One of Britain’s best columnists, The Sun’s Jane Moore, backs our candidate today. “Electing him as Mayor would be outrageous,” Jane writes. “He should be PM and nothing less.” Her support is as important to the Project as Polly Toynbee’s opposition. More as we have it.
You’ve got to realise they would have done it. They would have gone right ahead and swept another priceless heirloom from the mantelpiece of history. They were revving up their bulldozers, ready to roar into the ancient and irreplaceable ecosystem. Another great tree would have been felled in the forest of knowledge, and the owl
It is one of the great mysteries of modern geopolitics. How the hell has Condoleezza Rice got away with it for so long? There she is, Secretary of State of the United States and one of the most powerful people on the planet. It is Condi Rice who leads on behalf of you, me, the
By the time we had been interviewing for three solid hours I was like a limp dishrag. I was wrung out with the hopefulness of it all. It was the talent, the energy, the sheer brilliance of these young people, all of them beaming ‘Pick me, pick me’ into my befuddled skull. We were only
Now if you were an average overworked overtaxed Spectator-reading parent of a university student, I think I know how you would feel about this lecturers’ strike. I think you’d be fit to be tied. You would be chomping the carpet and firing off letters to the editor about the Spartist whingers who were prejudicing your
Boris Johnson goes to Beijing on a mission to sell democracy, but finds his hosts — as wedded to authority as they have been for the last 4,000 years — politely declining his offer It was towards the end of my trip to China that the tall, beautiful communist-party girl turned and asked the killer
As this edition appears I will be back in Edinburgh for my latest bout of electioneering. The last time I appeared there was a massive crowd of students boiling away in a bar, and an alarming group at the back waving banners saying things like ‘Bog off, Boris’ and ‘No to top-up fees’. I scrambled
I found myself in disgrace a while ago when I contrived to fly my family to a Greek airport called Preveza, only to discover on arrival that they didn’t have a hire car big enough for our purposes. It was about 11 p.m. and I was standing pathetically thinking about buses and looking at a
It is always nice to get back and find you haven’t been burgled. The locks were secure, the windows intact, and with a song in my heart I opened my bank statement. It all seemed pretty satisfactory, if a tiny bit emaciated, and for a second or two I let my eye run down the
If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains, and we would
Let no one say that this election is going to be the same as the last. We are winning back what I call the buggy vote. That is the middle-class mums and dads pushing prams. I don’t know quite why, but I attach terrific political significance to the opinions of these representatives of ‘hard-working families’.
This election is a swindle. It is a fraud on the electorate. We are asked to vote for one man, Blair, when he has explicitly said that he will not serve a full five years, and the chances must therefore be that the Labour machine will try, at some point in the next few years,
Baghdad As the Puma chugs over Baghdad I look out over the machine gun and I have to admit I am full of a sudden wistfulness. I have been here before, almost two years ago exactly. It was a week after the end of the war, and in those days my feelings were of nervous
This article first ran in the 3rd May 2003 issue of The Spectator Baghdad We could tell something was up as soon as we approached the petrol station. There was an American tank parked amid a big crowd of jerrycan-toting Iraqis. Unusually, the soldiers were down and walking around, guns at the ready. Then I
As soon as I see Bertha’s rear end backing down the tailgate towards me, I think there has been some mistake. They told me they would find a nice quiet mare, given that I have never been riding before. Advancing upon me are the towering bay buttocks of the biggest horse I have ever seen.
In the first interview since he delivered his report, Lord Butler tells Boris Johnson that Britain suffers from an overmighty executive bringing in ‘a huge number of extremely bad Bills’ If you, like me, had gone charging up the stairs of The Spectator last Tuesday afternoon, and if you had rounded the corner to see
Boris Johnson says that the end of Yasser Arafat — the man who brought so much suffering to his own people — could be the opportunity for lasting peace But why did he do it? I asked the dark and bony young man in the yarmulka, still clearing up the scene of the murders. We
Boris Johnson, at the Republican convention, says that Bush’s conservative credentials are not always convincing but his optimism is unfailingly inspiring New York Come off it, I am thinking to myself. The last time I saw Tuesday night’s Republican keynote speaker was only a week ago. I was lying comatose on a motel bed in
Las Vegas Whatever else we import from American politics, please let us avoid the appalling new practice of requiring children to give testimonials on behalf of their parents. I was sitting with my 11-year-old daughter in our VIP suite in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, waiting for John Kerry to come on CNN, when my blood
It was our last day in Courchevel, and everyone was having a snowball fight by the lifts at 1850, when my friend Charlotte said in urgent tones, ‘You know you’ve been looking for Posh Spice?’ Too damn right I had. Le tout Courchevel had been hunting the maritally troubled superstar, who was rumoured to be