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The troubling rise of Japan’s ‘baby hatches’

The San-ikukai hospital in Tokyo’s Sumida ward is much like any other in the Japanese capital, save for one special feature. It has had, since March...

latest 0

The Spectator

Philip Patrick

Why the Civil Service are revolting – again

Many people who work in the Civil Service are revolting. Quite literally in the verbal meaning of the word, and, as many have long argued, very...

latest 0

The Spectator

Patrick West

Help! I’ve got a sex offender tattooed on me

Some wear their hearts on their sleeves. Others wear convicted sex offenders on their biceps. The phrase “Rolf Harris tattoo” is now often used...

latest 5

The Spectator

Bethany Elliott

Does Reform really want to win?

Well chaps, it’s over. Reform have buckled under the pressure. The towel has been thrown in. The party in teal are walking away from it all, having...

latest 7

The Spectator

Oliver Dean

Andy Burnham’s deafening silence on the Russian threat isn’t sustainable

It’s hard to keep up with what might kill us first. A week ago, the tech-bros were competing to tell us that AI might wipe out humanity within a...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Tim Shipman

Michael Nazir-Ali: Pakistani Christians fear backlash over Lambeth Palace award

Pakistani Christians could face renewed persecution following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s decision to withdraw an honour to a leading Muslim...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Patrick Gibbons

MPs to investigate Britain’s Eurovision humiliation

As if MPs haven’t wasted enough time on Gaza, a select committee has found another pressing national crisis to investigate: why Britain is so crap...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Steerpike

Another AfD win could mean the end for Germany’s embattled chancellor

Just a fortnight after the Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, two more state elections are taking place in...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Constantin Eckner

Canada’s meaningless relationship with the EU

Canada and the European Union are on the path to forming some sort of a political relationship that no one can figure out. The terms and conditions...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Michael Taube

The mystery of Canada’s ‘associate membership’ of the EU

EU President Ursula von der Leyen has offered Canada ‘associate membership’ of the EU. No one knows what ‘associate membership’ means and the...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Andrew Lilico

Mark Carney will regret tying Canada to the EU

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney says he welcomes the EU’s ‘ambition’ for Canada to become an associate member. He should drop these...

yesterday 3

The Spectator

Jonathan Saxty

Weekend wagers and an ante-post tip

Jockey Saffie Osborne has the world at her feet. She’s talented, young, attractive, personable, ambitious, well-connected and much more. I have no...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Penworthy

Dolce Vita / The most shameful thing I’ve ever done

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is raining at last, thank God, and the sound of thunder cascades across the heavens like some kind of conversation. This...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Nicholas Farrell

Politics / Can Reform reform?

Of all the uses to which Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne might put their money, there are few more innocent than giving it to a political party....

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Michael Gove

Last supper / Death at the Athenaeum

During the 1980s my friend Canon Brian Brindley was arguably the ‘highest’ clergyman in the Church of England, celebrating Solemn Masses of rococo...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Damian Thompson

The real reason children no longer enjoy reading

At the tail end of the summer holiday, my son and I had a shouting match in King’s Cross station. For more than three hours on the train south from...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Mary Wakefield

Rebranding net zero is daft

Would renaming the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero really make it easier for the government to persuade the public of the benefits of net...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Isabel Hardman

We don’t need more Austen adaptations. Or do we?

It’s a shame that Jane Austen can’t profit from selling the adaptation rights to her novels. In her own lifetime, she made but a modest...

yesterday 9

The Spectator

Beatrice Scudeler

The mad genius of Copenhagen’s bike culture

Copenhagen’s obsession with cycling is evident from the moment you arrive. Walking out of the cavernous Central Station, on my first visit to the...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Mark Nayler

Watching the Scottish Parliament fills me with knuckle-chewing horror

Watching the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament, a thought often occurs: if these people won elections, imagine the runners up. The runner-up to...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Stephen Daisley

Why green zealots want to drop ‘net zero’

First, the good news. The Commons select committee on energy security and net zero has called on the government to drop net zero. Now the bad news:...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Watch: Lord Khan addresses Polanski in Urdu

Zack Polanski was left red-faced at City Hall this morning after Lord Khan of Tooting answered a question from the Green leader in Urdu. In a...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Steerpike

Ed Sheeran has done nothing wrong

So now we know what happens if you refuse to prostrate yourself before the Gaza cult. If you politely decline wearing the keffiyeh like a holy shroud...

previous day 20

The Spectator

Brendan O’neill

Does Andrew Griffith have what it takes?

Appointments to the shadow cabinet recall Ernest Shackleton’s job advert to cross the Antarctic. ‘Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages,...

previous day 10

The Spectator

James Heale

The Bank of England’s karaoke comrade

The general secretary of the Trades Union Congress appears to be a man of many talents – at least in his own estimation. Paul Nowak yesterday...

previous day 20

The Spectator

Steerpike

The Bank holding interest rates will be of little relief for John Healey

The Bank of England has just voted six-three to hold interest rates at 3.75 per cent, a decision that makes Britain’s central bank an outlier...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Michael Simmons

Is Charles Spencer right about King Charles?

As soon as news broke that copies of Charles Spencer’s memoir about the late Princess of Wales, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, had been stolen from...

previous day 20

The Spectator

Alexander Larman

The Houthis are complicating Trump’s already failing war

To lose one Middle East sea lane vital for the global economy may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. As every armchair...

previous day 20

The Spectator

Paul Wood

Who’s afraid of AI?

Who’s afraid of AI?

It’s not often that we get a ringside seat to the Birth of a Narrative. Usually, those overseeing the parturition are careful to manage the event...

previous day 20

The Spectator

Roger Kimball

Brown furniture isn’t dead

Throw out your grandfather clocks, the naysayers said, and banish your commodes to the scrapheap and junkshop. Brown furniture – invented in the...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Alexander Larman

Piddington and the idiocy of British middle-class progressivism

The Piddington result is in. Ninety-two per cent of the voters in the tiny Oxfordshire village have voted to secede from the United Kingdom – 285...

previous day 20

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The NAFTA betrayal / How Trump abandoned the Rust Belt

Every day, I play a game that I call “How Low Can He Go?” Despite the simple premise, it’s harder to win than you might think, since Donald...

previous day 10

The Spectator

John R. Macarthur

Side bet / Is the government deliberately disrupting the prediction markets?

Earlier this summer, I sat barefoot in Berkeley with a dozen aspiring “geopolitical traders,” learning how to make money from war. We were at a...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Alex Bronzini-Vender

Why is my high-school classmate releasing an AI-generated novel?

Why is my high-school classmate releasing an AI-generated novel?

Recently I started logging in to Facebook again, mostly to do the depressing thing of posting photos of my children to my late father’s wall. One of...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Katherine Dee

The death of biblical literacy

We are often told these days, most recently in James Marriott’s much talked about book The New Dark Ages, that the world has a problem with reading....

previous day 4

The Spectator

Gwion Wyn Jones

Machines are replacing the Chinese working class

You may have seen clips of the recent Chinese robot Olympics, where a bipedal, humanoid robot beat Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint record by almost a...

previous day 6

The Spectator

Jacob Dreyer

The new age of influence campaigns

The new age of influence campaigns

Midway through a podcast appearance, my host became distracted by a flurry of social media posts claiming that he was a paid agent of the Israeli...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Allum Bokhari

Mehdi Hasan is losing the argument on hijabs in schools

When you title your book Win Every Argument, you create the very definition of a hostage to fortune. So it’s especially unfortunate that Mehdi...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Stephen Pollard

How to deal with a bore like Macklemore

Exciting news: free speech is high-status again. The decision by the organisers of Ed Sheeran’s US tour to drop anti-Israel rapper Macklemore is...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Stephen Daisley

The new fourth plinth is decidedly misjudged

As I sat down to write this article, an artist friend phoned me to deliver a pithy but convincing defence of public art: it exists, he said, to...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Digby Warde-Aldam

Rattle makes Schumann shine and sing

Phrenology, eh? It’s cobblers, plainly, but Robert Schumann didn’t know that and his biographer Martin Geck tells how in 1846, near Dresden, he...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Richard Bratby

A sumptuous set that’s too good for the play

The Children by Lucy Kirkwood is a life-or-death drama about three ageing boffins invited to fix a broken atomic power station and save Britain from...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Lloyd Evans

Queen at Sea is a shattering watch

‘Old age’, Bette Davis once reportedly remarked, ‘ain’t no place for sissies’ and neither is Queen at Sea. It’s a film that unflinchingly...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Deborah Ross

The fearlessness of Steven McRae

Steven McRae ranked for a decade as the Royal Ballet’s star virtuoso – a fearless technician of dazzling precision, speed, stamina and verve....

previous day 20

The Spectator

Rupert Christiansen

What a great band Geese are

It’s a measure of Geese’s rise – their flight? – that, on Thursday night, the social media accounts of End of the Road were receiving requests...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Michael Hann

The disappointment of 70 Up (so far)

In advance, I confidently imagined that 70 Up would be the big programme of the week. In the event, it rather disappointingly felt more like the...

previous day 10

The Spectator

James Walton

How I became a Canadian nationalist

This is how I became a Canadian nationalist. I did it on the rebound. I never wanted to, and it is a strange experience to find myself pounding the...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Peter Hitchens

Lucy Letby and the truth about NHS managers

Read the Thirlwall report on the neonatal deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital, and two kinds of culpability emerge. Lucy Letby stands convicted...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Druin Burch

Maps / The man trying to save Britain’s last great map library

In the heart of Bloomsbury, deep in the bowels of the UCL geography department, down corridors floored in institutional linoleum, sticky and scuffed...

previous day 10

The Spectator

Alex Diggins

US politics / America is not our friend

Imagine, if you will, King Charles in the Deep South. The aesthetics are easy enough: it doesn’t take much to picture His Majesty in crumpled linen,...

previous day 20

The Spectator

Madeline Grant