Like skaters on a lake’s frozen surface, we are sometimes reminded how thin is the crust of philosophical confidence on which our systems of political economy rest. Two years ago we were mostly agreed that free market economics had won the ancient argument between capitalism and the planned economy. Two years ago the case for
I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever
It takes more than an inch of snow to stop the wheels of Scottish democracy. The devolved parliament was hard at work on Monday morning, eight of its members engaged on a most sombre business: a motion formally denouncing a rogue political columnist. It reads as follows: “That the Parliament notes that the journalist, Fraser
I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings
If the bankers start saying sorry, then we’ll have to forgive them. It’s much too soon I’m not sure I can deal with contrition from bankers. I thought it was what I wanted, but I now think I was wrong. ‘The first stage is to fess up,’ said Stephen Hester, the new RBS chief executive,
Perhaps George Osborne regularly serves meatloaf at the powerbroking soirées he hosts at his west London house. But when this detail about the food served at his lunch with David Cameron and Kenneth Clarke was briefed to the press it did seem a bit odd. Perhaps the shadow chancellor suspected Kenneth Clarke would want something
The gay lobby should rejoice at the Pope’s argument that God makes us the way we are I have been puzzling during the winter holidays over Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message. You may remember that it was interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, provoking the usual outrage. Most people, it seems, saw the response. Few
What are we to make of the disquieting information that Ehud Barak’s favoured pastime, when not waging war, politicking or dressing as a woman, is the dismantling and reassembling of clocks? ‘That’s really creepy,’ I said to the wife, when somebody on Newsnight mentioned it while we were watching it in bed. ‘It makes him
Judging the Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards is far from an onerous task. There are two splendid lunches, plenty of wine, first-rate gossip and more than a little argument. The deliberations are secret, but I can perhaps share with you an unexpected debate that took place when we were deciding who to name as
A splendid Spectator 180th anniversary issue was published this year. Along with many readers, I fell upon a treasury of previously published columns: a selection of examples through the magazine’s history of the wit, erudition and style of contributors since 1828. We found pieces by Graham Greene, John Buchan and Bernard Levin; letters from George
I dread to think why a Liberal Democrat would want to impersonate a traffic warden. It wouldn’t just be to get free parking. Not with them. It would have to be a sex thing. Some kind of NCP-themed bondage dungeon; an underground den kitted out to look like an underground car park. ‘You’ve been a
To understand the true nature of history, let us start with the question of Napoleon’s piles Cometh the hour, cometh the piles? Well, Wellington called Waterloo ‘the closest run thing you ever saw in your life’, and on the morning of battle, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus
If there really is a secret Zionist brotherhood running the world, why aren’t I a member? I know that the Iranian regime is famously confused about quite a lot of things, but if they are right about David Miliband being a member of a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, I’ll be absolutely livid. That bloody man has
Very long flights — flights like mine, to and from Australia, for instance — offer such an opportunity to think that you can tease a thought almost to the point of madness. What follows may read like that, and if you don’t wish to perform mental gymnastics on a nerdish pinhead until you’re intellectually giddy,
Given that Gordon Brown spent his adult life plotting to get into 10 Downing Street, he has been understandably quiet about his decision to leave it. Tony Blair’s old office certainly brought him rotten luck, and his new open-plan base in Number 12 has far better feng shui for a man of his disposition. There
I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg
Kookaburras don’t really laugh, but I can see why the old song suggests it: a weird, taunting call, which does have a kind of dark comicality about it. And this is one of the sounds that wake me each morning in Hunters Hill — where I find that The Spectator now has an Australian edition.
There was something almost comic about Gordon Brown and David Cameron’s rush to associate themselves with Barack Obama’s victory, each offering their own quite different interpretation. The Prime Minister declared that people are looking to government to help them during the economic downturn. The Conservative leader, with no less confidence, asserted that people are obviously
A nanosecond is easily measured in Westminster as the time between a politician’s hearing of a colleague’s impending resignation and wondering ‘What’s in it for me?’ It takes perhaps a full second to construct a theory as to why the unfortunate soul had it coming and probably deserved it. It takes about a minute to
The real BBC scandal is that John Prescott has been allowed to talk about class Obviously, the senior powers at the BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. What a cock-up. What a failure of leadership. What a grubby betrayal of Reithian values. Is our licence fee really well spent on this gibbering nonsense? What