If Jeb Bush is to have any chance of winning the Republican nomination in 2016, he needs a ‘media moment’. He needs an exchange of arguments or insults with Donald J. Trump in which he indisputably comes out on top. If you listen to Team Bush’s boosters, that moment happened last night. But they would
This Sunday, Spectator Life will be live blogging the Baftas. Lloyd Evans, Melissa Kite, Jasper Rees, Emily Hill and I will be covering the red carpet show on BBC3 at 8.30pm and then, from 9pm, the highlight show on BBC1. We’ll be covering all the highlights, doing our best to sound knowing, funny and insightful
If all goes according to David Cameron’s plan, he’ll have his EU deal by this time next week. But Downing Street still can’t be sure of which Tory heavyweights will be with Cameron come the referendum campaign, and which won’t. Even more than Boris Johnson, Michael Gove is causing Downing Street angst. As I report
Here is a thought for all those Tory MPs calculating their personal advantage in the forthcoming EU referendum: unless the vote is an absolutely overwhelming Remain, the next leader of the Conservative party — whose day is no longer so far off — will come from the Leave camp. This will happen, obviously, if Leave wins, but
For the latest competition you were invited to submit a poem suitable for inclusion in Now We are Rich. There was no obligation to write in the style of A.A. Milne, but most of you did. I enjoyed Barbara Kirby’s neat take on Milne’s ‘A Thought’ : If I were Ted and Ted were me,
Eurosceptics may have only a few days before their ministerial colleagues can join them in campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union. But they’re currently very unhappy at the sort of briefing they’ve been hearing about what might happen to those ministers after the referendum. The official line is that the Prime Minister will not
Our newsagents are about to get a little duller: the Independent is no more – at least, not the print edition. I know that, in this brave new digital world of ours, we’re not supposed to equate the end of print with the death of a title. But it’s certainly the end of an era.
What sad news that the Independent is closing. In September last year, I did an investigation into the strange, celebrity-orientated world of the paper’s young owner, Evgeny Lebedev. What was intriguing was that, although Indie journalists were willing to talk — off the record — about Lebedev’s eccentricity, almost everybody I spoke to was keen to stress that,
The Tories risk playing ‘petty, grubby’ politics by planning to delay the Commons vote on Trident renewal, former head of the Navy Lord West has warned Coffee House. A group of former senior military figures, ex-ministers and MPs are writing to David Cameron and George Osborne next week to urge them to push ahead with
After MPs claimed last month that the Kids Company’s closure was down to a ‘catalogue of failures’, the charity’s founder Camila Batmanghelidjh appeared on Woman’s Hour in an attempt to defend her honour. Alas things soon took a turn for the worse when she was asked why Kids Company had used charity money to send a youngster in
It was a close fight. Both sides at Tuesday night’s debate at IET London seemed to accept that trust in official health guidelines was running low. And, among the 200 or so members of the audience, that was certainly the case: a show of hands requested by the evening’s chair Andrew Neil at the start
When Seumas Milne — the Guardian associate editor and columnist — was hired as Jeremy Corbyn’s director of communications, Labour released a statement in which they made it clear that Milne would remain on ‘indefinite leave’ from the paper while he worked for the party. The arrangement raised eyebrows at the paper and proved to be a point of contention
John Humphrys gave Today show listeners cause to splutter into their cornflakes this morning. The BBC anchor attempted to rap to grime music, following a segment on the Brit awards: Mr S suspects he ought to stick to the day job.
Google ‘Mark Pearson’ and the first thing you will learn about the 51 year-old artist is that he was accused of a sex attack. You can read all about how at Waterloo Station Pearson supposedly sexually assaulted a woman before striking her. Then, if you have time, read on: and you’ll also discover this never happened.
Events in Europe are unfolding rapidly, and we at The Spectator are looking for writers living abroad who would be interested in contributing occasionally to the magazine and our website. So we’re setting up a writing competition: the Timothy Garton Ash prize for European writing. It will go to the best original essay from any country in Europe,
Until August last year, I’d pretty much been in back to back relationships for the previous seven years. The guys I dated varied in height, race, age, style and personality. But one thing linked them together. What? Almost all turned out to be gay. And the few that weren’t would rather sleep in their jeans
What’s best for Europe? Sir: It seems that the British negotiations in Europe have produced little, and even at this late stage they would surely be more effective if the tone were based more on what is best for Europe as a whole (‘Fighting over the crumbs’, 6 February). If we leave, we will desert
On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was having a mixed time in Venice: on the one hand, as Dürer explained, he was making lots of delightful new acquaintances, among them ‘good lute-players’ and also ‘connoisseurs in painting, men of much noble sentiment
Matters of life and death Lord Lucan is now officially presumed dead. How do you have someone declared dead? In England and Wales, under the Presumption of Death Act 2013… — Anyone can apply to have anyone else declared dead, but if the applicant is not a spouse, civil partner, parent, child or sibling of
The world champion is back on form. After winning the overall laurels in last year’s Grand Tour, and taking first prizes on tie break at both London and Qatar in December, Carlsen secured a convincing and outright triumph at the Tata Steel elite tournament in Wijk aan Zee, Holland, last month. His margin of victory