Columns

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Tory party is split on one issue: Boris

‘I can’t put into words how awful this is’ remarks one Tory MP. The party is split not on the kind of policy issue that people can debate but on the question of one man: the Prime Minister. Neither side is finding this struggle rewarding. The Johnson loyalists feel that they spend all day trying to bail water out of the boat, only to be hit by another wave as yet another story breaks. Those who want Johnson gone fear that the police investigation may slow every-thing down and that the current mantra, ‘Wait for the Sue Gray report’, will simply morph into ‘Wait for the Met report’. In No. 10, there is still a mood of defiance.

Douglas Murray

This government’s greatest failure is economic

‘The main job of a government is to ensure that the economics don’t go wrong.’ So argued an economist friend of mine to me many years back. And I must admit that my first response was uncommonly cynical. ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ I replied. ‘You’re a political economist.’ It is to be expected. In the same way a military-defence type might say that the most vital job of government is to be able to defend these islands and project military force. Or Lulu Lytle might explain that the most important thing in government is to get the interiors right. But as the years have gone by, I have realised that my cynicism was wrong and my friend’s argument was true.

Rod Liddle

The freedom to be wrong

I must offer my support to Luke Main and Dr Joanna Brunker, who as a consequence of their fervent Christian beliefs refused to sell their house in Surrey to a gay couple. It shows a certain principle, no? I recently sold my house in Kent and being a Christian should really have made a similar sort of stipulation — but the truth is that such is my avarice I’d have flogged the property to the campest old queen in the country if he’d offered a few quid over the asking price. As it happens, we did discriminate against some potential purchasers, by taking against them because they were down from London, or neurotic, or had loathsome children. But then I believe the law allows one to do that.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

‘Operation Red Meat’ won’t beef up the government

Are you ready for ‘Operation Red Meat’? If not, then you should brace yourself. For it looks set to be one of the most fearsome operations of modern political times, liable to make Conservative voters quiver with excitement and feel almost too stimulated. Alert readers will have noticed that Boris Johnson did not have the best end to 2021. Unfortunately he hasn’t had the best start to 2022 either. Hardly a day has gone by when we haven’t learned of some new shocker from No. 10. The impression has been not just of shambolic-ness but of dishonesty, double standards and general incompetence. The point is that the Prime Minister and the fawning court around him seem to have noticed that he has lost his lustre. The joke has worn thin.

Lionel Shriver

Joe Biden’s Civil War re-enactment

We can’t blame American progressives for yearning to relive the civil rights movement. Those were heady days. Opposition to segregation — real ‘structural racism’ — placed you conspicuously on the proverbial right side of history. Joining the cause was like shooting up moral heroin. So maybe it’s predictable that when talking up his two voting rights bills in Atlanta last week, Joe Biden evoked the 1963 bombing of a black church in Alabama and MLK’s storied march in Selma two years later. Yet it’s one thing to wax nostalgic, quite another to insist that it’s still 1965 — much less 1865.

Matthew Parris

Good things can come from guilt

I do not know anyone in the Sackler family. I wouldn’t even have heard of them were it not for recent reports of their return to the large-scale philanthropy with which their name was once associated. These reports have led to criticism of institutions that accepted Sackler charity: the well-worn argument being that the family’s businesses made a fortune from aggressively promoting the use of opioids in America, and opioids have caused serious addiction problems for millions of Americans. Sam Leith wrote thoughtfully about the controversy on the Spectator website last week (‘We should be thankful for the Sackler family’s philanthropy’).

Rod Liddle

The true cause of the public’s anger

What Keir Starmer should have said, but didn’t, was that he had indeed drunk some beer in a frowsy Labour party constituency office, but that he had not remotely enjoyed it. This would have had the advantage of being true, for a start: even through the blurred window you can see the Labour leader’s face etched in misery as he shares a comradely pint with some typical party activists — Roz Harridan, Loretta (formerly Dave) Spart and bum-fluff Oli from the youth wing — in Durham. Thing is, I remember having drinks with comrades when I was in the Labour party and they were never much fun, just tiresome evenings in which everyone tried to out-pious each other. No ribald jokes (such as ‘Why did the feminist cross the road?

Thursday

Katy Balls

After Boris, who?

Even Boris Johnson’s longest-standing supporters now think he might be on the way out. His admission that he attended a Downing Street garden party when the rest of the country was living under strict Covid rules has proved the final straw for politicians ground down by months of negative headlines. MPs complain they've had enough, and don’t think he can recover. But there are two outstanding questions that are much harder to answer: when does he go? And who exactly should replace him? Until now, ministers had been talking up the May local elections as the crunch point.

Mary Wakefield

Why must younger generations constantly ‘work on themselves’?

If I could lift one thing from younger generations, unpeel one idea from their anxious minds, it would be the notion they have to ‘work on themselves’, and that the point of life is to do this ‘work’ until they feel able to have a relationship, at which point they must grimly set about working on that. I’m not suggesting that it’s not useful to have treatment or therapy for a particular problem, but it’s as if everyone born after 1990 thinks of themselves the way 1950s man thought of his car — as something to be worked on in every spare moment, tinkered with and polished, but rarely taken out for a spin, for fear of dents. You can tell an era by its aphorisms.

Douglas Murray

I tempted fate – and got Covid

Well, I did warn you. As I typed my column last week on the imminent end of Covid I said I knew that I was tempting fate. The main fear I had in mind was that the moment the magazine hit the newsstands some wild new strain of the virus would break out, wipe out half of humanity and lead to quite a cross letters page the following week. Fate had a more minimalist plan. Having dodged Covid for two years, it took me writing a column predicting the end of the virus for the fates to eye me up and snicker: ‘Now we’ve got him.’ The day after I filed, I developed a sore throat and a blocked nose. By the time the magazine was on the stands, I was wondering whether Betty White had chosen to strike me down from beyond the grave.

Rod Liddle

The truth about that No. 10 party

People seem surprised and a little doubting that the Prime Minister is incapable of remembering if he attended a party in his own back garden in May 2020. It does not come as much of a shock to me, seeing as he has difficulty remembering how many children he has. Beneath that albino mop resides a brain comprising plasma in a perpetual turbulent flux, like you get in one of those tokamaks used in the pursuit of nuclear fusion energy. Except Boris’s brain does not have the correct-strength magnets to hold it all in place, just a skull. As a consequence he possesses no judgment and nothing in the way of principle, no capability for strategic vision and scarcely enough competence to get himself dressed of a morning.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

How to wrongfoot an anti-vaxxer

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a good, informative feature assessing some of the bogus arguments flying around in this pandemic. But it was not what I was looking for. Since undergraduate days I’ve been fascinated by the category of mental imbalance we call paranoia, believing its milder manifestations to be present to some degree in all of us. Mass paranoia is plainly a strand in the anti-vax movement, and I’ve been listening to a powerful BBC Radio 4 and podcast series researched and presented by Jon Ronson, Things Fell Apart.

Douglas Murray

The time has come to get on with our lives

If anyone had any doubts about the wisdom of tempting fate then they probably haven’t considered the case of Betty White and People magazine. Assuming that some Spectator readers are not also subscribers to People, I should inform you that the cover for the current issue features the last of The Golden Girls. ‘Betty White turns 100!’ sings the headline, with the subtitle ‘Funny never gets old’. But while funny may not get old, the issue soon did. White died a few days shy of her 100th birthday, just as People magazine hit the newsstands. It sits there still, the worst example of a cover tempting fate since November 2016, when Newsweek brought out an issue with Hillary Clinton on the front under the headline ‘Madam President’.

Lionel Shriver

The end is always nigh

Typically for my generation, I woke repeatedly as a kid with my pyjamas soaked in sweat because I’d had yet another nightmare about nuclear war. While I rarely dream about mushroom clouds any more, a dark cloud of one shape or another has dogged me like a sooty, vaporous stray for my entire life. For my conservative classmates in the mid-1960s, American democracy was on the cusp of being overtaken by communism, even if they weren’t sure what that bogeyman was. Yet don’t imagine liberals like my parents were by contrast keeping sensibly calm and carrying on. The left has manfully merchandised the end of the world since I can remember.

Rod Liddle

My dog and the NHS have a lot in common

We are considering privatising or selling off our dog, Jessie. She seemed a rather wonderful idea when we got her nine years ago. But since then she has become a hideously bloated, entitled creature who almost by herself determines how we live our lives. In winter she is particularly tyrannical — she has three walks a day, and with darkness falling at four o’clock that means almost every hour of daylight is spent servicing her needs. We cannot go out by ourselves without ensuring she will not be unduly inconvenienced, and as she has grown older so the costs of keeping her have spiralled — and will continue to spiral. Is she grateful? Not a bit of it. The food and treats we give her are never sufficient and so she follows us around demanding more, outraged.

James Forsyth

What Boris must do to survive

In recent years, the notion of cabinet government has been a polite fiction. In theory, the prime minister is merely the first among equals when he meets his secretaries of state. In practice, they all owe their position to No. 10 and usually do what they’re told. The situation was summed up by an old Spitting Image sketch showing Margaret Thatcher at a restaurant with her cabinet ministers. She orders steak. ‘What about the vegetables?’ the waitress asks. ‘Oh,’ she replies, ‘they’ll have the same as me.’ For the first two years of Boris Johnson’s premiership, cabinet ministers were more claque than cabinet. ‘How many hospitals are we going to build?’ he asked at their first meeting after his general election victory.

Friday

Rod Liddle

Most-read 2021: ‘My’ truth about Meghan and Harry

We're closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here's number one: Rod Liddle writing in March on Harry and Meghan.  Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy, has been talking to the press about one of her hobbies. Apparently she likes nothing more than playing the role of a ‘unicorn’ — the third partner in a sexual liaison. She explained: ‘Finding the strength to explore these more complicated, passionate aspects of my personality became the key to harnessing my voice and creative spark, which in turn helped me better cope with depression, anxiety, and the lingering cognitive effects of adolescent anorexia.’ This is a fascinating approach to curing eating disorders, I think.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The Covid dissidents who’ve made my Christmas merrier

A few years back, a hackneyed journalistic come-hither led me to a sober reckoning: would I write about someone alive today whom I especially admire? I couldn’t think of anyone I held in high esteem who wasn’t dead. Either I was surrounded by mediocrities, or I was an ungenerous, withholding jerk. I’m pleased to discover that these days I admire a host of folks who aren’t dead. Some are colleagues or acquaintances; others I’ve never met. While they don’t all embrace the same catechism, they’ve one thing in common: they depart from establishment orthodoxy on Covid-19. What they share, then, is an anti-catechism.

Kate Andrews

Has Boris made you better off?

Despite the political misery for Boris Johnson as he ends the year, he has a big hope: that salaries will boom in 2022. At Conservative party conference in October, he told fellow Tories what to expect. Yes, the country has gone through a phase of economic chaos — and as a result some supermarket shelves have been empty and truck drivers have been hard to find — but this was actually good news, he claimed, because it marked the start of a new, high-pay economic model. ‘We are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity,’ he boasted.

Lara Prendergast

It’s not up to Boris to save Christmas – it’s up to us

How well-behaved have you been in the second year of Covid? I wouldn’t say I’ve been perfect but I haven’t been that bad. I’ve done most things the government has demanded of me. I’ve had both my Covid jabs. I’ve downloaded a vaccine passport, even though I hate the idea. I’ve squelched antibac gel on to my hands most times I’ve taken the Tube. I’ve shoved countless cotton swabs down my throat and up my nose. I’ve worn my mask. We all did lots of this stuff in the hope that life would get back to normal, whatever that means. But the threat of Christmas being cancelled hangs over us once more. According to the headlines, the Prime Minister is ‘battling to save Christmas from Omicron’, this year’s supervillain.