Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator

Freddy Gray

Hiding Biden is the best way to get him elected

So Mrs American Voter, which septuagenarian sex abuser do you want to be President? The whole ‘#MeToo’ business probably should have taken a back seat in 2020 — given the epochal health crisis, the vast Covid-19 death toll and the collapsed US economy. But sex always makes headlines and this month Joe Biden, the presumptive

Is the Isle of Wight really the best place to launch a tracing app?

Technology can save the world — from South Korea to Singapore to, um, the Isle of Wight. Oh yes. Britain is catching up at super-fibre-optic-lightning speed with the superpowers of tech in its fight against Covid-19. We’ve developed a snazzy ‘track and trace’ app, that’s already been trialled at an RAF base in Yorkshire, and

Why are people taking Trump’s disinfectant comments seriously?

Every time you think Donald Trump has lost his talent for making people’s heads explode, he somehow excels himself. His latest? Telling Americans that injecting disinfectant and shining UV light could cure Covid-19 patients. You’ll have seen the clip already, everybody has, but it is worth watching again: Trump voters don’t necessarily take Trump all

Corona wars: will either Trump or Xi win?

44 min listen

Historian Niall Ferguson writes in this week’s cover piece that, even before coronavirus, the Cold War between America and China was already getting underway. With the current pandemic, animosity between the two superpowers has only increased. So when it comes to the geopolitics of the ‘corona wars’, who will win? Niall tells Cindy on the podcast

Is the ‘Clap for Me Now’ video a wind-up?

‘What did you do in the coronavirus crisis, dad?’ ‘Well son, I’m glad you ask. I helped make a very important video, entitled ‘You Clap for Me Now’. It used a technique we call passive-aggression to make people realise what horrible racists they had been towards immigrants. The video was really a poem, set to

Confessions of a Covid-19 truther

According to psychologists, denial is a common defence mechanism. We humans reject truths which we find too uncomfortable to bear. When reality becomes too painful, we refuse to acknowledge it. The more evidence mounts against us, the more we insist that everything is ok. I fear I might be doing precisely that in reaction to

Let’s applaud mothers — the real key workers

Our daughter Clementine, 5, has just decided what she wants to be when she grows up. ‘A cleaner …. and a mother,’ she says, in that order. Her mother, my wife Taffeta, winces at Clemmie’s ambition. Middle-class rules dictate that we should try to knock such traditional notions out of little girls’ brains. It’s not

America has a choice between two kinds of crazy

‘We are the United States of Amnesia,’ said Gore Vidal in 2004. These days, it’s more the United States of Dementia. In 2020, the country seems determined to choose between two elderly men who, it is fair to say, are some distance from sanity. Joe Biden, the 77-year-old who even aides admit has lost his