The week of my cricket team’s annual tour of Cornwall. I formed Heartaches CC in 1973 and 765 games later it is still going strong. Not that I am a key component of the side these days, if I ever was, despite my seven wickets against Mullion in 1991. When I suffered my fourth injury
The days between my leaving the Tories and joining Reform were an odd uneven time. It was the hardest decision I have ever made – I’d been a Conservative party member for 30 years, after all. Before the announcement, only three people knew what I was planning to do. In Westminster almost everything leaks so
It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the
One of the pleasures of spending the summer in France is that I can turn aside from our national problems and concentrate on those of our neighbour. They are similar but gratifyingly worse. You have to know someone quite well before they will open up about their own politics to a semi-outsider. I used to
I am entombed, like Edgar Allan Poe’s prematurely buried man, listening through headphones to a contemporary Russian fugue for organ and bagpipes. I had asked for a soothing Schubert prelude, but the radiologist couldn’t lay hands on one. The headphones have no volume control I can locate – only on and off, and off will
It is one of the joys of sport that friendships forged in changing rooms and on playing fields can be immediately rekindled decades later. Conversation flows like a tap turned back on. My old Westminster School team celebrated an anniversary recently. Players flew in from Dallas, Miami and Tallinn or tubed it from Hampstead and
How screwed is Britain? I’ve checked with the Impartiality Police. They said stick to the facts. Like many ailing, ageing western democracies, we’ve had low growth, soaring debts and flat living standards for nearly two decades. Have our politicians met the moment? You tell me. Perhaps, as The Spectator has long advocated, we need some
The Prom was Berlioz and Strauss, but the Albert Hall is always the star for me. It is a lover’s gift from Queen to Consort which completes a circle of passion for a Queen who loved music and sex in equal measure. Strauss was a music president of Hitler’s Reichsmusikkammer, but in a private letter
For the recent heatwave, it was my mission to escape our little Wiltshire cottage, where it hit 35°C. It has one of those very poor structural designs unique to Britain that, like plastic conservatories or the Tube, is useless in hot weather. First, we went to stay with friends in Frinton-on-Sea with our English bulldog,
I’m a Londoner born and bred, and I love this city, even though it’s slowly being destroyed by the insidious antics of Sadiq Khan. Do his repeated failures explain why his hair is going prematurely white? Why are the roads closed all the time, for no apparent reason? Why are there endless roadworks, yet no
Normally I model myself on one of the more retiring of the Desert Fathers, as much as a man living in England with six children can, so I rarely venture out. But this summer I could have given Galahad Threepwood a run for his money in the socialising stakes. Not that a Desert Father would
The late John Updike once wrote an amusing article about signing books. This wasn’t at some literary event with a few dozen fans queueing – no, it was vastly more daunting. An American book club had taken one of Updike’s novels for its Book of the Month and asked him to sign 25,000 copies –
On the hottest day of the year, St Pancras station would not have been my first choice for lunch, but it turned out to be, quite literally, the coolest of venues. I was meeting my brother (not Jeremy, as is often assumed, but Ben), over from Spain to attend the launch of a book I’ve
Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more
‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ asked a Spectator writer last weekend. The answer, according to slavishly pro-Israel commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti, is that I’m now ‘darker’, ‘degraded’, ‘dismal’ and ‘debase(d)’ – because I’ve become more critical of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza. For a long time on my YouTube show Uncensored, I defended
On 30 April, the solicitors Mishcon de Reya asked me to join a panel commemorating the 25th anniversary of the High Court trial in which David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Deborah was there, alongside her lawyer, Anthony Julius. Irving’s anti-Semitism had a particular purpose. Postwar, the chief obstacle
I have seen the future of food. And some of you won’t like it. On a research trip to the Netherlands last week, along with the fellow partners of my firm, Bramble, I took a speedboat tour of the port of Rotterdam. One of the most awesome sights was the so-called ‘Innocent Blender’ – a
I never thought I would read a headline like ‘Kirstie Allsopp’s husband enables upskirting’. Regrettably, this type of nonsense has become a regular part of our life since Ben and his business partner Will decided to rescue an old pub on Latimer Road. There used to be a dozen pubs on this street, but they
On the road with a new book, I recently spoke at a literary luncheon hosted by the Cambridge Festival. What could be more civilised than food, wine and conversations about murder with a charming audience… but this is one of many festivals that lost its funding thanks to the organisers of Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh pulling
‘What!? But they won’t let you in!’ and ‘What!? But they’ll detain you at the border!’ and ‘What!? But they’re all nuts over there!’ were just some of the responses from friends and colleagues at my announcement that I was heading to the US for three and a half weeks’ work. But my visa was
