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The black cab is dying out. Good.

A recent study by the Centre for London thinktank claims that the city’s black cabs could disappear forever, unless something is done to reverse the decline. Thanks to Uber, the ubiquitous satnav which devalues the cabbies’ hard-earned Knowledge of London’s streets, and the Mayor’s anti-motorist measures, there are ever fewer black cabs rumbling around the capital. The number dropped from more than 23,000 in 2014 to just under 14,500 last year – down by a third. Only a hundred licences were handed out last year. At this rate, we are told, they will vanish altogether by 2045. Well, tough. I’ve been a Londoner for half a century and have had

Julie Burchill

The glamour and grit of J.K. Rowling

Seeing that photograph of J.K. Rowling, I reflected gleefully that her journey from mousey, play-nice moderate to unapologetically glam and flamboyantly defiant fox is complete. It’s not often that glamour and righteousness come along in one person – but when it occasionally happens, as her caption said, ‘I love it when a plan comes together.’ Many brave people – mostly women, but joined by a few exceptional men – have sacrificed much for the victory we finally took receipt of in the Supreme Court last week. They have been robbed of reputations, careers, relationships and – almost – sanity, as much of the world’s establishment and institutions went gender-woo gaga

The Vanity Fairytale

The last time I saw Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair for 25 years, he was strolling along Jermyn Street in London. Graydon was a media-land acquaintance from LA and New York where I worked as a journalist in the 1990s. We gossiped affably for a few minutes about mutual British friends before heading back to our different lives (him to a suite at the Connaught, me to a rented flat in Pimlico). It wasn’t until I read his entertaining new memoirs, When the Going Was Good, that I realised quite how very different our lives had become ever since I met him at Vanity Fair’s first Oscar party in

Why I’m joining the Church of England

I blame The Spectator. The chain of events that has led me to be christened and confirmed in the Anglican Church began with an article I wrote for Spectator Life in January. I had spent New Year’s Eve with a friend, a former vicar, who had lost his faith and honourably resigned his living as a result. He claimed that most contemporary clergy no longer believe in the basic tenets of Christian doctrine: the divinity and miracles of Christ; the Virgin birth; the resurrection; life after death; even the very existence of God. I wrote an article bemoaning this, and mourning the decline of the Church as an essential element

Lindt has cheapened itself

Lindt has opened a ‘first of its kind’ flagship store at Piccadilly Circus. Roger Federer was wheeled out to cut the ribbon. It features the UK’s largest Lindt truffle pick ’n’ mix counter (a snip at £6.50/100g), a ‘barista-style’ hot chocolate bar and an ice cream station. There’s even jars of chocolate spread for those who consider Nutella lowbrow. Lindt’s CEO for UK and Ireland, in that PR corporatese that sounds like guff to everyone except his marketing department, said: ‘With 2025 marking Lindt & Sprungli’s 180th anniversary, what better way to celebrate this journey and enduring passion for captivating chocolate lovers worldwide.’ It’s enough to make me crave Quality

Two bets for the Irish Grand National

The weather is going to have a big bearing on the result of the BoyleSports Irish Grand National on Easter Monday. There is plenty of rain forecast between now and the off, and if that prediction is correct, the ground is going to be “soft”, or even “heavy”, by the off. I am loathe to desert Haiti Couleurs after he did this column a favour winning at the Cheltenham Festival: put up at 8-1, Rebecca Curtis’s game gelding won the Princess Royal National Hunt Challenge Cup Novices’ Handicap Chase at 7-2 by a comfortable four and a half lengths. Haiti Couleurs is a magnificent, precise jumper and seems to go

Olivia Potts

Why Easter eggs are getting more expensive

While the US continues to use the price of chicken eggs as a political (American) football, closer to home our concern is with eggs of a sweeter kind. This year has seen chocolate prices rise dramatically. The price of cocoa had remained stable for decades, but in November 2023 it rocketed and has remained high ever since: it is currently almost three times what it was 18 months ago. The sudden increase came about after particularly poor harvests in West Africa, where more than 80 per cent of the world’s cocoa is grown. Extreme weather, in the form of both record-breaking high temperatures and then very heavy rains, have ravaged

Melanie McDonagh

Is it time for Christians to unite over Easter?

So, you thought the date of Easter, which rambles irritatingly round the spring calendar, was settled by the Synod of Whitby, no? That gathering in 664 AD, which established that Northumbria would celebrate Easter in the Roman calendar, used to be one of the events that Every Schoolboy Knows, though probably not now. There were two rival ways of computing Easter, the Celtic and the Roman, and the problem was that King Oswald belonged to the Irish/Iona tradition, and his wife, Eanflaed, kept the Roman calendar. One bit of the court would be in Lent and fasting, vegan-style, and abstaining from sex and fighting, while the other was celebrating Easter,

Woke was invented by angry schoolgirls

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank. I first found out about Tumblr in 2012, when I was in Year 7; a girl in my year group started a blog about her depression and anxiety and linked it from her public

Flawed women are hot

Think how many times you’ve seen the ‘Mona Lisa’. You’ve seen her in movies, in books, in cartoons; you’ve seen her as icon of female beauty, as an emblem of feminine mystique, as a commentary on the male gaze, or an amusing face on which to paint a moustache. But in all that time I bet 94 per cent of you have never noticed: she hasn’t got any eyebrows. It is, however, true – go look again. La Gioconda is eyebrowless. Why? A few ‘Mona Lisa’ truthers claim the brows have gone awol, but the consensus is they were never there. She shaved them off, because that was the quirky

Why I’ve given up on bacon

Having long been a man whose spirits wilted if meat was not the centre of his meal, I have become almost vegetarian. It’s routinely predictable for age to lead us astray from our youthful socialism, but I find my dietary change more difficult to explain. My younger self would view my politics with horror and my diet with incredulity. I remain partial to eating flesh, but the conviction that any plate without it must be a side dish has evaporated. For most of my life, meat and two veg was my credo – and if the two vegetables were ketchup and mustard, then all the better. But these days I