Crikey, this really will have to be another voice. Has The Spectator taken leave of its senses? I could hardly bring myself to take last week’s edition out of its see-through plastic wrapping when, pictured on the cover, I saw a huge cartoon bulldog being walked on by a Muslim terrorist, and beside it four
So there I was last Monday at 12.20, standing outside All Saints Church in Elton, in the Peak District of Derbyshire where I live, with a small suitcase, on my way to London. The bus to Matlock meets the train, and a No. 172 Hulley’s bus was due at 12.22. It’s a five-mile journey. Silly
Most of us know what it is to finish a task undertaken for the first time, having made every mistake in the book, and regret we are unlikely ever to have to do this job again. We would know the ropes next time: the pitfalls, the useful little short-cuts. The job would be a doddle
Many readers will have read The Spectator Easter survey — ‘Did Jesus really rise from the dead?’ — with intense interest. I did. The results of a survey posing the simple question, ‘Do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?’ were sharply different from what I expected. Just one avowed atheist was interviewed,
Briefly last week the nation chortled over its cornflakes at newspaper headlines about the ‘black spider’, and reports of letters to ministers from the Prince of Wales, and pictures of letters from ministers to the Prince of Wales heavily annotated in the sort of spidery black ink, which did look obsessive when spread across the
Suppose a public body owned tens of thousands of acres of real estate across England, mostly in prime residential areas. Suppose it showed little inclination to rationalise its holdings in any tough-minded way, but drifted on, barely able to maintain the property it owned. Would there not be a strong case for HM Government to
Last week David Cameron delivered the best speech on modern Conservatism since Keith Joseph’s lectures in the late 1970s. Read to the Demos think-tank on Monday 30 January, it was a paper of real stature: lucid, original, candid and thoughtful. Journalists do not much care for philosophical stuff unless it contains an ‘announcement’ or ‘throws
My friends would concur in describing me as someone in whom the precautionary instinct is not as strong as it ought to be. But even I, were I Mark Oaten, would have asked myself whether running for the leadership of my party was a good idea. All over Westminster, all over Fleet Street and all
Do you not find that when a wrong has been done, time may elapse before the wrongfulness pricks through into our consciences? I mean not only wrongs we do ourselves, or which are done to us, but also the sense we may have that a small or large injustice has been done in the world,
David Hearsey, DFC, was a bomber pilot. Here he recalls participating in a raid over Leipzig in his Handley Page Halifax in February 1944. We set out on an easterly heading across the North Sea towards the Danish coast. I told the gunners, Wally and Ted, to test their guns and fire a few rounds
Patrick Hagen served as a wireless operator with 4 Commando Brigade signals troop. Here he describes the moment when, while guarding their exit route during a four-man hit-and-run raid on a radar site on the French coast, he and his friend Harry were discovered by two Germans. ‘There were only two types of commandos, the
Ask any former drug addict. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you are ready for cold turkey. What France is facing now is the equivalent of waking up on a soiled mattress in a crack-house you cannot remember entering. It may be what France needs. It may be what Germany needs too. Until the
The Labour party is uneasy. For 11 years it has made the political weather. It has set the terms of debate; its intellectual totalitarianism has almost succeeded in branding any non-New Labour position as illegitimate. Now, everything has changed. On the underground, in pubs, people are talking about David Cameron. Though he has hardly done
So far, at least, we are none the wiser about why God sent an earthquake to kill so many people in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We can only hope that sooner or later his purpose will be made evident, so that we all might learn. Why would he torture his people so? The mullahs have
Voltaire was a superb polemicist but a cheat in debate. He never laid a finger on the Christian argument which in Candide he mocked as claiming that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. He showed that the world was a dreadful place. In a sparkling and brutal parody he
Much nonsense is being written about new ways for the Conservative party to choose its leader. The plan being floated — that MPs might offer constituency chairmen a shortlist to choose from — is absurd. It would have produced Iain Duncan Smith. Everybody can guess who the five would be this time, but one or
The late Peter Campbell, sometime professor of politics at the University of Reading, would have enjoyed the irony. He died just before the general election. His funeral was hastily arranged for Friday 6 May, mid-morning, in Reading. For me these were a couple of days of little sleep and intensely hard work. So Peter will
There has never been such a dramatic political decline. Three months ago, Tony Blair was full of plans for his third term. Now, he is a corpse waiting for a coffin. Three months ago, the Blairites were blithely dismissive of Gordon Brown. Now, they are frantically sucking up to him. The PM may have been
Catch your opponent unawares. Hit him with an accusation which he cannot come straight back at and answer. While he flails, change the subject fast. Move to a new charge. Keep changing the subject before your opponent has got to grips with the last one. Be like a Boy David with his sling, light on
I well remember the Conservative party’s shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport. As I never tire of reminding him, in days long gone, before John Whittingdale became the Member of Parliament for Maldon & East Chelmsford, he and I were young Turks together at the Conservative research department. Our boss was Chris