Joanna Rossiter is a freelance journalist and author of The Sea Change (Penguin)
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The government may have resigned itself to keeping schools closed for the majority of pupils until September but there’s a simple solution to the classroom capacity problem sitting at the heart of every town and village in Britain. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has been busy speaking out about everything from future government austerity
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It’s heartening to hear that while it’s curtains for the economy, our domestic lives are on the up. In Wuhan there was a spike in divorce rates, and in Japan, wives have been sending their husbands away to hostels. But here in Britain, there’s love in lockdown. Sales of engagement rings have risen significantly since
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After coming under fire for its timid reporting of the Telford and Oxford grooming scandals, the BBC seems to have taken stock: this week, it successfully exposed the grooming of looked-after teenagers living on their own. According to Newsnight thousands of vulnerable young people are being placed in unregistered, independent accommodation from the age of
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Boris Johnson had barely finished announcing the phased reopening of primary schools on Sunday night when my phone started buzzing with messages from concerned parents in our Year 1 WhatsApp group. The consensus was clear: to send your child back in June would be irresponsible parenting. Several said they refused to let their child be
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All you carefree millennials sans famille – spare a thought for parents currently in lockdown. While twenty-somethings may be secretly rubbing their hands with glee at the chance to catch up on their books bucket list or work their way through Netflix over the next three months, there is no such joy for parents. The
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A strange thing happened as coronavirus reached Europe’s shores. Concepts like ‘net zero’ and ‘climate crisis’ which had previously dominated the agenda vanished overnight. While the vast majority of people have accepted this change of tack in the fight against the virus, there have been some environmentalists who seem to be put out at seeing
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Institutional racism is rife at Cambridge university – that was the assumption behind the university’s ‘reverse-mentoring’ scheme which was launched to much fanfare last summer. The idea was simple enough: senior academics who were white would be educated about racism by their BAME colleagues. But the news that the scheme may be scrapped after its
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In the new episode of That’s Life, comedian Geoff Norcott talks to Spectator Life’s satirical writers Andy Shaw and Benedict Spence about the words, people and events that have shaped the recent news agenda. Geoff discusses the future of ‘woke-ism’, Emma Watson’s assertion that she is self-partnered and why from now on he’s going to
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‘You guys should get outside London and go to talk to people who are not rich remainers,’ Dominic Cummings declared in September to journalists expressing scepticism about Brexit. There’s been a strong sense, ever since Boris Johnson took office, that the Prime Minister and his advisors wanted to do things differently. Their plan it seemed
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In the new That’s Life podcast, comedian Simon Evans joins journalist Benedict Spence and Spectator Life contributor Andy Shaw to give you a sideways look at the events, people, words and ideas that shape the news agenda. Andy and Benedict talk to Simon about cancel culture, Boris’s hospital debacle and why Guy Verhofstadt is his
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‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?’ Jane Eyre asks Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel. What is true of Brontë’s heroine is equally true of her Yorkshire home: plain in every sense of the word and yet perennially mysterious. The muted colour palette
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Greta Thunberg’s yacht, the Malizia II, has delivered her to the UN climate conference in New York – two weeks after she first set sail from Europe. The transatlantic trip was a masterstroke in PR, with every major media outlet broadcasting updates on the journey and detailing the hardships Thunberg has endured – no toilet, no
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Prince Harry’s revelation that he intends to only have two children for the sake of the planet is woke politics at its worst. As his critics have readily pointed out, if he truly believes that having fewer children will save the planet then why not stop at one child? As much as Harry might like
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There is fresh hope for Venezuelans this week as Norway seeks to broker a new round of talks between the Maduro regime and Juan Guaido’s opposition party. The hope is that if Maduro is offered a way to end his rule without international repercussions or imprisonment, he may be prepared to stand down. Norway has
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Who on earth would want to be an academic in 2019? This is the question anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity must now be asking themselves. When a PhD student left Cambridge University last week on the grounds that a non-white lecturer ‘had repeatedly read out the n-word during class discussions’, I harboured a
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Donald Trump said in his interview with Good Morning Britain this morning that he ‘totally listened’ to Prince Charles’s views on climate change. It’s quite a feat for the future king to curry favour with the president and bend his ear on the issues most dear to him. But to anyone watching Trump’s State Visit unfold over
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That Martin Luther King was unfaithful to his wife has long been public knowledge. But new revelations from King’s biographer David Garrow in the Times suggest that King’s sexual behaviour towards women is far more compromising than previously thought. According to Garrow, the FBI bugged King’s Washington hotel room and recorded him boasting about his sexual
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As any parent of young children will tell you, toddler groups exist as much for the adults as for the kids, and my local meet-up is no exception. We knock back coffee and compete to see who has had the least sleep while the children run riot on trikes. The small talk always winds its
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‘You can get away from everything,’ said Harold Wilson of the Isles of Scilly, ‘not only in distance but also in time’. During recess, Wilson would frequently catch the sleeper from Paddington to Penzance before making the notoriously choppy crossing to Britain’s most westerly archipelago. There he would unwind in his cottage on St Mary’s
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When young Venezuelan revolutionary Juan Guaido won the backing of Western leaders back in January, the political winds seemed to be blowing in his favour. Every politician from the White House to Brussels was lining up to endorse him as he declared the Maduro regime to be illegitimate. He was subsequently supported by the Venezuelan
