William Atkinson is The Spectator's assistant content editor
‘It won’t last,’ my schoolfriend Albert told me, as we staggered down Embankment one summer evening in 2018, a few pints into his birthday pub crawl. I wasn’t sure as to what he was referring. The evening twilight? His youthful good looks? Our ability to walk in a straight line? He expanded: ‘Harry and Meghan.
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I have little interest in what Keir Starmer will say in the Commons later today. I’ve only been in political journalism for four years, and I’m already onto the fall of my fourth prime minister. The death drawls of a premiership have a familiar and tedious air; whatever Starmer says about l’affaire Mandelson, the original
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I don’t much miss being a teacher. A pathological dislike of teenage boys, a congenital inability to remember historical facts and an unwillingness to spend my spare moments lesson-planning rather than go to the pub meant that a brief career diversion to pay off my overdraft did not become a lifelong vocation. But there is
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Has Britain become a freeloader’s paradise, asks the Spectator’s economics editor Michael Simmons in our cover piece this week. Michael analyses ‘the benefits of benefits’, at a time when Britain’s welfare bill is burgeoning and most households are struggling with cost of living. For example, while a family of four can expect to pay £111
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For a country of ten million people that spent most of the 20th century occupied and impoverished, Hungary today is thriving. This, in the eyes of his supporters, is down to the 16-year rule of Viktor Orban. Hungary’s Prime Minister has, to use his phrasing, aimed to create an ‘illiberal democracy’. He has reformed the
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The recent ‘school wars’ farrago was an act of madness – or, more accurately, Madness. ‘All the kids have gone away/Gone to fight with next door’s school/Every term that is the rule’. So the Camden ska band sang on ‘Baggy Trousers’, their 1980 classic about their school days. Schoolchildren organising to duff up their contemporaries is not new; social media
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Is Shabana Mahmood ‘one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had’? Tory MP Edward Leigh thinks so. The Father of the House lavished praise on the Home Secretary in the Commons yesterday after Mahmood announced a ban on the annual al-Quds Day march. He isn’t the only right-winger to fall for Mahmood.
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Fresh from chastising Labour for not involving Britain more deeply in another American misadventure in the Middle East, Kemi Badenoch is reportedly planning a ‘root and branch’ shadow cabinet reshuffle. Those most at risk are said to be her top team of Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel and Shadow Home Secretary
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Over the last week, I have been stalking Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party has been in Westminster to renew the bonds of Anglospheric amity; consequently, I had the pleasure of watching him speak on two successive evenings. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Jenrick Until a
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Being a mildly Celtophobic Tory from Metro-Land, I’m an unlikely Welsh nationalist. Aside from once sharing a Christmas dinner with Cerys Matthews, I’ve few ties to the Principality. Nonetheless, last week I found myself at the conference of Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales. If Wales did become independent, it would be a tragic
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If Kemi Badenoch makes a speech during a war with Iran, does anyone hear it? Following the Gorton and Denton by-election – but seemingly before President Trump had decided to set fire to the Middle East – the Conservative leader had intuited that it was time to outline her party’s new approach to our fraught
Iloved my moustache. Unfortunately, my fondness for it seemed inversely proportionate to its popularity among my peers. After much unsolicited feedback from friends (‘You look like a young Peter Mandelson’) and online strangers (‘You look like a 1970s porn star’), I put a poll on my Instagram asking my followers whether or not I should
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‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Keir Starmer seems to have mirrored Juliet after deciding to move on Chris Wormald on as Cabinet Secretary. Yet the young Capulet was asking not where her lover was, but why he must be Romeo – a Montague. ‘Deny they father and refuse they name’, she implored, so that the pair could be together. With
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Last weekend, I sat in my kitchen to build and paint an Airfix model. I’d experimented before with mindful colouring and adult Lego, but this was my first try at the solo bachelor activity par excellence. After a few hours of tugging, sticking and dabbing, I was quite impressed with my little Tiger 1 tank.
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Predictions ageing poorly is an occupational hazard for journalists and commentators. But few have gone as sour as those made by Roger Cooper in this magazine, in February 1979, days after the last Shah of Iran had fled. In a piece titled ‘Is Khomeini the leader for Iran?’, Cooper speculated that ‘the prospect… of an
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As per J. M. Barrie, one either believes in fairies, or they don’t. I take a similar approach to Rory Stewart. To his legions of Rest is Politics listeners, the ex-Tory MP, bedroom-squatter, and Afghanistan-botherer is a sage – as right-wing a voice as their timid and tiny middle-class minds can handle, successfully neutralised by
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Justin Marozzi analyses what Trump’s coup in Venezuela means for Iran; Lisa Haseldine asks why Britain isn’t expanding its military capabilities, as European allies do so; William Atkinson argues that the MET’s attack on freemasonry is unjustified; and, Toby Young explains why the chickenpox vaccine is a positive health measure.
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It’s a personal delight that on 29 September 1829, the first day of Robert Peel’s new force, the first warrant number issued by the Metropolitan Police was to a William Atkinson. I’m less happy that officer number one was sacked after just four hours on duty, for being drunk. As the Met approaches its 200th
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Regular listeners will remember back in May we recorded a podcast debating whether Kemi Badenoch was the right fit for Tory leader. At that point in time the Conservatives were falling in the polls and she was facing allegations of laziness and a lack of a political vision. Spool forward to the end of the
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Much like Alan Partridge, Kemi Badenoch hopes to have bounced back. After an unsure start to her first year as Tory leader – hopeless interviews and PMQs showings, and a local election shellacking – she now seems to be on a roll. Her two recent set piece speeches at conference and responding to the Budget
