Features

There is no sacred right to be a lazy fat slob

If political reality means we can’t tax the overweight, then at least let’s have tax breaks for those who bother to take exercise, writes unashamed metrosexual Dan Jones Hands up if you employ a personal trainer. Actually, that’s a trick question. If you can raise your arm without wincing in pain then either you don’t

Three women showed me how bad things have got

Over the last week I have been pondering the lives of three totally different women. The first was our dim, weasel-worded Home Secretary, adept at letting others fall on their sword but unwilling to follow suit. Second, the late Jade Goody with her sad, manufactured martyrdom, and last a hard-working NHS doctor responsible for the

A Blogger’s Notebook

Having sat patiently on a barrel of digital dynamite for months — the emails from Gordon Brown’s chief spin doctor Damian McBride to Mandelson’s protégé Derek Draper, suggesting Tory smear stories — I light the fuse on Andrew Neil’s BBC Daily Politics show. In an unedifying squabble, I succeed in stitching up the once again infamous

Eat, drink and be communist

In 1890 Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, celebrated his 70th birthday. ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning,’ he boasted to Laura Lafargue, daughter of his old friend Karl Marx, ‘and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne — that morning we had had 12 dozen oysters.’ This was

A granny in the front line against New Labour

Elizabeth Pascoe, a granny in her sixties with a fondness for pink cardigans, is an unlikely heroine, but she is one to me. For when Liverpool city council and a government agency told her, four years ago, that they wanted to compulsorily purchase and demolish her fine Victorian home in the Edge Lane area for

I half expected to see Welles run towards me

Harry Mount celebrates the 60th anniversary of Carol Reed’s masterly film The Third Man with a tour of Harry Lime’s postwar Vienna — the true star of the movie Vienna Six times a week, the Burg Kino cinema in Vienna shows The Third Man in its small Studio Theatre. ‘It’s best that you book,’ said

In New York, pregnancy is a form of tyranny

Even Sylvia Plath (though usually pretty downbeat about life) viewed pregnancy as an exalted state. In her diary she characterised gestation as ‘the Great Experience a [woman’s] body is formed to partake of, to nourish’, while in her poem ‘Morning Song’ she celebrated feeling ‘cow heavy and floral’. Bringing children into the world clearly fulfilled

The real scandal is that we always, always end up paying

The Jacqui Smith case and the grotesque sight of her husband apologising for watching porn films at the taxpayer’s expense are just the latest symptoms of a well-advanced political disease, says Rod Liddle. They take the voters for a bunch of mugs At last the politicians have done the decent thing and called in the

What I heard at J.D. Salinger’s doorstep

J.D. Salinger is in the kitchen when I turn the corner of his farmhouse, his reported deafness probably explaining why he doesn’t hear me until I am a few feet from him and ringing the doorbell. His wife correctly guesses the identity of the caller and, apprised of the information out of my hearing, the

Brussels Notebook

It’s dawning on me that the Prime Minister can’t listen to criticism. It’s dawning on me that the Prime Minister can’t listen to criticism. I don’t just mean that he can’t respond to criticism; I mean that he literally can’t listen to it. When he came to the European Parliament to drum up support for

Our society must be equal to the threats ahead

There seems to have been a view developing in recent years that defines peace simply as the absence of war. If only we can avoid armed conflict, the argument seems to say, then we will live in a more peaceful world. But peace is not simply the absence of war. Real peace is accompanied by

Mary Wakefield

Meet Gordon’s Pet Shop persecutors

Mary Wakefield meets the successful pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, and finds them eloquent critics of New Labour, staunch defenders of civil liberties — and fans of Vince Cable Through the woods, the trees And further on the sea We lived in the shadow of the war Sand in the sandwiches Wasps in the

The real reason I had to join The Spectator

Over the past four decades I have received many reviews in The Spectator, all of them mixed (in the technical theatrical sense of ‘extremely bad’). For example, in 1976 The Spectator wrote about Fawlty Towers: I’ve been bellyaching, ever since I started writing this column, about the low standard of the programmes. I have been

‘In a global era, we need our roots more than ever’

Gordon Brown tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is so preoccupied with national identity. In the modern world, he says, we must be explicit about what being a Briton means ‘The problems will arise if you cannot say to a young person that there’s going to be a job after the training. We’ve got to make