Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. He writes on Substack, at Ross on Why?
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Among the many council election results coming in today, the decision of the voters in Bristol to ditch the post of elected mayor, by a margin of 59 to 41 per cent, could easily get missed. Why does it matter? Because the government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda proposes to establish elected mayoralties all over England –
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Is Bill Gates shorting Tesla? He certainly didn’t deny it in an interview with the Today programme. The suggestion is that he has upset Elon Musk, who has complained that he couldn’t take Gates’s philanthropy on climate change issues seriously if he was betting against the share price of the world’s biggest electric car-maker. But
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Friday morning’s headlines can pretty much already be written: Conservatives suffer heavy losses in local elections; a humbled Boris Johnson addresses the nation saying that lessons have been learned; backbench MPs resume plotting, trying to decide whether to move now or in a few months’ time. Former Tory voters will be feeling pleased with themselves
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In their post-royal careers, Harry and Meghan have learned two lessons in quick succession: firstly, that membership of the royal family opens the door to media deals less well-connected celebrities could only dream about. Secondly, they have learned that even royal fame will not, ultimately, help one of the biggest media organisations in the world
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The biggest long-term threat to the Conservatives is neither partygate nor even the cost of living crisis – but declining rates of home ownership. As Mrs Thatcher understood, when people are able to afford their own home, they become more conservative in outlook. They put down roots in their local area and they gain a
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Is there anything we use in everyday life which was not, at some point on its journey to acceptance, denounced as a menace? Certainly not cars, bicycles, trains and aeroplanes, all of which were accused of various hazards and temptations. To take trains, for example, some confidently predicted that their passengers would suffocate at high
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Thierry Breton, the European Commission for the internal market, lost no time in rattling his sabre at Twitter as soon as it was announced that the company had accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy it. Even though Musk had made no announcement on how he intends to run the company, beyond stating his belief in
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Why does Elon Musk really want to buy Twitter? Is it vanity, political activism, or a shrewd financial move? Musk’s reputation lies in building companies from scratch, yet Twitter is a mature business. It is hard to see why that should excite him anything like transforming the car industry or creating a market for space
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Any Conservative who doubts that Labour’s promise to abolish non-dom status could seriously damage the government needs to look at the fate of Rishi Sunak. So recently the heir apparent to the Tory leadership, Sunak has this week plunged to bottom in a poll of the most popular cabinet members. It comes, of course, just
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If Boris Johnson is forced from office by his own MPs, partygate will only be part of the story. Another huge part of it will be his failure to appreciate the full scale of the cost of living crisis now washing over millions of households – especially his reluctance to address the issue of energy
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We have yet to see the first sample papers for the new GCSE in natural history to be announced by education secretary Nadhim Zahawi this week, but the fact that it has come about after lobbying by Caroline Lucas, Chris Packham and other green activists is a pretty good guide as to what might be
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Remember how David Cameron’s government was going to end Nimbyism by having local communities vote for new housing developments on their doorsteps? That didn’t end so well. Last October, following a shock defeat in the Amersham by-election, the Prime Minister gave up on building more new homes in the shires in favour of reverting to
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Boris Johnson made a big error, alright. But it wasn’t walking into a room where his wife had prepared him a surprise birthday cake. It was in overriding his liberal instincts and imposing highly prescriptive lockdown rules in the first place. If, in March 2020, he had stood up to advisers and said that no,
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How tempting it must be for Rishi Sunak to chuck in his job as Chancellor. ‘My chances of ever becoming PM have plummeted to next to nothing,’ he must be thinking, ‘so why not go off and earn some serious money instead, away from the spotlight?’ I have no insight into the state of the
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The political story for the moment is the cost of living crisis. But by the end of the year could we be talking about a recession instead? We shouldn’t read too much into one year’s economic growth figures, especially given how often they are revised upwards or downwards. But February’s figures, published this morning, have
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Today’s Energy Security Strategy puts energy security at the heart of the debate over energy and environmental policy, where it always should have been. There is little question that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought about a big change to the tone of energy policy, but will today’s announcements really wean us off Russian
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As they say in the music business, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ. It is something that no one knows better than Ed Sheeran, who yesterday won a legal battle over claims that his song Shape of You plagiarised an earlier song, Oh Why by Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue. The judge ruled that
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This week’s rise in National Insurance has caused the government enough trouble, but it faces potentially an even bigger problem next year – when it tries to prise the extra £12 billion raised in NI away from the NHS and use it to fund social care instead. The extra revenue from NI has been earmarked
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It is been a familiar story in recent years: a Budget that sounded reasonably good when delivered, but that unravels in subsequent days. Rishi Sunak’s spring statement was no exception. When he delivered it a fortnight ago, he said he was going to compensate low-earners by raising the primary threshold for National Insurance, bringing it
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When allied military operations go well or badly, we very quickly hear about them. But what about sanctions? It is about time that we started to ask: are they hitting their target, or are some of them slewing off, out of control, straight into civilian targets? Notionally, sanctions have been a success – or at
