Features

Dear Boris: what happens if Trump doesn’t accept defeat?

Dear Prime Minister, You already have quite enough on your plate. So forgive me if I hoist a storm cone over another potential problem. I refer to the US presidential election on 3 November and the possibility of its ending in deadlock and confusion. I was the British ambassador to Washington during the Bush/Gore election

Alex Massie

Can the new Scottish Tory leader thwart Nicola Sturgeon?

As a boy, Douglas Ross, the new leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party, had two interests: cows and football. Growing up on a dairy farm in Moray, he never aspired to hold political office. He enjoyed the solitude of early morning milking. ‘Some people like big tractors, other people like sheep. I was

The rise of the Econian

A study has shown that protestors who took part in Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations last year were overwhelmingly middle-class, highly educated and southern. Well, there’s a surprise. It turns out some 85 per cent of the London protestors had a degree, a third had a postgraduate qualification and two thirds described themselves as middle-class. Three quarters

Should Nicola Sturgeon get a statue?

The Scottish National party and its supporters like the world to see Scottish independence as a final act of decolonisation, Scots throwing off the yoke of English imperialism and, with it, the taint of having been imperialists themselves. Last week Scots academic Sir Geoff Palmer compared it to the process that led to his native

Why do we still struggle to see Xi’s China as a threat?

For years Westminster has been obsessing over Russian interference in Britain. Yet while we fret over oligarchs and social-media bots, the most dangerous assault on our democracy and security goes not just unchallenged, but largely unnoticed. Beijing is richer and more sophisticated than Moscow on every level, and its influence more prevalent across British society.

Tear gas Ted: the mayor manning Portland’s barricades

Portland, Oregon The federal courthouse in downtown Portland, Oregon, has become ground-zero for the nightly orgy of assaults, looting, arson, and public nudity — and, most recently, a surrealistic duel between protestors and federal agents using leaf-blowers to drive back each other’s tear gas — that continues to enliven America’s so-called Rose City in the

Why does no one want to be a cartoonist any more?

‘Nightmare!’ is how The Spectator’s cartoon editor Michael Heath has been describing cartooning for at least 30 years, but it’s truer now than ever. Eighty years ago, cartoonists were so celebrated that waxworks of Low, Strube and Poy were displayed in Madame Tussauds. Today, all that remains of Low is a pair of waxy hands

How Lebanon unravelled

Lebanon will be 100 years old on 1 September. But the joke circulating in Beirut is that the country may not be around for the party. Eye-watering hyper-inflation, not helped by the Covid pandemic, has brought the country to its knees, just as famine and extreme poverty sparked its creation after the end of the

Putin plans to make the West destroy itself

There’s only one person who’ll be genuinely pleased with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, finally revealed on Tuesday, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Russia emerges as an amorphous and formidable enemy — all the more so because the inconclusive and much-redacted report contains next to no substantiated allegations. Instead Russia appears as a phantom,

How Britain can tame China

Chinese leaders love to use the phrase ‘win-win’, but they actually hope to win twice and leave other nations in positions of relative disadvantage. The Chinese Communist party’s behaviour during the Covid-19 crisis is a case in point. In the midst of the global pandemic, the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security

What would it mean to ‘decolonise’ the Classics?

We classicists peering into the past can sometimes be blindsided by the present. 2020 brings the charge that our discipline promotes racism. Last month, America’s Society for Classical Studies announced ‘the complicity of Classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes’. A pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton has

Trick or treat: the pros and cons of being hacked

The phone rang at 9 a.m. on Monday, with an old friend from Italy saying: ‘Of course I’ll do you a favour, my dear, but you don’t say what it is.’ I thought he’d finally lost his marbles (always a possibility with friends my age) but he said I’d just sent him an email asking

Lara King

Home advantage: not going to school was the making of me

At last, school’s out for summer — although this might be a strange concept for children who have not set foot in a classroom for months. If social media is anything to go by, home-schooling is hell. Since March, the internet has been awash with panicked parents sharing mock timetables with slots for ‘mum quits’

Why would anyone want to work from home?

I’ve been having an office romance. Not with anyone in the office — but with the office itself. I’ve been going into the office every day during lockdown and I love everything about it: the bike ride from my Camden flat to work in Fitzrovia; the professional feeling that comes from being in a place