Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
We have a new editor here at The Spectator: Danielle Wall has taken the reins of Spectator Life, our quarterly 52-page supplement. We don’t normally write about our staff changes, but Danielle is someone that regular readers ought to know about. She has been a mainstay of The Spectator for ten years, but her route
If Rod Liddle is one of your guilty (or not so guilty) pleasures and you’ve been toying with the idea of subscribing to The Spectator, then we have the perfect excuse. We do reader events every so often, the most popular of which have been with Rod Liddle. They have both sold out in a
The magazine industry releases annual circulation figures today and the results for The Spectator are historic in two ways. First: our sales are at a record high, at 73,328, which is quite something for the world’s oldest weekly magazine. But we can today announce something I never thought I’d say: sales of the print magazine
At the start of last year, Katy Balls was assigned to the political beat for The Spectator. With the snap general election, she had a baptism of fire – and, before too long, a regular column in the national press (the i newspaper). This morning, she was one of the six journalists shortlisted as Political
If you have been browsing The Spectator’s website as a visitor, we have the perfect opportunity to subscribe. Perfect, that is, you’re a fan of Steven Pinker – and if you’re not, you should be. He’s one of the most original, agenda-setting writers of our time. From the use of language to the use of
A few years ago, we had a bit of a problem with Toby Young’s column – one that never quite went away. He started writing for us regularly shortly after he’d written a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about his complete failure to make it big in New York. His column
Yesterday, the Greater Manchester Police tweeted out the above picture claiming that that ‘the only legal place’ to put a SatNav is ‘the bottom right hand side of your windscreen… everywhere else is illegal.’ It was quite untrue. Deliciously, the picture showed a suspicious mark on the middle of the car windscreen that looked very
Angela Rayner is perhaps the only Labour MP who works with a picture of Theresa May hanging above her desk. It’s there for inspiration, she says, a daily reminder of the general incompetence of the Conservative government and the need for its removal. ‘That picture motivates me, in a strange way,’ she says when we
I interview Angela Rayner, the Shadow Education Secretary, for the forthcoming edition of The Spectator. I met her before Christmas and was fascinated by the way she explains her politics in terms of her biography. She tells me how much she owes to a welfare state that was there for her, in a way that
‘You wouldn’t make good spies, would you,’ chuckles Ruth Davidson as she finds us sitting with our backs to the door in the Scottish Parliament café. She then triumphantly declares that she knows who we’ve been speaking to when preparing for the interview — getting two out of the five names isn’t bad going. After
For the whole board of the Social Mobility Commission to resign with its chairman, Alan Milburn, condemning the Prime Minister’s commitment to the agenda is pretty damaging. But this attack was inevitable, for reasons that haven’t (so far) been picked up by the newspapers. Ever since Theresa May took office, she has shown almost no
Given that most think tanks and universities are heavily against Brexit, the recent arrival of the Legatum Institute into the arena of trade policy mattered. It was filling a a gap in the market: proper research into potential trade relationships, on the basis that Brexit might not be a disaster. It has also acquired the
Germany is this weekend seeing whether or not Angela Merkel will be able to form a government as she deals with the political fallout from her immigration policy. Quite a contrast from Norway, whose Conservative-led coalition recently entered its second term after taking a very different approach to refugees. Last week I met Sylvi Listhaug,
When Britain voted to leave the EU, it didn’t necessarily follow that we’d be kicked out of its European Capital of Culture scheme – given that it aimed to be exactly that, rather than an EU Capital of Culture. After all Istanbul, Reykjavík and Stavanger all qualified and all won. There were some ominous signs: a few
When Angela Merkel invited refugees to Germany in 2015, tearing up the rules obliging migrants to seek asylum in the first country they arrive in, the consequences were pretty immediate. Over 160,000 went to Sweden, leading to well-publicised disruption. Next door, things were different. Norway took in just 30,000; this year it has accepted just
The Cabinet is expected to resume talks about Brexit today, reportedly nudging towards a £40 billion offer ahead of a meeting on Friday – but is there much point? Germany still has no government with Angela Merkel’s coalition talks having collapsed. The chairman of the Free Democratic Party ended talks with Merkel last night and
Today’s Guardian has an odd splash headline, denouncing as ‘Orwellian’ a letter that Michael Gove and Boris Johnson sent to Theresa May warning her that some parts of her government are unprepared for ‘no deal’. I’m not quite sure what’s Orwellian about that, or even so controversial. Here’s the leaked extract of the letter. ‘Your
Jeremy Hunt has told Tory rebels that”if we don’t back Theresa May we will have no Brexit”. It echoes a point Paul Mason once made – a point that you hear quite often: there’s no chance of no deal on Brexit, because there is no parliamentary majority for no deal. It’s understandable, given recently chaos, to imagine
We ran a Steerpike blog entitled “the resignation letter blunder” about how Theresa May put Priti Patel’s name underneath her signature. In fact, the blunder was ours. No10 was following protocol, where it’s normal to put the recipient’s name under the Prime Minister’s signature in such letters. We – and I – ought to have
There are two ways of seeing the extraordinary rise of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince: the blood-stained debut of a new dictator, or the long-overdue emergence of a reformer with the steel to take on the kingdom’s old guard. The British government is firmly in the second camp. Mohammad bin Salman is just 32 years old,