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Katy Balls

The importance of Gavin Williamson

When Boris Johnson tried to call a general election in September last year, everyone around him assumed that Jeremy Corbyn would agree. When this didn’t happen, Johnson found himself out of ideas. Dominic Cummings’s plan was to keep calling for an election, keep holding votes and hope the resolve among opposition parties would break. The

Brits aren’t idiotic – but our institutions are

Two headlines from the same news-paper, less than three weeks apart. So, the Guardian on 31 July: ‘The Guardian view on delaying elections: it’s what autocrats do.’ This was in response to a suggestion from the US President that the elections might need to be delayed on account of Covid. And then on 17 August:

The Spectator's Notes

Should Gavin Williamson resign as a career move?

Amid all the puzzlement and recrimination about why the government got into this mess about A-level and GCSE results, one factor has been missed — the effect of Covid-19. I do not mean the obvious fact that none of this would have happened without the disease. I mean the less obvious one that our governmental

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