Travis Aaroe is an assistant editor on The Spectator’s World edition.
A video has been doing the rounds in which a woman holds an iguana up to the glass window of an aquarium. A beluga whale emerges from the murk. For a brief moment two creatures whose very existence is incomprehensible to each other – who would never, in millions of years, have met but for
Lord Peter Mandelson is to the “Third Way” what Roger Stone is to populism – an alte kameraden from the freewheeling early days. A pinstriped broker and fixer. Whatever ultimately comes of the association with Jeffrey Epstein that has just cost him his job as ambassador to the United States, that such a figure was ever appointed
Under Trumpism the old certainties no longer hold and are starting to ebb away. Do illegal immigrants really have an inviolable and unlimited right of appeal against deportation? Probably not. Is America honour-bound to defend small nations against aggressors? It isn’t. People don’t really believe in the ruling pieties anymore yet they do not know
Henry VIII, who was born on this day in 1491, is the only English monarch other than William the Conqueror who can claim to have destroyed a society and replaced it with a new one. Catholic apologists like Chesterton are right to see in the Henry VIII saga a sort of secular apocalypse; it was,
In 1979 the price of gas at the American pump doubled to $39.50 a barrel – $172 in today’s money. The future of industrial civilisation seemed in doubt. But to Jimmy Carter, these oil woes were a distraction from the real issue: the moral failure of the American people. ‘Much deeper’ than the energy crisis,
The term ‘technocracy’, or more often ‘technocrat’, is found everywhere. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are referred to as technocrats. But what exactly does it mean? In the 15 years he served as prime minister, Lord Liverpool always put in the hours. He dutifully opened the latest despatches and read them in turn,
