Freddie Sayers is CEO and Publisher of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Something remarkable is happening at the world’s oldest weekly magazine. After years of relatively flat subscriber numbers, The Spectator has surged past its Covid-era peak and now has more paying subscribers than at any point in its 198-year history. Today’s ABC circulation figures show that, while most of our competitors have been on a downward trajectory
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One important piece of information missing during these dramatic Brexit manoeuvres is what the voters actually want. Rory Stewart, one of the only ministers doing a decent job of selling the Prime Minister’s plan, speculated that ‘80 per cent of the British public support this deal’ and was promptly forced to apologise. Meanwhile opponents of
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In my business, there’s a lot of fretting about the idea of representativeness. Pollsters put questions to, say, a thousand people – and take them as a sample of the country. How to be sure that you have the right sample? You need the right number of men, women, northerners, middle class, Lib Dem voters etc – but
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Forget John McCain – on the evidence of this morning’s Press Conference it is Hillary Clinton who is getting inside David Cameron’s head. Talking about Britain’s UNICEF rankings, Cameron concluded, “We must live by the words of the famous African saying: It takes a village to raise a child.” As any American will tell you,
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This has been the week of unanimous public lynching of famous wives. Am I the only person in the world who has found them unsettling? The first victim was Hillary Clinton, in Tuesday’s Democratic Debate at Drexel College, Philadelphia. Ahead of her rivals for the nomination by over 30 points in national polls, there seems
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Last week Prince Albert II, ruler of the tiny Mediterranean state of Monaco since his father’s death in 2005, came to London to unveil his vision for the principality. The playboy of the gossip columns was nowhere to be seen: on display at a press conference at the Ritz hotel was a softly spoken, Amherst-educated,
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The Blair-Bush partnership, so awkward for the Labour party, has come to an end and everyone is speculating about how Gordon Brown will recalibrate the Special Relationship. But what about the Tories? Marginalised for years by Tony Blair’s diagonal alliance with the Republican President, they have struggled to know who their real friends are in
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Freddie Sayers went to an EU conference for young people in Ireland — and no one turned up. Euroenthusiasm is not groovy Imagine a huge celebrity wedding before any of the guests have arrived. A romantic Irish castle, a giant marquee with ruched egg-white lining and silver-birch detail, flurries of organisers talking into radios and
From our UK edition
Blair has made a mess of the top-up Bill, says Freddie Sayers. It’s now up to the Tories to revolutionise our universities on market principles I think I once knew how Tony Blair felt on Tuesday night. It was Matriculation Day for the Fresher class of 2000 at New College, Oxford. With the obligatory white