Until recently, the Tories seemed pretty confident about next week’s election. Despite spending three and a half years blundering over Brexit, they were still comfortably ahead of Labour in the polls. In Jeremy Corbyn, they had an opposition leader denounced as a terrorist sympathiser, an unreconstructed communist, a rabid anti-Semite and — in general —
Radicalism does not usually work out well for the Labour party. Michael Foot fought the 1983 general election on a hard-left manifesto famously dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’ and saw his party’s worst result since the first world war. But as next week’s general election approaches, despite running on an even more sweepingly
In the next few days, on 3 and 4 December, Prime Minister Boris Johnson will host a grand international conference of 29 North American and European nations to mark the 70th anniversary of the foundation of Nato — the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which, led by the United States, kept the peace during the fraught
Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are part of a breed of socialists who argue that this time will be different. Socialism never failed, they insist: only the walls, barbed wire and jackboots did. So what they plan for Britain, while radical, is bound to work! True, it’s more radical than anything done in any European
When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for The Who and — we’re pleased to discover — Spectator subscriber, isn’t much like most rock stars. Sober now for three decades, he calls instead on his wife Rachel’s psychic powers.
Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, was right to take the unprecedented action of denouncing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour for endemic anti-Jewish prejudice. James Cleverly, the Conservative chairman, was right to draw attention to polls showing half of British Jews are contemplating emigration if Labour wins. The Jewish Chronicle was right to turn its cover into an
My beloved grandmother died at 90, and my mother at 89, after having Alzheimer’s for 11 years. So I am not rattled by the old; I find their memory lapses challenging rather than frightening. (If I were the full-time carer of an elderly husband, it might be another matter. One woman described it as being
Some of Venice’s problems are well known: the challenge of conserving her famous buildings, the dangers of poorly managed mass tourism — not to mention the fact that the city might well simply drown, a threat made all the more obvious by last week’s floods, the worst in 50 years. Since 1987 billions have been
Is Iceland on the global warming front line? You’d be forgiven for thinking so. We’ve all seen the documentaries where teary-eyed reporters stand perilously close to melting glaciers. In August, a funeral was even held for the first Icelandic glacier ‘lost to climate change’. Foreign dignitaries now hardly visit my country without taking a trip
If you’re driving at dawn or at dusk in the countryside at this time of year, you might well see shady-looking men standing around in a stubble field, their 4x4s parked close by and ‘long’ dogs — greyhound types — straining on the lead beside them. Watch and you’ll see them walk up the field,
Poetry is on a hot streak. Last year, sales in the UK topped £12 million for the first time — a rise of more than 10 per cent for the second year running. According to Parisa Ebrahimi, the poetry editor at Chatto & Windus, one reason for the trend is that poetry is no longer
I have enough self-awareness to know that the public are unlikely to care too much about a spat between a multi-millionaire ‘PR guru’ and what someone called a cabal of washed-up spin doctors. But I also know that millions and millions care about Brexit, and the fight for a Final Say referendum — which is
Ever since the referendum, the two strongest political forces in Britain have been Leave and Remain. Loyalty to political parties has faded, but feelings about the referendum result are almost stronger now than they were on 23 June 2016. For Remainers, these are tense times: for years, there has been the hope of a second
Despite the consistent poll lead and projections of a majority of about 40 seats, the Tories are still nervous. They are nervous because they are uncertain, because their route to victory involves taking seats that the Tories haven’t won in living memory, so no one has a proper sense of how well (or otherwise) it’s
When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise
How should fiscal conservatism be defined? George Osborne inherited a fiscal deficit that was clearly unsustainable. During the panic over the possibility of a global depression and concerned for his electoral prospects, Gordon Brown had massively inflated government spending. Only Alistair Darling prevented more excess. As Chancellor Osborne said, there was no choice but to
Every generation and teen subculture likes to put the boot into baby boomers like me. I’ve been physically attacked by skinheads, verbally assaulted by right-wing intellectuals and mocked by millennials. But I never thought I would be subjected to the derision and verbal lashings of Generation Z. The ‘zoomers’ — that is, people born after
Leaving the auditorium of the Royal Opera House last week after The Sleeping Beauty, I passed a woman taking selfie after selfie in the mirror of the hall. She had snuck out during the curtain call to have the red banquettes to herself. When she should have been applauding Yasmine Naghdi and Francesca Hayward —
This week, a malign foreign actor invaded the British media, spreading disinformation and seeking to meddle in the general election. A malevolent force exploiting our democracy to advance its own interests. That’s right, Hillary Clinton has been in London. She has another book to promote, The Book of Gutsy Women, and she’s again talking about
Tory MPs used to think they could rely on telltale signs while out on the campaign trail — a detached house or a neatly kept lawn — to help them find their target voters. These days, things are more complicated. The Tories’ electoral strategy now rests on persuading voters who have never voted Conservative in