Rather miraculously, my daughter managed to leave the country last week to go on holiday with a group of friends. To celebrate finishing their A-levels, they had bought tickets to a music festival in Croatia, but it was cancelled at the last minute due to a surge in Covid cases. Having been denied every other
Before the television presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air — which cost him his job at GB News last week — he explained that his understanding of the gesture had changed. Having initially thought of it as political with a capital ‘p’, he now realised that in the eyes of most people,
I failed a moral test last weekend. A friend offered me a free ticket to the Euro 2020 final and I accepted, knowing my 13-year-old son Charlie would be bitterly disappointed. I had told him I’d try to get two tickets so I could take him, but all my efforts had come to nought and
Even a small dog can be quite high maintenance. No, I’m not talking about Mali, our one-year-old cavapoochon, but Bertie, a six-month-old cavapoo. Bertie is Mali’s best friend and — I regret to say — almost constant companion. The reason they spend so much time together is because his owner, a close friend of Caroline’s,
I’m struggling to work up much enthusiasm about England’s progress in the Euros. I know, I know, Tuesday night’s victory was the first time England has beaten Germany in the knockout stage of a tournament in 55 years — and the moment Gareth Southgate, the team manager, finally made amends for missing his penalty in
‘Whatever you do, don’t call them snowflakes,’ Caroline said the last time I spoke to Oxford students. ‘That’s not a grown-up way of conducting a political debate. It’s like calling you a gammon.’ She’s right, of course, but by God they make it hard. This week we learned that the Oxford University students’ union is
I’ve just written an essay for the People’s Lockdown Inquiry, a new collaboration between Buckingham University, the Institute of Ideas and the Reclaim party. The question I’ve puzzled over in my contribution is why the global elite became such enthusiastic supporters of the heavy-handed, statist approach to managing the coronavirus crisis — stay-at home orders,
I spent last weekend in south Devon at Dartington, the former estate of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, and now a charitable trust. I know the place quite well because my father was more or less adopted by the Elmhirsts when he was 14 and I spent four years there as a teenager while he was
Meritocracy, a word coined by my father, gets a bad press these days. Two recent books — The Meritocracy Trap (2019) by Daniel Markovits and The Tyranny of Merit (2020) by Michael Sandel — hold it responsible for many of America’s ills, and in some settings saying you believe the most qualified person should get
Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of Alexander Lukashenko’s book and campaign for re-election on a vodka-and-sauna approach to managing the pandemic. Belarus was one of a handful of European countries not to impose a lockdown last year, with the President urging
Scarcely a day passes without a major British institution announcing it is ‘decolonising’ itself. Most recently it was the turn of Shakespeare’s Globe, which announced a series of ‘anti-racist Shakespeare webinars’ as part of its ‘commitment to decolonising the plays of Shakespeare’. That brought me up short. At the time of Shakespeare’s birth, England didn’t
Some 114,201 ballots were rejected in the first round of the London mayoral election, approximately 5 per cent of the total votes cast. This wasn’t because people were deliberately spoiling their ballots to protest about the fact that no one standing represented their views. After all, there were 20 candidates in the election encompassing a
In the introduction to an anthology of his jazz record reviews, the poet Philip Larkin imagines his readers. They’re not exactly full of the joys of spring. He describes them as ‘sullen fleshy inarticulate men… whose first coronary is coming like Christmas’. Loaded down with ‘commitments and obligations and necessary observances’ they’re drifting helplessly towards
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of the 20th century, had pinned above his desk. During my five-year stint as The Spectator’s theatre critic I did my best to follow that philosophy. But according to a new set of guidelines devised by
Has it ever been more difficult to plan a family holiday? At the time of writing, it is illegal to travel abroad from the UK for non-work purposes. That restriction is expected to be lifted in due course, although not before 17 May, and replaced by a traffic light system, with countries ranked green, amber
As I’ve written before, the thing I’ve missed the most in the past 12 months is going to see QPR with my son Charlie. So I’m alarmed about the prospect of having to produce a ‘Covid status certificate’ every time I want to go to a game. That was the advice in a recent letter
Judging from the reaction to last week’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, you’d think it had been written by a group of white supremacists who deliberately falsified the evidence about the prevalence of racism in contemporary Britain. Labour MP Clive Lewis tweeted a picture of the Ku Klux Klan alongside the hashtag #RaceReport,
Along with many other people, I gave up drinking for the month of January and then resumed with gusto on 1 February. But my 13-year-old son Fred, the only Christian in my household, urged me to give it up again for Lent. ‘Why not keep me company?’ he asked, having decided to forego sugar. But
I was walking with our one-year-old cavapoochon on the way back from the baker’s in Acton on Sunday morning when I spotted a man with two greyhounds coming towards me. At least, I think they were greyhounds. They looked like they’d been injected with steroids, making their muscles grow and pop and giving their faces
The last time I went to a football game was on Saturday 7 March last year when my 12-year-old son and I went to see QPR play Preston North End. When we got there we were handed a certificate, signed by the manager, congratulating us on having travelled 228 miles. Pretty heroic given QPR’s record
