Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
Are you ashamed of your country and depressed following last night’s vote against intervening in Syria? David Aaronovitch the journalist is. I do not give a fuck what this means for Miliband and Cameron. It’s the message it sends to Assad that counts. I am ashamed. — David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) August 29, 2013 Tim Shipman of the
Leave Florence and Sienna to the aesthetes. Let the in-crowd do Naples and Palermo. For the amateur Italophile, Rome is the destination. The eternal city is endlessly glorious, chaotic, stylish and funny: where else do you see nuns listening to iPods? Or medieval churches with condom machines by the doors? You can barely walk ten
‘Syria won’t go away if we just shut our eyes,’ says the newly ennobled Daniel Finklestein, in today’s Times (£). What he proposes instead is that we support the Prime Minister, then close our eyes and intervene. It is better to do something than nothing. Who knows what will happen? But at least we will
Well, well, well. Nick Cohen’s excellent column in this week’s mag has caused a stir today. Sadly, though, Nick’s astute argument became another excuse for a boring slanging match between atheists and believers. And of course Stephen Fry waded in: Mary had a little lamb It’s fleece was white as snow All you religious dicks
Of all the qualities one hopes for in a Bank of England Governor – a brilliant mind, the courage to tell politicians they are wrong, supernatural foresight – coolness is not among them. I don’t mean coolness under pressure; clearly that helps. I mean the ability to project a hip image. The new Bank of
You can’t keep a good pervert down. Every time the Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga – l’affaire DSK, to give it its nom propre – threatens to fade from view, it rears its dirty head again. The latest is that DSK was, according to a leaked document written by the magistrates investigating his case, a ‘pimp party king’
Here’s another sign that America’s economy is on the mend: US culture wars are in the news again. When Americans are not depressed about unemployment and ‘declinism’, they revert to rowing about liberty. It’s what they do best. But the culture wars are becoming a culture rout. Yesterday was another good day for America’s progressives: the
Can Barack Obama still pretend to be champion of the liberal dream even though we all know he isn’t? Yes he can! Can a President who rides roughshod over civil liberties, orders illegal drone strikes that kill innocent people, and snoops on citizens still present himself as a harbinger of world peace? Yes he can!
Porn, porn, porn. One way or another, we all like talking about it. But today’s debate about children and ‘sexually explicit material’ on the internet might be more demeaning than the smut itself. For a start, it’s government manufactured: the coalition knows that nobody ever lost votes by saying they cared about kids. The media
There’s excitement in Christian circles today about the first meeting of Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby. The two men have important things in common. Both reached their positions of power from unusual backgrounds: Welby from the evangelical HTB movement; Francis from the Society of Jesus. Both have spent quite a lot of time attacking unregulated
What is a red line, exactly? We’ve been hearing a lot of talk about ‘red lines’ from our politicians in recent weeks in relation to Syria, chemical weapons, and western intervention. ‘Red Line’ has become a sort of post-Iraq diplomatic catchphrase. It translates, roughly, as the ‘point at which we, the West, will definitely —
We’ve had a lot of horrible news this week, and inevitably that means a lot of tragedy tweeting. You know the sort of thing: a terror attack or a natural disaster happens, and everybody hops on the internet to share their reactions and emote ad nauseam. There’s not much point railing against this. Twitter is
It’s Monday lunchtime, downstairs in the Spectator office, and Boris Johnson is trying to flog a bus to a Frenchwoman. ‘What about the new Routemaster? It’s absolutely great, yup, fantastic, yup. Hey, they could be really good for Paris,’ he says. She smiles and says nothing. ‘Well what about bendy-buses then?’ he carries on. ‘We’ve
Over the next few days, we’ll all have to swallow gallons of journalistic effluvium about the great Alex Ferguson, who announced his resignation this morning. We will be told about the legendary gum-chewing manager who transformed humble, working-class Manchester United into a world-topping global brand. We should, however, be expressing relief that a man who
My name’s Freddy and I’m an online gambling addict. The problem started a few years ago when I opened an account on Betfair.com. At first it was small bets on football games, maybe the odd greyhound. A fiver here, a tenner there. Click, click, click. It was fun. Pretty soon, however, the hobby had developed
Are we hearing the opening chords of the George W. Bush redemption song? The Atlantic thinks so. This week he’s opening his huge presidential library, and a new Washington-ABC poll shows that his job approval rating now – more than four years after he left office – is 47 per cent, as high as it was just after he
I couldn’t get Richard Dawkins to reply to Theo Hobson’s excellent article on ‘the new new atheists’. Probably, he didn’t see my message. Or maybe he thought it beneath him. Or maybe like God he just doesn’t respond to all our entreaties. There’s no doubt, though, that Theo’s piece touched a nerve among the godless trolls of the web —
It was never going to take long for football to become part of the Thatcher death row. Almost any big media story that involves stupidity, mawkishness, and tribal loyalty will inevitably be sucked into the national game. On Monday, Manchester United decided not to stage a minute’s silence for Mrs T – no surprise there
After almost a week of media breast-beating about the Philpott case, a creepy consensus is emerging over benefits for children. Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative backbencher, wants child benefit to be limited in future to a family’s first two children. Lots of Tories agree. So does former Tony Blair speechwriter, Philip Collins. ‘This would save £3.3 billion
Does being gay make you a better historian? ‘Immensely, immensely,’ says Diarmaid MacCulloch. ‘From a young age, four or five onwards, I began to realise that the world was not as it pretends to be, there are lots of other things there. You learn how to listen to what is being half-said or implied, and
