Spectator

The Spectator Podcast: General shambles

On this week’s episode we look ahead to the General Election, now just days away, and ask whether Theresa May might conceivably have blown her chances, or if Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister is still as unlikely as ever. And, for some light relief, we also be consider the role that handwriting plays in our digital society. First, the British public will be heading to the polls in just a week’s time, so we took a moment to reflect on the campaign so far. In his cover piece this week, James Forsyth decries the state of this election, saying that it has left Theresa May, particularly, in a weakened state. James joins

The Spectator Podcast: The Islamist worldview

On this week’s episode, we reflect on the tragic events in Manchester and what can be done to prevent similar attacks in the future. We also look at the emergence of political courts in America, Russia, France and beyond, and tip which constituencies to have a flutter on in next month’s election. First, we took a moment to consider the terrorist attack that struck Manchester on Monday evening. With scores dead and injured, including children as young as 8, what can be done to stop another atrocity like this taking place? Douglas Murray says, in this week’s Spectator cover piece, that we have long understood the Islamist worldview, but failed to tackle its ideology.

The Spectator Podcast: The May manifesto

On this week’s episode, we discuss Theresa May’s lurch to the left, the NHS’s looming crisis, and how Americans should talk about Trump. First up: Theresa May has launched the Conservative party’s manifesto this week, but whilst much has been made of the slow death of the Labour party, the Tories appear to have borrowed rather liberally from Ed Miliband’s 2015 offering. This is what Fraser Nelson says in his cover piece, claiming that the Conservatives have become ‘the party of Brexit’ rather than of low taxation. He joins the podcast along with David Goodhart, who writes this week on how Theresa May is finding a new middle way. As Fraser writes: “The

The Spectator Podcast: Election special

On this week’s episode, we discuss the two European nations that are are heading for the polls in the next couple of months. First, we look at Theresa May’s shock decision to hold a snap election, and then we cross the channel to consider the French election as they get set to whittle the field down to just two. With British news set to be dominated until June 8th by election fever (yet again), there was no place to start this week but with the fallout from the Prime Minister’s stunning U-turn on an early election. It’s a gamble, James Forsyth says in his cover piece this week, but with a portentially enormous pay

Spectator competition winners: being dumped Alan Bennett-style

The latest challenge was to submit a Dear John letter, in prose or verse, in the style of a well-known author. My, you were good this week — good enough to make being jilted seem quite the thing. Even that most maddening of break-up clichés ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ has a certain charm when filtered (courtesy of Chris O’Carroll) through the whimsical lens of Ogden Nash. Robert Schechter’s Andrew Marvell kept it brief: Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime, But since there’s not enough of either I think we ought to take a breather. Douglas G. Brown, Paul Freeman, Martin Parker, R.M

Spectator competition winners: Coleridge’s wedding guest

The call for a response from Coleridge’s Wedding-Guest attracted a bumper entry with lots of clever nods to his ballad of sin and atonement. Some of you were more charitable than others to the gimlet-eyed seadog with verbal diarrhoea. In a hotly contested week, Brian Allgar, Chris O’Carroll, Max Gutmann, Graham King and Mike Morrison came close to glory but were pipped by the winners, below, who take £25 each. Basil Ransome-Davies nabs £30. Basil Ransome-Davies My mates and me were larging it, As pissed as several newts. Three wedding guests, we was all dressed In Jasper Conran suits. This geezer came up — ponged a bit, Well hairy, bleedin’

How it feels to get a bad review in The Spectator

It is delightful to be writing for a magazine I’ve read, man and boy, since I was 15. Such is my affection for The Spectator that I felt a particular puff of pride when my name appeared on the cover a few weeks ago. The fact that the words in question were ‘Simon Callow’s Wagnerian disaster’ barely dented my pleasure. It advertised a quite collectibly horrible review of a short biography of Wagner I had written. The reviewer was Michael Tanner, a great explicator of philosophers, and indeed of Wagner himself. The review, dripping with scorn, had a certain personal edge to it. After having for my work as either

RIP Luis Dominguez, the man who invented the Speccie luncheon

Luis Dominguez was born in the UK to the family of an Argentine diplomat and spent most of his childhood in the US, having relocated there during World War II.  I first met him at Portsmouth Priory, a small boarding school in Rhode Island, not far from Newport. My memory is of him dressed in whites for the tennis team. My next crossing of Luis’s trail was at Rollins, a small college in Winter Park, Florida. Here he was once again dressed in whites as leader of the triumphant tennis team. After graduation, we met in New York for lunch at the Racquet and Tennis Club. Luis worked for House

The Spectator’s Notes | 16 February 2017

How does Vladimir Putin think about the world? It becomes dangerously important to know. I still have not seen a revealing speech by or discussion with him. I have found out a bit more, however, about the two-hour private interview conducted with him by several young Etonians last summer. One reason they got into the room, it seems, is that Mr Putin wanted to know about Eton and why it produced 19 prime ministers. The boys explained that one of the school’s great advantages was its societies — Political, Literary, Cheese etc. — largely organised by them, not by masters. They said these brought them into contact with a wide range

Martin Vander Weyer

My survey of bank closures suggests a new purpose for the tarnished Co-op

Many thanks to the stampede of readers who sent news of bank branch closures. There’s certainly a national pattern, and possibly an epidemic, with HSBC, NatWest, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank closing outlets as fast as they can, and only the Nationwide building society making a virtue of offering an undiminished service. Counter staff still in post are praised for their kindness, particularly to readers’ elderly mothers, but sham ‘consultations’ on closures that are faits accomplis are a frequent cause of irritation. It’s clear that many towns will soon be left with no more than a single ATM plus, if they’re lucky, a post-office counter — making life particularly tough for

The Spectator podcast: The great French collapse

On this week’s episode, we consider Marine Le Pen’s path to power in France, whether we allow posh people to bluff their way to success, and why men aren’t ‘lunging’ at women in Ubers. The first round of the French presidential election will be held at the end of April, and, after a turbulent couple of months that has seen establishment candidates dropping like, well, establishment candidates, the polls favour a run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Macron, a 39-year-old independent candidate seen as another ‘heir to Blair’, is all that stands between the Front National and government, a terrifying prospect for liberal France. In this week’s magazine, Professor Robert

High life | 2 February 2017

When I saw an email from Lucy, the lady who has the unenviable task of editing my copy each week, I knew something was wrong. And sure enough it was. The bad news was that my first editor at my beloved Spectator had died. Forty years, gone in a jiffy. It was back in 1977, and I had gone to Turin to pick up a new car on my way to Paris. Back then one had to drive the first thousand miles slowly, while breaking in the engine. (Yes, I know: a bit like wearing spats and a monocle, but that’s how it was in those prehistoric days.) Driving a

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 February 2017

As he left the editorship of The Spectator in March 1984, Alexander Chancellor wrote in this space: ‘When I joined the paper as editor in 1975, people were in the habit of asking me what my “policy” was going to be… How desperately uneasy this question made me. If there was a lavatory in the vicinity, I would lock myself inside it. I was sure I ought to have a “policy”… but I most certainly hadn’t got one.’ As his assistant editor, I witnessed the dismay on the faces of proprietors, advertisers and various big shots at Alexander’s answers to this sort of question. He would say, ‘Well, we should

‘Above all else, fun’

Alexander Chancellor’s ‘Long Life’ is over; but it was not nearly long enough. I was feeling rather gloomy last Friday, having just had our old terrier put down, when I opened The Spectator and was immediately cheered up by the first paragraph of Alexander’s column. It was so typical of the way that he often looked at the world, and of his delightfully quirky sense of humour, that he should relate a children’s song to the new President of the United States. Recalling Nellie the elephant and her trumpety-trump, he wrote: ‘I’m hoping against hope that Donald Trumpety-Trump will also say goodbye to the circus in Washington and return to

These little islands

From ‘Engage the enemy more closely!’, The Spectator, 30 December 1916: Britain was never more vigorous than she is now: She has renewed her youth, and we may look forward to many years, possibly to many generations, of potent life. Still, we cannot conceal from ourselves that the destiny of these little islands in the Northern Sea must in the last resort be to lose their relative importance… To us the thought of our decline, inevitable, though it may be long postponed, brings no sense of hopelessness or misery as it did to the Roman. We can feel, and do feel, that in the bright new worlds of the West

The Spectator’s Christmas quiz

Say so In 2016, who said: 1. ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ 2. ‘We’ve got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain. Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world.’ 3. ‘The Prime Minister — I should be pleased about this I suppose — seems to think he should be in Chippenham, paying homage to the town where I was born.’ 4. (On discontinuing his Twitter account for six months): ‘Too many people have peed in the pool.’ 5. ‘The UK is going to be in the back of the queue.’ 6. ‘Son of a whore, I will curse you in that forum.’ 7. ‘Watching

The Spectator Christmas Carol Service, in pictures | 22 December 2016

The Spectator hosted its annual carol concert at St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street, earlier this month. Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Rod Liddle and Low Life columnist, Jeremy Clarke, were among those who gave readings at the event, which was held in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support. As well as getting the chance to mingle with familiar faces from the magazine, Spectator readers were also treated to mince pies and mulled wine after the service. Here is a selection of photos from the event:        

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Why Conrad Black was right about the genius of Trump

At least two former Spectator figures understood things about the recent American contest which eluded most commentators. The first is our former proprietor, Conrad Black. Disagreeing with the anti-Trump conservative National Review, for which he writes, Conrad filed a powerful piece at the time of Trump’s nomination: ‘What the world has witnessed, but has not recognised it yet, has been a campaign of genius.’ He enumerated virtually every issue where Trump was nearer to the voters than Democrats, the media, and other Republicans. The second is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, nowadays the Telegraph’s international business editor. In the 1980s, Ambrose wrote wonderful pieces from central America for The Spectator, the only British

High life | 17 November 2016

New York   The only thing worse than a sore loser, I suppose, is a sore winner, but thank God we don’t run into too many of those. Thirty years ago, The Spectator and I lost a libel case that cost the then proprietor and yours truly a small fortune. As it turned out, after the plaintiff had gone to that sauna-like place below, everything that I had written was the truth and nothing but. (The hubby of the woman who sued me came clean after her death, but a lot of good that did the Speccie and me.) The sainted editor at the time was Charles Moore, and in