Columnists

Columns

Katy Balls

Labour vs the unions

The Labour party is preparing for power and the unions are deciding what role they might play. Friend or foe? Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has already incited their ire by refusing to commit to accepting independent pay-review body recommendations. Unite, the second-largest trade union, this week debated cutting ties with Labour and starting its

The BBC is self-destructing

There are still 27 people left in the British Isles – at the time of writing – who are unaware of the name of the BBC presenter who allegedly paid a teenager lots of money to look at pictures of their bottom and so on. Some of them are on the remote windswept island of

Daniel Korski and the lives of others

The news has been coming so thick and fast of late that every week there are dozens of stories we don’t have time to linger over. Major scandals take up all our attention, only to fizzle out or be replaced by new ones. All the while there are little bits of roadkill that are at

Don’t write off Rishi

Were I sure this was about me alone, I’d hardly bother to mention it: but I may be typical of quite a few others. If so, it’s a touch too early for the Tories to abandon hope. Last Saturday I wrote in the Times about Sir Keir Starmer, suggesting he lacks the voice or personal

Heritable guilt is in vogue

I made a poor excuse for a Presbyterian even as a kid. I resented religious indoctrination every precious school-free Sunday. Yet despite my apostatic nature, any number of biblical tenets with broad secular application have become touchstones. Of particular value during our post-Floydian festival of flagellation is Ezekiel 18: ‘The son shall not bear the

The Spectator's Notes

The BBC and a 21st-century media madness

The story of the famous BBC television presenter who, at the time of writing, has still not been named, has all the elements of 21st-century-media madness – something allegedly sexual which may or not involve a person too young for such things; a desperate hue and cry to see who will dare to name the

Any other business

Would a German takeover of BT be so bad?

To the Mansion House, on an unbearably humid evening, for the Lord Mayor’s annual ‘Financial and Professional Services’ dinner. It’s a big night for the City, with the formal unveiling of reforms designed to channel pension money into unlisted equities, creating by 2030 a £50 billion pool of capital for high-growth UK companies that might