Columns

Oh God, don’t let the Pope be a climate fanatic

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more

Cameron’s dark evening of the soul

At 6.30 p.m. on 7 May, the Camerons invited guests at their home in Oxfordshire into the garden for a drink. Everyone stood on the patio, wrapped up in coats and shawls and drinking wine. They were understandably nervous. The Prime Minister had prepared a resignation statement and read it out to the assembled gathering.

My time of the month

I have spent the last few days posing with a tampon as part of an international campaign to demystify the important issue of menstruation. I do not usually menstruate myself, although out of a wish to show solidarity with those who do I set aside five or six days each month to behave in a

Why does no one blame Cameron for Libya?

Call me petulant, but I’m not sure Britain is getting enough credit for our fine, fine work in Libya. The Islamic State, so recently present only in the semi-mythical lands of Syria and Iraq — places you see on the news, but don’t really have to believe in — has now set up residence a

Ed’s campaign was fine. The problem is his party

Patrick Wintour is one of the best political editors around. For the Guardian he’s been for decades a cool and well-sourced voice: even-handed, informed, interesting but in the best sense dry. So when I heard he’d written the most comprehensive behind-the-scenes account yet of Labour’s failed general election campaign I hurried to read it. I was

The march of the ‘yes’ men

Forty years ago this week, Britain voted to remain part of the European Community. That remains the only direct vote on the European question that the country has had. The promise of a say on the EU constitution was shelved when that document metamorphosed into the Lisbon Treaty, and the ‘referendum lock’ that the coalition

Migrants face many dangers. Are we one of them?

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’ Some insults

Football’s elite deserve the foulness of Fifa

My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel Nascimento Lopes. Manuel is the Fifa delegate from Guinea-Bissau, an African country which occupies 130th place in the Fifa world rankings but which, far more importantly in this context, punches well above its weight when

Cameron’s EU rollercoaster

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/defeatingisis/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Rob Oxley discuss David Cameron’s EU negotiations so far” startat=1493] Listen [/audioplayer]We have just had a very insular general election campaign, but the mood at Westminster is now determined by news from foreign capitals. There was a flurry of excitement last Wednesday when the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaüble, suggested

Benefits for people who don’t live here? Great idea

Yet another exciting discovery from the world of Islamic science. As you are probably aware, Islamic culture has always paid a high regard to science and Muslims will tell you proudly that they invented absolutely nothing. That is, they have provided the world with the mathematical representation of absolutely nothing, what we now know as

In today’s church, it seems, God can be outvoted

I see. So now we have the result of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, and now we’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church’s chastened response, we shall have to rewrite Exodus 32, which (you may remember) reports Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of

A small majority means big challenges

In ancient Rome, when a general rode in triumph through the city, a slave would stand behind him whispering into his ear, ‘Remember you are mortal.’ Today, there is no shortage of people volunteering to make the same point to David Cameron. First, there are Tory backbenchers with long-standing grudges who are already making clear

Let’s set the cops on barbaric fox-hunters

Among those deeply disappointed with the Conservative party’s victory on 7 May was Britain’s diverse and vibrant community of wild animals. They have not yet daubed anti-Tory slogans on war memorials or marched through city centres screaming that they are not going to take it any more — and still less written vacuous and hyperbolic

Calling all British tourists – Ukraine needs you!

 Kiev ‘What the hell’s going to happen to your poor country?’ I ask the man in the flea market not far from St Sophia cathedral (Delingpole tourist rating: total must-see). ‘What do you think?’ I shrug. ‘Partition, maybe.’ The man shrugs back. We agree that what Putin is doing in the east is appalling. But

Labour must estrange its awful voters

And so now we have to suffer the epic delusions, temper tantrums and hissy fits of the metro-left. They simply cannot believe how you scumbags could have got it so wrong last Thursday, you morons. You vindictive, selfish morons. That has been the general response from all of the people, the liberal middle-class lefties, who

Why won’t the lefties show London a little more love?

London is a bad thing. Everybody knows this now. Britain has had enough of London. Ed Miliband failed in part because he was ‘too north London’ (euphemism) and Chuka Umunna would fail just the same because he is too south London (euphemism). According to one commentator, Britain’s capital is now a ‘Guardianista colony’; filled with

We columnists have never been more useless

It takes some agility to shoot yourself in the foot and saw off the branch you’re sitting on, while hoisting yourself with your own petard, all at the same time; but that is what I shall now attempt. In this analysis of general election commentary I shall argue that over the last two months Britain