Munich, Germany The organisers of the Munich security conference weren’t subtle. A large statue of an elephant stood in one of the lobbies. The logo on all official documents was an elephant, this time with bits of countries printed on it. A poster for an exhibition celebrating the meeting’s 60th anniversary had an image of
When Keir Starmer was told his pledge to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament was not enough to fund his vision for the armed forces, as outlined in the strategic defence review (SDR), he put his head in his hands and snapped: ‘Why are you doing this to
It was lucky that the bus was behind schedule – mainly because the driver had stepped out to take his own photograph for social media (#endofanera) – otherwise the young lad in the hoodie might have missed it. ‘Is this the last bus?’ he asked as he fumbled for change. ‘It’s the last bus from
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme asks me to champion a favourite book and I choose Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It is a subversive piece of work, elegant on the surface but vicious at its core. It is about Edinburgh between the wars and the effect approaching adulthood has on a group
Better not tell Ed Miliband, but in spring 2022 his then shadow cabinet colleague, David Lammy, appears to have struck oil. For the first time, The Spectator can tell the story of how, while serving as Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Lammy was announced as the director of another country’s sovereign wealth fund – set up
Sergeant Rob Goacher was on patrol recently when the radio crackled with a tip-off. Two men were hare coursing – chasing and killing hares with greyhounds or lurchers – in the fields near Winterbourne Monkton, a small village in Wiltshire. When Goacher arrived, a silver Subaru with the exhaust hanging off edged out of a
Years ago, Peter Mandelson shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney. Reminiscing about his involvement in Labour’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the ‘spray-paint election’. The manifesto was a ‘beautiful technicolour’ document but the tax-and-spend shibboleths of Old Labour remained, along with the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. ‘I spray-painted the
The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferrable to
Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for
How do you get into the University of Oxford? It is a question asked by thousands of young people every year. In Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (1973), Charles Highway discovers that the key is to feign socialism and memorise a few book reviews. It turns out there is an even better ruse: the Saïd
The tsunami of Jeffrey Epstein material released this month has been both horrifying and gratifying. It makes clear the extent of Epstein’s penetration of world elites – potentially even at the direction of various foreign intelligence agencies – and that this is a story as much about national security as financial and sexual irregularities. The
If Keir Starmer resigned tomorrow, the Labour party would be thrown into confusion. None of its factions has an obvious candidate to replace him. Yet some Labour MPs and commentators think they have found a solution. Why not send for Al Carns, minister for the armed forces, a former Royal Marines colonel, and MP for
On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by
Is there any area of public policy which Keir Starmer’s government has got right? ‘Where very little is working, AI is a bright spot,’ says a former adviser. ‘They’ve started well but they are now in danger of blowing it.’ When Labour came to power they consigned much of the past 14 years of Tory
Still they keep coming: email after email from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal correspondence, along with the almost unmanageable amount of other material in the Epstein files. They span two decades and an astonishingly wide range of topics: his Amazon purchases, missing laundry, the banning of his Xbox Live account, his reaction to photos of young women,
Like Harold Wilson and his ill-defined ‘white heat of technology’, Keir Starmer has latched on to artificial intelligence as the saviour which is finally going to jolt Britain’s sluggish economy into growth. He once even suggested it would help fill potholes. A year ago he launched his AI Opportunities Action Plan, which is supposed to
Forgive me. I am going to begin by quoting two prominent left-wing Londoners – and agreeing with one. In a speech recently, Sadiq Khan warned that artificial intelligence could become ‘a weapon of mass destruction of jobs’. He did acknowledge AI’s potential to fight cancer and other evils, but his main point was that it
Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of PayPal. We discussed globalisation, artificial intelligence, and the rise of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. But one subject seemed to particularly exercise Thiel: the Antichrist. He promised to expand on this when we next met – which
Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but the motley fleet of oil tankers that have allowed Russian oil to keep flowing to international markets. Oil dollars have been the lifeblood of Russia’s war economy during four years of conflict. And the West’s
The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too