Features

What does Totnes think of Sarah Wollaston, its defecting MP?

‘Totnes? It’s hippie central.’ A friend warned me what to expect when I visited the affluent, left-leaning town in south-east Devon to assess public opinion about the local MP, Dr Sarah Wollaston. In March she left the Tories to join Change UK and she now sits as a Liberal Democrat. I equipped myself with a

What I’ve learned from five months sleeping on the streets

Over the years, I have spent around five months sleeping rough on the streets of London, Birmingham and New York, making undercover TV programmes. Matthew, who works in my Westminster office, spent last summer involuntarily homeless after he was cheated by his business partner. I suspect we are the only people within the Palace of

How verbal and physical abuse drove me out of the police

The past decade has not been kind to those we entrust, in the words of Sir Robert Peel, ‘to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen’. Since 2010, police numbers have fallen by more than 20,000, with too many choosing to leave the force owing to physical and emotional assaults in

Laura Freeman

How woke is your home?

Quick! Roll up the Persian carpet. Hide the willow-pattern service. Sweep the wok and chopsticks under the Berber rug. Mr and Mx Virtue-Signaller from number 12 are on their way over for tea. How woke is your house? If your impeccably enlightened neighbour ran a finger along the mantelpiece, would you pass the cultural-appropriation test?

We need the monarchy more than ever

One part of our unwritten constitution has been functioning perfectly during the Brexit upheaval: the monarchy. Unhappy behaviour by some younger royals reminds us how jealously the institution must be protected. It will also be essential to guard the monarchy’s impartial ‘light above politics’ (Roger Scruton’s happy phrase) with more care than ever in the

How did my children become more middle class than me?

In a café in Norfolk last week, my seven-year-old son uttered words that mortified me. No, he didn’t comment loudly on someone’s weight, or ask why the lady next to us had a moustache. It was worse than that. Asked by a kindly man at the next table if he was enjoying his bacon sandwich,

War of words | 15 August 2019

Italy is preparing to go back to the polls and this time Matteo Salvini looks set to return as the undisputed king of Italian politics. His Lega party (formerly the Northern League) has split with its coalition partner, the Five Star movement. For Salvini, the appeal of a general election is obvious: Five Star’s popularity

India’s land grab

Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator until cruelly sacked to make way for Boris Johnson, never wasted ideas. He liked to reuse them. Often. Every summer he would write the same column attacking the silly season. August, Mr Johnson maintained, was not silly at all. The first world war started in August. The Nazi-Soviet pact

Time warp

How we love bringing history into our political debates. It may seem strange in a country where so little history is taught at school, but perhaps that makes it easier. We grab hold of vague notions of the past for a Punch-and-Judy brawl. There could hardly be a better example of this than Brexit, in

For the love of dog

The picture on the front of the Animal Blessing Service programme featured a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a goldfish, a cockatoo, a hamster, a snake and a ferret. In the event, the congregation was confined to people and dogs, including my two cockers. We sat in a circle in the shady courtyard of St

The towns making waves

The real secret behind Margate’s revival isn’t so much the restored Dreamland amusement park, but the trains. A decade ago, it gained high-speed, InterCity-like trains to St Pancras, putting it within 90 minutes of London. Before the trains get to Margate they stop in Whitstable, which I remember as a bit of a hole in

Rod Liddle

Home and away | 8 August 2019

The epiphany came when I was standing in the oxymoron of a speedy boarding queue at Gatwick, waiting to have my ticket checked by Eva Braun, mewling middle-class brats squabbling beneath my feet, all of us en route to somewhere in the EU which is both searingly hot and supported by British taxpayer subsidies (for

Bill of health

It would be daft for someone to offer you £1.8 billion and you turn it down. That sort of money isn’t to be sniffed at. This is how much Boris Johnson announced he would give to the NHS as an extra funding boost. And I don’t want to seem churlish or ungrateful — after all,

Spectator writers on the UK’s best beaches

Tom Holland Trevone, Cornwall   Pretty much every summer, my family and my cousins head for a farm in north Cornwall, strategically situated for visits to our favourite beach: Trevone. A beautiful cove with breakers, cliffs and an unobtrusive shop, its chief appeal is the opportunity it provides for building colossal sandcastles. Each year, our