Columnists

Columns

James Delingpole

Will no one ever take on the Green Blob?

Gosh it hurts when your little corner of paradise is destroyed by a few idiots’ ignorance and greed. This is what has just happened to one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, the magically beautiful and remarkably untouristed stretch of the Wye Valley round and about Builth Wells. Every summer we used to take a holiday let

Why sex is welcome in Derby Cathedral, but the Holy Bible isn’t

Nic Roeg’s art-house thriller from 1973 Don’t Look Now was most famous, or infamous, for its lengthy and explicit sex scene. I think it’s fair to say that the lugubrious (and in 1973 near ubiquitous) Donald Sutherland gave Julie Christie a very thorough seeing-to, involving the first act of cunnilingus in a mainstream movie. Even

What if she loses?

We are heading into uncharted waters. The great hope of No. 10 and cabinet loyalists was that once Theresa May’s Brexit plan was an international agreement, the debate would change. It wouldn’t just be the Prime Minister’s plan, but a deal between Britain and 27 other countries. They thought that this would imbue it with

I admit it – I’m a smartphone addict

I am often extremely dismissive of people immersed in their smartphones. I tut at the mole-ish pedestrians who step out into the traffic, faces uplit and shocked when a car goes by. Last week, in a toddler playgroup, I actually hissed at some poor father. We were in the middle of ‘The Grand Old Duke

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 November 2018

Theresa May, William Hague and others say that the EU will not want to trap Britain in the backstop because it is not in its interest. It will want to move to a free-trade agreement for its own benefit. If that is so, why is the backstop the thing above all others upon which the

Any other business

How a betting business saved Stoke-on-Trent

I wrote last week of my fear that we’ll never ‘take back control of our fish’, as Brexiteers ardently wish, because the rights of UK fishermen — whose diminished industry contributes less than half a per cent of GDP — will be too easy to give away in the next negotiating phase. Sure enough, last