The journalist Jonathan Miller, a cherished Spectator contributor, died last week at his home in Occitanie, France. Below is an extract from the memoir he had only just completed, Shock of the News: Confessions of a Troublemaker. Here he explains how he came to write about French politics and culture for the magazine. I t
It’s more than two months since I returned from Dublin, and at last the hangover is beginning to fade. I flew out with our team at The Rest is History to record a series about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. Our guests were Paul Rouse, a professor at University College Dublin and
Tokyo Could Japan be the world’s first -algocracy – government by algorithm? The concept has been flirted with elsewhere: in 2017 a chatbot called Alisa challenged Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency. But there is reason to believe that if any major country is going to replace its politicians with AI, it will be Japan.
Donald Trump this week boosted Ukraine’s air defences with new Patriot batteries, threatened Vladimir Putin with sanctions if he does not agree to a ceasefire, and even reportedly gave tacit approval to more Ukrainian strikes on Moscow. Trump’s newfound support for Ukraine is a welcome lifeline. The question is whether his help will be enough
Andy Warhol believed that the greatness of America lay in how the richest consumers bought exactly the same things as the poorest. ‘You can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and, just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you
Controlled immigration was once a left-wing cause. It was a basic tenet of trade unionism – not to mention economics – that the number of workers in a labour market dictates the rate of pay. When more and more people compete for the same jobs, employers can cut wages. Those who care about profits rather
In February 2020, a few weeks before Britain was thrown into lockdown, Sajid Javid resigned as chancellor of the exchequer over a bust-up with the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. The fight was thought to be over Cummings’s attempts to dictate who could and could not work in No. 11. In fact, it was
Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad.
Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point
The evidence was clear, the official had dropped a clanger. At 4-4 in the first set of the women’s match at Wimbledon last Sunday, the British player Sonay Kartal should have had her serve broken when she hit a backhand long. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova saw the ball land well out of court, as did those watching
On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton
The House of Lords is very old, but not quite continuous. In 1649, shortly after the execution of King Charles I, the Cromwellian House of Commons passed an act which said: The Commons of England assembled in parliament, finding by too long experience, that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the People
Keir Starmer has not been the luckiest general. But, in one respect, he has bested Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington will shortly be purged from parliament, two centuries after Waterloo. Like his ancestor, Charles Wellesley has led a life of public service. For that, he will shortly receive the sack as part of the greatest
Madrid In the mid-1990s, Spain’s socialist prime minister Felipe Gonzalez saw his political career collapse under the weight of a corruption scandal. A Supreme Court investigation revealed a fraudulent contracting scheme that illegally funded the Socialist party’s (PSOE) election campaigns. Despite intense media pressure from government-aligned outlets, two brave judges upheld the rule of law.
My first job in government was working for Norman Tebbit as his special adviser in the Department of Trade and Industry. I received the call 41 years ago, in the summer of 1984, and it was agreed that I would join him immediately after the Conservative party conference concluded that year in Brighton. He was
This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France’s most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in 2020, wrote many books during his long and varied life, but only one, The Camp of the Saints, is remembered. Even his admirers and sympathisers admit that the book isn’t a classic in the literary
Manhattan The Friday before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, the 33-year-old candidate Zohran Mamdani walked the entire length of the city. ‘We’re outside,’ he told his videographer as they began their trek at Inwood Hill Park, ‘because New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at!’ Like
Perhaps the most traumatic part of attending an American wedding – much worse than the bridesmaids coming in the wrong way, the proliferation of dinner suits and the tendency of couples to write their own appalling vows – is the tradition of the ‘rehearsal dinner’. This, an event the night before the wedding, is where
The usual piece about public libraries runs like this. Public libraries are for ‘more than just books’. They are in a desperate plight after years of cuts, or better still ‘Tory cuts’. Librarians, who are heroes, struggle to go on serving their local communities. Libraries are hanging on by a thread, and because of those
Syria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held as sabaya, or sex slaves. After the Assad dictatorship fell, amid revenge attacks by militias loyal to the country’s new rulers, there were reports of abductions for rape and even of forced marriage. Alawite human