum, Populus released its final opinion poll showing a ten-point lead for Remain. This carried weight because the founder of Populus, Andrew Cooper, was also pollster for the official Remain campaign. His findings had been passed to 10 Downing Street earlier, leading David Cameron and
I think my favourite moment of the referendum campaign was John Major’s intervention, a couple of weeks before polling day. In that immediately recognisable tone of condescension tinged with snippy petulance, which we all remember and love so well from the time of his magnificent stewardship of this country, he said that people who didn’t
‘Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ I think this is how quite a few of us are feeling right now, we Brexiteers. We’re over the initial giddy disbelief, the euphoric rush of ‘My God, we actually did it!’ and heading towards the Wednesday Blues stage
There are lies, damned lies and pretending to back Remain. I lie because I am a coward. I hug friends who burst into tears, petrified by life without the European Union. I sympathise with strangers, who act like Lady Di just died and there’s nowhere to lay flowers. I obfuscate, I mutter, I am evasive.
I do like a wet and muddy Glastonbury. Albeit, admittedly, not quite as much as I like a dry and sunny one. It’s different, though. When the weather is poor, you become a pioneer, remaking the land, terra-forming the turf with your trudge. On the Sunday evening you can climb high up to the top
When is a nutter not a nutter, but a politically motivated terrorist? And are those two states of being always mutually exclusive? Or are they always the same thing? That first question was asked, in a fairly gentle manner, by a Muslim mate of mine on a social media site. The thread had been about
Sir Cliff Richard will not be charged with historic sex offences, say the police and Crown Prosecution Service. There is ‘insufficient evidence’. You, reader — yes, you: I cannot reveal your name because I’m making this up, but let’s call you Alan, and let’s suppose my reader-ship know very well who you are… you, Alan,
The best thing that can be said for David Cameron’s current predicament is that he has been here before. His career has been punctuated by moments when the polls and the pundits have said he was done for. In 2007, with the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown enjoying a honey-moon and considering a snap election,
Life is speeded up. It used to be that when a hideous atrocity occurred people waited a day or two, even a week, before co-opting it into their political armoury. Now it happens while the smell of cordite is still in the air and before the blood has dried. There is a breathtaking shamelessness about
Berne, Switzerland Before we vote Brexit I thought I’d pop over to Switzerland — courtesy of Die Weltwoche, the nearest local equivalent to The Spectator — to see how life will be once we escape the EU. Can confirm: it’s going to be great. We’ll be richer, freer and the views are fantastic: lakes and
On Thursday last week, as the baby and I were moving in our usual slow circles around the house, from changing station to feeding station to the place of dreaded midday nap, my husband, Dom, called to say he and all his colleagues were coming over. Dom is employed by Vote Leave, the group campaigning
The Spectator Podcast Christopher Meyer, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the first 100 days of Brexit At 5.15 a.m. on Friday 24 June 2016, David Cameron calls Michael Gove and concedes defeat in the EU referendum. The conversation is brief. With nearly all the results in, it is clear that Remain cannot overturn Leave’s
Have you got your names down yet for the Bunyadi? I’d hurry, if I were you. There’s currently a waiting list of more than 40,000, most of them homo-sexual Camden cyclists, I would guess. The Bunyadi is the country’s first nude restaurant and is, of course, in London. You go in, take all of your
Once upon a time, I didn’t really care about politics. Not viscerally. Growing up in a political family, I suppose, you go one of two ways. You know those kids you’ll sometimes see being paraded around by political parents in facepaint and rosettes, waving from shoulders as though born into a cult? I wasn’t like
I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though they may otherwise be, the sight of rolls and overhangs, jowls and bulges, makes them angry. One extremely thin woman I know finds it hard, she told me, even to have fat friends. Another shivers
To go fishing on the Itchen in mayfly season, you either have to be very, very rich or very, very lucky. That’s why I’m so grateful to have a friend in Mike Daunt, arguably Britain’s best-connected angler, certainly the most foul-mouthed, who invited me up for the day on to a particularly juicy beat of
Complaining about the EU referendum campaign has become an integral part of the referendum; even Delia Smith has got in on the act. But politicians on both sides who pretend that the choice is simple, despite having agonised over it themselves for years, are only partly to blame for the dire state of the debate.
A long and arduous flight back from the Caucasus, but worth it nonetheless for the meaningful protest we had staged in the fragrant and lovely Georgian capital, Tbilisi. They have opened a vegan restaurant there called the Café Kiwi — an affront not just to ordinary Georgians, but to all right-thinking people, surely. A bunch
