The Spectator columnists & writers

Who is the real Joe Biden?

Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump in the polls, so what is at the root of his appeal? (00:50) The government is anxious about a second wave - can it avoid repeating its mistakes? (11:15) And Rachel Johnson on her generation of high flyers and early retirees (23:30).With editor of the Spectator's US edition, Freddy Gray; our economics correspondent Kate Andrews; deputy political editor Katy Balls; former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt; journalist Rachel Johnson; and comedian Dominic Frisby.Presented by Cindy Yu.Produced by Cindy Yu, Max Jeffery, and Sam Russell.

Rachel Johnson

Boomer and bust: Covid is fast-forwarding us into retirement

Rachel Johnson

Boomer and bust: Covid is fast-forwarding us into retirement

Rachel Johnson

Lockdown has proven that we’re a nation of Sufferers, not Resisters

Rachel Johnson

Lockdown has proven that we’re a nation of Sufferers, not Resisters

When the post office and stores closed in our village on Exmoor, my youngest stared out of the car window as we drove past and saw its dreaded ‘Closed’ sign and ‘For sale’ placard outside for the first time. ‘That’s my whole childhood,’ he wailed, ‘GONE.’ As an over-50 who’s had peak everything, I can’t complain — out loud anyway — but I find the losses for younger generations too painful to contemplate. No travel, no parties, no pubs, no clubs, no sport, no sex, no education, a life unlived online for the foreseeable. Given how badly Oliver took that one tiny but vital enterprise shutting up shop, I’ve been shocked and impressed by how well millions have adapted to the closure of the country. Lockdown has worked because, against all expectation, there turned out to be many more Accepters and Sufferers than Resisters (the three pandemic personalities identified by King’s College).

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Rachel Johnson, Paul Wood, and Simon Barnes

25 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Rachel Johnson, Paul Wood, and Simon Barnes

25 min listen

This week's episode features Rachel Johnson's diary, in which she talks about becoming an aunt again; Paul Wood on why mass testing isn't good enough – and why we should be testing everyone in the country; and Simon Barnes on why boxing is the most natural thing in the world.

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson: What I wish I’d said about my brother’s treatment

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson: What I wish I’d said about my brother’s treatment

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson: everyone in my family is getting quince paste for Christmas

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson: everyone in my family is getting quince paste for Christmas

Brrring! Freddy Gray of this parish is on the blower. ‘How about a piece for this week saying he’s won, I’ve lost, let’s Get Brexit Done, that sort of thing,’ he pitched. ‘Sorry Freddy, can’t talk, am making membrillo,’ I snapped as I gazed down into my second batch of chopped quinces, vanilla, lemon and sugar — which were rendering down in my magic machine to be set into claggy slabs of mahogany fruit fudge — while snorting the heady, tangy fumes as if they were mummy’s special marching powders. ‘You what?’ I explained in brief what membrillo was (quince paste, made from the bulging, knobbly, hard yellow fruit and best eaten with manchego cheese) and why I was making it (I am channelling Mrs Beeton partly to distract from Brexit and the news cycle, but that’s not the whole story).

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 15 August 2019

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 15 August 2019

I lay low during the ‘season’ as I can’t think what to say to people any more. I went to only two summer parties, a personal worst for me: Lady Annabel Goldsmith’s annual gold-plater in Richmond, and Jenni Russell and Stephen Lambert’s Notting Hill do, where I found myself introducing David Cameron to Seumas Milne. ‘You were at Eton and you went to Winchester,’ I said, as if the pair were shy teenagers at the Feathers Ball before the snogging, ‘so you two should get on like a house on fire!’ Seumas tried to recruit me in 2017 but I never came across. ‘Which party should I enter as a sleeper cell next?’ I joked (after I quit the Lib Dems they surged and as soon as I joined Change UK they tanked). ‘The Lib Dems,’ said Milne.

Rachel Johnson

Kiss off | 11 April 2019

Rachel Johnson

Kiss off | 11 April 2019

It’s out of control! If I play doubles first thing, have a lunch, then go to perhaps two parties in an evening, I can be embracing more than a hundred people in the course of my day. It’s so unhygienic — especially in the flu season, when someone gives you a sticky peck before telling you in the next breath how ill they are. It all makes me envy the royals, who have a trusty and time-honoured system of self-protection from this imposition. Princess Anne sticks out a white-gloved hand. You curtsey to the Queen and other members of the royal family, unless you know them a bit, where — at their lead — you are permitted to perform ‘the kiss, bob, snog’ (Nicky Haslam, arbiter of all these important things, explains it’s actually kiss, curtsey/bow, hug and is reserved for friends).

Table Talk

With Rachel Johnson

28 min listen

Table Talk

With Rachel Johnson

28 min listen

Journalist and author Rachel Johnson joins Lara and Livvy on this episode to talk about what it was like to share with a student house with Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, then budding student chef, about cooking rice found in a Greek bin for her children, and why 'American food' is an oxymoron.

Rachel Johnson

Publish and be damned

Rachel Johnson

Publish and be damned

The other day Will Self unburdened himself on the state of fiction with crushing hauteur. ‘What’s now regarded as serious literature would, ten or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young adult fiction… in terms of literary history, it does seem a bit of a regression. If you consider that Nabokov’s Lolita was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, it’s a different order of literature…’ Stop right there! Will Self’s top pick was Lolita. This was the novel of the 20th century that stood the test of time. But would Lolita even be plucked from the slush pile in 2019, let alone be listed as one of the 100 best novels ever written by Le Monde, Time, and newspapers passim? If placed on the curriculums of universities (big ‘if’), surely it would attract an automatic trigger warning along the lines that ‘The plot of the novel is the systematic rape of a young girl’.

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 13 September 2018

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 13 September 2018

People are still asking ‘So, how was your summer’ and mine was nice as far as it went: I didn’t ‘go away’ but spent long weeks rambling on Exmoor in the drizzle, baking scones and making and remaking beds for the various guests who came and went, supplying them with endless free hot meals. Then I was sacked on the spot by the new incoming editor of my paper. I always regard it as a badge of honour to be sacked. It’s business. In fact, most national newspaper editors have sacked me and then forgotten and tried to rehire me at least once, so I try never to take it personally (just as my then boyfriend Ivo dumped me in an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill but was so blotto he had no memory of the occasion and we married a few months later).

Rachel Johnson

All over the shop

Rachel Johnson

All over the shop

A few years ago, some friends came to stay with us on Exmoor. After they unfurled from their Volvo, they presented us with some unctuous Parma ham and a few bottles of Barolo, all of which I received eagerly. ‘Thank you so much!’ I cried, adding, ‘Such a shame we don’t have any Charentais melons, otherwise we could have this as a starter tonight!’ Even though he’d just ferried his family four hours from Primrose Hill and up our bone-shaking unmade track to reach the valley, Justin looked stricken at the thought of Parma ham sans melon. ‘No problem, I’ll run and get some,’ he said, jumping back into the driver’s seat. Then he poked his head out of the window. ‘Where’s your nearest Waitrose?’ he asked, as if there would be one in the village.

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 22 March 2018

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 22 March 2018

I went to a dinner for Toby Young, who has had some troubles of late, at this magazine’s gracious HQ, hosted by the editor. I was slightly dreading being beasted by a reptilian gathering of hard Brexiters, but it was in the diary. So I tipped up last Friday in a somewhat plunging jumpsuit and accepted only water as aperitif, wittering about not having done my column yet and having to do Newsnight later. Half an hour later I was knocking back claret and competing to tell embarrassing stories about Toby and it was still only 7.15 p.m. (the evening started at the ungodly hour of 6.30 p.m.). Over the beef I asked who the greybeard on my left was, across from Douglas Murray and James Delingpole. ‘He was the treasurer of Vote Leave,’ Tobes whispered back.

Rachel Johnson

Why I feel sorry for Damian Green

Rachel Johnson

Why I feel sorry for Damian Green

I have to admit, I feel a bit sorry for Damian Green about the porn found on his work computer. What if someone else had downloaded it? What if it had been planted as kompromat via some Russian malware? Especially as what’s on telly can be far more alarming. I was sofa-side on Monday night, crying through Gabriel Gatehouse’s Newsnight package on the massacre of Rohingya Muslims, which showed dead babies and interviewed their mothers and widowed fathers. I was so distressed that my husband changed to Channel 4 for relief. On our wide HD flatscreen were close-ups of no fewer than six hairless adult female pudenda. It was his turn to scream, and he bolted from the room. Later I found him lying motionless on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 16 November 2017

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 16 November 2017

Long letter from the High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School, addressing me as ‘Dear Old Paulina’ (I thought we were never ‘Old Paulinas’, merely ‘Paulinas’ till the bitter end, but I will let the solecism pass). It informs me that fellow former pupils have been in touch to report sexual abuse when I was there ‘between the 1970s and the 1990s’. The letter invites #metoo to name and shame teachers — who must be well into their dotage if not dead — while insisting that the numera una assoluta girls’ school in the world is now a sterile, predator-free zone. The letter is spattered with every compulsory clunky current buzzword and phrase, such as ‘safe, intellectually-stimulating and challenging environment’… ‘safeguarding is not confined to school hours’… ‘we have a whistleblowing policy’ and on and on.

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 25 May 2017

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 25 May 2017

The chances of my 20-year-old student son being at an Ariana Grande concert on a Monday night were, my head told me, zero. But as I watched ambulances converge on the arena, my maternal heart was in my mouth. Oliver had just been to the premier league darts at the venue (like me, there is no sport my son doesn’t enjoy watching). I called. No answer. I sent a text. ‘Don’t go near Manchester Arena — explosion.’ Then another one. ‘Let me know you’re OK.’ He was. But those teenagers, all those girls. Eight years old. The nation weeps for other people’s children. The day I went Yellow Tory and joined the Lib Dems, I got a two-word text from David Davis, the Brexit secretary. ‘Lib Dem?’ My two-word text back: ‘For now.

Rachel Johnson

Don’t be jealous of my brother’s whopping tax return

Rachel Johnson

Don’t be jealous of my brother’s whopping tax return

With hindsight maybe it was silly for me to bleat, ‘As everyone knows, the Johnsons are neither posh nor rich’ on Newsnight just before my older brother published his tax returns showing the impressive sums he’s made in journalism and publishing. I can only imagine how the antlers of rival 12-point stags such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts must have drooped as they calculated how many copies the full-time Mayor and MP and bestselling ‘popular historian’ must have shifted to earn royalties running into the hundreds of thousands. Having heard him toot about his eye-watering advance for his forthcoming Shakespeare, I felt only admiration that he paid almost a million pounds in tax over four years, and this is what I should have said on Newsnight.

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 14 April 2016

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 14 April 2016

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 25 June 2015

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 25 June 2015

My husband says I only write books in order to have a launch party. Not so. I also write books in order to give the author speech at the party. To this end, I hired a wild warehouse under the Westway flyover. Faced with a stream of emails from PAs asking things like whether vegan canapés would be served, and a direct call from financier Peter Soros asking whether 7 p.m. to midnight meant dinner or ‘cocktail prolongé’, I replied that it was BYOB — buy your own burgers. The great, the good, the bad, the ugly and the US ambassador streamed in to drink my wine out of plastic beakers. A bespoke light show played against the graffitoed warehouse walls. A DJ in a pink beret played ‘beats’. Piers Morgan arrived saying, ‘I’ve just seen someone who wants to punch me (Angus Deayton), a man I want to punch (Jeremy Paxman) and someone who’s already punched me (Jeremy Clarkson).

Rachel Johnson

The kibbutz goes capitalist

Rachel Johnson

The kibbutz goes capitalist

Galilee: The last time I was here, the kibbutz was filled with sunburnt, muscular, sweaty Israelis covered in dark curly hair, driving Jeeps, so handsome I’d spill my Jaffa orange juice down my white cheesecloth culottes when they spoke to me. Then, Kfar Hanassi, in northern Galilee, a grenade’s throw from the Golan Heights, had 600 or so members, and cleaved to the lofty-lefty ideals of the collective: everyone gave what they could, in the words of the kibbutz movement, and got what they needed. No one owned a house, everyone ate the same thing together in the dining room (yoghurt, hummus, eggs, more yoghurt, more hummus). After dinner, everyone attended plenary meetings to discuss the security fence, or dance to an Irish-Israeli fiddle band.

Rachel Johnson

Sex and the city

Rachel Johnson

Sex and the city

We don’t do burlesque here. We do bawdy, Benny Hill, end-of-pier prurience instead. Montmartre may have the Moulin Rouge, but the closest we get to saucy is John Major not ‘on’ Edwina Currie — titter — but on our tradition of music hall. As a nation we can-cannot do the can-can. So I found it intriguing that impresario Harvey Goldsmith has imported one of Paris’ most distinguished and long-running titty shows, Crazy Horse, to London’s Southbank. I went, to sit in a hot tent in the dark with a lot of mouth breathers, to watch young women without any clothes on, apart from strange pants consisting of large Band-Aids that barely covered the Hitler-moustaches painted vertically on the pubis. If that floats your boat, I suggest you go.

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 4 February 2012

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 4 February 2012

Try as I might, I can’t pretend even to myself that the Cambridge Union debate against Katie Price was anything but a total victory for tits and telly, and an utter defeat for me. What was I thinking? But still. Last week I found myself at the Cambridge Union in a tight red dress, proposing the motion ‘This House believes the only Limit to Female Success is Female Ambition’ to an overflowing chamber. I thought I made some jolly good points. And Miss Price, in sparkly leggings and six-inch heels, was winningly unsure of herself, and actually delivered a four-minute speech in proposition rather than opposition of the motion. But none of this counted. Our side was crushed. The headlines were gleeful. ‘The Price is Right!’, ‘Posh Boris’s Sister Loses Cambridge Debate to JORDAN!!’ Our encounter was cast as a claws-out catfight — ‘It’s JORDAN v.

Rachel Johnson

Away win

Rachel Johnson

Away win

Is there such a thing as ‘Boarding School Syndrome’? No, says Rachel Johnson A few months back, I gave a speech in Leeds to the Boarding Schools Association, in the course of which I spoke of the time I was sent to an all-boys prep school in another country days after my tenth birthday. ‘I was cold and hungry all the time: rations were so short that I would huddle under my pink candlewick bedspread, sucking on a toothpaste tube to curb hunger pangs,’ I preached to the choir. ‘I once found a live maggot wriggling in my shepherd’s pie, and showed the headmaster, who advised me to eat it.’ Despite all this, I burbled on, ‘I was happier there — shaggy, plump, and entirely the wrong sex — than I’d ever been.’The headmasters of our finest public schools wiped away tears, my speech was reprinted (thank you Daily Telegraph), the paper even managing to find a peg for my paean to prep school: a report in the British Journal of Psychotherapy by a Jungian analyst called Professor Joy Schaverien on something worrying called ‘Boarding School Syndrome’.

Rachel Johnson

How to spend it

Rachel Johnson

How to spend it

Leisure and pleasure have always been Scylla and Charybdis for politicians. Vacation on a yacht called Monkey Business, borrow a Caribbean pile from a billionaire, spend time with Cliff Richard, and you’re tabloid toast. Not this lot. The Cameron and Clegg sets have steered through the whirlpools without hitting the rocks. David Cameron, the 19th Prime Minister to have been to Eton, and his Westminster-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, are wealthy, healthy, educated and entitled. They have connections to crowned heads of Europe. But neither is taking the toff path. On paper at least — in the news pages of the dailies — they’re taking the high street, loading the boot of the Espace at Waitrose, dressed in Gap and Converse, somewhere in middle England.

Rachel Johnson

Come on, girls — have a crack!

Rachel Johnson

Come on, girls — have a crack!

When I was asked recently whether I wanted to go shooting, I felt torn. It’s clearly very fashionable at the moment, as Charles Moore’s story about Cherie Blair and Lord Mandelson at the Rothschilds shows. But shooting is unutterably bloody, if you’re a woman. It starts with a long drive to a big house, encumbered by a vast array of boots, hats, gloves, jackets and thermal underwear, as well as sparkly evening outfits. You spend the night carousing, and in the morning the men — henceforth to be referred to only as ‘guns’ — wake early and pad about in heavy, Scott-of-the-Antarctic tweeds that smell of gun oil, reeking breeks, and long, gartered woollen socks in amusing colours. A massive cooked breakfast is underway.

Rachel Johnson

Sorry, Liz, you’re wrong about sex in the country

Rachel Johnson

Sorry, Liz, you’re wrong about sex in the country

Like all red-blooded members of the human race, there is nothing I like more than looking at pictures of Liz Hurley. So this month’s Tatler was a particular treat. There she was in wellies, accessorised by tulle and mousseline gowns in dusty baby-pink. The pictures ticked all the right boxes. Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, in ballgown and Wellingtons in the hen house at Chatsworth? Check! Muddy-hem-and-heaving-bodice costume dramas set in National Trust locations? Check! (The shoot was at Sezincote, Glos, a jewel of a mini stately modelled on a Rajasthan palace.) Anyway, after I’d enjoyed the sight of Miss Hurley in her newly adopted habitat (she now lives on a 400-acre organic farm in the more Poshtershire end of the same county), and had a good look at the elegant stretch of withers our lovely filly was exposing in what was clearly the expensive shoot’s money-shot, I turned to the text.

Rachel Johnson

A bag of Monster Munch declares the spirit of the age

Rachel Johnson

A bag of Monster Munch declares the spirit of the age

‘Nice car,’ said my host approvingly, as he saw me off after Sunday lunch last weekend, as the blossom hung heavy on the bough and all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire chorused in the sunshine.I opened the door with pride. At this point I should boast that the vehicle in question is not some hybrid, some gleaming marque of prestige. It’s my husband’s R-reg VW Passat. I swept the litter off the seat on to the floor with a fine, careless gesture before taking the wheel and accepting the compliment with a smile. The car’s air conditioning is broken, it has many more miles on the clock than Madonna, and it has a sudden tendency to cut out like Devon Loch in the final furlong of the Grand National — in fact, you couldn’t pay someone to tow it away, but none of this matters.

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 23 August 2008

Rachel Johnson

Diary - 23 August 2008

The fifth week of continuous downpour. Mouldiest summer ever. The children stay abed until lunchtime. I yell upstairs, Who wants to go for a massive walk? Who wants to come to Tesco in Minehead? Who wants to go to the Exmoor pony centre? There are never any takers. Exmoor pony centre was the scene of one of our many recent unsuccessful family outings, rivalling the lack of success of our visit to the Big Sheep ‘all-weather attraction’ outside Bideford. At the Big Sheep, we drove for two hours to watch a sheepdog herd three ewes. So the children basically get up for lunch, when we all crouch in the dingly-dell kitchen with its view on to a ferny bank, eating pasties and hunks of Cheddar, watching the endless rain drench the green valley, puddling the unmetalled road the colour of builder’s tea, and turning the Exe into fast-running Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

Rachel Johnson

Even middle-class children are suffering from neglect

Rachel Johnson

Even middle-class children are suffering from neglect

And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office? When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them — let’s be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate — at alternate weekends? So we don’t need to ask any more who tucks them up at night, takes them to school, listens to their Homeric summaries of Harry Potter books, buys them Start-rites, takes them to the dentist, finds out they’re upset, do we? Because it’s not you two, the parents, who gave them life. No, it’s more likely to be Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a monkey’s.All this week, the story has been that we have the least nurtured offspring in the world: as Fathers 4 Justice staged a rooftop protest on Harriet Harman’s roof, David Cameron, a father of three, told Relate that families needed support, money, tax-breaks, but above all, time; we are bottom of the UN table for raising children; and the four children’s commissioners this week reported that the UN convention on the rights of the child doesn’t seem to apply in Britain, with one in three children living in poverty, and over a million in poor housing.