The Spectator

A censored hymn to motorway misery

Service record The government is to form a design panel to improve motorway services stations. These have not always charmed the British public, not least the very first: Watford Gap services, which opened in 1959 on the same day as the first stretch of the M1. — It quickly became a night-time haunt of rock

How to fix our defence budget mess

With the exception of 1983, when Michael Foot promised unilateral nuclear disarmament, defence has played little role in modern election campaigns. This is not least because the two main parties appear to have developed a non-aggression pact. They have agreed to heap praise upon the armed forces and commit them to ever more frequent foreign

The Spectator at war: President Wilson’s mistake

From ‘President Wilson’s Mistake’, The Spectator, 27 March 1915: President Wilson’s attitude can only be described as a tragedy. We do not believe that there was a man more determined than he was when he entered office to conduct his administration on moral lines, and to show the world that morality and politics are not

March Wine Club | 26 March 2015

Chateau Musar is one of those delightful oenological quirks – a remarkable wine of great style produced under extraordinarily difficult conditions in the most unlikely of places: Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. If the success of past offers is anything to go by, Musar has a huge following among Spectator readers and we’re delighted that both Chateau

Better off out

From ‘President Wilson’s Mistake’, The Spectator, 27 March 1915: The Americans have a world of their own in which to take sides physically, and are perfectly entitled to say to Europe: ‘You must do your own police work and restrain your own malefactors. Europe must not expect from us more than abstract sympathy in regard to

The Spectator at war: Counting the cost

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 27 March 1915: The controversy as to what should be our future military policy in the west still goes on, and calculations are made on the basis of the inquiry — If it cost us so many thousand men to advance two miles on a front of four,