Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
From our UK edition
Why is Christianity so unhelpful on the very ethical dilemma that most concerns ordinary people in our everyday lives? Why does Jesus have nothing helpful to say about the ranking of obligations? Last weekend, digging a huge hole in the ground to receive a gargantuan granite trough I’ve just bought, I was about four feet
From our UK edition
Gweru on the central Highveld of Zimbabwe used to be called Gwelo when I was there as a boy but seemed otherwise largely unchanged when we passed through a couple of weeks ago. Sleepy, laid-back: a petrol station, a few stores and a scattering of offices and little townships of bungalows on the main tarred
From our UK edition
Last Saturday I wrote for my newspaper a column whose drift was that it was time for the sane majority of the Conservative party to repel those elements on the Tory right who plainly wish the Prime Minister and the coalition ill, and who would never be satisfied with his stance on Europe, however much
From our UK edition
What’s to be done about the online comments sections in daily newspapers? These (for those estimable Spectator readers who have yet to succumb to tablets, iPhones and computer screens) are the spaces that the online versions of newspapers and magazines provide beneath the articles they publish, for readers to offer (or ‘post’) thoughts of their
From our UK edition
In post when the curtain came down on Britain’s African empire, there survives today a generation of colonial officers whose numbers are dwindling fast. Many were fired by an idealism already out of fashion when they chose their career. Most came to love their adopted continent. Some can write. Two of these are Jonathan Lawley
From our UK edition
Forgive me, but let’s go straight in. Readers of a sensitive disposition look away, but there’s a serious reason for the exercise I suggest that those with access to Google might like to attempt. There’s a thing called the AdWords Keyword Tool. You can find it at adwords.google.co.uk/-keywordtool. It is provided by Google for the
From our UK edition
It must be a couple of years since, spooked by the banking crisis and walking past the Savoy hotel on the Strand, I remembered a clever but impetuous Polish friend’s advice to buy bullion — silver or gold — and his mention that there was a respectable dealer in the Savoy arcade. And as I
From our UK edition
Just before Easter, writing for the Times, I talked to 30 of the 40 Conservative MPs with the most marginal constituencies. My aim was to get a sense of how they think their party should position itself. I explored their opinions on a range of vexed policy areas. Finally I asked whether David Cameron’s leadership
From our UK edition
Chesterfield is a medium-sized town just off the M1, near what were once the coalfields of north-eastern Derbyshire. Not without history (and a lovely old market square) and not without character (a church with a splendidly warped spire, positively Van Goghian, is its most famous feature), the town is nevertheless an unassuming, formerly industrial north
From our UK edition
Were you to try to identify the sort of journalist least likely to feel sympathy for Keith O’Brien, I suppose you’d place near the top of your list a columnist who was (a) an atheist, (b) especially allergic to the totalitarian mumbo-jumbo of the Roman Catholic church, (c) gay, and (d) a strong supporter of
From our UK edition
Showering the other day, I noticed a visitor had left his shampoo behind. Going through the familiar ablutions I stared glassily, half-focused on the immediate foreground, in the way you do when your activity requires some but not all of your attention. Vosene. The trade name started running through my mind. I repeated it to
From our UK edition
The Parque Mátires ’71 is pleasant, nothing special, hardly distinguishable from dozens of other little parks in Old Havana. Fairly safe, reasonably clean, shabby, some tatty greenery and a few trees, a bird-limed bronze statue to a forgotten hero, and rickety park benches around a stone-paved terrace. I was perched on the more stable slats
From our UK edition
On the patio of my hotel in Havana… No, begin again. It isn’t really a hotel, it’s a Casa Particular — someone’s home. Delia’s home: a modest ground-floor apartment in an externally shabby old stone tenement on a neglected side street near the waterfront of Old Havana. Casas Particulares are a tropical adaptation of the B&B:
From our UK edition
The end of an old year cast me into a portentous frame of mind as I descended a couple of thousand feet down an ancient path through forest, brush and briar to the Pantà de Susqueda: an immense, deep lake created by a dam, 400 feet high, across the gorge of the River Ter in
From our UK edition
‘The next time we want to import a horse to Russia,’ wrote Laura Brady, Second Secretary in our Moscow embassy, ‘it will be a doddle.’ I quote her story in an anthology of diplomatic writing, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, that the BBC’s Andrew Bryson and I have collected for the new book. Miss Brady was
From our UK edition
‘“You will be haunted,” resumed the Ghost, “by Three Spirits, without their visits you cannot hope to shun the path I tread…”’ ‘“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” said the Apparition. “Come with me,” and Scrooge followed.’ The scene was as familiar to Ebenezer Scrooge as to any Spectator reader. Returning to the past,
From our UK edition
Others have already swelled a chorus of rage against Rotherham -council for removing three foster children from the couple caring for them, on the grounds that the couple were members of Ukip; and the rage is justified. But few sane people will need persuading that the -council’s judgment was wrong, and I don’t intend to
From our UK edition
A day or so after writing a column, when the horse has certainly bolted, you read it in print. Now you are hit by l’esprit d’escalier. Ideas you left out stare you in the face. Friends call with arguments you never thought to include — obvious, once mentioned — and again you kick yourself. My
From our UK edition
Let me guess most readers’ reaction to news that Alex Salmond has arm-twisted Westminster into allowing 16- to 18-year-olds in Scotland to vote in the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence. I bet the reaction resembled mine. Annoyance. The very thought! As to the assurance that this concession will be temporary, and pressure will not build
From our UK edition
Few put a political argument better than Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, and his latest column in the Times is no exception. Policies portrayed as priorities of the Tory right, he said, are also shared by the majority of the public. Some 70 per cent of Britons want a referendum on Europe and 80
