Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
Let me ease you gently into a big and boring-sounding word for a small dishonesty that today corrupts the language of politics. Doubtless we shall be encountering it (though never by name) in Rachel Reeves’s looming Budget. If you step away from levying the new taxes you must then cut the goodies they were to
Old tortoise that I am, my head usually yanks back into my shell when people start talking about artificial intelligence. One reason for this is laziness in the face of the challenge of learning to understand a deep and complex subject. I’m not proud of that. But of another reason I’m unashamed. Societies standing at
My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory chancellors and would give the same advice to governments of any stripe. Wikipedia calls him a prize-winning economist and that’s right, but he has a gadfly instinct and a remorselessly rational intellect that takes him
This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an endless dirt road in the most remote part of the north-western Cape Province in the country of my birth, South Africa. To many eyes this might seem a landscape of utter desolation: hot, dry and
Last week at the Buxton International Festival I joined a big audience for an onstage interview with Anna Reid. She’s a writer who specialises in Eastern European history, was once the Economist magazine’s correspondent in Ukraine, and made her name with a brilliant book, Borderland, which was both a portrait, a history and an appreciation
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: after President Biden’s debate disaster, Freddy Gray profiles the one woman who could persuade him to step down, his wife Jill (1:05); Angus Colwell reports from Israel, where escalation of war seems a very real possibility (9:02); Matthew Parris attempts to reappraise the past 14 years of Conservative government (14:16);
Memorably sweeping statements tripping easily from the tongue have a habit of worming their way into assumptions we make and ending up as the judgment of history. The word ‘appeasement’ rather than the decisions Neville Chamberlain actually took have consigned the name of a defensible statesman to something approaching a term of abuse. ‘Milk snatcher’
The opposite of attraction is repulsion. Political commentary gives too little attention to a party’s (or leader’s) capacity to repel. Attractiveness to some may itself inspire disgust in others, simultaneously lifting support yet imposing a ceiling upon how high. Here’s a quiz. Our last five elections have seen Labour and the Conservatives slugging it out
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery reports on the rise of luxury watch thefts in London (1:18); Melanie McDonagh discusses the collapse of religion in Scotland (5:51); reflecting on the longevity of Diane Abbott and what her selection row means for Labour, Matthew Parris argues that shrewd plans need faultless execution (10:44); Iain MacGregor
‘Tony Blair walks on water.’ Decades ago this statement led a Times photographer and me to the front door of the dismal Hackney North & Stoke Newington Labour party offices. It was 23 April 1997, and a fateful general election loomed. I was my newspaper’s 46-year-old political sketchwriter, and Labour’s local candidate was a 43-year-old
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It’s a bumper edition of The Edition this week. After Rishi Sunak called a surprise – and perhaps misguided – snap election just a couple of hours after our press deadline, we had to frantically come up with a new digital cover. To take us through a breathless day in Westminster and the fallout of
Last week saw a flurry of media reports, of whose headlines one of the worst preceded one of the best reports. ‘Eating too many ultra-processed foods has been linked to a higher risk of early death,’ barked the Telegraph – but went on to explain carefully and fairly a ground-breaking report. Other broadsheets opted for
Can nothing protect us from a plague of plastic tree protectors? They’ve descended on us like locusts, covering our hills, dales and roadsides with a nasty green and black petrochemical swarm. They are not for the most part biodegradable, and those that claim to be will still disintegrate into microplastic debris lodged into our soil.
It’s been a torrid few weeks for anyone who knows anyone who was running in the London Marathon. In have come the emails sent by the sender to himself or herself, and BCC’d no doubt to a very long list of the sender’s friends: ‘I’m running the London Marathon on 21 April, for [insert name
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This week: Matthew Parris questions what’s left to say about the Tories (00:57), Laurie Graham discusses her struggle to see a GP (07:35), Rachel Johnson makes the case against women only clubs (13:38), Laura Gascoigne tells us the truth about Caravaggio’s last painting (19:21) and Angus Colwell reads his notes on wild garlic (28:58). Produced by
Spare a thought for us political commentators. We stare into the void between now and a (presumed) decisive Labour victory in a (presumed) autumn general election, haunted by the need to say something significant on a weekly basis at least. Yet there seems so little left to say. Readers don’t need to be told that
Throughout the short life of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed in the Commons, the ‘faith community’ (a quaint term for that category of human beings who throughout history have been more assiduous than any other in trying to kill each other) have with skill and persistence deployed an argument of great potency. Such is
Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back
For my newspaper I wrote last week about the rocketing numbers (now more than nine million) of our fellow citizens who are ‘economically inactive’ (aged 16-64, unemployed but not seeking work). Within that category, a fast-growing number (nearly three million) are claiming a range of disability or sickness-related benefits, usually a PIP (personal independence payment).
Columnists get unsolicited free copies of new books, it often seems by almost every post. They frequently come as publishers’ ‘uncorrected proofs’, before publication day. Publicists are of course hoping we might mention the book in something we write, and often there’s a friendly note inviting us to provide a quote for the book-cover’s inside
