Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
Much heartened by the barrage of criticism I’ve been receiving from both Spectator and Times readers, I’m returning to the subject of Coutts’s customer selection. I’ve learned over the years how to spot the emergence of a herd opinion, not just by the volume of shouts but also by how members of the herd begin
Dame Alison Rose should not have resigned as head of NatWest over the Nigel Farage affair – and ministers who forced this by flinching in the face of a silly media storm should be ashamed of themselves. In the great Coutts debate this columnist finds himself in a minority. I express no opinion on the
Were I sure this was about me alone, I’d hardly bother to mention it: but I may be typical of quite a few others. If so, it’s a touch too early for the Tories to abandon hope. Last Saturday I wrote in the Times about Sir Keir Starmer, suggesting he lacks the voice or personal
Pantomime is meant to be silly and perhaps superficial, but fun. One does not (for example) join an audience for Cinderella to be driven into deep contemplation of life, morality and the cultural roots of human duty. But that is what happened to me last Saturday afternoon while watching the most marvellous performance at Nevill
The hubbub about Boris Johnson is blocking the view. He is, of course, an easy and undemanding topic of conversation. His behaviour is, of course, unedifying. His unsuitability for office is beyond question. And his capacity to horrify, amuse, disgust or worry us appears limitless. So here we all are again, talking about ‘Boris’. And
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On this week’s episode: Price caps are back in the news as the government is reportedly considering implementing one on basic food items. What happened to the Rishi Sunak who admired Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson? In her cover article this week, our economics editor Kate Andrews argues that the prime minister and his party
Sometimes it’s the little things that depress most. I groaned last week to hear the news item. The government is contemplating a ‘price cap’ on ‘basic items’ in ‘supermarkets’. Forgive the quotation marks, but each of these terms is so horribly problematic that one has to start by asking what they even mean. Has Conservatism
Since at least the beginning of this century there has been a mood abroad – cultural as well as political – to trash the place that contributes most to British culture and the British economy. Without London and its population, we in the rest of the United Kingdom would be unable to continue living in
Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra
On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for a world religion. In online posts beneath my column came hundreds of comments from Christians protesting that I’d misunderstood the Crucifixion’s meaning, which was (they said) the ultimate victory. Triumphantly, Jesus redeemed our sins. Or
In June 1999, I described on this page jameitos, tiny, blind, albino crabs on the sea bottom in a cave in Lanzarote, occasionally caught in a shaft of sunlight they couldn’t see. ‘Might there be searchlights moving across the surface of our world, too,’ I wrote, ‘catching [us] within their purview, and we the objects
In the language of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, futa (I’m told) means ‘river’ and leufú means ‘big’. So Spanish–speaking Chile could have called it the Rio Grande but instead have kept the indigenous name, Futaleufú, for this sinuous, deep, swift-flowing river, hurling its clear turquoise waters at the black basalt that flanks its roaring
I have never met Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, but I have not the least doubt that his heart is in the right place. And that’s the problem. In the current and coming furore about small boat crossings and what to do about them, too many who comment are concerned to show
Perhaps there’s a German word – for there’s no English one – for that alloy of liberation with melancholy that comes with having faced up to something sad. I have made my will. A draft for my English will lies on the desk beside me, and early this week I flew to Catalonia to make
Fifty years ago I was hitchhiking down the Eastern Seaboard towards Miami overnight. It was midwinter, icy and way, way below zero. Through miscalculation, I had ended up being dropped near the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I walked up a ramp to the elevated carriageway and began trying to thumb another lift. Utterly stupid: no car was
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On the podcast this week: How will the war on Ukraine end? This is the question that Russia correspondent Owen Matthews asks in his cover piece for The Spectator. He is joined by Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of Nato, to discuss whether the end is in sight (01:02). Also this week: Matthew Parris interviews
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On this week’s episode, Matthew Parris wonders what ‘winning’ in Ukraine really means (00:52), Lionel Shriver says she’s fighting her own war against words (08:43), and Gus Carter wonders whether it’s a good idea to reintroduce Bison into Britain (18:28).
I awoke in the small hours last week and began worrying about the Ukraine war. A friend had earlier taken me to task over the airy way I’d introduced an argument with the words ‘Once we’ve won the war in Ukraine’ – as though this was a simple matter and just a question of ‘when’.
Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything about a yew bush that isn’t a swan, the topiarist creates a representation of that bird in living foliage. The topiarist’s swan is wondrous, but spare a thought for the clippings. Formless, meaningless to the
From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often dazzle the reader with a display of erudition or passion, rather than tell the more mundane truth. The mundane truth is that our dispositions and the courses of our lives tend to be fixed before
