Gus Carter is The Spectator’s deputy features editor.
Pam Bondi’s departure as attorney general has prompted the usual Kremlinologist speculation. One theory has it that Donald Trump was furious that she may have warned Democrat Eric Swalwell about a planned FBI release of documents detailing his past relationship with a Chinese spy. Bondi’s replacement, Todd Blanche, dismissed these claims as false. Another theory
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A century ago, Britain had reason to despair. A generation had been lost to war, influenza was killing those who survived and revolution was sweeping across Europe. A strange new movement called the Blackshirts was marching on Rome just as Russia’s civil war was ending in Soviet victory. Yet Britons were out having fun. The
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Nigel Farage keeps eclectic company. Reform is not a party of slick spin doctors or career politicians. Instead, it is staffed by people like George Cottrell, the minor aristocrat and former convict, who acts as Farage’s fixer. He is, according to Farage, ‘like a son to me’. I’m told that Cottrell is often seen in
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I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: John Power examines the rise in drug abuse and homelessness on British streets; Madeline Grant explains the allure of Hollywood radical Sydney Sweeney; Ysenda Maxtone Graham laments the rise of the on-the-day party flake; Calvin Po warns of a war on Britain’s historic architecture; and Gus Carter reads his
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Last month, the founder of the Browns restaurant chain was charged with killing his mother. Shocking news, but it feels somehow appropriate. Browns is the traditional lunch spot for families looking to feed their student child, the place where 2.2s are revealed and doomed university girlfriends introduced. Many parents have found themselves spending hundreds on
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Sometimes a small detail in a news story tells you more than a months-long investigation splashed across the front page. ‘Starmer appears to realise that he needs to do more to connect with his party and has begun a new charm offensive,’ the Sunday Times reported. Some MPs have been invited for breakfast and ‘No.
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Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling
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‘Small but mighty,’ is how Baroness Casey described Bedfordshire Police when she released her report on grooming gangs over the summer. She told MPs that most forces had failed to properly record child abuse. ‘A bloody disaster, frankly’. But Bedfordshire is different. They’re using artificial intelligence so police can spend more time hunting criminals. ‘I didn’t know about Louise
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There are no revolutionaries in Europe’s streets. No communists marching on parliament buildings. If anything, the continent has seen a rightward shift over the past decade. And yet Europe is becoming the home of a reluctant, greying socialism. In France, the new Sébastien Lecornu regime is considering a wealth tax on entrepreneurs and the rich
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What could be more fun for a 14-year-old boy than messing about in the woods with a gun? My school’s Combined Cadet Force offered precisely that, marching us through the Brecon Beacons and organising mock skirmishes with SA80 rifles (albeit using blanks). When we weren’t trying to shoot each other, we were fighting over OS
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First: how Merkel killed the European dream ‘Ten years ago,’ Lisa Haseldine says, ‘Angela Merkel told the German press what she was going to do about the swell of Syrian refugees heading to Europe’: ‘Wir schaffen das’ – we can handle it. With these words, ‘she ushered in a new era of uncontrolled mass migration’.
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Just before my father died, he visited Mannina in Florence to have his feet measured for a pair of shoes. I’d found the handwritten receipt in his desk on thin yellow paper, stapled with samples of leather. Online pictures of Mannina showed a glass-fronted shop of lacquered wood and brass, the name in beveled gold
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First up: how private equity is ruining Britain Gus Carter writes in the magazine this week about how foreign private equity (PE) is hollowing out Britain – PE now owns everything from a Pret a Manger to a Dorset village, and even the number of children’s homes owned by PE has doubled in the last
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What has happened to Britain’s rivers isn’t a mistake. The fact that serious pollution is up 60 per cent on the year, or that only one in seven rivers can be called ecologically healthy, is the result of corporate tactics. It is effluent from the murky world of private equity. Some 2.5 million people in
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First up: how the Bank of England wrecked the economy Britain’s economy is teetering on the brink of a deep fiscal hole, created by billions of pounds of unfunded spending – never-ending health promises, a spiralling welfare bill and a triple lock on the state pension, which will cost three times as much as originally
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This week: Peerless – the purge of the hereditary peers For this week’s cover, Charles Moore declares that the hereditary principle in Parliament is dead. Even though he lacks ‘a New Model Army’ to enforce the chamber’s full abolition, Keir Starmer is removing the hereditary peers. In doing so, he creates more room, reduces the
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This week: one year of Labour – the verdict In the magazine this week Tim Shipman declares his verdict on Keir Starmer’s Labour government as we approach the first anniversary of their election victory. One year on, some of Labour’s most notable policies have been completely changed – from the u-turn over winter fuel allowance
All Americans are going to learn what it’s like to live in central New York City – but worse
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End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall What ‘started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men’, argues Gareth Roberts, became ‘a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality’ but ‘anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional’. Yet now Reform-led councils are taking down Pride flags, Pride events are being cancelled
