Boris johnson

Wednesday

Madeline Grant

The tragedy of Keir Starmer

For someone who likes to present the general public with the idea that he doesn’t have a personality, Sir Keir ‘I don’t dream’ Starmer has actually provided plenty of insight into who he really is. From his occasional flashes of fury when thwarted in the Commons to his chronic lack of authenticity when out bothering voters, a picture emerges of a man who doesn’t much like the ‘people’ side of politics. Perhaps the most revealing example was when, in opposition, he unhesitatingly told Emily Maitlis that he preferred Davos over Westminster. By his own revealed preferences and statements, Starmer is an aspirant technocrat, not an enthusiastic democrat. In the source

Friday

Michael Gove

Q&A: Boris, Cameron or May? Plus, our most left-wing beliefs revealed

35 min listen

To submit your urgent questions to Michael and Maddie, go to: spectator.co.uk/quiteright This week on the first ever Quite right! Q&A: What’s your most left-wing belief? Michael & Maddie confess their guilty liberal secrets on the Elgin Marbles, prison reform and private equity – or ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. Also this week: who would you trust to save your life on a desert island – Boris Johnson, Theresa May or David Cameron? And finally, a literary turn: from John Donne to Thomas Hardy, Michael and Maddie share their favourite poems, and make the case for learning verse by heart. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

'People can't take a joke these days': Michael Heath on wokeness, The Spectator and turning 90

When I joined The Spectator, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-storey Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She was married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with the home secretary, David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was Boris Johnson, then editor, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with assistant editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing,

Tuesday

Maggie Fergusson

The mystery of Rapa Nui’s moai may be solved

Boris Johnson claims that in his first year at Oxford he attended just one lecture. Delivered in the crepuscular gloom of the Pitt Rivers Museum, it was about Rapa Nui, the tiny Pacific island 2,200 miles from mainland Chile. As a boy, Johnson had read the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island and had become obsessed. No wonder. For although Rapa Nui – or Easter Island – is only half the size of the Isle of Wight, it has a haunting history teeming with questions. Who first discovered this speck in the Pacific? How did they get there? How did they manage to settle in this

Thursday

Michael Gove

What this new history of Brexit gets right

Why did the United Kingdom leave the European Union? Perhaps it might be better to ask why did it ever join. Tom McTague attempts to answer both questions in this panoramic history of British – and continental – politics from 1942 to the present day. It is to the author’s great credit that he approaches a debate which has polarised politics and shattered friendships with disciplined, but never anaemic, detachment. It is hard to think of many books which leave one admiring both Edward Heath and Enoch Powell more. McTague has set himself a formidable task in seeking to explain the two most consequential decisions of British postwar politics. That

Thursday

Beatrice Scudeler

The shocking state of perinatal care in Britain

We think of PTSD as something that happens to war veterans, but the Conservative politician Theo Clarke’s harrowing account of birth trauma proves otherwise. Her perspective is unique. When the former MP for Stafford was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, the government was in shambles. Boris Johnson was about to resign, to be succeeded by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in embarrassingly short order; and Queen Elizabeth was on her deathbed. It was a stressful time for an MP to have a baby. We are acutely aware of this in the first half of Breaking the Taboo, which is part political memoir and part exposé of the UK’s

Tuesday

Hermione Eyre

Being stalked by a murderer was just one of life’s problems – Sarah Vine

Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’: Realise… that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t. There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD.

Friday

Katy Balls

The Katie Lam Edition

28 min listen

Katie Lam was elected as a new Conservative MP, for Weald of Kent, at the 2024 election. While studying at Cambridge she was president of the Cambridge Union and chairman of the Conservative Association, and she was later a special advisor – first under Boris Johnson in the business unit at Number 10, and then later working on counterterrorism with Suella Braverman. In between university and politics, she worked at Goldman Sachs and at AI-specialists Faculty, and she is also an accomplished lyricist and scriptwriter having co-written five musicals. She was appointed a Tory assistant whip last year when Kemi Badenoch took over as leader. On the podcast, Katie talks

Thursday

Toby Young

I was right – and Gove was wrong – on lockdown

In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made one comment I’d like to take issue with. He wrote: ‘For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday Telegraph columnist, modesty forbids, etc) wanted to stand in the way of a stampede.’ In fact, he wasn’t the only one and, lacking Dan’s modesty, I’m happy to name myself as one of the first journalists to oppose the lockdown policy, along with Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, Ross Clark, Julia Hartley-Brewer and a handful of

Tuesday

Declan Lyons

The punishing life of a chief whip

For many Spectator readers, their only exposure to the workings of the Whips’ Office will be through the machinations of Francis Urquhart, Michael Dobbs’s fictional chief whip made famous in House of Cards. In the first diaries published by a former chief whip, Simon Hart aims to shine a light on the vital and often unrecognised role that the Whips’ Office plays in the functioning of parliament and government. Having been overlooked by David Cameron and Theresa May, Hart arrives at the top table under Boris Johnson in 2019, nine years after his entry to parliament. He serves as secretary of state for Wales until he joinsa slew of others

Monday

Michael Gove

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about the psychological significance of Bible stories. He speaks to The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove about supernatural relationships, the folly of net zero and what’s next for Europe. ‘A lot of the atheist argument misses the mark because the God that’s being disbelieved is never defined’ MICHAEL GOVE: In your book, you work intimately with Bible stories to bring out their meaning, their relevance and their importance. Why should anyone read the Bible? JORDAN PETERSON: The simple answer is because you have to have your story straight or you go off

Thursday

Kate Andrews

‘The public sector is the illness’: Javier Milei on his first year in office

Buenos Aires ‘I never wind down,’ says Argentina’s President Javier Milei when we meet in his Presidential Office at the Casa Rosada. ‘I work all day, practically… I get up at 6 a.m., I take a shower and at 7 a.m. I am already at my desk working. And I work all the way until 11 p.m. I enjoy my job. I enjoy cutting public spending. I love the chainsaw.’ It was a photo of Milei with a chainsaw – who was then the insurgent candidate – that propelled him to international fame last year. He waved it on the campaign trail as a symbol of what he would do

Wednesday

Tanith Carey

The sad demise of the scathing school report

As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the teachers are actually trying to say about their child. These days, reports tend to be written with the help of AI software or templates, which makes it impossible to work out how your child is really doing. In our super-sensitive age, many schools now play it safe by couching all comments as positives, and only

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The column you don’t want to read

Curiously unobserved about last month’s US election: how astonishing it was that the candidates’ policy positions during the pandemic played a role in neither the campaigns nor the results. It may feel as if Covid was a long time ago, but do the math. It wasn’t. In the US and UK, medical hysteria gravely blighted a good two-and-a-half years of our lives, only roundly concluding a couple of years ago – if then, for several passengers on my flight to London last week were still wearing those insipid paper masks, the sight of which inspired both my pitying contempt and shudder-inducing flashbacks. Yet the biggest public health debacle in world

Tuesday

Alex Burghart

Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?

The great parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the Henry Lucy of our day, has described Sir Graham Brady (now Lord Brady) thus: ‘Were he a yacht, his galley would gleam, the decks would be scrubbed daily and there would be a large brass bell to summon matelots to morning parade. Commodore Brady runs a tight ship.’ After 27 years in the Commons, 14 of them as Chair of the 1922 Committee, the commodore has swapped his deck garb for ermine and written a kiss-and-tell about his political encounters with five Tory prime ministers. The 1922 Committee – the fabled men in grey suits who represent the parliamentary party’s backbenchers – is

Thursday

Katy Balls

‘I was much more disposable than I believed’: an interview with Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson is enjoying himself back at The Spectator. ‘My place of former employment,’ the former editor booms as he sits down, stands up, and starts re-ordering items around the wood-panelled office. ‘I like this book-lined air that you’ve given me – very, very grand.’ ‘I found the pandemic a nightmare because I was genuinely uncertain as to the efficacy of what we were doing’ He’s spent the past month flogging his memoir, Unleashed. He hopes to hit 100,000 UK sales well before Christmas. Such is his enthusiasm for his cause that he was kicked off the Channel 4 US election night show for ‘banging on about his book’. ‘I’ve

Thursday

Nadine Dorries

Nigel told me he’s the new Boris

Last week I arrived in London from the Cotswolds just in time to witness the collective meltdown from everyone around me as it was announced that Donald Trump was the President-elect. I was delighted. Who are we to complain? The American people knew exactly what they were doing. I had been booked on to ITV’s This Morning where we were to discuss Kamala Harris’s resignation speech, a story so feeble it wouldn’t last until the 6 p.m. news. The tone in the studio was ‘poor Kamala’. I was having none of it. She fully deserved to lose. She had no coherent policies on immigration or the economy and banged on

Wednesday

Peter Jones

Boris Johnson is no Pericles

Boris Johnson’s Unleashed imagines him, like Cincinnatus, leaving his plough, saving Rome, and returning to it. But given that Boris is among the international elite, perhaps Alcibiades (c. 451-404 bc) would fit him better. Athenian elites had long had connections with the other power-brokers of the classical Greek world, Sparta and Persia. Born into such a family, the young Alcibiades, at the death of his father in 447 bc, was placed in the care of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, who chose Socrates as his mentor (we are told he tried to seduce Socrates but failed). A charismatic and handsome young man, he led a life of ‘lawless self-indulgence’ but,

Thursday

Charles Moore

Who will dress Keir Starmer now?

It is worth upholding the stuffy point which should have prevailed at the start. It was always improper and unethical for Sue Gray (formerly in charge of Propriety and Ethics in government) to leave the civil service to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. In her beginning was her end. Carrying with her all her inside knowledge, she was almost a gamekeeper turned poacher, inspiring mistrust among career officials without winning the respect of the much rougher political crowd. To understand why she was unsuited to her job, one has only to imagine how the thing would look the other way round, with Morgan McSweeney being suddenly announced as,

Michael Gove

My plans for The Spectator

Shortly after Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley, he invited me to lunch at The Spectator. It was, he said, to be an intimate affair. The magazine’s then proprietor, Conrad Black, had made it known that he expected Boris to stand down as editor now that he was embarking on a political career. Speculation as to who might succeed him was intense among ambitious young journalists. And I was one of those at the time who harboured secret hopes. Was this invitation a sign of favour, a laying-on of hands, the anointing of an heir? On arriving at lunch I discovered that there were other guests.