Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
‘Nice people, with nice habits/ they keep rabbits/ but got no money at all,’ sang the popular duo Flanagan and Allen in my father’s day. I can still remember Dad playing it on our gramophone in the early 1950s. My family liked these sentiments; secretly we rather hoped they applied to us. But I write
Military commanders, announced last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, ‘have warned the Prime Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’. What the newspaper calls ‘senior sources’ have been singing and I don’t doubt the burden of their song is as reported. The same briefing
I have just spent a day in a GP’s surgery. I was not detaining her with any complicated medical complaint of my own. I was shadowing her as a journalist. Some weeks ago I wrote a column for the Times whose headline (though not my choice) brutally summarised my argument: that general practitioners were becoming
From the moment I arrived in Bakewell, Derbyshire, as a carpet-bagger politician nearly a quarter of a century ago, I knew I’d never leave. The attractions of the county and its sweet green hills and dales only grew. And in the end, though I had meant the Peaks to be just rungs on my ladder
A long-exposure photograph of the night sky will show you something that you never see, however often you look at the stars: thousands of perfect curves, concentrically arranged around an invisible pinhead. Everything is wheeling slowly about a single point. A good book or a great adventure, fictional or real, often does the same. There
Like many of the best thrillers the Heath Caper affair involves sex, spies and blackmail, and an array of possible resolutions that are all eminently plausible yet cannot all be true. Or can they? I have something of a personal window into the worlds this story touches. It is an old story, that has just
In the week past, Gordon Brown has been involved in a sad dispute with the Sun about whether that newspaper did or did not have his and his wife’s approval for publishing news of the then prime minister’s baby son Fraser’s cystic fibrosis. The Sun (in the form of Rebekah Brooks) has claimed the couple
War in South Africa — the second Boer war — was already brewing by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Two years later it began. By the end of the century Britain was bogged down and struggling. On the Queen’s death in 1901 the unholy mess continued. In 1902 we were finally able to declare
Observing the fealties of football supporters, I’ve been struck by a contradiction that troubles any non-sporting mind. To a fan, which team you support is often a matter of chance. But once you’ve attached yourself to a team, the loyalty can be ferocious, and run deep. It can become part of who you are. So
I’ve much respect for the Matlock Mercury: our part of the Derbyshire dales would be the poorer without this lively and conscientious local paper. And were it not for the Mercury’s useful report I’d never even have learned about the county council’s plan. But I do take issue with the headline. ‘Big switch-off to hit
A slow reader but someone who has to plough through stuff for work, I skim and flick uneasily, and by middle age had almost completely lost my teenage habit of unhurried reading for pleasure. But in the last decade I’ve started again in a gentle way to read fiction and biography for amusement alone. It
I’m not the first columnist and will not be the last to shrink from finding out too much. For this there are subtler reasons than laziness: a half-acknowledged fear that one’s argument will lose shape; that complexity may overwhelm understanding; that counterfactuals and shades of grey spoil a simple picture, and resolution sink beneath a
In light of George Galloway returning to Parliament as the member for Bradford West, we’ve dug out Matthew Parris’s account of his infamous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. And if you can’t remember his feline hijinks, the video’s above for your pleasure. We each of us remember where we were when news reached us that George
My reaction last week, I suppose, will not be dissimilar from those of the majority of my readers. I growled. From my radio came a report about problems that British researchers were encountering with supplies of mice for medical experiments. Apparently anti-vivisectionists have been targeting the transport companies that bring supplies of mice from the
Is The Spectator like the owner of ‘a wall which has been festooned, overnight, with defamatory graffiti’? At its most thrilling this magazine does sometimes feel like that; but, in truth, the editorial hand here (though it may seem marvellously light to us contributors) is a quiet background presence protecting us and our potential victims
This goes to print on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. So allow me to pitch in to February’s religion-versus-secularism debate from a new direction. As an unbeliever I wish to complain on behalf of serious religious belief. Faith is being defended by the wrong people, in the wrong way. ‘Faith’ means faith. Doubt
I think her first name was Denise. It was hard to discern on her small easyjet name badge; but the surname was certainly Williams. So let’s call her Denise Williams. The name matters less than the circumstance. It was Luton Airport departures corridor (gates 1 to 8 to the best of my recollection); the time
James Moriarty, Hannibal Lecter, Silas Lynch, Simon Legree, Iago, Iscariot, Schettino… pity Francesco Schettino: all but doomed by his name alone. What a great name for an alleged villain. The skipper of the Costa Concordia, the cruise liner now wrecked off a Tuscan island whose name sounds like a typographical tweaking of ‘gigolo’, presents an
Infrastructure. Still reading this? Well done, because the word alone will have lost half my readers at first sight. Infrastructure is a big idea dogged by a dreadful modern name. If Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Joseph Paxton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Joseph Bazalgette had been informed as little boys that they were to dedicate their
Sometimes it is by catching ourselves unawares that we see ourselves best. That unprepossessing fellow with a dull, crumpled, peasant face and a faintly disobliged expression that you caught a glimpse of in the shop window while Christmas shopping on Oxford Street — oh crikey, that was you. Our looks, however, are not our fault.