I write before knowing the results of the American presidential election, but I am still wondering whether Barack Obama might have done better if he hadn’t given up smoking. That may sound silly when everyone knows that America is a country full of anti-smoking fanatics where even hardened criminals migrate humbly from the bars to
My friend Cosmo Landesman and I recently thought of an idea for a toilet book over lunch. Called ‘You Know You’re Getting Old When…’, it would be a compendium of all those moments when you suddenly get a whiff of mortality. By the end of the meal, the table was littered with paper napkins, all
Luminaries interviewed in the Racing Post are often asked to name four people they would most like to have dinner with. Lucky enough to enjoy a pub lunch last week with three who would certainly qualify for my dinner-table four — Henrietta Knight, Terry Biddlecombe and Mick Channon — I felt something of a fraud
Edward Heath may have been one of the most unsuccessful prime ministers in British history, having presided during his four-year term (1970–1974) over shortages, power cuts, a three-day week and hyperinflation, with nothing much to boast about except getting Britain into the European Common Market (admittedly an historic achievement); but this did not prevent him
I’m currently in Marrakech for half-term and was planning on writing a column about how disappointed my children are by this cosmopolitan city. To them, it’s not exotic at all. On the contrary, it’s indistinguishable from large swaths of west London. My four-year-old woke up in the taxi taking us from the airport to our
One of the ways by which I pay for the maintenance of my two Inigo Jones pavilions at Stoke Park in Northamptonshire is to let one of them out for wedding receptions. These buildings, originally a chapel and a library, were once attached by colonnades to a large country house; but this burnt down in
After Brad Wiggins’s Tour de France victory, Mo Farah’s Olympics successes and Andy Murray’s first Grand Slam title, any other result would have been unthinkable, so praise the Lord that Frankel did win Ascot’s Champion Stakes. On unsuitably soft ground and after gifting the others lengths at the start, the unbeaten star of world racing
At a lunch party last Sunday with a group of journalists, the conversation inevitably turned to class and how this ancient English obsession has come to dominate the political news agenda. It’s now such a hot topic that the moment a member of the government does anything that can be construed as remotely snobbish —
I have just got back from a few days in Provence, staying with a friend in her delightful house in a hilltop village north of Avignon, where in-between eating and drinking, visiting markets, and going for walks in the autumn sun, I read Peter Paterson’s life of Lord George-Brown, who was Harold Wilson’s mercurial foreign
There was quite an important news story buried beneath all the post-match analysis from the party conferences. Apparently there really is life after death. Perhaps the reason this ‘news’ didn’t receive more coverage is because it’s not based on any startling new evidence. Rather, the claim has been made by a man called Eben Alexander
In one of those futile bits of research on which academics waste time and money in the pathetic hope of getting mentioned in the press, Hiroshima University in Japan claims to have discovered that people work harder if they have a picture of a pet on their desk. This finding was considered so interesting by
Remember the one about the husband who goes home and gets clouted with a frying pan by his wife. ‘Hey, what’s that for?’ ‘I found a note in your suit pocket with a number and the name Fanny May on it?’ ‘Oh, that’s just a horse I bet on last week.’ Two weeks later he
I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where I’ve been asking more or less everyone the same question: ‘When David Cameron gracefully exits the political stage in 2018, having won a thumping majority in 2015, who do you most want to succeed him: Boris Johnson or Michael Gove?’ The popular choice is
For the fifth year running my nearest village in Northamptonshire has just hosted a weekend of celebration called ‘Stoke Bruerne: Village at War’. A busy two-day programme of events, including a Spitfire fly-past, a bread-and-dripping and spam-sandwich tuck-in, and classes in how to dance the Lambeth Walk, started on Saturday morning with a formal opening
In my last Spectator column, I mounted a polemical defence of Michael Gove’s GCSEs reforms and, in the course of advancing my argument, I made a claim that I’ve subsequently been hounded about. Indeed, a website called fullfact.org mounted an investigation into this claim and concluded that I was guilty of ‘gross exaggeration’. Needless to
An actor’s life can be quite hazardous. Last week, a day or two after I had seen him perform as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale fell over and dislocated a finger, running off the stage in agony. And last weekend my niece Anna Chancellor showed me some nasty bruises
Arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia the other night to join a cruise ship for after-dinner talks, I found I was sharing my hotel with 250 women, every one of them clad in eye-jarring combinations of red and purple. It was the annual ‘Hoot’ of the Red Hat Society, an association of ladies of 50-plus devoted,
It’s 2.43 a.m. Unable to sleep, you reach out into the night for company: literally. Out goes your arm, towards the radio on the bedside table, and you grope for the ‘on’ button. You bring the radio close to you: a hard, cold, rectangular cuddly toy with an aerial instead of ears, and you turn
Who wants to be a millionaire? The answer is practically everybody. Who wouldn’t want a life of financial ease in which every need was affordable? But since the vast majority of us will never achieve this blessed state, we try to persuade ourselves that it is not such a happy one. When people believed in
On the principle that you should know your enemy, I’ve spent the last few days trying to work out where the critics of Michael Gove’s GCSE reforms are coming from. Why does anyone object to introducing more rigour into the classroom? Just to be clear, the last government presided over a period of relentless dumbing