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Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 July 2019

The hotel manager had arranged for me to borrow an Alfa Romeo Spider Duetto two-seater convertible (1982) for the afternoon. And now, after lunch, here it was, as promised, parked on the forecourt. ‘You’re familiar with left-hand drive cars I take it, Mr Clarke?’ she said, a touch apprehensively I thought. ‘I’ve had a Spider,’ I said. ‘Similar to this, but a later, fuel-injected model.’ A true statement — although I was as confounded by it as she was. She handed me the key and a map with a suggested scenic route marked in Biro. I climbed in, fired the thing up, and with a cheery wave, 10,000 exploratory revs

Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 July 2019

Not going to the osteopath worked a treat. Walking out of that surgery after hearing the crunching coming from inside the consulting room while another patient was being done proved to be just the cure I needed. Now, I want to make absolutely clear before we go any further that I am not about to insult osteopaths. General Osteopathic Council, stand down. Individual enraged osteopaths, replace your receivers. Do not start dialling the switchboard. Do not begin composing emails beginning: ‘Dear Sir, I wish to express in the strongest possible terms…’ Relax. There is no need to complain. Let me say for the record: I support practitioners of alternative medicine;

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My campaign for fairer treatment

I am a football fan. Each fortnight I go to watch my club and, like the overwhelming majority of the football–supporting community, I do so peaceably, giving offence or threat to nobody. Sometimes I take boiled sweets. At halftime I might enjoy a chicken balti pie and a glass of lager. I do not lamp opposing supporters over the head with a bottle, or chase them around the back streets of the local area screaming: ‘I’m going to open you up like a can of peaches.’ Only a tiny minority of the football-supporting community do things like that, and so I am disinclined to consider them football supporters at all.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 4 July 2019

Hold the presses, this is a world exclusive. A Boris ex I sat next to last week gave me the scoop: he is absent-minded, disorganised and drops wine on sofas. The ex in question was Petronella Wyatt and we were at a lunch Rupert Hambro gave for Conrad Black. There were lotsa big hitters there, including Pa Johnson. La Wyatt is a good girl, and she did have a bit of a rough time with Mr B, but she’s been grand where cashing in is concerned. Despite non-stop offers by the lowlifes that pass as journalists nowadays, she has refused them all. Ladies do not spill the beans, especially not

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 July 2019

As they say: it all happened so quickly that it wasn’t until afterwards. One minute I was bawling at my sister, the next NHS workers arrived from all directions and removed my mother from her house to a nursing home. It was like the dramatic conclusion to an undercover ‘sting’ operation. They came streaming in through the front door laughing and joking. To avoid doing anything silly or controversial, I removed myself from the scene. While my mother was being carried out of her front door, a diplomatic mission was dispatched to offer me a confection of emollient explanations. This consisted of a community nurse and an occupational therapist. They

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 July 2019

Either the osteopath is a psychopath or he is the second coming. I see no other possibility. I turned up on the doorstep of his surgery feeling demented from the pain that has been gnawing at the base of my skull relentlessly for two weeks. All I had done was to duck under the tape of my horses’ field, a movement I have performed a thousand times. But this time, as I turned my head momentarily upside down, something pinged and my skull exploded into the worst headache ever. It was so bad I wrapped my head in a coat and became, like Tchaikovsky, possessed by the theory that it

Thursday

Taki

High life | 27 June 2019

The Duke of Marlborough gave a toast last week that brought the house down during a Turning Point dinner for those of us resolved to end the threat of cultural Marxism once and for all. (Much easier said than done; the ‘crapitalists’ of the entertainment industry control the culture.) The hosts were John Mappin and Charlie Kirk, a rising star in America, and Nigel Farage was the star attraction. (Outside the usual rent-a-crowd of lefty agitators were screaming quaint and original insults such as ‘scum’ and ‘fascists’.) Jamie Marlborough is living up to his name and rank. He exhibits none of the bullshit of Rory Stewart who, when asked what

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 27 June 2019

The weather forecast was rain, torrential, all day, so I took my anorak. In the hospital car park it was spitting, nothing much, so I left it in the car. My appointment was scheduled for 1.30. Before my name was called, I had time to browse the waiting-room bookshelf (paperbacks 50p, hardbacks £1). There, in the red livery of the Wordsworth Military Library, was Rorke’s Drift: A Victorian Epic by Michael Glover. I bore it back to my high-backed chair and started to read. When a nurse came in and called my name, I had to come all the way back from South Africa in 1879 to answer it. This

Melissa Kite

Real life | 27 June 2019

Remainers don’t like borders, I get that. But I had always assumed this was a preference confined to geopolitics. I had assumed that when these people got home they barricaded themselves in their houses and let no one over the threshold they didn’t completely trust like the rest of us. But perhaps they are not such hypocrites after all. For as the builder boyfriend found out when he was on a job the other day, it seems the eccentric dislike of borders permeates some people’s everyday lives. ‘Please leave the gap in the fence,’ was the instruction given to him by a well-to-do Londoner who had secured his services to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My advice to Boris’s keepers

I had never heard of Mark Field until he was suspended for removing, in a commendably vigorous manner, the Greenpeace protester Janet Barker from a black tie event in London, where guests had gathered to listen to a speech from the man who is still Chancellor for a bit, Philip Hammond. I wondered immediately if Field could be shoehorned into the leadership contest somehow, given his decisiveness and admirable restraint. Faced with Ms Barker, I might have acted with less restraint, even if I agree with most of the stuff she’s protesting about. She posed a possible danger to guests and for feminists to say that she didn’t, because she’s

Thursday

Taki

High life | 20 June 2019

Bellamy’s and Oswald’s are the two best restaurants in London. They are owned by two friends of mine — both gents, both English — and the service and food are as good as it gets. And it don’t get better, as they say in Chicago. Last Friday I got off the plane and went straight to Bellamy’s, where the owner Gavin Rankin, Tim Hanbury, annually voted father- and husband-of-the-year since 1980, and Charles Glass, left-wing author and right-wing bon vivant, were waiting. Vodka, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, beer and brandies followed. Living in Gstaad does for the mind what cocaine does for the libido. The last conversation I had back home was with

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 20 June 2019

I walked in out of the rain, dripping, and sat down beside the fire on the primitive high-backed settle. ‘Is this OK?’ I said to the guardian. ‘Yes, you’re allowed to sit on the furniture, none of which is original,’ she said. She was a small woman in her fifties, radiating an attractive combination of reverence and humility. The log fire smoking quietly in the fireplace was a wonderful, essential touch, I thought. The slow tick of a grandfather clock and the rain squalling against the windows emphasised the silence of the cottage parlour. The cob walls, painted the colour of diluted pig’s blood, were a yard thick. There was

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 June 2019

‘Take a seat,’ said the prospective lodger as we stood in my dining room. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sit down while we discuss things,’ he said, producing a folder which he waved at me. Something was wrong here, even I could work that out. ‘Discuss things? What things?’ I asked, backing up a bit because he was a big fella — 6ft something, lanky, with long unkempt hair that made him look like a premiership footballer after a bad night out. He advanced towards me with his folder. I backed into the dining-room table. The builder boyfriend was going to go mad. He

Thursday

Taki

High life | 13 June 2019

A lady once offered to go to bed with me if I could ensure that she would write The Spectator’s Diary. This was some time ago, but what I clearly recall is that I didn’t even try. To help her land the Diary, that is. I don’t wish to start any guessing games among the beautiful ‘gels’ that put out the world’s best weekly, but to my surprise that particular lady did get her wish some time after, with no help from yours truly. (What I can tell you is that all this did not happen under the present sainted editor’s watch.) I was thinking of the Diary as I

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 June 2019

As usual I go downstairs at five o’clock in the morning and into the dining room, which now serves as my mother’s bedroom. She generally sleeps fitfully until about four, punctuated by visits to the lavatory, the door of which is beside her bed, on the side she sleeps on. These visits are undertaken with the deliberation and the creeping slowness of a two-toed sloth. One wonders how she manages it. After she wakes she lies there, praying for everybody, I expect, until this zombie appears at five. I help her on with her dressing gown and day socks and assist her on the ten-yard expedition from the bed to

Melissa Kite

Real life | 13 June 2019

When is planning permission for four loft windows actually planning permission for two? Or simultaneously vice versa? It’s a very tricky question. After spending a week in the nine circles of hell that constitute local authority planning, I have narrowed my loft conversion problems down to two possible options. Either I’d got planning permission for four windows and it was revised down to two, or I’d got planning for two windows and it was revised up to four. Half the planning department at the local council think it was the former and half the latter. Building Control, meanwhile, said they always bow to planning. In other words, they think it’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The wrong kind of diversity

The BBC has advised its journalists not to use the word ‘terror’ or ‘terrorist’ when some bloke blows himself up screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ in a public place, thus killing as well lots of non-Allahu akbar kind of people. The words ‘terror’ or ‘terrorist’ are, in this context, pejorative and the use of them involves making an assumption, which of course we must never do. It may not have been terror which the chap intended to instil in the local population, but enlightenment, good cheer and a general sense of bonhomie, of course. Given that the BBC no longer uses the word ‘Islamic’ whenever mentioning these sorts of actions,  it is

Tuesday

Toby Young

Has the BBC gone back on its word over free TV licences?

If I were a pensioner, I’d be a bit miffed by the BBC’s decision to end the policy of giving free TV licences to the over-75s. At present, the cost is met by the government, but it was due to be picked up by the BBC from 1 June 2020. At least, that’s what I thought — and I had good reason. According to a report on the BBC News website dated 6 July 2015, the Beeb would ‘cover the cost of providing free television licences for over-75s’ and ‘in return… the licence fee will rise with inflation’. The story referred to this as a ‘deal’ that the BBC had

Saturday

Toby Young

Budweiser flags up how Pride has been taken over by corporations

Maurice Bowra, the flamboyant warden of Wadham College from 1938 to 1970, once argued against the legalisation of homosexuality on the grounds that it would take all the fun out of it. Without the risk of being picked up by the police, cruising up and down the Cowley Road at one in the morning would become rather tedious. He referred to the secret club of powerful homosexuals in the British establishment as the ‘homintern’ and prided himself on being a high-ranking officer. He liked the fact that there was something exotic and clandestine about his sexuality and dreaded the risk of embourgeoisement if the law was changed. Easy for Bowra

Thursday

Taki

High life | 6 June 2019

They were putting the finishing touches to the giant tent as I drove up to Schloss Wolfsegg after an hour’s flight from Gstaad to a tiny nearby airport. With me were my son and two good friends, and the Pilatus felt like a Messerschmitt 109 cutting through the clouds and landing on a dime. The Pilatus is a great airplane. It can cruise for seven hours at 280 knots, and land at less than 500 metres. It seats six people very comfortably. The only man who has complained about this aircraft is my old friend Charlie Glass, who like a true lefty whined about the lavatory’s headroom. (I told him