Common ground Sir: Katy Balls asks ‘Lawyer or leader?’ (Politics, 25 January), but it became fairly clear which Keir Starmer is when he appointed as his Attorney General Lord Hermer, a human rights lawyer. As was mentioned, Lord Hermer has often represented those rejecting British values rather than standing up for them. Sir Keir and
Power of assembly Nigel Farage claimed he would put together the biggest political rally in British history to launch Reform UK’s local election manifesto in March. How many people will have to assemble to fulfil his promise? – The Chartists claimed to put together a crowd of 500,000 when presenting a petition demanding electoral reform
The poem is ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’ by Arthur Hugh Clough. The final words are SUN CLIMBS SLOW, HOW SLOWLY, BUT WESTWARD, LOOK, THE LAND IS BRIGHT. The other two extracts are DUPES (25A) and THE FIELD (22). CLOUGH (3) was to be shaded. First prize Will Snell, London SE10 Runners-up Mike Conway,
The Foreign Secretary describes his approach to diplomacy as ‘progressive realism’. One can legitimately ask what is progressive about a closer accommodation with the slave-labour-deploying Leninists of Beijing or what is realistic about ceding the UK’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to China’s ally Mauritius. But David Lammy seems happy in his work. His choice
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, flew to Brussels for an EU summit, sought a ‘reset’ of relations and had celeriac soup and sea bream for dinner. AstraZeneca dropped plans to invest £450 million in a vaccine manufacturing plant in Speke, Liverpool, blaming the government’s ‘final offer compared to the previous government’s proposal’. Rachel
Grunting, you slipper-creep across the floor slower than a sailboat in a Force 1 breeze. I wonder whether in that ancient circuit board of a head from which so little intelligible has issued for weeks the Beaufort Scale still means anything or whether, if mentioned, you would as usual get totally muddled, mistake Force 1,
Chains of command Sir: Matthew Lynn is correct to emphasise the economic dangers of deindustrialisation (‘Not made in Britain’, 25 January). But there are cultural dangers too. It’s now 40 years since Correlli Barnett and I made a television programme called Assembled in Britain, drawing attention to the alarming retreat of manufacturing. No recent government has
Chocks away Rachel Reeves backed a third runway for Heathrow, reigniting a debate which has been going on for years. Yet Heathrow, when originally laid out in 1946, had six runways varying in length between 5,300 and 9,200ft: three pairs of parallel runways running east to west, north-west to south-east and north-east to south-west. As aircraft
The unclued lights (including the pair at 4 and 37) are former county towns of eight historic Scottish counties. First prize Eleanor Morrall, Coseley, West Midlands Runners-up Revd John Thackray, Ipswich, Suffolk; Tom Fanshawe, Wantage, Oxon
This week, Chinese technology has shown the West the challenge it faces – ruthless, implacable and impossible to ignore. The unveiling of the Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek has not only disrupted the business models of America’s tech behemoths; it has also shown that, in the race to develop the tools for economic hegemony, Beijing
Home The government would invest 2.6 per cent of GDP a year to create growth, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech. Standing behind a placard reading ‘Kickstart economic growth’, she kept repeating the word ‘growth’. Welfare and the visa system would be reformed. A third runway at Heathrow would bring
Forced Labour Sir: Matthew Parris wonders ‘Why was everyone fooled by Rachel Reeves?’(18 January) and goes on to include Sir Keir Starmer in this question. The former he concludes is ‘an empty vessel’ and the latter ‘bereft of ideas’. By ‘everyone’ he chiefly means the commentariat, although he claims he was not himself misled. They
Gig economy Donald Trump had the Village People perform at a concert prior to his inauguration. Who topped the bill at previous presidential inaugurations, either on the day or at accompanying concerts? – Joe Biden (2021): Lady Gaga – Donald Trump (2017): Kid Rock – Barack Obama (2013): Beyoncé – Barack Obama (2009): Aretha Franklin
Unclued lights were familiar three-word Latin expressions, all starting with ‘in’: IN STATU (2) PUPILLARI (11), IN MEDIAS (3) RES (40), IN LOCO (8) PARENTIS (43), IN FLAGRANTE (19) DELICTO (15), and IN VINO (36) VERITAS (20). First prize Gladys Chadwick, Walton, Cheshire Runners-up John Nutkins, London; John Bartlett, Shirley, Solihull, West Midlands
Why does Keir Starmer find it so hard to use the word ‘terrorist’ when talking about a man who buys ricin and a machete online, reads up about killing people in an al Qaeda training manual – and then goes out and stabs to death three young girls attending a dance class? When asked this
Home Axel Rudakubana, 18, pleaded guilty to the murder of three girls in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at Southport on 29 July 2024, and to ten attempted murders as well as possessing al Qaeda literature and producing the poison ricin. He had been charged with murder on 31 July but
Letters omitted from across answers, read in clue order, give MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM SPECTATOR… the ‘organ’ in the title. The first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of Adrian Bliss’s The Greatest Nobodies of History: Minor Characters from Major Moments (Century) go to the following.
Nothing left Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the
Swing states Where would Canada and Greenland rank if they became US states? – Canada would be, by far, the largest state. In fact, at 3,855,100 square miles it is marginally larger than the current US (3,796,742 square miles). – It would also be the largest state by population, with 41.5m inhabitants, putting it ahead
It would be natural to assume that sinking bond markets would be the government’s priority this week, as low UK growth and high borrowing rattles investors. Yet remarkably the Prime Minister’s attentions seem to be focused elsewhere: on advancing a deal to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in the days before Donald
