Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
You know the story. A Prime Minister takes a tough line on Brexit talks and holds a snap election thinking voters will be impressed – instead, they don’t care and it ends in disaster. It happened to Theresa May in 2017 and it just has happened to Leo Varadkar. The votes are still being counted,
In the end, it took just over a week for Prince Harry to announce and finalise the terms of his exit from the royal family. But Queen seems to have told him that, while he’s free to leave the firm, out means out. He and Meghan have agreed to give up their ‘royal highness’ titles
The night before our last issue went to press, I received a message from the Prime Minister saying that he was sorry, that he had hoped to write the diary but couldn’t find time. No problem, I replied, he’d just seen off Jeremy Corbyn and had a Queen’s Speech to agree and deliver and our
In all the madness of last year, we had to delay The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards until later this month. The first step is to agree the categories. Last time, we had “Resignation of the Year” – such a hotly-contested category that it had to be shared between David Davis and Dominic Raab, the
The next Budget will signal some pretty big changes in the way government spending is distributed, with investment directed towards the parts of the country that have tended to be denied it. The shift in policy was first disclosed by the Prime Minister to James Forsyth and Katy Balls in an interview during the election
Is a wind of change blowing in the Arab world and bringing Muslims and Jews closer together? Ed Husain made the case for this in an article in our Christmas special issue: a younger generation is tiring of the hardliners, he said, asking what all the angst has achieved and wondering if Israel might be
As a lifelong Europhile, I rather liked the love letter to Britain from Frans Timmermans, vice president of the new European Commission. We in this country do love Europe, its people, its culture, its quirks, its diversity. Never has Britain been integrated more closely with the rest of Europe, never have we done more trade,
As we reach the end of an incredible year, we at The Spectator are delighted to announce our latest sales figures: 81,900 for the third quarter of this year. That means we close this decade with sales up 43 per cent, in a magazine market that has declined by 63 per cent. Not bad for
If Boris Johnson wins next week, it will be on a manifesto of change. He will not deliver the fourth term of the same Tory government, he says, but a new agenda guided by a new philosophy — and the big difference will be spending. Gone are the days when Tories defined themselves by a
With YouGov’s MRP model pointing to a 68-seat Tory majority, Conservative voters might think they have pretty solid ground for optimism. But as I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, things can still go wrong for the Tories. Here are my reasons to be fearful:- The Labour vote has grown since the election was called. Anti-Semitism
This was not just the best speech that Boris Johnson has given since becoming Prime Minister, it’s the first proper weapons-grade speech that he has given since running for the job. It showcased his gift of communication, his ability to mobilise language to uplift, enthuse and motivate. To convey a sense of cheerful mission –
Sajid Javid hates identity politics and has spent most of his political career avoiding it. But his speech today showed how effective he can be when he discusses his own life story. Having his mum in the hall was quite something: this is a woman who grew up in poverty in the Punjab and came
Michael Gove stands in front of an empty throne in the magnificent Cabinet Office room. George III was the last monarch to use it and there it has stayed, beneath his portrait. For a second, it looks like Gove is about to sit in it and grant us an audience, but he’s only leaning over
‘How have you been?’ David Cameron asks, bounding up to meet me. Fine, I say, then make the mistake of asking him the same question. His face drops. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Well. So-so.’ Watching the political news, he says, has been getting him down (in a way it didn’t when he was in office) and
How is Britain seen by outsiders? What marks us out? Humour, self-deprecation, our changing weather, frequent cups of tea. But there’s something else that foreigners say after a spell here: the UK is a place where couples without children worry about where their unconceived children will go to school. As a Scot, I used to
How is Britain seen by outsiders? What marks us out? Humour, self-deprecation, our changing weather, frequent cups of tea. But there’s something else that foreigners say after a spell here: the UK is a place where couples without children worry about where their unconceived children will go to school. As a Scot, I used to
From our US edition
To end free movement without carefully working out what follows after shows pretty striking thoughtlessness
For all its ferocious momentum, Boris Johnson’s government is capable of making pretty bad mistakes – as we saw with Priti Patel’s announcement that free movement of people will end with Brexit on 31 October. A problem, when it hasn’t worked out let alone revealed what regime will replace it. As I say in this
What makes Boris Johnson an improvement on Theresa May? Those of us who cheered him on into 10 Downing Street have a long list. He backed Brexit, so would stand a far greater chance of getting it done. He’d hire better people, who could outwit and outmanoeuvre his parliamentary enemies (as we have seen this
We can today announce that The Spectator’s sales have hit another record high: 77,889 for the first half of this year, up 9 per cent year-on-year. Print subscriptions are growing at their fastest rate since 1995, but we’re recruiting new subscribers through digital means. We hear a lot about the decline of print, or even ‘subscription
