In what I like to think of as The Spectator’s back garden — most people call it St James’s Park — the cherry trees are in blossom. There’s a group of six or seven of them, clouds of bright pink, in the corner nearest 22 Old Queen Street. They’re worth a look, even if you
There was a great commotion in central London last night. A police helicopter hovered over The Spectator‘s office making a din, police sirens sounded and thudding music rattled the windows. I found out why when I left the office and walked via Parliament Square to Whitehall. There was an anti-Trump protest outside Parliament – #stoptrump was the
For sheer entertainment value, you couldn’t beat it. Donald Trump’s sprawling – and first solo – press conference was a glimpse of the US presidency as reality TV. Here was a man utterly unsuited to the task at hand, bluffing and blustering his way through it on live television. It was like watching Howard Beale’s
There are plenty of places to fly to for winter sun, but only one place that offers five-star hotels for the price of a B&B in Lyme Regis. South Africa has always been good value for British visitors, even five years ago when there were 11 rand to the pound. Now that figure is closer
Late last year Britain’s independent schools received a wake-up call. Andrew Halls, headmaster of King’s College School in Wimbledon, delivered it. Far too many of them, he said, have become the ‘finishing schools for the children of oligarchs’ because of an ‘apparently endless queue’ of wealthy foreigners who have pushed fees sky-high; there’s a ‘fees time
Every year — according to Fleet Street legend — the Telegraph prints a lovely photograph on its front page after the A-level results are published. It shows happy, bright young ladies clutching important letters and leaping into the air with glee. These lissom blondes are, of course, the students with straight As. ‘Yessss!’, they have
When I last watched the Heaven family home videos, a striking trend emerged. In every clip from the early 1990s, one of my siblings or I was being encouraged to sing. We babies were bounced on daddy’s knee, and he sang ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ over and over again until — looking goggle-eyed and faintly