Features Archives

Thursday

August 6, 2026

Tax the poor

A sanctimonious liberal like any other respectable 16-year-old, I made a seminal lurch to the right the first time I opened a pay slip. I was manning the register weekends for the Ice Capades Chalet in Atlanta and made about $40 a week. Or so I imagined. Then where the hell was it? The significantly lighter payment was my rude introduction to taxation at source. Indignation at being fleeced at a minimal income persisted into my adulthood. I lived on a wing and a prayer for decades, and having to pitch anything whatsoever into the communal pot was consternating. I fancied that I asked for nothing from government; in trade, they should ask for nothing from me. I wasn’t yet a grown-up.

Lucas Chancellor

Love lessons from my grandfather

After a lovely 25th birthday trip to Vienna, I returned home to face the reality of my quarter-life circumstances. I had been happy with my milestones to date – a degree, a stint of modeling on the European and New York runways, a couple of relationships and some encouraging writing contracts – but was then told by my mother what my grandfather Alexander Chancellor had pulled off by the time he was my age. Having moved to Italy to work for Reuters news agency, he spoke Italian fluently and had married my grandmother, Susanna Debenham; he had two children, he had bought a house and even had someone iron his shirts from time to time, which Susie was definitely not going to do. By the time he reached 35, he was editing this magazine.

William Clouston

Rod had one great regret

In 2019, I had to explain to Iain Dale – live on LBC – that Rod Liddle’s suggestion in his Spectator column that elections should be held on Islamic holy days to deter Muslims from voting was not a serious proposal. Neither was his idea that students be drugged by their parents to the same end. It was humor, and they were jokes. When he was in hospital a few weeks ago, I visited Rod with some cake. While he munched away, he expressed a sense of regret that he could have been a great writer. Rod always thought his true calling was writing fiction, rather than journalism, and always wondered if he’d sold his soul by following the money. He was right – he did have the makings of a British Houellebecq.

Sophie Winkleman

‘The Middlesbrough Shakespeare’: Why I loved Rod

I met Rod 22 years ago this month. We had been selected as teammates on a gameshow pilot, and, halfway through the morning’s filming, we went for a fag break. He said to me: “This is crap, shall we go to the pub?” We scarpered and spent the rest of the day in a Covent Garden pub, working our way through the drinks list and chatting away like chipmunks. I’d never been starstruck by anyone before I met Rod. However famous or talented actors are, their job is to say stuff written by other people. Rod, however, was a legend to me. I began reading his Guardian columns at university. Though I was studying all the greats of English literature, it was Rod’s writing which felt like a ribbon-wrapped gift, a treat, a joy.

Rod Liddle

Can I fucking swear yet?: Rod Liddle’s last column

The following column was written in 2024 for former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson when he left the magazine. This is the first time it has been published. My favorite ever email came from a friend and fellow hack, Roland White. It said: “You bastard. I had a 50 quid bet that Charles Moore would be the first Spectator writer to use the word ‘clunge’ in an article.” Ha. I admit I had been surprised to see the word there, in hard copy, when the mag was published. I had expected the usual haggling. “Can’t you say vagina, Rod? Or just leave it out altogether? Or how about Lady Garden?

Boris Johnson

Rod’s genius? Driving his enemies nuts

There is a reason the death of Rod Liddle has provoked such a swirling tide of grief among his millions of followers, including readers of this magazine, and that is that in the last 25 years Rod came to occupy a crucial position in journalism, and indeed in our country as a whole. His columns became a haven, a refuge, in which he gave us permission to think things that are in fact common sense, but which have for some reason become taboo. He gave us a renewed permission to laugh – at him, at ourselves, at our collective absurdities – at a time when laughter is increasingly controlled and often suppressed.

Roger Kimball

The Republican party’s secret weapons

Do the Republicans have a secret weapon they can deploy in the midterms? In fact, I think they have two weapons, one sort-of-secret, the other out in the open but somehow not quite recognized. “That’s good,” you say, if (faute de mieux) you want the Republicans to win. Midterms, we’ve been told ad nauseam, almost always favor the party out of power. I believe that the last time the incumbent party won in the midterms was in 2002 when George W. Bush, riding the tailwind of public sentiment following the September 11 attacks by our Muslim friends, picked up eight House seats. Many of the most noteworthy Democrat candidates hail from la-la land At the moment, all the polls have the Dems leading by a comfortable margin.

Tuesday

July 28, 2026

Douglas Murray

The problem with the Ann Widdecombe suspect’s ‘fair trial’

It’s hard to hold anyone responsible for anything today in British politics. That’s because no sooner have the facts emerged than everybody in Westminster has played another game of musical chairs. If the word “amusing” can be used in the same paragraph as “attempted beheading” allow me one amusing example. In June, a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan allegedly attempted to behead a local man on the streets of Belfast. It was apparently caught on video. Everyone was geared up to make their points. The left was preparing to argue “So you’re saying all asylum seekers are beheaders, are you?” while the right was gearing up to say: “We must hold people accountable.

Saturday

July 25, 2026

Daniel McCarthy

I invented Nixonmaxxing

The kids call it “Nixonmaxxing,” and I invented it 30 years ago. “I think that his historical record is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so,” Vice President J.D. Vance says about Richard Nixon, who has become, as a recent Wall Street Journal headline put it, “an unlikely new icon” for young conservatives. Maybe I can’t claim to have been the first teenage Republican to have embraced Nixon chic, but all the way back in 1996 a young Danny, irked by the banality of college application essay questions, decided to make his pitch to higher education by writing about the merits of the president who’d been taken down by Watergate. It was a way of daring colleges and universities to reject me.

Friday

July 24, 2026

Tim Shipman

Andy Burnham’s centrist act isn’t fooling anyone

When Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood arrived in Downing Street on July 20, the image of political rivals arm in arm symbolized a new government of differing views taking shape. It might have been more awkward. As they neared the door of No. 10 and the waiting television cameras, Miliband turned to Mahmood and asked: “Should we turn around for a photo together?” Mahmood gave the idea short shrift: “We’re not getting married, Ed!” But in a sense, Labour is seeking a new relationship with the British public – and everyone around Andy Burnham is alive to the importance of images, symbols and vibes. As Wes Streeting, the new Defense Secretary, put it in cabinet the next day: “We have a second chance to make a first impression with the voters.

Madeline Grant

Mr. Burnham, put on a suit and tie

A brass fanfare; a wide establishing shot of five men in three-piece suits, seated in a library of leather-bound tomes – this is Harold Macmillan doing informal. The scene is from a 1959 party political broadcast, which purports to show a “relaxed chat” between Macmillan and four of his ministers, all of whom he refers to by their cabinet titles. Almost everything about it is artificial (including quite possibly the claim that it took place the day after the parliamentary recess). Watching it now is a reminder of two things, perhaps contradictory. First, that prime ministers have always played a clever and not entirely authentic game when it comes to informality; second, how far we’ve fallen. Can you imagine the equivalent today?

Tali Fraser

The Welsh government’s mad decolonization plans

A teenager in Wales might want to play video games, hang out with friends or even, dare I suggest it, read a book. The Welsh government, however, would prefer they put on a headset and confront their “unconscious bias.” It has created a £1.2 million metaverse, the “world’s first anti-racist virtual world,” to teach Welsh teens about their “white privilege.” But this is only one element of an official commitment to end racism by 2030. Not today, not yesterday, but a specific year in the future. The idea for an Anti-racist Wales Action Plan – ArWAP – was born following fervor around the Black Lives Matter movement, and an official plan followed in 2022.

Matt Ridley

Turtle doves and the myth of rewilding

In the latest success story for reintroducing species to the British countryside, turtle doves, reared in captivity and released at three locations in Somerset and Devon last year, have returned to breed. Turtle doves have steeply declined in numbers, hanging on in the south and east of the country, but this scheme opens a new front in the battle to save the species as a British summer visitor. In May 2025, 244 captive-bred turtle doves were set free across three sites. Like others of their species, they spent the winter in Africa but a handful found their way back to southwest England this summer. Reintroductions like this are now all the rage among conservationists because it is a policy that can have spectacular results.

Charles Moore

Burnham’s solutions must not lie in the 1970s

Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 percent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Vladimir Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil-fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretense that things can be made cheaper by fiat.

Michael Gove

The wrong lessons from a politician’s murder

Reason, David Hume noted, is a slave of the passions. Arguments, especially political crusades, are often rooted in emotional responses, with the evidence assembled to justify a position which is heartfelt but often wrongheaded. So it is with the cry, from politicians, for more steps to be taken to safeguard the personal security of politicians. The killing of the former Member of Parliament Ann Widdecombe, like the deaths of Jo Cox and David Amess, has generated new demands for action, and legislation, to protect those in public life from risk and danger. The transparent nobility of Ann’s life and the grotesque tragedy of her death make it emotionally difficult to resist the call for strengthened perimeters around our politicians.

Thursday

July 23, 2026

Kabir Singh Bawa

The grid cannot cope with the rise in data centers

As June gave way to July, with a heat dome over the Eastern Seaboard, the US Department of Energy signed an order few people understood. It gave the region’s grid operator permission to do something that would have sounded simply deranged a decade ago. If the system came under enough strain, PJM – the body that keeps the lights on for 67 million Americans from Chicago to Washington – could order the great data centers of Virginia and Maryland to disconnect from the grid and run on diesel instead, so that everyone else could keep their A/C on. Any facility drawing 50 megawatts or more would have 15 minutes to comply. It was, said the order, a last resort before rolling blackouts. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said keeping the power on was “non-negotiable.

Katherine Dee

The rise of mediated murder

A few months ago I stumbled across a TikTok series. A distraught older sister. A younger brother who’d committed suicide. And an online girlfriend who had allegedly coerced him – and several others – into taking their own lives. According to the video creator, this was the girl’s modus operandi: target vulnerable people on Roblox, form relationships with them over Discord and find ways to convince them to kill themselves, often on camera. I can’t verify the videos’ claims, but it was a story I felt I’d heard many times before. A young person falls into an intense, online relationship. That person commits suicide. Someone close to the youngster becomes convinced that the other party’s sole goal is to drive people to suicide.

Kilby

Do deals get done at Sun Valley anymore?

Silicon Valley is really just a few hundred people connected by favors and money. Most of us rely on this network, but few know how it really functions. This new column reveals the inner wiring of the American tech world. Traditionally, the Valley’s message to Washington has been: keep out. Now Sam Altman is offering the government 5 percent of OpenAI – worth some $43 billion – as a gift. Quite a conversion. The Valley that once worshipped Ronald Reagan now warms to Donald Trump’s economics. The state already owns a slice of Intel and a cut of Nvidia’s chip sales to China. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has introduced a bill that would take half the equity of the biggest AI firms in a one-off tax; so for Altman, 5 percent seems a cheap insurance policy.

Geoffrey Cain

Meet the political donors lining up to influence AI policy

Most Americans have yet to work out quite what they think about artificial intelligence, but already the AI game is under way: the buying and placing of political pawns in readiness for America’s first comprehensive federal AI law. Voters have yet to elect their senators and representatives, but the power brokers – political donors – are spending, primary by primary, to help ensure their chosen candidates survive to write that all-important legislation. Two rival networks with differing views about what this law should entail have raised more than $200 million for this year’s midterm elections.

Gary Dexter

The rise of Japan’s organic right

Sanseitō is a new right-wing Japanese party. The name means the “Party of Participatory Politics” or “Do-It-Yourself.” It was founded in 2020 by some disgruntled political YouTubers and gained national fame in 2022 when its founder, Sohei Kamiya, won a seat in the House of Councillors. Sanseitō now has 30 seats in the Diet. The party is nationalistic, proposing much stricter immigration controls under the slogan “Japan First.” It is broadly anti-vaxx. It opposes same-sex marriage and supports nuclear-weapon sharing with the United States, while Kamiya has repeatedly promised the party “would not sell out Japan to Jewish capital.