The late Jonathan Miller, who lived near Montpellier, was the author of Shock of the News: Confessions of a Troublemaker, Gibson Square.
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Ladies and gentlemen, please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Richard Branson will this week once again blast his Virgin rocket ship into space. Although not really, because at best his sub-orbital ship will only get to the edge of
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Team Putin has this week gained a new and vaguely prominent supporter: Nicolas Sarkozy, the disgraced former President of France. French politicians do not have a reputation for ethical probity but Sarkozy takes the gateau Most sensible people here are on vacation and political news is thin so a pro-Moscow declaration of Sarko, in an
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Barbara Amiel was right that one private jet isn’t enough. One jet is always in the wrong place, or undergoing maintenance, or perhaps these days being attacked by eco-activists. So two is the absolute minimum. Needless to say, the very idea of private jets sends environmentalists insane. Just last week, Just Stop Oil types attacked private jets
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Montpellier A spectre is haunting Europe. In France, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and even Switzerland, the rule of law is being challenged by the rule of gangs. Disaffected young people cut off from society feel nothing but nihilistic contempt for it. Higher temperatures and social media are creating a heated summer. Judging from recent events in
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Bella is a three-year-old dog of indeterminate breed. I found her by the side of the road. She is fearless, affectionate and cute, like many dogs, but her place in history is assured because as far as I can tell, she is the first dog in history to have been cancelled for failure to kowtow
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36 min listen
On the podcast: In his cover piece for the magazine, journalist Jonathan Miller argues that President Macron is pitting himself against the people by refusing to back down from his plans to raise the age of retirement. He is joined by regular Coffee House contributor Gavin Mortimer, to ask whether this could be Macron’s last
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Montpellier Every generation or so, French politics is decided on the streets. The May 1968 unrest in Paris spread worldwide; Jacques Chirac’s welfare reform agenda was ended with the 1995 disturbances. The spirit of revolt is so alive in French society that a special police force exists for such occasions, specialising in crowd control. Now
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Do not take too seriously the demand of Roger Karoutchi, a Républicain who rejoices in the title of deputy speaker of the French Senate, that the mortal remains of Napoleon III, the last Emperor of France, be repatriated from Farnborough, in Hampshire, where they have lain in an immense sarcophagus since 1879, to Metropolitan France itself.
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President Macron has landed in Washington with his fleet of jets to spend the next few days in procession across the capital with an enormous entourage in attendance. ‘It is unclear to many of us why Macron gets Biden’s first state visit,’ says my man in the Washington punditry. ‘Also unclear why Mme and I
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In April 2021 I wrote a piece for The Spectator which became the most-read article I have ever had published here. It began with the words: ‘I bought an electric car and wish I hadn’t.’ It was the story of my ill-judged decision to get a Hyundai Kona Electric. I had hoped to use it
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Europe is lost in space. Ever since the Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin and America landed men on the moon, Europe has proclaimed the ambition to compete on the final frontier. More than half a century later, Europe is unable to compete even with India, as in October it became incapable of launching its own payloads
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To have ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings… and touched the face of God’ is amongst the most ancient dreams of humanity. Never better expressed than in the sonnet of pilot-poet John Gillespie Magee. Yet inevitably, the green blob has discovered a new target for cancelation: the air show.
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Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her raped, strangled and mutilated body was found near her home in a suitcase. The police quickly arrested a female suspect, ‘Dahbia B’, aged 24, whom they initially described as mentally ill. It then emerged that
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Is Emmanuel Macron a friend of the United Kingdom? Liz Truss said over the summer that she didn’t know, which was a reasonable response in the circumstances. This is a president surrounded by close advisors who hold Britain in barely disguised contempt. Other than a brief pretend bromance with Boris Johnson, whom Macron promptly knifed
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French elites are annoyed and perturbed that Italian elections have produced a new prime minister of the right, Giorgia Meloni, whom many within the Paris groupthink bubble consider to be practically a fascist. Not welcome news for Emmanuel Macron, who is up to his neck in problems. His European Renaissance is flailing. Eurozone inflation is
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Did Donald Trump have kompromat on Emmanuel Macron within the secret files seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago Xanadu? One of the files is known to have been titled ‘Info re: President of France’. And Trump is known to have bragged for years that he knew details of Macron’s sex life. Well, possibly. There’s
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The infection of France by le wokisme continues apace. Last year, president Emmanuel Macron vowed to stand against intersectionality only to see his parliamentary majority swept away in the recent National Assembly elections in part by the leftist coalition of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Now a new woketarian front is opening against the mores of traditional France
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21 min listen
Freddy Gray questions Biden’s supposed ‘hot streak’ (00:55), Mary Killen warns that a neighbourly feud is worse than a hosepipe ban (07:19) and Jonathan Miller talks about France’s sexual civil war (11:43).
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39 min listen
In this week’s episode: Who’s to blame for the water shortages? James Forsyth, The Spectator’s political editor and Ciaran Nelson from Anglian Water join us to discuss the UK’s deteriorating water supply. (0.29) Also this week: Is it time for some old-fashioned Tory state-building? Tim Stanley from the Telegraph shares his vision for a Conservative
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Montpellier France is going through a sexual civil war. After the great carnal outburst of the free-loving soixante-huitards, some have reverted to abstinence and prudishness, while others are pushing sexuality to new extremes. The crisis in French sexuality has exposed itself this summer as the clothes have come off. It’s not always a pretty sight,