Bbc

I’m cooking almost full-time for my poor old Mum and learning on the job: shepherd’s pie, roast pork, cauliflower cheese. I’m slaving over the stove and recipe book for hours and she hardly touches any of it. ‘Come on. Eat up. Do you good,’ I say, not unconscious of the role reversal. The other day I tried a slow-cooked beef casserole. The BBC website advised browning the meat first. Sheer political correctness. I simply lobbed the ingredients in a pot, poured on the boiling water, shoved the pot in the oven, got in my car and drove to the pub. About once a week, I drive over to my petrolhead

It is 100 years since women got the vote and I have been joining in the celebrations, on public transport — lightly tapping attractive women on the knee or gently massaging their lovely shoulders and saying, cheerfully, ‘Well done, babes!’ Some react with anger and irritation to my heartfelt congratulations, especially when I ask for their phone numbers so that we might discuss suffrage further — which is, I suppose, an indication they did not really want the vote in the first place. Certainly it imposes a terrible pressure upon them — they are forced, every five years, to make a clear decision. The statistics suggest many resent this imposition

The future of modern Britain looks set to be an unusually complicated affair. Take just one piece of news that came out of the trial of Darren Osborne over recent days. According to relatives of the Finsbury Park attacker, the first trigger towards his radicalisation was watching the BBC drama Three Girls about the Rochdale grooming gangs. Evidence suggests that this drama put him on the path to deciding to hire a van and drive it into a group of Muslims in Finsbury Park a few weeks later, murdering 51-year old Makram Ali. Now of course the BBC’s drama department should not be held responsible for the death of Mr

Gavin Stamp, who died just before the year’s end, will be mourned by many Spectator readers. For years, particularly in the 1980s, he was the paper’s main voice on architectural questions, notably as they affected the public space. His voice, both angry and compassionate, would be raised whenever he thought someone in authority — in church, state, local government, big business — was damaging what belonged to the people. He was very important at changing official attitudes imbued with fag-end modernism. No one expounded better the conception of a building’s public purpose, so to hear him talk about, say, Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, was

So the BBC resolves to improve its treatment of religion, to take it more seriously as a major force in our culture. Good. But if clumsily undertaken such intentions can backfire, and deepen the liberal elite’s disdain for religion. Imagine if Thought for the Day was doubled in length, or if Songs of Praise was aired twice a week. The challenge is to find new forms of religious broadcasting that unsettle assumptions. I can only think of one example of this in the last decade: Rev, the sitcom that combined affection for the C of E with satire. Because it was irreverent, it could also be profoundly sympathetic – it

  Philip Hammond’s last Budget focused on driverless cars as an example of the brave new technological world. But should we believe the hype? The Spectator arranged for Christian Wolmar, author of a new book on the subject, to meet Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and The Spectator’s Wiki Man columnist, to talk about the future of driving and transport.   Wolmar: Let’s face it: we’re talking about a technology that will never happen. There may be some driverless cars going round Phoenix in a very limited way but the owners, Waymo, which is part of Google, are very secretive about precisely what they’re doing. The hype is being