Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
Seldom has a collective term been less appropriate: ‘the Channel Islands’ – as though these were in any sense (other than the geographical) a place. Entertained in my English mind had been a scatter of similar, pretty but perhaps over-manicured little islands stuck in the mid-Channel between Great Britain and France but sunnier, and where
‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial politician Talleyrand. Whenever a person behaves in ways we had not anticipated, it is a Darwinian and often useful human instinct to suspect a rational motive, and seek it out. So it’s unsurprising that in
Harold Wilson once declared that the Labour party ‘is a moral crusade or it is nothing’, a proposition whose logical consequence is troubling. Returning now from the United States, the comparable proposition both haunts and comforts me, because America is not nothing. Travelling through several Midwest and western states, I’ve been struck by how many
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This week: sectarian persecution returns Paul Wood, Colin Freeman and Father Benedict Kiely write in the magazine this week about the religious persecution that minorities are facing across the world from Syria to the Congo. In Syria, there have been reports of massacres with hundreds of civilians from the Alawite Muslim minority targeted, in part
It is meet, right and our bounden duty to begin any column about Ukraine with a vigorous expression of the columnist’s distaste for the President and Vice-President of the United States. Consider that done. Donald Trump is a slob, a bully and a liar: a person of low character. J.D. Vance is a nasty and morally
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood reads his letter from the Vatican (1:17); Matthew Parris warns Conservatives from embracing causes that could lose them as much support as they would gain (7:31); reviewing Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, Ian Buruma argues that the atomic bombs were not
On Thursday 16 August 1739, the young John Wesley met and for an hour argued with the middle-aged Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler. It was an ill-tempered encounter. Wesley believed that God communicated directly with individuals, invested his promises and purposes in them personally, and charged them with missions to reveal and explain the divine
Forgive me for returning in this column to Diego Garcia. The issue is too important to shrug aside: important not only in itself, in defence terms and in the immediate, but in the longer-term lesson this has for Britain in our relationship with the United States; and there is a new rumour to report, and
Very soon – as soon as the mutual courtesies now being exchanged between the new American President and his British counterpart are over – our government is likely to be at loggerheads with Donald Trump over our plan to cede the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), the Chagos archipelago, to Mauritius, then take out a
It is some time since I could claim any close acquaintance with the daily skirmishes of workaday Westminster. From risers and fallers on the stock exchange of parliamentary esteem I stand somewhat aside these days: no longer a war correspondent sending back dispatches from the battles between tribes in the febrile atmosphere and smelly carpets
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This week is a special episode of the podcast where we are looking back on some of our favourite pieces from the magazine over the past year and revisiting some of the conversations we had around them. First up: the Starmer supremacy Let’s start with undoubtedly the biggest news of the year: Starmer’s supermajority and
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Welcome to a special festive episode of The Edition podcast, where we will be taking you through the pages of The Spectator’s Christmas triple issue. Up first: our review of the year – and what a year it has been. At the start of 2024, the outcome of the US election looked very different, the UK had a
Ophiostoma novo-ulmi is not an expression that sits easily at the head of a Christmas Spectator column, so I’ll return later to the unpleasant fungus and disobliging beetle that over my lifetime have been devastating the English elm, and turn instead to one of our most beloved poets offering his own personal homage to his
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Alexandra Shulman reads her fashion notebook (1:13); Sean Thomas asks if a demilitarised zone in Ukraine is inevitable (6:02); Matthew Parris argues against proportional representation (13:47); Adrian Dannatt explains his new exhibition Fresh Window: the art of display and display of art (21:46); and Philip Hensher declares he has met the man
Here comes a new law in political science: Joe’s Law. As I write, the Republic of Ireland is still working out, after its general election, what sort of a coalition government will be entailed by its system of proportional representation. And the Germans are fretting already about whether and how a new coalition might be
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas
‘Et remarquant que cette vérité, je pense, donc je suis, était si ferme et si assurée, que toutes les plus extravagantes suppositions des Sceptiques n’étaient pas capables de l’ébranler, je jugeai que je pouvais la recevoir sans scrupule pour le premier principe de la Philosophie que je cherchais.’ Pardon my French – and I translate
You can hear it already. Rising from the tents of the dejected Democrat camp comes the whimper of self-reproach. It’s all our fault. Liberalism created this monster. There’s a distinct whiff of mea culpa in the air. Nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa for the alienation of half the American people. Donald Trump and his mob?
Years ago Lord Patten of Barnes – Chris – was our guest for my Great Lives programme on BBC Radio 4. He championed the life of Pope John XXIII, a mid-20th-century pope from humble origins who (his admirers would say) did much to bring the Roman Catholic Church into the 20th century. He had his
Let me ease you gently into a big and boring-sounding word for a small dishonesty that today corrupts the language of politics. Doubtless we shall be encountering it (though never by name) in Rachel Reeves’s looming Budget. If you step away from levying the new taxes you must then cut the goodies they were to
