Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street. He is the author of The Age of Stupid substack.
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The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius had the Delphic Oracle smashed up in 390 AD, but the gifts of the old gods were already well on the way out. The Sibylline Books were burned shortly after. Scrying glasses across the ancient world had misted over. The prophets fell silent. Well, they hadn’t seen that coming. It
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‘Grow the pie’. Somebody thought ‘grow the pie’ was The Thing, that ‘grow the pie’ was it. That this knockout phrase would silence the army of doubters and bring millions of voters back on side. They were proud of ‘grow the pie’. They thought ‘grow the pie’ was a great idea that people can really
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Our common culture – the huge audiences that tv, film and pop music used to attract – has evaporated. Politics is about the only thing remaining where we are all on the same page. It’s perhaps inevitable then that public reaction has become ever more febrile and volatile. Poll percentages now go crashing and soaring
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‘I’m not sure I even know what woke means,’ tweeted barrister Chris Daw at the weekend, ‘but if it’s just treating all people fairly, and with kindness and dignity, it doesn’t seem so bad.’ This is the perfect example of the faux-naïf, head shaking sadly, cosy boast – well, when you get right down to
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Recent sad events have seen everybody behaving exactly as you would expect. There’s nothing wrong about that. A certain continuity of conduct is reassuring, a truism that the late Queen herself exemplified better than anyone. Her job was to be regal. Similarly, it’s the job of chippy academics to spill their thoughts, of the New
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The death of the Queen has led to a host of peculiar postponements. Perhaps the strangest was the announcement that the launch of ‘Bowie On The Blockchain’, a sale of NFT artworks inspired by the deceased pop star, has been delayed ‘out of respect for the people of the UK and Queen Elizabeth II’. It’s
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On a recent trip to Sainsbury’s, I was perplexed to find nothing where it should be. I’m used to things being switched about to a small extent. It can even be quite fun to track down rice pudding where the clingfilm used to be and the clingfilm where the baked beans once were. But this
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The Conservative party leadership contest (sometimes referred to as a ‘race’, which is pushing it) is nearing its end. It’ll be hard getting used to the world without it. We’re all such different people now, 900 years on. At least we’ll always have the misty water-coloured memories. One thing that both candidates agree on is
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We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite
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Rarified cable TV channel Sky Arts has recently revealed its list of the top 50 most influential British artists of the last 50 years. Even in the crowded field of clickbaity lists, which usually contain at least one or two names calculated to raise eyebrows and hackles – ‘Octopussy is the best Bond film’ –
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When I was 11, I was a pompous little git, but was I also a playground prophet? It first dawned on me that I was one lunchtime in the late 1970s as I looked around at my peers. There they were shouting, swearing and hitting each other. Were we, I wondered, the clueless inheritors of a system we wouldn’t
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Has Justin Welby met his match in Sandi Toksvig? The entertainer has sent an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining about his attempts to compromise with African bishops and avoid a showdown at the Lambeth Conference on the issue of same-sex marriage. The gist of it is: ‘Even though I don’t believe in God,
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Watching people brazening it out can be tremendous fun. The higher the stakes, the more extreme the disparity between reality and what we now call ‘cope’, the greater the cheer. We remember the brass neck of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister dubbed ‘Comical Ali’, still denying the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime as
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Barring a disaster — given her record, that’s not impossible — Liz Truss will soon be the prime minister. She didn’t slip up in last night’s debate. She even surprised observers by showing mental dexterity when being needled by Rishi Sunak. Nevertheless, the adjective most often used to describe her – I’ve seen it in
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In this week’s episode:Will Donald Trump have a second shot at the US presidency?Freddy Gray and Sarah Baxter debate the return of Donald Trump. (1.10)Also this week:A look at the history of Scotland’s paradoxical relationship between Scottish identity and the Union.The Spectator’s Scotland editor, Alex Massie talks with Murray Pittock about his book Scotland: The
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The recent heatwave inspired many people to bring out their stories of the summer of 1976. I have a memory of it which has nothing to do with the temperature, but which I think could be even more relevant to our times. It happened in the baking, crammed, nicotine-steeped ballroom of a holiday camp. I
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As I write this, the first day of the heatwave has just dawned. FEAR COMES THE SUN is the Daily Mail headline, while the Mirror has plumped for BLOWTORCH BRITAIN. The Telegraph maybe laments that its house style eschews the use of capital letters for ‘Heatwave meltdown brings Britain to a halt’. At the same
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There’s a scent in the air around the Tory leadership contest. It is the whiff of desperation. The aroma of provincial ballrooms when the lights go up at midnight; or of the last few seconds before a firing on The Apprentice when a contestant butts in with ‘Can I just say…’ and Lord Sugar snaps:
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In a speech last night to the Institute of Public Policy Research, Angela Rayner revealed that, ‘the reporters for Hansard have a bit of a nightmare sometimes transcribing the way I speak in parliament into their house style. But I don’t compromise on it, because it’s who I am.’ It is, admittedly, refreshing to hear
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So we come to the end of Pride month. We’re all now familiar with the rituals: the rainbow flag plastered across everything from sandwiches to mouthwash, the vapid statements of obeisance from big businesses and institutions. 2022 has seen a bumper crop of these. Rainbow bullets displayed on Twitter by the US Marines. Central London
