Features

When the bloke in the bar turns out to be a paedophile

To the British tabloids, he was ‘the Pied Piper of paedophiles’, the UK’s ‘most wanted child abuser’. But we all knew him as Willem: the fat, jolly, occasionally lecherous Dutchman who was a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community. If you visited one of the city’s same-sex watering holes before last August, when Czech police

Congratulations, Rob Ford: you’ve finally made me despise you

The first thing you see after leaving the baggage carousel at Toronto’s Pearson airport is an enormous photograph of Mayor Rob Ford. In it, the former high school football coach grins in his blingy regalia, teeth yellowed, one eye squinting in a semi-wink. His scalp is flushed and shiny through a receding blond hairline and

What’s keeping the banks buoyant?

‘The central bankers have won,’ a senior City stockbroker said to me this week with an air of resignation. ‘There’s no point fighting them. Investors are doing as they’re told.’ And, wow, how they’re doing as they’re told. Thanks to central bank money-printing, cash is sloshing around the global financial system in desperate search of

Fraser Nelson

Britain’s Eurovision problem

Britain is a stickler for tradition and each May we now observe a relatively new one: we bomb in the Eurovision Song Contest. The protocol now is well-established. Our entry is chosen by a BBC bureaucrat who appears to see the whole thing as a bad joke. We send out Bonnie Tyler/Engelbert Humperdinck etc to face an army

Freddy Gray

Boris’s Paris match: an interview with Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet

It’s Monday lunchtime, downstairs in the Spectator office, and Boris Johnson is trying to flog a bus to a Frenchwoman. ‘What about the new Routemaster? It’s absolutely great, yup, fantastic, yup. Hey, they could be really good for Paris,’ he says. She smiles and says nothing. ‘Well what about bendy-buses then?’ he carries on. ‘We’ve

Arm Syria’s rebels? That would be pouring petrol on a fire

Syria is sliding rapidly into chaos.  The supply of weapons to the opposition could only make matters worse, yet the Prime Minister seems to be -contemplating it. We have misjudged the situation from the start. From the early days of the crisis, two years ago, we rode to the rescue with our rhetoric. We were all

Life among South Africa’s nouveaux riches

Not long ago Cyril Ramaphosa, probably South Africa’s future president and ANC leader, attempted to buy a buffalo. It was at an auction for hunters and game ranchers. He bid £1.3 million and, incredibly, lost out to another tycoon. At the same event he still managed to spend another million pounds on game species for

The not-so-great Gatsby

You do not need to have read the book or even seen a film adaptation to feel a thrill at the word ‘Gatsby’. More than a novel, a film or a character, ‘Gatsby’ is an aspiration. The golden age of jazz, cocktails and evening dress, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is one of those works which