Features

Thursday

Dennis Sewell

The quango state: how the left still runs Britain

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson discusses David Cameron’s quango problems” startat=1350] Listen [/audioplayer]Last week Sally Morgan reverted to type. After almost three years as a model of cross-party co-operation, instinctive Labour tribalism finally won out as she accused Downing Street of purging Labour supporters from high offices. Of the many Labour types appointed by the coalition

Thursday

Charles Alexander

Will Test cricket survive the Age of India?

For the past three months the cricket press has concentrated on the destruction of the England cricket team at the hands of Australia. It now emerges that correspondents were missing a bigger story. While Mitchell Johnson was carving up the England batting order, the England, Australia and India cricket authorities were doing the same to

Sam Kiley

Israel’s other A-bomb

 Jerusalem Some day soon, the foreign minister of a major ally may decide to drop an A-bomb on Israel. William Hague and John Kerry have each pointedly left the option open. And Jimmy Carter, of course, has already done it. This A-bomb isn’t a literal bomb, cooked up beneath the deserts of Iran, but it

Harry Mount

The case against London cabbies

I lost my misguided faith in black cabs last week, on the corner of Royal College Street in north London. It was the tiniest trip — 2.4 miles from Bloomsbury to my Camden flat at 11.30 in the evening. Hard to mess up, too: empty roads, good weather and the easiest of routes — practically

Alec Marsh

Britain’s accidental one-child policy

[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_January_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Alec Marsh discuss the death of the big middle class family’] Listen [/audioplayer]The future Mrs Marsh and I wait outside a small Victorian terraced house for an estate agent. It’s a familiar Saturday scene, especially in W7 — the last London postcode before you reach Middlesex and an area I formerly classified as

Tim Ecott

Why we should let Faroe islanders hunt whales

In Tórshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands, I met a man who first helped his father kill a whale with a sharp knife when he was eight years old. The spouting blood soaked his hair and covered his face like warpaint.  He remembered the warmth on his skin, a contrast to the cold North Atlantic

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Agitprop for toddlers: the oddly strident politics of CBeebies

I think I might be a bad parent; whenever my wife is out, I plonk our two-year-old daughter in front of the television. The other day we watched a rainbow nation of children marching around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’, and I realised that something has changed in children’s

Florence King

America’s war on sleep

 Fredericksburg, Virginia Ask an American to name the author of the line ‘Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’, and he will promptly reply ‘Shakespeare’. It’s pure guesswork but we always credit the Bard with anything that sounds like a literary quotation, so he inadvertently gets it right. But if you recite the

Daron Acemoglu

Why foreign aid fails – and how to really help Africa

David Cameron speaks compellingly about international aid. Eradicating poverty, he says, means certain institutional changes: rights for women and minorities, a free media and integrity in government. It means the freedom to participate in society and have a say over how your country is run. We wholeheartedly agree and were flattered to see the Prime

Alex Wickham

MPs grope men too

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Alex Wickham discuss Westminster’s wandering hands with Miranda Green” startat=790] Listen [/audioplayer]As I walked out of the bar, I noticed a Conservative MP following me. It had been an evening for young political activists, mostly teenage boys, and it was drawing to an end. I pretended to be engrossed in my phone, but

Douglas Murray

Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East’s 30 year war

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray discuss Islam’s 30 year war with former solider Thomas Tugendhat”] Listen [/audioplayer]Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a counter-coup. But Lebanon is starting once again to fragment. Beneath all these facts — beneath all the explosions, exhortations and blood — certain

Thursday

Vernon Bogdanor

The Spectator book review that brought down Macmillan’s government

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Vernon Bogdanor discuss Iain Macleod’s ‘What Happened’ article” startat=1460] Listen [/audioplayer]Fifty years ago this week, a cover story in The Spectator helped to bring down a Conservative government. It was called ‘The Tory Leadership’ and was written by the editor, Iain Macleod, who had been a senior minister in Harold Macmillan’s government. Purporting

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

François Hollande – all the president’s women

Obviously, the whole Hollande business is utterly compelling from a prurient point of view, though journalists did brilliantly in coming up with spurious public interest reasons for talking about it (Corsican mafia! Presidential security! Lying!). The most riveting aspect, for me, is the heroic restraint of his former partner Ségolène Royale when she was asked

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The fight for compassionate Conservatism

‘Has the Secretary of State, like me, managed to watch programmes such as Benefits Street and On Benefits & Proud? If so, has he, like me, been struck by the number who complain about welfare reform while able to afford copious amounts of cigarettes, have lots of tattoos, and watch Sky TV on the obligatory

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Benefits Street exposes Britain’s dirty secret – how welfare imprisons the poor

[audioplayer src=’http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3′ title=’Fraser Nelson and Frank Field MP discuss Benefits Street’] Listen [/audioplayer]No scandal has been more successfully covered up than the appalling truth about what happens to Britain’s poorest people. We have, as a country, grown used to pretending they don’t exist; we shovel them off to edge-of-town housing estates and pay them to

Thursday