Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
From our UK edition
It’s been a beast of a year, hasn’t it? This morning my father-in-law died of Covid in Pristina, and it’s only when it comes right home to you that you’re reminded how real and immediate the threat from that spiteful little virus is. The reason I’m writing about this personal loss is that I worry
From our UK edition
37 min listen
Despite her government’s underperformance on education, health and Covid-19, Nicola Sturgeon’s popularity continues to climb – why? (01:10) Does spending more on overseas aid mean we care more? (14:05) And finally, are we all followers of the cult of casualness? (26:25) With The Spectator’s Scotland editor Alex Massie, former SNP finance spokesperson Andrew Wilson, development
From our UK edition
The other day I made a couple of calls to a bank about a loan. After the usual jumping over hoops to get to talk to a human being — the failure of voice-activated systems to understand a word I say, even when it’s the word ‘loan’, is particularly wounding — I got through to
From our UK edition
J.K. Rowling has written a book for children — and you know what? It’s a charmer. The Ickabod (Hachette, £20) was created for her own children between the Harry Potter books (how does she do it?) and was stashed away until the arrival of Covid, when she found that children were stuck indoors without much
From our UK edition
The phrase ‘petticoat government’ has, for reasons that escape me, gone out of currency lately. But it came to mind this morning when the BBC reported that the Prime Minister’s communications chief, Lee Cain, had resigned, even though he’d only just reportedly been appointed as Downing Street Chief of Staff. One reason, the BBC explained
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Remember, remember the fifth of November. Except it’s not really possible this year, is it? Given that we’re not even allowed to meet up in our gardens, the chances of anyone watching an effigy of an unfortunate 17th-century gentleman go up in flames today are zero. In one way, I can’t say I am sorry.
From our UK edition
This morning, my son, who’s 17, was turned away from our local church. The designated spaces for people attending mass were full. He tried to book online at the church down the road – they were full too (and last week they turned my daughter away). It was too late to make an online booking
From our UK edition
38 min listen
Americans look like they’re going to put Joe Biden in the White House – so what would his premiership look like? (00:45) Plus, Boris Johnson’s impossible bind on coronavirus (13:55) and how should you sign off an email? (28:35) With editor of the Spectator’s American edition Freddy Gray; Biden biographer Evan Osnos; political editor James
From our UK edition
Just now, I wrote an email and I couldn’t for the life of me think how to sign it off. ‘Kind regards’, the default setting for most messages, felt a bit too formal, given I am on friendly terms with the recipient; he’s older than me and a priest. ‘Yours ever’ seems forward. ‘Best wishes’
From our UK edition
Well, who can the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have in mind in their video message to Time 100 – for the magazine’s issue on influential people – when they talked about the need to reject ‘hate speech, misinformation and online negativity’ in the context of the US election? There are precisely two possibilities. Do
Her views on the Constitution really shouldn’t scare the horses
From our UK edition
President Trump has presided over a notable deal between Kosovo and Serbia. It’s interesting in more ways than one. For starters, the deal is very, very Trump. It’s about the economy, stupid. The deal-maker-in-chief, Richard Grenell, former acting director of National Intelligence, has, as he said, flipped the script. The deal has put economic development
From our UK edition
If the Proms director, David Pickard, thought he’d get away with fiddling with Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms, boy, he knows better now. Yesterday, the Proms publicity people put out a statement deploring social media commentary about its plans and explaining: ‘The Proms will reinvent the Last Night
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Not all coronavirus research sounds like fun, but wouldn’t you just loved to have been at the session where 25 choristers were asked to sing Happy Birthday at varying volumes to determine whether or not it would be safe for choirs to get back to business. The exercise was carried out by academics collaborating with
From our UK edition
Bit late now, isn’t it, to complain about the exams debacle? Where were they, Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer, the teaching unions, Nicola Sturgeon and the BBC on 18 March when Gavin Williamson fatally decided to scrap this year’s A-levels and GCSEs? If they were throwing their rattles out of the pram, it wasn’t loud enough to
From our UK edition
Just when you think it’s not actually possible for the Government to get things worse when it comes to schools and Covid, along comes Ofqual to make a fool of you by proving that yes, it is indeed possible for them to make an even bigger mess of things. Today we found out that it
From our UK edition
Mary Wakefield’s piece in today’s magazine – How the Catholic Church betrayed the dying – is right and eloquent in pointing out that there were Catholics dying in hospital from Covid who weren’t given the last rites for the absolution of their sins and the viaticum, the eucharist or food for the last journey. It
From our UK edition
This week would normally be the time when state and private schools go their separate ways, when privately educated children go off on their holidays while the state school lot carry on for another couple of weeks of term. Except this time, the divergence happened in March, when lockdown started and the educational apartheid began,
From our UK edition
Four months after the election, Ireland finally has a government and a prime minister, Taoiseach Micheál Martin. The country has since independence been governed by the two old Civil War parties – a conflict without any resonance whatever in contemporary Ireland – and, surprise surprise, it still is. The difference now is that whereas previously,
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One of the umpteen things people don’t elect a Tory government for is to make marriage more easily dissoluble. In the last year for which figures were available, 2017, the number of opposite-sex marriages was the lowest on record – just shy of 243,000 – and I’m not sure that’ll be boosted by making marriage
