Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
Rubbish has always fired my imagination and set my pulse racing. I don’t know why; it may be an inherited trait. My late father used to rifle through our bins lest anything useful had been thrown away, and in unhappier circumstances might in old age have extended his research into the streets, parks and railway
Cricket. Aargh. My gorge rises at the very word. Days — months — years of schoolboy misery; long, wretched, empty afternoons of boredom, fear and wasted time. Which is no way to say thank-you to Sir John Major for inviting me to a remarkable book launch for what looks and sounds like rather good book:
It may be time to stop talking about whether David Miliband challenges Gordon Brown, and start talking about when. The young cabinet minister plainly contemplates the possibility — or why would he have been so conspicuously keeping his options open since speculation began? — and nothing has happened that makes a Miliband bid look less
‘I was much surprised,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in 1873, ‘at the fortifications of Sydney Harbour. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of these forts.’ He was right. Guarding the entrance to the city’s great inland harbour system at North Head and South Head are lookouts and
As we go to print the five kidnapped tourists in Ethiopia have been returned alive, but mystery still surrounds the circumstances of their capture and the motives of their kidnappers, while some of the Ethiopians who were captured with them are still missing. I expect a good deal of theorising in the week ahead. Some
A log cabin by a frozen lake in the snowy fastness of central Sweden is a good place to contemplate the future of Blairite third-way politics. Scandinavia has some claim to be the spiritual home of social democracy and, though we on the Right have been predicting the Swedish model’s collision with the buffers for
Minette Marrin, the columnist with whom I most often agree, put it best in the Sunday Telegraph last week. Couldn’t we just have fudged this gay adoption/Catholic objection thing, she asked? She herself, she said, supported the new anti-discrimination rules to which the Roman Catholic hierarchy is objecting; she thought their objections wrong-headed. But she
The last time I was in Chile it was the anniversary of the accession to power of General Augusto Pinochet. I had been unaware of the holiday. My companions and I had walked down from the high Andean plateau of south-western Bolivia into the little desert town of San Pedro de Atacama in the extreme
Imagine that the prime minister of the day — whoever he might be — were to stand down as PM and leader of the majority party in Parliament. His party would choose a new leader. The new leader would presumably become prime minister. I say ‘presumably’ because, according to my understanding of our unwritten constitution,
Crikey, this really will have to be another voice. Has The Spectator taken leave of its senses? I could hardly bring myself to take last week’s edition out of its see-through plastic wrapping when, pictured on the cover, I saw a huge cartoon bulldog being walked on by a Muslim terrorist, and beside it four
First and most importantly, Hugh Thomson is a good thing. It takes a rare combination of scholarly focus and Boys’ Own derring-do to write books about adventuring in Peru (this is his third) which consistently rise above the level of backpackers’ companions, and convey not only Thomson’s great knowledge of the ancient civilisations of the
So there I was last Monday at 12.20, standing outside All Saints Church in Elton, in the Peak District of Derbyshire where I live, with a small suitcase, on my way to London. The bus to Matlock meets the train, and a No. 172 Hulley’s bus was due at 12.22. It’s a five-mile journey. Silly
Most of us know what it is to finish a task undertaken for the first time, having made every mistake in the book, and regret we are unlikely ever to have to do this job again. We would know the ropes next time: the pitfalls, the useful little short-cuts. The job would be a doddle
Many readers will have read The Spectator Easter survey — ‘Did Jesus really rise from the dead?’ — with intense interest. I did. The results of a survey posing the simple question, ‘Do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?’ were sharply different from what I expected. Just one avowed atheist was interviewed,
Briefly last week the nation chortled over its cornflakes at newspaper headlines about the ‘black spider’, and reports of letters to ministers from the Prince of Wales, and pictures of letters from ministers to the Prince of Wales heavily annotated in the sort of spidery black ink, which did look obsessive when spread across the
Suppose a public body owned tens of thousands of acres of real estate across England, mostly in prime residential areas. Suppose it showed little inclination to rationalise its holdings in any tough-minded way, but drifted on, barely able to maintain the property it owned. Would there not be a strong case for HM Government to
Last week David Cameron delivered the best speech on modern Conservatism since Keith Joseph’s lectures in the late 1970s. Read to the Demos think-tank on Monday 30 January, it was a paper of real stature: lucid, original, candid and thoughtful. Journalists do not much care for philosophical stuff unless it contains an ‘announcement’ or ‘throws
My friends would concur in describing me as someone in whom the precautionary instinct is not as strong as it ought to be. But even I, were I Mark Oaten, would have asked myself whether running for the leadership of my party was a good idea. All over Westminster, all over Fleet Street and all
Do you not find that when a wrong has been done, time may elapse before the wrongfulness pricks through into our consciences? I mean not only wrongs we do ourselves, or which are done to us, but also the sense we may have that a small or large injustice has been done in the world,
Ask any former drug addict. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you are ready for cold turkey. What France is facing now is the equivalent of waking up on a soiled mattress in a crack-house you cannot remember entering. It may be what France needs. It may be what Germany needs too. Until the