Features

Political football

Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of nation states competing for glory that appeals to leaders who wish to show off the greatness of their country to the world. Berlin ’36, Moscow ’80, Sochi ’14 — nothing says ‘we’re here, get used

Look down on me at your peril: I’ll eat you alive

Angela Rayner is perhaps the only Labour MP who works with a picture of Theresa May hanging above her desk. It’s there for inspiration, she says, a daily reminder of the general incompetence of the Conservative government and the need for its removal. ‘That picture motivates me, in a strange way,’ she says when we

Continental divides

What do Europeans really think about Brexit? Do they secretly admire our unexpected decision to walk away from all those pesky regulations and sub-committees? Or are our former ‘European friends’ relieved the arrogant, entitled Brits are leaving them alone? The official response of the European political class is one of regret combined with studied indifference

Anthem for groomed youth

This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first world war. A bare week before the conflict concluded in a grey November, another poet, Sassoon’s friend and protégé Wilfred Owen, whose work now epitomises the waste and futility of that struggle, was cut down

Read ’em and weep

Subtitles are taking over the world. It’s increasingly rare these days for a video clip to be free of those irritating little bars along the bottom, rendering before your eyes what your ears are coping with quite easily, thank you very much. That interview you clicked on from Twitter? There are the speaker’s words subtitled

Falling short | 4 January 2018

Hedge funds have already spotted it: Jim Mellon’s latest book, Juvenescence, reviews the new science that will lengthen our lives by 20 years. Through regeneration (stem cell) and repair (DNA) technologies, we’ll soon be living healthily and happily to 110 or more. How soon? Who knows. But the repercussions will be enormous. Major insurance companies

Every picture tells a story

I am in Paris for the Rolling Stones’ No Filter concert, in Ronnie Wood’s dressing room minutes before he is due on stage. Walking through the door, I find myself in what looks like a giant crèche, and every size of child and grandchild bouncing around on a thick rug woven in the pattern of

Are driverless cars the future?

  Philip Hammond’s last Budget focused on driverless cars as an example of the brave new technological world. But should we believe the hype? The Spectator arranged for Christian Wolmar, author of a new book on the subject, to meet Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and The Spectator’s Wiki Man columnist, to talk about

The Establishment of 2018: a guide

  Old establishment New establishment Order of the Garter BBC Sports Personality of the Year Parliament’s Woolsack The Supreme Court The Borgias Sir Nicholas Serota and friends William Rees-Mogg Owen Jones Jacob Bronowski Simon Cowell Ciggy soak and TV cook Fanny Cradock Clean-living (Deliciously) Ella Mills Shirley Williams Lily Allen MCC committee members BBC trustees

Mission impossible? | 13 December 2017

If you work for the Church of England in any capacity, from Archbishop of Canterbury to parish flower-arranger, how do you deal with the distressing statistics that in the past 20 years, average Sunday attendance has plummeted to 780,000 and is going down by a rate of about 20,000 a year? Do you pretend it’s

How to date without getting sued

For the young heterosexual Spectator male, the dating world is beset with perplexities. It was all so different in his father’s era, when making a pass was not seen by women as harassment or assault but as par for the course on the romance-seeking circuit. Lunging for kisses without invitation and even pressing girls against

Fraser Nelson

The Queen of Scots

‘You wouldn’t make good spies, would you,’ chuckles Ruth Davidson as she finds us sitting with our backs to the door in the Scottish Parliament café. She then triumphantly declares that she knows who we’ve been speaking to when preparing for the interview — getting two out of the five names isn’t bad going. After

Order, order | 13 December 2017

Diet nannies will spend Christmas telling us ‘you are what you eat’ but in the House of Commons ‘you are where you sit’. Are you a Tory Whips’ stooge or a Dominic Grieve groupie aching to block Brexit, a braw new blue Scot or an English provincial plodder without hope of advancement? Parliament-watchers discern plenty

Wise old war horse

It is always a delight to drive the country roads of Hampshire to see the man known throughout the army simply as ‘Dwin’ — Field Marshal Lord Bramall. Until quite recently, I was always greeted at the door in person by the last of the Chiefs of the Defence Staff (CDS) who had really seen

The ‘designer baby’ myth

Christmas Day marks the birthday of one of the most gifted human beings ever born. His brilliance was of a supernoval intensity, but he was, by all accounts, very far from pleasant company. I refer to Isaac Newton. Would you like your next child to have the intelligence of a Newton? It may not be

Carola Binney

Christmas in China

If you think capitalism has blinged up Christmas, you should see what the Communists are doing to it. At this time of year, Chinese cities are dressed up like one big Oxford Street, but with lights that put London’s in the shade. Christmas Eve has become the biggest shopping day of the year. At the

Have you heard a convincing ghost story?

  Anthony Horowitz   Novelist   I have never really believed in ghosts, but I actually had a personal experience which I still find hard to explain. I was walking beside the river Kwai in Thailand with my wife. We had been told that a steam train travelled across the famous bridge once a week

Madness on parade

As Kim Jong-un might blow up the world next year, if not this, and people are forever trying to work out what is going on in his country, perhaps it is worth describing a military parade I attended in Pyongyang a few years back. The occasion was the centenary of the birth of the current