An email from the high-minded Carnegie Endowment, marking the triggering of Article 50 and the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, speaks of ‘The Closing of the European Mind’. ‘The cult of the protective sovereign nation-state,’ it goes on, ‘will not provide convincing solutions to 21st-century challenges, which are inherently transnational.’ This is true, in
We keep being incited to find it heartwarming that Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley were known as the Chuckle Brothers. But what were they chuckling about? Their shared success at outwitting the British state. Both, though for opposite reasons, had made their careers out of harassing Britain, and both, in their later years, had acquired
The great achievement of the Scottish Nationalists is to persuade people outside the borders of their own nation — including the London-based media — to equate them with the Scottish people. Obviously, they are their chief elected representatives just now, but the result of the referendum on Scottish independence quite clearly showed that the equation
After he left the Blues and Royals in 1981, the young Tristan Voorspuy drove a motorbike from London to Cape Town. Thus began his love of Africa. He also learnt to fly, and arranged to travel alone to Kenya from England in a single-engine aeroplane, using only a schoolboy atlas. Luckily, his brother Morvern, a
Chief Constable Simon Bailey, who heads Operation Hydrant, the police investigation of ‘non-recent’ child abuse cases, now says that paedophiles who view images of child abuse should not be prosecuted, because police cannot cope with the numbers involved. Mr Bailey is wedded to the doctrine that someone who says he is an abuse victim must
Last month, at Policy Exchange, I met a charming, quiet American general called H.R. McMaster. In conversation, I was struck by his zeal for Nato and his concern wherever the alliance is now weakest, as in Turkey. In his speech to the thinktank, he said clearly that Russia and China are attempting to ‘collapse’ the
How does Vladimir Putin think about the world? It becomes dangerously important to know. I still have not seen a revealing speech by or discussion with him. I have found out a bit more, however, about the two-hour private interview conducted with him by several young Etonians last summer. One reason they got into the
As we have been reminded this week, the most famous words (apart from ‘Order, order’) ever uttered by a Speaker of the House of Commons were those of William Lenthall. When King Charles I entered Parliament in search of the ‘five birds’ in 1642, Lenthall knelt to the King but told him, ‘I have neither eyes to
As he left the editorship of The Spectator in March 1984, Alexander Chancellor wrote in this space: ‘When I joined the paper as editor in 1975, people were in the habit of asking me what my “policy” was going to be… How desperately uneasy this question made me. If there was a lavatory in the
The English tradition of dissenting judgments in important civil cases is a good one. They are often better than the majority view, because they tend to be advanced by judges who resist the self-aggrandisement of their profession. In the Miller case on triggering Article 50, before the Supreme Court, Lords Reed, Carnwath and Hughes dissented
It is hard to be shocked by anything in these tumultuous times, but I was brought up short by the ‘attic’ headline of Tuesday’s Times, advertising the paper’s T2 section: ‘Up close and personal with Donald Trump — Michael Gove’ , it said, and continued, ‘Sex after 50: it’s fabulous’.. The earliest members of Alcoholics
At the Golden Globes ceremony, Meryl Streep attacked Donald Trump because he ‘imitated a disabled reporter’. ‘When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose,’ she added. It has not been explained over here that hers is a disputed version of what happened. The controversy began in November 2015, when Trump, campaigning,
‘My deep concern is that because of changed ways that news is now gathered, collated, packaged, delivered and displayed, the country can often find itself in… the tyrannical grip of the massed media… which could seriously threaten the political health of the United Kingdom as a Parliamentary democracy.’ This is from a letter I have
‘Are you Charles Moore of The Spectator?’ I answered to that description. ‘Well,’ said my questioner, ‘I am worried that you’re becoming very right-wing.’ We were sitting by the fire in a charming, smoky hut with no electric light and lots to eat and drink. It was a shooting lunch, the sort of occasion where one
It seems perplexing that François Fillon, now the Republican candidate for the French presidency, should be a declared admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Although she certainly has her fans in France, it is an absolutely standard political line — even on the right — that her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic liberalism is un-French. Yet M. Fillon, dismissed by Nicholas
It is not self-evidently ridiculous that Nigel Farage should be the next British ambassador to the United States. The wishes of the president-elect should not automatically be discounted. John F. Kennedy’s wish that his friend David Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech) should be ambassador was granted. It is also not true that the post must be filled
On a day when much fuss was being made about ‘false news’ on the net, it was amusing to study the Times splash of Tuesday, greedily repeated by the BBC. It concerned a ‘leaked’ memo, ‘prepared for the Cabinet Office’ and ‘seen and aided by senior civil servants’. The memo, from a Deloitte employee, was
It is a great relief that there will be no inquiry into the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in 1984. The weirdness is that Mrs May’s people ever entertained the thought in the first place. The push for an inquiry is a classic example of the attempt by the aggrieved, usually on the left, to turn history
World leaders are preoccupied nowadays with what is known as their ‘legacy’. In practice, this means being linked with moral-sounding projects, rather than embedding clear achievements. Barack Obama is even more obsessed with legacy than his predecessors. What might be his final way of showing this? Some suggest he will order the United States to
Vote Leave was the most successful electoral campaign in British history. Against the opposition of all three political parties, it won, achieving the largest vote for anything in this country, ever. But voting to leave is only the essential start, not the fulfilment, and now there is no Vote Leave. After victory, the campaign’s leaders
