The Spectator's Notes

On Advent Sunday, our grandson Christian became a Christian. He was baptised, sleeping, in the font of our parish church. On the whiteboard in the maternity ward, the newborn’s name beneath his was Mohamed. As is usual (and, in my view, preferable) nowadays, he was christened in the middle of the communion rather than separately.

Sir Tom Stoppard, who died last week, never wrote a memoir, but he did sort of speak one. Just over ten years ago, he told me that he and his new wife, Sabrina Guinness, had become tenants of an old rectory in Dorset. I asked him if he would therefore speak as guest of honour

About seven years ago, I bought two pairs of pyjamas, one British, the other Chinese. At the time, they seemed of roughly similar quality, the important difference being that the Chinese ones were half the price of the British. Given that they have the same ‘lived experience’, I can make a direct comparison. The British

When the BBC denies ‘systemic bias’, it denies the main, the crucial thing exposed by Michael Prescott’s now-famous leaked internal memo. Prescott was not presenting a ragbag of mistakes, but examples from many different areas of subjects where an institutional view prevailed – against Donald Trump, pro-trans, pro-immigration etc, all of them defensible views but

As others, including Nigel Farage, were quick to point out, Sarah Pochin got it wrong. She uttered words which, shorn of their context (as they obviously would be), made her sound racist. But the almost compulsory use of persons of colour to promote products and services is a bit of a wonder of the world.

Poor old Hamas, losing all those dead Jews. The BBC reports that Hamas ‘could not locate the remaining hostages’ bodies’, of which there are 28. One can understand the problem. When you have been starving and torturing so many for so long, you may not necessarily remember where you left them when they died. In

‘The facts of life are Conservative.’ This sentence is often attributed to Margaret Thatcher, whose centenary falls next week. The exact words are ‘The facts of life invariably do turn out to be Tory’ and were not hers. They appeared in the first major policy document produced under her leadership, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976). The

It amuses me that the two main parties most averse to the idea of honours, monarchy, chivalry etc are led by knights – Labour by Sir Keir Starmer and the Liberal Democrats by Sir Ed Davey. This is entirely fitting, since they accurately reflect the dominant Blob establishment world-view and so were rewarded by being

How can the nature sector respond to the genocide in Gaza? These are not my words. They appear in the subject box of an email which has been sent to members of the Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), though not, I think, by the WCL itself. It invites recipients to an ‘open forum for discussion

Daniel Kruger is a good and thoughtful man, whom I used to employ as a leader writer before he left for the higher calling of improving prisons. His choices in life have always been influenced by his sense of Christian purpose. That is what will have driven him to defect from the Tories to Reform.

The current ‘Britain is on a knife edge’ mood is understandable. Our discontents are great and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is even more incompetent and divided than we critics expected. But do not forget how the British system works. We are not like France, paralysed because its executive president can, constitutionally, hold out until 2027,

A currently fashionable conservatism is militantly against Ukraine and, by more cautious implication, pro-Russia. We who disagree are, I quote Matthew Parris in these pages last week, ‘prey to the illusion that the second world war was a template for future conflict, and Hitler a template for Putin’. Others put it more unkindly, speaking of

Successful political leaders hold in their minds some idea of what Mrs Thatcher called ‘Our People’. In this context, I do not mean the whole population of the country they seek to lead, or the core of the party they belong to. I mean that group of people with whose aspirations they most wish to

Danny Kruger’s brave defence of Christianity in the history of this country, which he recently delivered to an empty House of Commons, has won much praise. His words reminded me of when the same thing happened the other way round. As fourth-century Rome was Christianised by imperial decree, the distinguished senator Symmachus spoke up for

Behind the latest push for recognition of a Palestinian state – even though there is no agreement of what it is that might be recognised – is a sort of impersonation of the story of Israel. Palestinian activists want their own Balfour Declaration. President Macron wants France and Britain to come up with their own

This column comes to you from Auckland Castle, former palace and hunting lodge of the Prince Bishops of Durham. We, the Rectory Society, are here by kind permission of its saviour, Jonathan Ruffer, celebrating our 20th anniversary. Jonathan rescued the castle not from the heathen but from the Church of England. The last Anglican bishop

There probably never has been a time when a governing party much liked its MPs. If you are on a mission, as governments imagine they are, you are always impatient when your own side raises objections. But it is only recently that governments have seemed positively affronted by the idea that their MPs should have

It was airily pleasant to walk round Parliament Square on Monday morning. I had come up to London to go to parliament and to interview Kemi Badenoch at a Policy Exchange event across the square. Palestine Action had announced a protest march against Donald Trump’s and Israel’s ‘genocide’ for that time. Although the Met had