This year has been a bad one for wildfires in Britain. In June, nearly 30,000 acres burned near Carrbridge in the Highlands. In August, a careless camper, I’m told, ignited 5,000 acres in the North York moors, setting off 18 unexploded shells, shrapnel from one of which narrowly missed a gamekeeper. The pollution from wildfires
As a foster carer and adopter, I’ve spent more mornings than I care to count coaxing my 13-year-old daughter into her uniform and then into the car. She has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the UK’s most underdiagnosed neuro-developmental condition, which leaves her with a brain wired for impulsivity, memory lapses and emotional storms that no
I arrived in Paris as an au pair in 2022. I was in my early twenties and armed only with GCSE French and a suitcase that could barely fit in my chambre de bonne – nine square metres of ‘characterful’ living space under the eaves, with a window just large enough to glimpse the Eiffel
Who is responsible for Labour’s recent woes? For some Conservatives, the answer is obvious – Sheridan Westlake. He is that rarest of beasts: an effective Tory operator who has served every leader since John Major. Flaxen-haired with an impish grin, he is spoken of by colleagues as part myth, part political mastermind. Yet ask him
We live in a strange era in which much of our day-to-day experience is constructed for us digitally on a screen. Even in the ‘real’ world, many objects that inhabit our homes will have been designed on a screen, made by computerised machines, and have that flat, wobble-free digital aesthetic – not only electronics, but
On 3 July a Chinese man, Xu Zewei, was arrested in Milan to face extradition on nine charges relating to the hack carried out by a group called Haf-nium during the Covid pandemic. Western companies had secrets stolen in 2020 and 2021 when a weakness in the Microsoft Exchange servers was exploited. The National Cyber
Whatever you think of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, there can be no doubt about this: she firmly backs the Church of England’s current official teaching on sex and marriage. Indeed, as the bishop who was recently in charge of updating that teaching, it might be the case that she upholds it more
For the past decade I’ve been in a toxic relationship. Sure, there were red flags – most of them on the dashboard – but it was love, or at least lust, on my part. My Land Rover seduced me with its size and strength, its rugged interior, how safe it made me feel when I
The antics of Keir Starmer and his top security adviser over the collapsed China espionage case bring to mind the slapstick British movie Carry On Spying – which is precisely the message it will have conveyed to Beijing. Instead of Bernard Cribbins, Kenneth Williams and their team of fictional incompetents, the real-life Whitehall farce has
It is party time in New York as we toast the launch of The Spectator’s swish new office on Fifth Avenue. The building, an art deco number originally designed by George F. Pelham, thrusts skywards, just a few blocks from the Empire State Building – and we’re right at the top. The Spectator State of
Hamburg What would happen if Russia was planning an attack on Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia – and the threat was sufficiently great that Nato felt the need to send troops east across Europe to face off against Moscow? This was the scenario the German Bundeswehr spent several days rehearsing last month, working out how the
Jilly Cooper, the last great Englishwoman of my lifetime – after Queen Elizabeth II and Debo – has died. The lights are going out all over Rutshire. During her life, Jilly shone as an author, a friend and a person – the definition of effervescent. You had to meet her only once to become a
This is West Cornwall, land of fishing, jam first and Trotskyite crafters. There is a sizeable community of nutters yearning for a Cornish intifada: the freedom within, and the freedom without. The old joke is: the duchy is shaped like a Christmas stocking and all the nuts are in the toe. Extinction Rebellion (XR) used
If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the
Failing institutions don’t like challenge, let alone being shown up. Few institutions are failing more tragically than our prisons – and the situation is getting worse. This is because the officials who preside over this debacle are purging the few people who have actually been making a positive difference. The latest organisation to be banned
Colossal, a $10 billion biotech firm with a knack of grabbing headlines, has announced it is on the way to de-extinguishing the dodo, the very icon of extinction. Like most of Colossal’s announcements, this one included a hefty helping of hype. All the firm’s scientists have actually done on this occasion is prove they can
Summer is icumen to its end, but my peach tree yielded a fine crop this year, though most of it was stolen. My mistake was planting the tree close to the road in my front garden, which made it easy for the thief to see and approach. I doubt that the thief reads The Spectator,
Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of the French Republic, has been convicted and sentenced to five years for a ‘criminal conspiracy tied to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign’. For those of us more familiar with Anglo-Saxon criminal law, there’s much to be confused by. France, like many ‘Napoleonic’ legal systems, draws no
Finally, some good news from Oxford. The university has recently been through a gloomy patch. It slipped from the top three in UK rankings for the first time since records began. The Oxford Union president-elect, George Abaraonye, also shamed the institution by gloating over the murder of Charlie Kirk. However, the university’s classicists are bringing
The European Union, guardian and champion of democracy, rightly takes a dim view when ruling parties ban their opponents, refuse to open polling stations in areas likely to vote against them, censor opposition news channels and allow a large staff of foreign election monitors to police social media in the run-up. If Serbia, say, or