Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield is commissioning editor of The Spectator.

Who’s Hugh?

The country-and-western singer Kinky Friedman has a song called ‘They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore’. ‘They don’t turn the other cheek the way they done before,’ sings Kinky. Had he met The Right Reverend Hugh Montefiore, the former Bishop of Birmingham, Kinky might have changed his tune. ‘It happened out of the blue.’ Montefiore,

Diary – 25 January 2003

I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. ‘Wanna see some photos of me?’ asked Ashley. PJ grinned. ‘I think you’ll like them, they’re hot,’ said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. ‘Hello,

Maximum Fiennes

I find it difficult to remember, in retrospect, why I thought it would impress Ranulph Fiennes – a man who has crossed the Antarctic unaided and who sawed the ends off his own, frostbitten fingers – if I arrived to interview him on a bicycle. I could have gone by cab and been waiting calmly

She must be joking

Mary Wakefield has been getting to grips with the terrifying but comic world of the Daily Mail’s Lynda Lee-Potter Lynda Lee-Potter was grinning like a lizard in the top left-hand corner of her page in the Daily Mail last Wednesday. Below her photograph was the headline ‘Only one penalty for such evil’. The evil was

Diary – 1 January 1970 | 1 January 1970

After Wednesday’s Tube strike, most Londoners will have decided again that the only solution is a bicycle. But there’s a dark side to cycling in the city. Since I bought my first bike a year or so ago I have been astonished by the outbursts of spittle-flecked fury pedestrians unleash upon cyclists. Any minor deviation