Journalism

Due to the large amount of applications received we have decided to close the application process sooner than planned. Please do check back for future opportunities. Summer’s coming, and we’re looking for interns at The Spectator. We’re looking for digitally-savvy lovers of good writing with fresh ideas to spend a week or two with us at 22 Old Queen St. The position will be paid (but not paid very much). We don’t mind where or whether you went to university; Frank Johnson was a superb editor of this magazine and he had no formal education to speak of. What matters is flair, imagination and enthusiasm. Skills that you can’t really learn in

Her Majesty’s Loyal Press Corps are on the verge of revolt. Minutes of a recent meeting of the Press Gallery Committee – seen by The Spectator – show that a Republican motion to ditch the Loyal Toast (in which Westminster hacks and assembled guests, from the PM down, raise a glass to the British sovereign) is being considered. Minutes from the July meeting of the Committee state: (ii) Loyal Toast: the committee considered the proposal to discontinue the loyal toast at Press Gallery lunches which had been deferred from a previous meeting. After discussion it was agreed that the chairman should take soundings amongst colleagues and report back to the

Recently one morning, as I was weeping over Caitlin Moran’s (daughter of Mr and Mrs Moran of Wolverhampton) brilliant book How to Build a Girl — specifically, the heartbreaking way she writes about coming from an impoverished family — a report came on to the radio with the glad tidings that working-class white children are now doing worse in schools than any other ethnic group. Said one Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the education select committee, ‘They do less homework and are more likely to miss school than other groups. We don’t know how much of the underperformance is due to poor attitudes to school, a lack of work

Husbands and wives across London gathered last night to hear Tim Dowling’s informed advice on How to be a Husband. At last night’s launch of his book of that title, Dowling told Mr S that marriage isn’t dissimilar from flying in a police helicopter – a task he’d confronted earlier in the day. ‘You get on it, you don’t know where it’s going or why you’re in it,’ he started, before pointing out ‘the difference is that you can’t put children in the helicopter and you can’t get out when the person next to you is being sick.’ Industry friends were present, including publisher William Sieghart, columnists Janice Turner and

The latest series of Andrew Rawnsley’s ‘Leader Conference’ on Radio 4 starts tonight…keenly awaited obviously. But having been on the programme a couple of times – though not, funnily, since I did a piece for this magazine about the difficulty a woman has in getting her oar in across the masculine timbre of Danny Finkelstein et al – perhaps I should disabuse you that this admirable series actually replicates what happens in a leader conference. It’s very good, as everything my old friend Andrew does, but just not quite the same as the thing itself. This, I may say, is something of a specialist subject of mine, on account of

Index on Censorship, once home to the most important defenders of free speech in Britain, is falling apart. Seventeen full-time staff members in place when Kirsty Hughes, a former European Commission bureaucrat, took over as chief executive in 2012 have been fired or resigned. Among the recipients of redundancy notices are Padraig Reidy who was Index’s public face and its most thoughtful writer, and Michael Harris, who organised the lobbying to reform England’s repressive libel laws, the most successful free speech campaign since the fight to overturn the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1960s.  The board, headed by David Aaronovitch of the Times and filled with Matthew Parris

Since I landed my new job as executive editor at Breitbart London, my old Fleet Street friends and colleagues have reacted with a mix of envy and horror. The envy part comes from the fancy title and their ludicrously exaggerated idea of how much I’m being paid; the horror from the fact that I’ve gone and joined what’s known disparagingly in the trade as a ‘vertical’. A vertical — the opposite of a horizontal, obviously — is an online enterprise that caters to a niche audience: dog owners, say; or foot fetishists; or, in the case of Breitbart.com, readers of a mainly American persuasion who like their news curated and

The other day Mumsnet asked whether I would talk to its audience about my Spectator pieces (here and here) on the universities’ plans to authorise the segregation of men and women on campuses. Why not? I thought. Mumsnet has a large and interesting audience. More than five million people visit each month, and politicians beg to go on to a site that is a successful online publisher, rather than some cowboy outfit. As the Financial Times said in a profile of Mumsnet’s CEO Justine Roberts, ‘It is owned by the founders,  staff and a “couple of mates” – and so any pressure to make more money comes from within. Recently it has turned a profit