Alexander Larman is an author and books editor of Spectator World, our US-based edition
Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of one of the twentieth century’s most salacious scandals, the former MP John Profumo took on a role as a volunteer at the East End charity Toynbee Hall. The unpaid and distinctly unglamorous job, which saw Profumo serving meals to the homeless and cleaning toilets, became a kind of
There was a magnificent chorus of spluttering and gasping in literary London last week when it was announced that the actress Sarah Jessica Parker was to be one of the judges for the Booker Prize. As one critic remarked, ‘Just because she plays a writer of sorts in Sex and the City doesn’t mean that
It is fair to say that Prince Andrew has always had poor taste in friends. Notoriously, and reputation-shreddingly, he consorted with Jeffrey Epstein long after the latter’s disgrace. There is a rogue’s gallery of potentates and sheikhs who have been only too happy to provide what one royal biographer euphemistically called “alternative sources of income”
Sir David Beckham. Sir Goldenballs. Once upon a time, when Beckham was in his sarong-wearing Nineties heyday, the idea of this petulant, photogenic but somehow risible footballer being awarded a knighthood would have seemed utterly ridiculous. Yet we now live in an age where other similarly lightweight people can be awarded such honours; Sir Ringo
As the first day of the Emir of Qatar’s state visit to Britain draws to a close, all those involved in this its organisation might allow themselves a larger-than-usual measure of Christmas cheer. From Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani’s arrival in the country earlier today, the lavish pageantry of his welcome by
Winston Churchill reputedly said ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ This adage must have been at the forefront of the minds of Jaguar’s chief executives as they unveiled the brand’s new electric concept car, the Type 00, during Miami Art Week. The company has had a torrid past few
Virtually every aspect of London has changed beyond recognition in the past nine hundred years, but there has been one certainty: Smithfield Market, the city’s most famous and longest established meat market. Now even this great feature of London life looks set to be no more. The City of London Corporation has voted to withdraw
Along with Aston Martin and Rolls Royce, Jaguar is, for most people, one of the great British blue chip motoring brands. When Inspector Morse drove around the not-so-mean streets of Oxford in his burgundy Jaguar Mark II, the implicit association between the terribly English detective and the quintessentially stylish car was one that lingered on
Gore Vidal once sighed that ‘every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’, and there is inevitably a sense that when some idiotic blockbuster makes $1 billion worldwide, our collective intelligence loses a couple of IQ points. It’s a relief, then, when the worst examples of their kind, made at enormous cost to negligible
If this year’s Remembrance Sunday was unusually affecting, it was in large part due to the presence of both the King and the Princess of Wales at the service. After one of the hardest years for the monarchy in living memory, surpassing even the so-called ‘annus horribilis’ of 1992, there is hope that, as 2024
For all his wealth and privilege, it is hard to imagine wanting to be Prince William. Not only was he irrevocably changed by his mother’s tragic death when he was aged 15, but the past year alone has seen his wife and father diagnosed with cancer. His ongoing estrangement from his embarrassing younger brother continues
Since King Charles became monarch in September 2022, after the death of Elizabeth II, he has received reasonably warm treatment from the press. It is easy to forget that, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, he was seen as an unpopular figure, lambasted by the Diana-supporting tabloids for being an adulterer (never mind his
If there is one thing that Paul French’s forthcoming book Her Lotus Year should put right about Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, it is that her so-called ‘lotus year’ in China in the 1920s was not the sexual bacchanal that it has been painted as by the prurient and the envious. Instead it was
For his first formal address as head of the Commonwealth, King Charles would probably have preferred to veer away from controversy. Unfortunately, delivering an anodyne and people pleasing speech was not on the agenda. Ever since it was announced that Samoa would be hosting a gathering of the 56 Commonwealth countries, it was inevitable that
Politicians are said to campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In the case of Keir Starmer, he campaigned in the most uninspiring, plodding prose imaginable, and has now chosen to govern in what might politely be compared to a child’s first attempt at poetry. It is all word-vomit and incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo. The country needed
The news that the Princess of Wales has been able to return to public-facing duties is both hugely welcome and, after a lengthy period out of the limelight due to her cancer diagnosis, a reminder that she remains the most dutiful and committed of all the members of the royal family. Yet her first official
Strange though it might seem now, at the beginning of 2020 Boris Johnson came close to achieving his childhood ambition of being ‘World King’. Johnson had led the Conservative party to its first decent majority since 1987 the previous month, was in the process of ‘getting Brexit done’ with an ‘oven-ready deal’ and was airily
Say what you like about Steven Patrick Morrissey – lead singer of The Smiths, the Mancunian miserabilist, ‘the Pope of Mope’ etc – but he has a knack, nearly four decades after his band dissolved acrimoniously, for coming out with attention- and headline-grabbing pronouncements. At first glance these declarations might seem like revelatory news stories,
The allegations against Mohamed Al Fayed are dreadful: the former Harrods owner has been accused of raping five women and sexually abusing at least 15 others when they worked at his department store. A BBC investigation, which detailed the allegations, claimed that this abuse took place from the late 1980s to the 2000s. The name
Sensational dramas about the Duke of York are rather like London buses: you wait five years for one, and then two come along at once. Amazon Prime’s three-part series, A Very Royal Scandal, which focuses on the notorious Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, is released tomorrow. The show follows the perspective of both the journalist
