All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Last week Carrie Lam, the embattled chief executive of Hong Kong’s increasingly beleaguered and unpopular government, deplored the latest round of protests against her administration. “Selfish” protestors, she declared, had “ruined” Christmas for millions of ordinary Hongkongers. Doubtless some of the territory’s citizens agreed with her but, having just returned from spending Christmas in Hong
Is a wind of change blowing in the Arab world and bringing Muslims and Jews closer together? Ed Husain made the case for this in an article in our Christmas special issue: a younger generation is tiring of the hardliners, he said, asking what all the angst has achieved and wondering if Israel might be
We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: James Forsyth’s article from October on a key Brexit briefing from Downing Street: Earlier today, I sent a message to a contact in Number 10 asking them how the Brexit talks were going. They sent a long reply which I
We don’t half take a lot for granted. We may look up to the Aussies, kowtow to the Americans and look on in awe at the Chinese, but we’re not doing too badly ourselves. To judge from the papers, we’re a nation of fatties who when not pigging out on Pringles on the sofa are
With just 35 minutes of 1999 to go, and as most of the country was preparing to celebrate the arrival of the new millennium, Peter Snow was desperately trying to fill airtime. He was the BBC’s Millennium Bug correspondent on a marathon 28-hour live broadcast called ‘2000 Today’, and every hour or two he would
Emmanuel Macron’s 2020 ‘to do’ list is nothing if not challenging. Starting with the domestic it offers no respite in its international agenda. Nation-wide transport strikes opposed to the President’s root and branch pension reform have been paralysing France for 23 days, now longer than the legendary 1995 strike that forced President Chirac to withdraw
I have in the past received thousands of abusive social media messages at a time. I used to feel that not responding to trolls or blocking them was weak, so I would call them out and try to engage in a reasoned debate. The ‘Don’t Feed the Trolls’ guide from the Center for Countering Digital
I decided to go booze free this Christmas. I had a lot of people staying, which means work, stress, and potential vicious, drink-fuelled arguments. With a post-Christmas holiday planned in Cuba, an island drowning in rum, I wanted to give my liver a break in preparation. I prepared well: I got the latest alcohol free
In these times of political upheaval, we have at least one consolation – that we can escape into the countryside and leave petty partisanship behind. That’s a sweet idea, but now rather behind the times. Richard Leafe, Chief Executive of the Lake District, has announced that the country’s largest and most popular national park needs
Oh dear. It’s not even 2020 yet and already the Labour leadership contest has descended into farce. Despite numerous private conversations over Jeremy Corbyn’s successor ahead of Labour’s election disaster, the Corbynistas have so far been unable to unite around one candidate. John McDonnell’s preferred successor Rebecca Long-Bailey has taken so long to get her
We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: Brendan O’Neill on the January episode of Question Time when the audience cheered for no deal: How brilliant was that cheer on Question Time last night? Isabel Oakeshott said Theresa May should just walk away from the EU. Fiona Bruce asked
Jolyon Maugham QC got up early on Boxing Day morning, put on his wife’s satin kimono, went into his garden and bludgeoned a fox to death with a baseball bat. He then announced what he had done on Twitter. There is no mystery about why he killed the fox. It had come to eat his
Judging by briefings to newspapers, Boris Johnson now wants to come after the BBC, first by turning the licence fee into a voluntary contribution. I hope he doesn’t. And if he does, I hope it’s not because I frequently interrupted him the last time he was interviewed on my show. No, I don’t think it was
Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born.
Lily Allen. Lights! Camera! Hanky! It’s been a vintage year for Twitter’s comedy genius. The needy pub-bore grumblings of Tony Blair. Ditto John Major. Ant and Dec. Even after the drunken prang it’s impossible to tell them apart. The panicky new jargon of weather forecasters, (old version in brackets). Flood warning. (Drizzle). Drought warning. (Drizzle
We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: Douglas Murray on the shameful hounding of a distinguished philosopher: Sometimes a scandal is not just a scandal, but a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been
It was an unusual Christmas morning chapel service. There was a bishop, for a start, and a baptism and then, somewhere between the peace and the eucharist, two of the congregation started trying to thump each other. Boxing day, it seemed, had come early. ‘It unnerved the bishop slightly,’ the priest in charge admits, ‘but
We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4: Matthew Parris on sexuality and gender: Long-suffering Spectator readers deserve a seasonal break from yet another Remoaner diatribe from me. My last on this page, making the outrageous suggestion that the populace may sometimes be wrong, is now being brandished
Spectator writers, past and present, were asked: ‘When have you changed your mind?’ Here is Tony Abbott’s response: A rather important issue — this question of multiculturalism. Thirty years ago, I was anxious about the impact on Australia of people from very diverse cultures. But then when I was running the group Australians for Constitutional
We have a likely candidate who allegedly told one of her colleagues ‘I’m glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours’, and who has threatened to sue the MP who told the story as she says it’s untrue. We have a frontrunner who can see nothing wrong in the manifesto with which Labour just crashed
“I am not a manual labourer and please God I shall never be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pinch, I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farmhand. But by no conceivable amount of effort
In the last few years, climate change has risen to the top of the agenda for consumers, voters, politicians, and journalists alike. But as well as cutting down emissions and using less plastic, could we also be rethinking the way we use energy at home? Here’s where smart meters come in – a smart meter
As a lifelong Europhile, I rather liked the love letter to Britain from Frans Timmermans, vice president of the new European Commission. We in this country do love Europe, its people, its culture, its quirks, its diversity. Never has Britain been integrated more closely with the rest of Europe, never have we done more trade,
Boris as PM can be a joy! He is bold, he has such enthusiasm, he has marvellous and often funny turns of phrase and he often has great instincts. Take for example his greetings to the Jewish people given just before Christmas on the feast of Hanukkah. It is exuberant, knowledgeable and very moving. https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1208789388278276096?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw This
East Germans had a name for their version of ‘woke’ culture’; it was Zersetzung, or ‘decomposition’ in English. It was a form of psychological warfare deployed against citizens suspected of ‘subversive incitement’. There were several techniques to Zersetzung but probably the most effective was what the Stasi described as the ‘systematic discrediting of public reputation’ by
‘People trust us,’ claimed Lord Hall, recently. But like a lot of what you hear from the BBC these days I’m not sure that that is strictly accurate. The BBC’s shamelessly biased news coverage over Brexit was bad enough but what has really started in sticking in viewers’ craws is the way its relentlessly woke
In previous years, Boxing Day has proved an occasion in which high profile Tories can find themselves in the firing line for taking part in various fox hunts across the country. However, this Boxing Day, it’s another political figure making headlines for their interactions with a fox. Step forward Jolyon Maugham QC. The Remain-supporting lawyer
We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 6: Toby Young on Prince Andrew: Like many people, I watched Prince Andrew’s Newsnight meltdown with mounting disbelief. Why had he agreed to do it? It wasn’t as if the general public was clamouring for an answer about what he was
Boris Johnson is nothing like Churchill, a view with which my friend Andrew Roberts concurs. But in the 20-odd years I have known Boris, I have often been struck by his similarity to John Wilkes, 18th-century politician, journalist and catnip to women. A wit and a showman, Wilkes, who denounced European entanglements and championed the
The moment of Boris’s victory makes me stop and look back. In the referendum of 1975 — my first vote — I voted ‘Yes’ (i.e. Remain), but I remember feeling a twinge of admiration for Orkney and Shetland, the only area to vote ‘No’. At Cambridge afterwards, I learnt and liked sovereignty arguments from people
We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 7, Paulina Neuding’s piece from October, on bomb attacks in Sweden: One night last week, explosions took place in three different locations in and around Stockholm. There were no injuries this time, just the usual shattered windows, scattered debris and shocked people
They said it In 2019, who said: 1. ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.’ 2. ‘I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at.’ 3. ‘Ninety per cent of giraffes are gay.’ 4. ‘I
Every Christmas I find I am living in the past. I blame my father. He was born in 1910 — before radio, before TV, before cinema had sound, so he and his siblings made their own entertainment at Christmas. He brought up his children to do the same, which is why my unfortunate offspring have
Just to sour the festive mood a little, I thought I’d ask what are your least favourite Christmas songs and carols. I’ve got lots of least favourites. ‘Look to the future now, it’s only just begun’, from Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody is probably the most stupid line ever written in a song. But I like