Mary Wakefield is commissioning editor of The Spectator.
For the last six months or so, officials on both sides of the US/Mexico border have had their fingers crossed that the appalling violence perpetrated by Mexico’s warring drug gangs might be dying down. The new president, Peña Nieto, has a new, more conciliatory approach so, you know, maybe everyone will start playing nice… No
Andrew Mitchell, formerly of DFID, urgently needs Coffee Housers’ help. It seems he won’t believe DFID wastes money, unless he sees actual, concrete examples. Last week, in the magazine, we ran a foreign aid special in which Jonathan Foreman and Justin Shaw showed us how and why we waste so much on ineffectual aid. In
‘They’re all bad, our politicians, all corrupt,’ said Maria, her cheery face dissolving into distaste. What about the new president, Peña Nieto? I ask. ‘That pretty boy? Ugh!’ It was late afternoon in Oaxaca’s central square, the Zocolo. Clouds were cruising in from the Sierra Madre and the dogs had begun to squabble and hump
There is one main road stretching north-south along the Bekaa valley between Lebanon and Syria. It runs in a beeline from the prosperous little city of Zhaleh, on through a series of villages each with its own religious bent — some Sunni, some Christian — to the border town of al-Qaa, then on into Homs
Four a.m. Something was triggering the motion-sensor on the outside light. One minute, darkness, the next, a window-full of flailing palm leaves, bright with rain. I blinked for a bit, then remembered: hurricane! There was one on its way, we’d been told by Rudy, the beach barman the day before, a bruiser called Ernesto. But
The Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for the year 2000 was won by Mary Wakefield. The judges included Antony Beevor; Patrick Marhnam; Boris Johnson, then editor of the magazine; and Mark Amory, who was and still is the Spectator’s literary editor. Mary is now Deputy Editor of the Spectator. The Shiva Naipaul prize is awarded for travel
Quite soon, it will be impossible to ignore the fact that a revolution is taking place. You’ll look up one day and the skies will be full of flying robots: pilotless drones or UAVS (Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles) — all programmed to carry out different tasks. There’ll be security drones circling shops, streaming video back to
The Spectator this week contains a brilliant piece on the crisis in Somalia by our Kenyan columnist Aidan Hartley. The Daily Telegraph today reports that voters are extremely sceptical about Cameron’s aid policy, wary of shovelling cash overseas when we’re hard-up at home. Aidan’s piece proves the voters absolutely right (no surprise). Not only would
I first heard the name ‘Dan Jarvis’ on a dance floor at a wedding in Bath. ‘Move like Jagger’ was thumping through the speakers, and most people had given up trying to chat, but I’d been collared by a cavalry officer who was damned if he was going to let disco get in the way
We are not made incrementally aware of things that happen incrementally. Though something may have been changing for a while, the realisation comes all at once in a swoop, usually when it’s far too late. I realised that I had become a ‘madam’ last weekend, in the butcher’s. We had a bit of a joke,
The Spectator’s deputy editor, Mary Wakefield, recently visited Rwanda to investigate the work a charity called Hope and Homes for Children. Her article on the subject appeared in last week’s issue of the magazine, but we thought we’d publish it here on Coffee House too, along with the short film that she recorded during her
Kigali, Rwanda Madame B has dressed up for our visit. She’s sitting on a bench with her back to the orphanage wall, talking about just how much she loves each child, but it’s her get-up that’s most impressive: black silk dress, hair done, make-up just so; finger and toenails painted hot pink, each with an
Do you paint yourself? Or…sing in a choir maybe? John Studzinski looks at me anxiously from the other side of a conference table, in a sleek little office belonging to his firm, Blackstone, the American private equity giant. He’s normally a confident man; outspoken on the subject of leadership, networking and England’s art scene (which
No one ever really expected Nadine Dorries’s ill-fated abortion bill to succeed — not after the Lib Dems had made a fuss, and the PM had withdrawn his support with his usual principled grace. But what’s more surprising has been the strange and unpleasant consensus which has risen up from the debate about the bill,
In single-sex schools girls don’t see themselves through boys’ eyes, says Mary Wakefield I remember quite clearly the moment I first realised how very lucky I was to have been sent to a single-sex boarding school. It was the summer of 1989 and my friends, Becca, Ilona and I were all 13 and arm in
Exactly halfway through my conversation with the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, I had an attack of conscience, a small one, but there it was. Sacks had explained the thesis of his book, The Great Partnership — that religion and science don’t have to fight but can co-exist, as separate strands of inquiry. We’d discussed our
The Spectator is very proud to be the purveyor of a long-distance birthday message to Prince Philip, who turned 90 yesterday, from some of his most devoted admirers: the tribe that actually worship him as a god. The cult of Philip began in the 50s when islanders on Tanna in the South Pacific noticed how
A massive project to change the lives of America’s poorest children It’s raining in Harlem this morning — big fat American rain tipping out of the big gray sky, sluicing down the crumbling brownstones, over the awning of the Manna soul food and salad bar (‘we serve oxtail, collard green, candy yam, fried fish, chips
Tom Conti tells Mary Wakefield how to get inside a woman’s mind I watched Shirley Valentine again last night. It’s different when you’re older. At 14 it’s impossible to imagine that any sane woman would talk to a wall — or put up with that dour, demanding husband for so many years. When you’re 35,
The adventures of a wrecked ship can be pieced together from entries in its log book. The last moments of some doomed flight can be reconstructed by consulting its black box. If Dominic and I come a cropper here on the hard shoulder of the Cairo–Alexandria desert road, our iPhones will tell our story in