Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis. The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40
Organised crime has a new focus: high-end food production. The latest victim is Wildfarmed, a UK-based, regenerative flour business co–founded by one half of the band Groove Armada. Last month, 50 tons of its flour were stolen, disguised as a wholesale order for the French supermarket E. Leclerc. In an audacious move, the fraudsters asked
‘Heliotropin,’ said the Frenchman mournfully. I was midway through lunch in Mayfair with Benoit Brosseau, whose father, Jean-Charles, created the fragrance Ombre Rose, and who now leads the company of the same name. I had asked the question I always put to fragrance people, in the full knowledge it will make them either sad or
England’s student debt is staggering. It comes to £270 billion – that’s larger than the budget for the NHS and two and a half times larger than the education budget. This arsenal of taxpayer-backed cash has seen the creation of 34 new universities just to feed an ever-hungrier mass of undergraduates. It’s forecast that by
Sir Roger Scruton is remembered by most people as a conservative philosopher. Softly spoken and thoughtful in conversation, he was brave and unconventional in his views. Few things are as unconventional as being a convinced and articulate conservative. It cost him advancement in the academic world. But he was admired, liked and even loved by
It is, apparently, a novel concept in our age of overconsumption, that life can still be enjoyable even if you don’t have stupid money. ‘Frugal chic’ is the new lifestyle trend summed up by the 25-year-old influencer Mia McGrath, who coined and trademarked the term, as ‘living luxuriously while spending intentionally’. Frugal chic supposedly teaches
‘I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left,’ Steve Hilton tells the lunch meeting of Southern California Republican Women. Knives and forks rattle on porcelain as the perfectly coiffured ladies down cutlery to clap. Remarkably, Hilton, the former director of strategy under David Cameron, has topped virtually every poll
I am standing in the village Co-op with my eight-year-old daughter when she asks, inevitably, to be bought a magazine. As most parents will know, magazine is a generous term for this iteration: a collection of sorry pages whose sole purpose is a vehicle for plastic toys. I say no, but then she blindsides me.
Spare a thought for Mrs McClafferty & Co. Like thousands of small business owners, she has spent years managing things the old-fashioned way: jotting down figures in a Silvine cash book, stuffing receipts into a shoebox and sorting it all out when the tax return comes around. But according to HMRC, taxpayers like her are
Having Donald Trump as your president probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before China
When Zia Yusuf first walked into the headquarters of Reform UK, he gestured at the empty room and asked: ‘Where’s the office?’ Ed Sumner, the party’s director of communications, replied: ‘This is it. It’s empty. This is the party.’ That was not even two years ago. Since then, Nigel Farage and Yusuf have built a
The seemingly endless debate about the hollowness of our armed forces has concentrated on size, technical capability and sustainability – never more so than in recent days when the UK’s unreadiness for war, or even to defend its own bases overseas, has been exposed. But there has been no mention of the moral component of
An interesting new perspective on London is doing the rounds. Our capital city is being advertised as a paradise. London, it seems, is suddenly a place where every building is a Wren, where every sunset is a Turner, where every neighbourhood is Notting Hill. The sentiment has even got a name – ‘Londonmaxxing’. It’s been
Is it worth going to university? Since 1999, when Tony Blair declared higher education the answer to all society’s problems, it has been a question Britain prefers not to ask. Every September, hundreds of thousands of school leavers pack their bags, wait for their maintenance loan to arrive and head off to their chosen city
It’s nearly two months since Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a total oil blockade on Cuba, and life is becoming odder. At the weekend, in a down-island town called Moron, teenage kids burnt down the local Communist party headquarters. Meanwhile, here in Havana, we’re awaiting the arrival of the Irish hip-hoppers Kneecap at
‘Donald Trump is a complicated person with simple ideas,’ said Kellyanne Conway, the former White House senior counsellor. ‘Way too many politicians are the exact opposite.’ It’s a good way of understanding the 45th and 47th US President and his extraordinary success. His turbulent personality causes mayhem, yet his political aims have remained constant, straightforward
A Labour MP, reflecting on the problems the Prime Minister faces over the war in Iran, observed this week: ‘Keir got it right, but things keep going wrong.’ His point was that Starmer kept Britain out of the Israeli-American air strikes, a position popular both with the parliamentary Labour party and the electorate, yet the
I’m conscious that, just as the easiest way to lose an argument is to mention Hitler, so the easiest way to lose journalistic credibility is to invoke the 1930s. Yet the similarities to our own dismal decade are now too numerous to ignore. There is the same collection of morbid symptoms: the rise of strongmen,
I spent my last year as editor of this magazine trapped on an auction block, hunting for a new proprietor. It was agony. There was a list of about 20 bidders for both The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph: the good, the bad and the really quite ugly. The ugliest of all – the government
Sir Stephen Watson, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), is Warrington-born, Rhodesia-raised. His father was an engineer in the Royal Navy and his work took the family to South Africa, South West Africa and then, when Sir Stephen was still a schoolboy, the breadbasket. The Watson family stayed in Rhodesia until Robert Mugabe became