Revealed: How the Treasury abandoned numeracy to boost diversity
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DIP / Will Starmer’s last defender please turn out the lights
Funding row / The defence investment plan is Starmer’s sad swansong
Politics / What is Andy Burnham hiding?
Architecture / The uprising against ugly cities
Books / Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?
Exhibitions / The joy of willow-pattern ceramics
In vogue / The social media ban will save glossy magazines
High life / Pick your poison in the Himalayan desert
In memoriam / The peerless Penelope Keith
Architecture / The uprising against ugly cities
Books / Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?
Exhibitions / The joy of willow-pattern ceramics
In vogue / The social media ban will save glossy magazines
From Spectator Life
High life / Pick your poison in the Himalayan desert
From Spectator Life
In memoriam / The peerless Penelope Keith
From Spectator Life
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All the latest analysis of the day's news
Road rage in the Foreign Office
Left-wing politicians rail against Mahmood’s ‘refugee tax’
‘Insane’ Treasury diversity plan attacked by MPs
The England cricket team is going backwards
Why white working-class kids fail
The true cost of ending the doctors’ strikes
Why asylum seekers probably won’t have to pay back their accommodation costs
Why does Starmer think he could become Nato chief?
How ideology hollowed out children’s literature
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An intelligent mix of culture, food, style and property, plus where to go and what to see.
The social media ban will save glossy magazines
From Spectator Life
I miss Roger Federer
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Andy Burnham’s half-baked Catholicism
From Spectator Life
The glory of espadrilles
From Spectator Life
The peerless Penelope Keith
From Spectator LifeThe news that Dame Penelope Keith has died at the age of 86 has devastated lovers of great British humour, to say nothing of Spectator readers. The two are, after all, closely linked. Keith was that rare actress who was the lead in not one but two seminal sitcoms, The Good Life and To The Manor Born. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to describe her performances as the aspirational Margo Leadbetter and the aristocratic Aubrey fforbes-Hamilton as showing thespian range. But there was no actress better at skewering the pretensions and absurdities of a certain kind of Englishwoman. Even today, if you say of someone that they are a ‘Penelope Keith type’, it is shorthand for Middle England in excelsis – even if that type is vanishing far quicker than is desirable.
Pick your poison in the Himalayan desert
From Spectator Life
Magazine
This week's magazine
Burnham’s odyssey
Can he resist the siren call of the left?
Can Burnham resist the siren call of the left?
Power, when it is gained and lost, is transferred in stages: the actual, the visual and the constitutional. The latter took place on Tuesday evening when the prime minister presumptive sent a letter to Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary, requesting that she commence access talks with his team. Keir Starmer had already given permission for them to proceed, but the propriety and ethics team in the Cabinet Office had told Romeo she could not initiate proceedings. Andy Burnham had to ask first. To all intents and purposes, he is already the vessel from which power flows. At the same time, it became clear that James Purnell, the former Blairite cabinet minister, will lead the transition team and stay on to become chief of staff in 10 Downing Street.
Can Burnham resist the siren call of the left?
Power, when it is gained and lost, is transferred in stages: the actual, the visual and the constitutional. The latter took place on Tuesday evening when the prime minister presumptive sent a letter to Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary, requesting that she commence access talks with his team. Keir Starmer had already given permission for them to proceed, but the propriety and ethics team in the Cabinet Office had told Romeo she could not initiate proceedings. Andy Burnham had to ask first. To all intents and purposes, he is already the vessel from which power flows. At the same time, it became clear that James Purnell, the former Blairite cabinet minister, will lead the transition team and stay on to become chief of staff in 10 Downing Street.
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Dull, duller and Dulles – was Churchill’s jibe about America’s Cold War icon unfair?
From the magazineIn the era of Trumpian foreign policy incoherence, a new intellectual biography of the American Cold War icon John Foster Dulles might seem welcome for hawks and doves alike. Indeed, Dulles’s tenure as secretary of state during the first six years of the Eisenhower administration could be viewed – even by the harshest left-wing critic of American imperialism – as a useful and reassuring point of reference, despite its narrow anti-communist dogma and too cavalier approach to the dangers of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and China. After all, the Eisenhower administration extricated the United States from President Truman’s stalemated Korean War and started no major new wars before the end of Eisenhower’s second term in January 1961.
Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed
From the magazineChinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations
From the magazine
Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed
From the magazine
Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction
From the magazine
The imaginative genius behind the Great Exhibition
From the magazine
Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?
From the magazine
Cartoons
‘‘OK, try counting something other than Brexit benefits.’’
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‘‘I’ve got a tie!’’
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‘‘I think I preferred it when she was doomscrolling.’’
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