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The Spectator![]() |
Does anyone know what’s actually happening in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland? If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC, it’s actually...
Westminster council has announced that every single social housing tenant in the borough will receive lifetime tenancies. No test of need. No...
Last month I watched conductor Harry Christophers blow through what sounded like an arthritic harmonica but in fact was a pure-toned pitch pipe,...
Twenty per cent of last year’s funerals in Britain were direct cremations – up from 14 per cent in 2020. Numbers are continuing to rise, fast, for...
Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously disreputable titles. I helped dream up...
Fenix International occupies the ninth floor of an innocuous office block on London’s Cheapside. The street’s name comes from the Old English for...
Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the...
What could it possibly feel like to be a sportsperson who gets the yips? To wake up one morning and be unable to replicate the technical skills...
The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a magnificently cheesy...
Actors are easily bored on long runs. Phoebe Waller-Bridge once revealed that she staged distractions in the wings to amuse her colleagues. On the...
Cul-de-Sac feels like an ersatz sitcom of a kind that’s increasingly common on the fringe. Audiences are eager to see an unpretentious domestic...
Tornado is a samurai spaghetti western starring Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Takehiro Hira (among others). Samurai spaghetti westerns aren’t anything...
Procrastination may be the thief of time, but in the right circumstances, it can be fun. The other day, I was enjoying myself in St James’s, my...
Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities don’t have much going for them. But when they do, it takes a certain amount of skill...
Intrepidly, the BBC dared recently to visit Dover, Delaware – source, it implied, of starvation in Gaza. I listened carefully as its State...
Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the ‘valiant Russians’ who had fought alongside Britain and America had...
When chancellors approach a major moment like a Spending Review, they tend to have a figure in their mind’s eye – someone who embodies the type of...
The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her...
Dear oh dear. With just days to go until the Scottish Conservative conference, party leader Russell Findlay will have been hoping for a quiet news...
While certain government departments celebrated Rachel Reeves’s spending review – Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner even threw a party the night...
I recently did an online quiz to name the 100 biggest selling pop and rock acts in the USA. The Beatles came top – the Rolling Stones, Led...
Gordon Brown may not be every teenager’s political pin-up. But as an Oxford student, Rachel Reeves proudly kept a framed photo of him in her...
The circus around Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – whose full name the New York Times likes to trot out as if citing an old-school English aristocrat...
Dominic Cummings delivered a Pharos Lecture in Oxford this week on why western regimes are in crisis. Here is an edited transcript of his speech:...
While much of the Western debate remains trapped in tired slogans and false moral narratives, events on the ground in the Middle East have taken a...
‘Sausages,’ my son says to me, leaning forward from the back of the car, with the authority and confidence only a three-year-old can truly muster....
The standard explanation for why charges for plastic bags reduced waste is economic. People were reluctant to pay 10p for a bag and so brought...
Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the interest in him now? The weird fact is...
The late Brian Wilson, who has died aged 82, once had his songs, which included modern-day classics such as ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Good Vibrations’,...
America’s policy undersecretary of defence, Elbridge Colby, is one of the brightest brains in Donald Trump’s administration. Having served in the...
Rachel Reeves delivered her spending plans for the next three years less than 24 hours ago, but already the credibility of the Chancellor’s plans...
The pro-immigration protests that erupted last week in Los Angeles have now spread across the United States. On Tuesday there were confrontations...
Pop music criticism, said Frank Zappa, was the work of people who can’t write, about people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read. Half a...
It seems conventional wisdom by now that the public can only be convinced by hyperbole. As Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte implies that Britain...
Not for the first time in Whitehall, we are seeing a power struggle between elected government ministers and civil servants under their control...
There were always going to be winners and losers in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s spending review and it appears that Sadiq Khan’s London has pulled...
As if the Labour government didn’t have enough on its plate with Rachel Reeves’s spending review to be announced at midday, it is also facing...
“England, the lions of Autumn are but lambs come the Spring”. That quote is often attributed to Michel Platini, but I remember hearing it still...
Rachel Reeves will apparently tell us today that she has chosen stability over chaos. It is one of the Chancellor’s standard lines, but it is very...
‘Mr Speaker, he loves talking about Liz Truss – why? Because he wants to hide from his economic record.’ Kemi Badenoch didn’t need to do much...
I love having friends over for dinner, and like to think I’m rather good at hosting. And while I always strive for a relaxed atmosphere and dislike...
This afternoon’s spending review mostly consisted of rehashed announcements, and in fact Tory plans that had been quickly rebadged. But there was...
The United Kingdom’s decision this week to impose personal sanctions on two Israeli cabinet ministers, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir...
Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras: a public sector elite, slow...
It’s a busy day in politics and the SNP is keen not to be left out of the action. As Chancellor Rachel Reeves unveils her spending review in...
Recently, I found myself trying to explain to a much younger colleague who Oliver Reed was. We’d got on to the subject of the hell-raising actor...
I’ve been mulling over Marco Rubio’s latest salvo in the Trump administration’s assault on the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The US Secretary of...
Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB colonel smuggled out of Russia by MI6 in the early 1990s with a treasure trove of notes from the KGB’s archive. The...
For those who feel Scottish politics has become a little dull of late, fear not: a rebel faction within the SNP is plotting to make things very...
Rachel Reeves looked a little surprised at the cheers from the Labour benches that greeted her as she stood to give the Commons details of the...