Michael Gove is editor of The Spectator.
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At the end of last week, the government suggested there should be resonant names – that evoked the grandeur of past heroes – for seven magnificent New Towns to be built across England. Just as Clement Attlee had envisioned a new Jerusalem after years of Tory neglect, so Labour would once again build the wholly
Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a contest, they are terrified it will lead to Ed Miliband entering the race to stop the Health Secretary – and coming out top. A Miliband premiership would, they worry, be the death of Labour. I’ve
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When Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, Tony Blair was in melancholic mood. The newly elected prime minister turned to his aides Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell and mused: ‘We shouldn’t lose any more territory. Britain needs to be big. Look at a map. Britain is so small.’ Nearly 30 years later,
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For David Cameron, there were two types of politician. Team players. Or tossers. Although he preferred a slightly saltier description for the latter type. For a year I was the member of his team whose principal job was tosser-hunter. As government chief whip between 2014 and 2015 I was responsible for maintaining parliamentary discipline, unity
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The Ancient Greeks believed the past was in front of us and the future behind. Man could look history in the face and learn from it, while the future was unknowable, hidden, the wind whistling at our back. It is in history, its patterns, and what it reveals about human nature, that we have the
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Why did the United Kingdom leave the European Union? Perhaps it might be better to ask why did it ever join. Tom McTague attempts to answer both questions in this panoramic history of British – and continental – politics from 1942 to the present day. It is to the author’s great credit that he approaches
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It is the most civilised way to travel anywhere in the kingdom. Which is why I am so distraught that the King has cancelled it. This week His Majesty has agreed, reluctantly I can be sure, to decommission his royal train. The decision was announced by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, James Chalmers. Mr
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As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of
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Keir Starmer looked blank. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, seemed confused. Only the old Stalinist Seumas Milne seemed really to understand. It was 2019. Labour’s front bench team, and their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s close advisers, were being upbraided – from the left. Why were they putting the interests of international capital ahead of our workers?
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Shabana Mahmood may be the only Labour politician to have persuaded Rishi Sunak to vote for her. The former prime minister was in the year above Mahmood when they both studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, in the 1990s. When she ran for JCR president, Sunak pledged his support. Meeting Mahmood in her ministerial office this
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Clement Attlee, in the words of Winston Churchill, was a modest man with much to be modest about. Labour’s postwar premier has been invoked as a role model by Keir Starmer recently, in the context of Attlee’s support for Nato and robustness on defence. Starmer’s allies also argue that, like Attlee, he is an unshowy
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Airport security was much on my mind last Friday afternoon. I had been due to fly from Heathrow to Zurich that morning, but the substation fire meant a switch to an afternoon departure from London City Airport. City is a business-oriented operation in every respect and one of its many efficient features is a baggage-checking
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Education secretary really is the best job in government, though sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Lives can be transformed – hopefully for the better – as a direct consequence of the decisions you make. But you are also firmly in the firing line. There’s no other area of public policy in which everyone is
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Sir Roger Scruton may not be the Prime Minister’s favourite author. Apparently Keir Starmer prefers Victoria Hislop. But as he prepares to travel to Washington next week, the PM could scarcely spend his time more wisely than burying his nose in The Uses of Pessimism – and the Dangers of False Hope, one of Scruton’s
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Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, does not immediately display the demeanour of a disruptor. He speaks softly, picks his phrases with care, and cultivates an unassuming image. But underneath the sober blue suit are the scars of a streetfighter. As a young man, McSweeney came to political maturity fighting the hard left in
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It will probably only damn me further in the eyes of many, but when I was a government minister I often used to ask Labour predecessors for advice. Tony Blair especially. He may have felt it was a forlorn exercise ever offering me his wisdom, especially when I went on to back Brexit, support parliament’s
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Twin studies are one of the most useful exercises in scientific inquiry. Take two biologically identical children who are brought up in different environments, and study their progress through life. Pioneered by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, they can demonstrate how much of our destiny is dictated by nature or nurture. This government
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Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about the psychological significance of Bible stories. He speaks to The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove about supernatural relationships, the folly of net zero and what’s next for Europe. ‘A lot of the atheist argument misses the
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Readers need to be able to trust The Spectator. Every fact you read in the magazine must be true. And every opinion uncensored. On 21 May this year we published an article by the brilliant writer Gareth Roberts headlined ‘The sad truth about “saint” Nicola Sturgeon’. Gareth was reporting on the former Scottish first minister’s appearance
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Shortly after Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley, he invited me to lunch at The Spectator. It was, he said, to be an intimate affair. The magazine’s then proprietor, Conrad Black, had made it known that he expected Boris to stand down as editor now that he was embarking on a
