At Christmas a friend from CNN sent me the story of a US officer on a European train. Searching for a seat, he found one occupied by a miniature poodle and asked its French female owner if she would put the dog on her lap. She not only refused but also remarked loudly as he
Tehran does not welcome pedestrians. It is eight o’clock on a July evening and the sun has plunged out of the air with alarming speed; the sky is the colour of wine, and the air is thick with the scent of heat and petrol. I have long forgotten where we are going. Dust-coloured buildings spill
This is going to be the year I do my Flash Gordon routine and launch a campaign to save the universe from Ming the Merciless. By which I mean some sort of alliance between the Conservatives and Ukip to prevent Miliband becoming the next prime minister. When I first started thinking about this, my conclusion
The date of this issue of The Spectator is 4 January 2014, which also happens to be my 74th birthday. There is nothing very special about being 74 except that it is the last year in which one can be described as being in one’s ‘early seventies’; for it is the last year in which
This is the season of goodwill when one should think about people less fortunate than oneself and wish them better luck. It’s easy to forget to do this when one is having a wonderful time with one’s family and friends, playing charades, getting drunk, and so on. But it would be heartless not to spare
You don’t realise how much your pleasures mean until you are denied them. It was wonderful to get back on a racecourse for Hennessy Day at Newbury even if my two sticks proved an encouragement to every acquaintance to engage at length about the hip replacements endured by their nearest and dearest. Even worse was
When I first suggested to my closest male friends that we have a boys’ Christmas lunch, it didn’t occur to me that this would turn into an annual institution. We saw each other three nights a week as it was, so this was just another excuse to go out and get drunk. But a one-off
John Thompson, who died last week at the age of 93, could have been editor of The Spectator if he had wanted. He was offered the job in 1970 by its then proprietor, Harry Creighton, but with typically good judgment he declined. Creighton, a jovial, rumbustious manufacturer of machine tools, fired two editors, Nigel Lawson
In one of those old Mae West films a girl admires her friend’s jewellery: ‘Goodness, what lovely pearls,’ only to meet the reply, ‘Goodness, my dear, had nothing to do with them.’ The same was true of the sealskin fur coat and silk stockings worn by the gorgeous Micheline Lugeon, a would-be beautician from Switzerland
I’ve just had a massive row with Caroline about Christmas cards. We usually send about 120 and this year we’ve each ordered them from a different source — Caroline from the children’s primary in Shepherd’s Bush and me from the West London Free School. Our fight was about which batch to keep. Caroline has sentiment
Back home from a week in Italy, I almost feel that I haven’t left. For I go almost at once to Milton Keynes to see Donizetti’s quintessentially Italian opera, L’elisir d’amore. It is a superb, joyous production by the Glyndebourne Tour company, one of which any great international opera house would have been proud. And
Damn and blast. I was quite keen on becoming the Conservative candidate for Hammersmith, but the timing isn’t going to work. My hope was that the local association would delay advertising for a candidate until next year, at which point I would have thrown my hat into the ring. Unfortunately, they’re keen to get someone
It’s filthy wet weather in Tuscany, so I’m lying on my bed in the afternoon reading through the Italian newspapers. They are full of stuff about Pope Francis — how his humility, his simplicity, and his reforming zeal are breathing new life into the Roman Catholic Church. They say that the long decline in church
Women truly are different. Recovering in a spare bedroom from the wonders of a hip replacement (don’t ever jump on industrial-sized wheelie bins to compress the contents), I passed Mrs Oakley’s bedroom at 3 a.m. to find her light on. What was wrong? ‘I can’t get to sleep,’ she complained, ‘because I know there’s something
The think tank Policy Exchange has just published an excellent report on Britain’s urban green spaces called ‘Park Land’. The report’s author, Katherine Drayson, argues that we need to take better care of our parks and public gardens, particularly in the north-east, where local authority expenditure on open spaces has been cut by more than
I love The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. On the face of it, they’re a great advertisement for just how broadminded and sophisticated the editors of this magazine are. We’re able to rise above the political fray and generously acknowledge MPs on both sides of the House, regardless of which party they belong to.
The police have been complaining a lot lately about frivolous calls to the emergency services. All over the country people in their thousands are calling 999 for the weirdest or silliest reasons. In Gloucestershire one man called to say that his wife was a werewolf, and another that he was being poisoned by a satellite
I was in Nottingham last Sunday to address university students about journalism. The occasion was a one-day ‘media conference’ organised by the Nottingham University students’ magazine, Impact, for the purpose of encouraging students to embark on journalistic careers. The conference, it promised, would give them a ‘kick start’ in this direction. I hadn’t realised until
On a grey October morning, along a Berkshire lane leading up to the Ridgeway amid fields stuffed with pheasant, 30 of us joined a mini-pilgrimage. The former champion jockeys Graham Thorner and Stan Mellor had made it along with Marcus Armytage, who won the Grand National on Mr Frisk. There, too, were a cluster of
Why is local politics so much dirtier than national politics? Is it because the players are fighting over relatively trivial matters, like Oxbridge dons competing for college posts? As Henry Kissinger said, ‘University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.’ Or is it because local politicians are less likely to be exposed