Madeline Grant is The Spectator’s assistant editor and parliamentary sketch writer.
46 min listen
Michael Gove and Madeline Grant return with another episode of Quite right!, The Spectator’s new podcast promising sanity and common sense in an increasingly unhinged world. This week, they dissect Keir Starmer’s brutal reshuffle – from the ‘volcanic ejection’ of Angela Rayner to the rise of Shabana Mahmood, the ‘uncompromising toughie’ now in charge of
It’s always nice when the muses of tragedy and comedy seem to be working in perfect sync: nowhere is this truer than the Labour deputy leadership contest. It would genuinely be difficult to relate how many people have indicated that they are standing for the role so unceremoniously vacated by Big Ange. Candidacies have come
Reform had clearly planned the Campest Show On Earth for their conference this year. Sparklers, club anthems and strobe lights: imagine Sir Keith Joseph was in charge of your primary school disco and you get a sense of the vibe. Unfortunately for the budding impresarios of Reform, they were upstaged. Just as their conference was
Imagine a school assembly run by the most boring narcissists imaginable. Right – you’ve come close to picturing the first parliamentary business questions after recess. Lucy ‘Paraffin’ Powell, the woman who can always make a bad situation worse, began with a list of all the MPs who had married, had children, or otherwise managed not
It was taxes that eventually did for Al Capone. And Spiro Agnew. And Judy Garland. So now the taxman’s bell tolls for Big Ange – who has often presented herself as a sort of mix of all three of those figures. The hard-partying working-class girl turned union bruiser turned second most powerful politician in the
48 min listen
Michael Gove and Madeline Grant launch ‘Quite right!’, the new podcast from The Spectator that promises sanity and common sense in a world that too often lacks both. In their first episode, they take stock of a political summer dominated by Nigel Farage, a Labour government already facing mutiny, and the curious spectacle of Tory
The Green party’s leadership announcement was live streamed using a phone which seemed to be wrapped in clingfilm and held by someone who appeared to be suffering from delirium tremens. You may not have realised that the Greens were electing a new leader. You may not even have realised that they have a leader at
How many resets does it take to make a doom loop? In another attempt to work out what the problem with his government is – and with all the mirror salesmen in the capital presumably on holiday – Keir Starmer has done another mini-reshuffle. ‘Phase two of my government starts today’ he says in a
I suspect most of us long ago gave up on expecting any humility from our politicians – indeed, the less impressive they become and the more impotent it is clear that they actually are, the more their God complexes seem to flare up. It’s almost like they think humans are characters in a simulator game
In 1620, in the Staffordshire market town of Bilston, a teenage boy decided he didn’t much fancy going to school. Rather than resort to conventional methods, 13-year-old William Perry claimed that he was possessed by a demon. His symptoms included reacting with spasms to the reading of the first verse of St John’s Gospel and
The current head of energy policy in this country is Muppet-made-flesh Ed Miliband. While he makes a speciality of eye-catching policy announcements; notably playing a tuneless rendition of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ under a wind turbine, he is proving less capable of any form of actual policy implementation. His absolutism is increasingly bringing him into conflict
There are few more irritating features of the modern apparatchik’s lexicon than ‘lived experience’. It implies the existence of some ‘unlived experience’ which is an impossibility. That said, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that members of the current cabinet know what it is to be zombies. Yet, in at least one area, the ‘lived experience’
I wonder how No. 10 decides which minister is up for the ritual humiliation of the Today programme each morning. Russian roulette? An elaborate lottery? A competition – last person to spell out ‘TOOLMAKER’ using alphabetti spaghetti? Either way, today’s lucky victim for the airwaves was Home Office minister Dan Jarvis. The Minister made a
There are not, as far as I know, any Italian top-flight poker players. Italians are hardly renowned for their ability to suppress their facial expressions or conceal what they’re really thinking. In this regard they are unusually well-represented by their Premier, Giorgia Meloni. Her visible hatred of Emmanuel Macron is often conveyed through withering stares Upon
Not since Barack Obama held a press conference dressed as the Man from Del Monte has a suit played such a critical role in US politics. But there it was, after the spring press conference incident, President Zelensky arrived in Washington DC wearing a suit. The YMCA-loving Trump administration is hardly batting off the accusations
This may be looked back on as the week when two-tier justice moved from being an accusation to a statement of incontrovertible fact. The stark difference in treatment of Ricky Jones, the former Labour councillor accused of encouraging violent disorder as he mimed a throat being cut at a protest and Lucy Connolly, the mother who
28 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Patrick Kidd asks why is sport so obsessed with Goats; Madeline Grant wonders why the government doesn’t show J.D. Vance the real Britain; Simon Heffer reviews Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea; Lloyd Evans provides a round-up of Edinburgh Fringe; and, Toby Young writes in praise of Wormwood
Like much of Radio 4’s output, Thought for the Day is something of a curate’s egg – sometimes enlightening and a source of inspiration or comfort. Often, however, it’s sanctimonious; auricular masturbation for the comfortable. Comfortable England has an empathy problem; it is willing to contort itself into paroxysms of emotion for migrants yet remains incapable
38 min listen
First: how Merkel killed the European dream ‘Ten years ago,’ Lisa Haseldine says, ‘Angela Merkel told the German press what she was going to do about the swell of Syrian refugees heading to Europe’: ‘Wir schaffen das’ – we can handle it. With these words, ‘she ushered in a new era of uncontrolled mass migration’.
We’re used to strange sights in north Oxfordshire. The first person I ever met in our small Cotswolds town was a lady who brandished a tin of homemade mackerel pâté at me. It was delicious, but the nature of her greeting gives you an idea of the kind of eccentricity that’s familiar in this part