Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
Anticipate the demise of Gordon Brown. Imagine Labour’s search for a leader with voter-appeal. Picture a younger Shirley Williams, but with the experience and affection she already commands. Wouldn’t she be a powerful contender? Couldn’t a new Shirley Williams, updated for the 21st century and reinserted into the Labour Party, give the rest a run
‘Good afternoon to you,’ says the email I recently received from Mr Dowling of Berry Bros & Rudd, ‘and thank you for your recent order no. 884095, placed through our website, for delivery to Spain. ‘There will be a shipping charge of £66.00 for the case of Wickham Vineyards Vintage Selection Dry White, Hampshire, England,
Why at a Ryanair check-in is there always somebody weeping? In this case, at Girona airport in Catalonia last week, she was a respectable, grandma-aged German lady in a white cotton-and-lace blouse. She was standing by the counter where you have to pay extra (only cash accepted) if you didn’t tick the right box for
It is five years since my father died. I thought I would get over it, but I haven’t. This is not a plea for sympathy — I’m fine, all’s well — but simply an observation, a report. Unusually for a man of 54 I had never, before Dad’s death, lost anyone close; and I had
I was lucky last Saturday at 10.30 to become a West Country pioneer. For some years the Conservative party has been experimenting with open primaries for the selection of their prospective parliamentary candidates. I’ve acted as ringmaster for a few of these, supplementing questions from the floor with my own: a sub-Dimbleby figure, putting them
Spike Milligan lives. I encountered him last week among the Australian military contingent at Camp Holland: a Dutch-led base in southern Afghanistan, in the province next to Helmand. Corporal Milligan, to be precise. But everyone calls him Spike. And though I’ve no reason to think he is or could be a fine singer or a
It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds No columnist should read too much into online responses to what he has written. No more than those who call in to radio phone-in programmes are those who post their comments online representative of readers as a whole — let
By this weekend most people won’t remember the details of, and some won’t remember at all, the exchange of emails between Lord Mandelson and the former Labour blogger Derek Draper, which took place in 2008 and before Mandelson joined Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, but which was leaked to a Sunday newspaper two weeks ago. What lingers
We call it ‘antiquity’. And yet, in this imperial Roman city, it seemed like yesterday Call to mind London’s Regent Street. Suppose it straight, not curved. Suppose it about the same width but more than twice as long: a mile and a quarter. Picture it lined on each side not with shop fronts but with
Sleeping with Agatha Christie and the ghosts of guests past in Syria’s Baron Hotel Do you believe in ghosts? I wish I did, for were I to entertain the flimsiest hope that some relic of a personality could haunt a place where once they were, then I should not have slept a wink last night,
Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff.
It was in the spring that I went to the funeral of Andrew Cavendish, the late and 11th Duke of Devonshire, at Edensor on Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire. It was almost five years to the day after his death that last Friday I went to the funeral of Ken Buxton in Flash, in Staffordshire. Though
Matthew Parris says Mayor Johnson must now focus obsessively on fixing London’s transport system In more ways than one, the suffix ‘ism’ is not easily appended to the word ‘Boris’. Indeed ‘Borisism’ sounds so ungainly that some may pray that no such phenomenon ever needs to be described. If so, the prayer has been answered.
Two small professional duties, and as much pleasures as duties, have recently overlapped in an unexpected way. I’ve read a colleague’s book on genetics; and I’ve recorded a BBC programme on the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. I know of no evidence that Jung took a close interest in genetics; and I imagine a typical modern geneticist
What came over me? I’m not a natural lawbreaker and was never a rebel as a youth. I deplore poll-tax rioters, eco-rioters and every lawless protest against supposed injustice, and read with awe of Charles Moore’s defiant stand against the TV licence people, wondering at the desperado our one-time Spectator editor has in later years
When I was a boy I never really understood strong winds, still less storms. I’m not sure I do now. This was not due to complete ignorance of meteorology. Something of a star pupil at geography (why the weather was geography rather than physics baffled me), I absorbed with interest and some degree of comprehension
At this rate, the throne might as well be replaced by a diamanté wheelchair Why do most parents who leave an inheritance leave it to their children? Why, when most people are well past middle age when their parents die, is this still considered the norm? Now that we live about a generation longer than
Some time ago I was in a room containing perhaps half a dozen other adults, a cat on a sofa-arm, and a baby in a carry-cot far from where I was sitting. The air was filled with the noise of general conversation. I had a cold. I coughed. The baby almost jumped out of its
Like skaters on a lake’s frozen surface, we are sometimes reminded how thin is the crust of philosophical confidence on which our systems of political economy rest. Two years ago we were mostly agreed that free market economics had won the ancient argument between capitalism and the planned economy. Two years ago the case for
I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings