Angus Colwell is The Spectator’s assistant online editor.
In the Spectator offices, my colleague Mary Wakefield and I often end up talking about young people while we’re making tea. She thinks I’m a bit too cocky about civilisation. Apparently when she starts telling me something weird that she’s seen my generation doing, my eyes start darting madly, looking for a way out. She probably looks
In the next few days Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and London. There are still some tickets left. The price is reasonable but the price doesn’t matter when the band are unequivocally one of the finest of live acts. By whatever means you can, go. When you get there, enjoy
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This week: Miliband’s empty energy promises. Ed Miliband has written a public letter confirming that Labour plans to decarbonise the electricity system by 2030. The problem with this, though, is that he doesn’t have the first idea about how to do it. The grid doesn’t have the capacity to transmit the required energy, Ross Clark
An atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons, and protons are made of quarks, and a quark is the size of the violin you’d play for a restaurant critic who complains about their job. It’s the best job in the world: go out for dinner on expenses with a friend or a lover, then
In January 2022, the New York Times ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, quoting Martin Amis’s daughter saying it seemed like it was. In the summer of 2023, the Guardian ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Lily-Rose Depp looks great when smoking. Last month, the Guardian again ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Dua Lipa smokes
Can you imagine how great it must have felt to be a Pret a Manger executive in late 2019? There was a Pret restaurant. They’d just bought Eat and its 94 stores. Veggie Pret was taking over the south east. London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart said Pret was his favourite pub. There was a Twitter
This piece was originally published in a different form on 12 July. Gareth Southgate, who has just resigned as England manager, deserves better than what he got. He is not perfect, as some football journalists imply (you end up suspecting they’re particularly chummy with the right people). But it’s not too much to say that Southgate achieved something special
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: after President Biden’s debate disaster, Freddy Gray profiles the one woman who could persuade him to step down, his wife Jill (1:05); Angus Colwell reports from Israel, where escalation of war seems a very real possibility (9:02); Matthew Parris attempts to reappraise the past 14 years of Conservative government (14:16);
According to my phone, I’m in Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport. Except I’m not. The Israel Defence Forces have scrambled the GPS of everyone within about an hour’s drive of the Israel-Lebanon border. The same navigation system that tells my iPhone its location is the same navigation system that Hezbollah could use to identify targets in
Britain’s general election campaign is being watched around the world, especially in countries that have relied on our support. One of those countries is Israel, where I spent a few days earlier this week as part of a Europe Israel Press Association delegation. I write about it in next week’s magazine, but there was one
Gareth Southgate, England’s semi-intellectual, waistcoat-strapped manager, knows he’s on his last chance at Euro 2024. He’s failed to bring a trophy home three times now and four will be unacceptable. This perhaps explains his newfound ruthlessness: he’s cut his most heroic failures from the squad who will travel to Germany. Jack Grealish, who brought good vibes but not a trophy, is gone. Jordan
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On this week’s Edition: Wannabes – are any of them ready? Our cover piece takes a look at the state of the parties a week into the UK general election campaign. The election announcement took everyone by surprise, including Tory MPs, so what’s been the fallout since? To provide the latest analysis, The Spectator’s political editor Katy
‘Sorry to be breaking into your usual politics-free feed,’ chirrups Rishi Sunak in his first-ever TikTok video. He is awkward, understandably. TikTok is enemy territory for the Tories. What most users learn about the Conservatives is usually damning, from left and right. ‘I think the Tory party deserves to die,’ says Jess Gill, who with
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Philosopher Slavoj Zizek takes us through his diary including his Britney Spears Theory of Action (1:08); Angus Colwell reports from the front line of the pro-Palestinian student protests (8:09); Svitlana Morenets provides an update on what’s going on in Georgia, where tensions between pro-EU and pro-Russian factions are heading to
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This week: On Monday, tents sprung up at Oxford and Cambridge as part of a global, pro-Palestinian student protest which began at Columbia University. In his cover piece, Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, explains how universities in both the US and the UK have misguidedly harboured and actively encouraged absurdist activism on
On the grass in front of UCL’s main building, on Sunday night, there were about 30 tents and the portico was plastered in handwritten signs: ‘Students: You’re in debt so UCL can fund a genocide!’ Some protestors sat on chairs, eating biscuits. Others stood at the front gate chanting ‘From the River to the Sea’.
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This week: Matthew Parris questions what’s left to say about the Tories (00:57), Laurie Graham discusses her struggle to see a GP (07:35), Rachel Johnson makes the case against women only clubs (13:38), Laura Gascoigne tells us the truth about Caravaggio’s last painting (19:21) and Angus Colwell reads his notes on wild garlic (28:58). Produced by
For a certain type of Barbour-clad middle-aged man, the best time of year is late summer, and the arrival of the grouse season. But if you’re in your twenties and living in Hackney, you’re more likely to get excited for spring and the arrival of wild garlic. Foraging has become a fashionable activity for twentysomethings.
A group of four stagger out of a pub in Britain at around 11.20 on a Thursday night. The search begins for somewhere to have one more drink without a £20 entry fee. Men on doors say no by shaking their heads. Pubs show their appetite for more visitors by turning their lights up a
Mark Sedwill is a serious man. He has a master’s in economics from Oxford. He worked in Cairo, Nicosia, Baghdad and Islamabad over several decades as a diplomat. He was a UN weapons inspector, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and served as the Nato senior civilian representative there. He became cabinet secretary in 2018 after
