The cabinet meeting this week turned into a surprisingly frank conversation about the National Health Service. Rishi Sunak was asked to give his thoughts on the future of health and social care. He gave a candid assessment of the dangers of being blind to the NHS’s many shortcomings. It’s political blasphemy to criticise the NHS.
David Hockney has just endorsed a series of specially designed beer mats, created by an artist called Mr Bingo, that display a cigarette in an ashtray with the slogan: ‘Bored with wellness.’ He went on to declare he found the very idea of wellness ‘ridiculous’ and ‘too bossy’. Hockney is a verification of that urban
I’m avoiding the village pub. Since Clarkson’s Farm I constantly get asked: ‘Are farm economics really as bad as that?’ They’re worse. For anyone who is not a multimillionaire TV star with vast tracts of prime Cotswold acres, the figures are grimly red. Half of British farmers earn £10,000 or less annually, which is why
Back in the 1960s, a senior Pentagon official would greet incoming recruits to his department with a cheery announcement: ‘Welcome to the world of strategic analysis, where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.’ The recent media excitement over Chinese tests of a hypersonic nuclear weapon which, anonymous Pentagon officials
A high-flying Chinese businessman once told me his secret to happiness: ‘Before a man is 35, women are tools; after 35, women are toys.’ It worked for him. He married an educated woman from a good family who helped him climb the career ladder; but once established in his career, he began seeking more exciting
Éric Zemmour looks down at a copy of The Spectator and cocks his eyebrows at the unflattering cartoon of him on the cover. He decides he doesn’t care. ‘It takes a lot to offend me, you know,’ he says. He then leafs through the magazine making polite and appreciative noises. ‘Ah, Doooglas Murray!’ he exclaims.
When I was young, I dated a man who wasn’t in advertising, but had lots of friends who were. Because I am witty, at some point during dinner — usually when dessert was being laid out with a platinum credit card — one of them would say: ‘Have you ever thought of working in advertising?’
Shukria Abdul Wahid has nine children, two boys and seven girls. All they had to eat yesterday, she says, were two small pieces of stale flatbread — for the whole family. She and her husband went without. They couldn’t even have tea to quieten their own hunger pangs. The gas bottle used to boil water
Given the ability of Covid-19 to make fools out of everyone, it is not entirely fair to single out an opinion piece penned by Christina Pagel and Martin McKee, members of the self-appointed ‘Independent Sage’ committee on 7 October. But it sums up an attitude which was common just seven weeks ago. ‘England, not for
I used to think that you could spot a literary classic by identifying certain salient characteristics: the writing would need literary quality, for example; the book would have had some historical significance; it would have an enduring reputation among scholars and general readers. But each rule threw up exceptions. Darwin’s The Origin of Species is
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Thanks to soaring infection rates in Europe, the war against Covid has entered a new phase, with the prospect of tougher restrictions and compulsory vaccination. Tens of thousands marched in protest through the streets of Vienna and Brussels at the weekend, with many chanting ‘Freedom’ and ‘Down with Dictatorship’. Prominent in their
When thousands of migrants massed on the Polish-Belarusian border, the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki lost no time in identifying who he believed the true culprit to be. Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko was just an ‘executor’, Morawiecki told his parliament. The true ‘enabler’ was ‘President Putin, who shows a determination to carry out the scenario
Joe Biden’s foreign policy has been driven by two objectives: to revive the US-led alliance system that atrophied under Donald Trump and to clear the decks to allow for a new focus on China. This requires America’s allies doing more elsewhere to free the US up for the task of preventing Beijing from achieving regional
The inflation tiger is roaring. Older people can hear it. How about younger ones? Inflation could, after all, be the biggest blow to their finances in their lifetime. They don’t seem hugely concerned. According to polling by GfK, Generation Z is totally ‘chill’ about inflation. Older generations, meanwhile, are scarred by the last inflation spiral
Two years in, there is no doubt the Covid pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But there is also little doubt that the bat carrying the progenitor of the virus lived somewhere else. Central to the mystery of Covid’s origin is how a virus normally found in horseshoe bats in caves in the
Earlier this year I drew a comparison between the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey and the Metropolitan police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick. When appointed, both were hailed as head-and-shoulders the best qualified internal candidate for the job. Yet both have subsequently attracted volleys of flak for everything that has gone wrong on their watch.
On a long-ago Remembrance Sunday, it fell to me, as a new service equerry, to present the Prince of Wales with his wreath to lay at the Cenotaph. The fact that the Cenotaph in question was in Hong Kong — still a British Crown Colony at the time — gives the memory a sepia tint.
What will become of the British monarchy after Elizabeth II? It’s a question that many would prefer not to ask. But the Queen is 95, her husband died earlier this year and she’s pulling out of engagements she’s rarely missed in 69 years on the throne. More honest royal sources confirm the obvious: she’s had
‘Cartoons are like gossamer and one doesn’t dissect gossamer.’ So says Mr Elinoff, the fictional cartoon editor of the New Yorker in an episode of Seinfeld, when trying to explain a cartoon to Elaine. Elaine isn’t satisfied. Mr Elinoff suggests the cartoon is a commentary on contemporary mores, a slice of life or even a
This week, the central committee of the Chinese Communist party will issue a ‘resolution on history’. It will enshrine the official historical narrative of the Xi Jinping era. Only two CCP leaders have issued a resolution of this kind before: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Mao’s resolution set out his role as China’s sole leader;
