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Britain must stand up to the US before it’s too late

Weaponising trade; interfering in the domestic affairs of open societies; using technological dependencies to undermine national security; threatening...

latest 0

The Spectator

William Matthews

The Windsors have much to learn from Harald of Norway’s reign

The death of the Norwegian monarch, King Harald, at the age of 89 might, initially, seem like a sad but ultimately inconsequential event as far as the...

latest 5

The Spectator

Alexander Larman

John Healey U-turns on defence spending

It was just 78 days ago that John Healey resigned as defence secretary, heralding the beginning of the end of Keir Starmer’s government. In his...

latest 9

The Spectator

James Heale

The Navy is right to be nervous about Russia’s maritime strength

Russia’s threats towards Britain in recent weeks of ‘consequences’ for its continued support of Ukraine have allowed the government to start...

latest 10

The Spectator

Eliot Wilson

How radical does Andy Burnham want to be?

Is Andy Burnham running a ‘circuit breaker’ government from the one led by Keir Starmer, or is it a ‘continuity’ administration? Chancellor...

latest 10

The Spectator

Isabel Hardman

Are tax rises coming?

Welcome to kite-flying season. With exactly two months to go until Andy Burnham and John Healey’s first Budget, we’re beginning to get a shape of...

latest 10

The Spectator

Michael Simmons

Does it matter that Jason Arday’s memoir is made up?

Bloomsbury’s former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on the Today programme this week to argue that Jason Arday’s publisher could...

latest 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Ratko Mladic was the ultimate Serb hillbilly hero

It’s rather appropriate that General Ratko Mladic, the 84-year-old former commander in chief of the Bosnian Serb army, ‘Butcher of the Balkans’...

latest 0

The Spectator

Charlotte Eagar

Labour MP defends her kids’ private schools

It’s been a tough old time for private schools. Amid endless self-aggrandising, Keir Starmer’s ministers took great pleasure in whacking VAT on...

latest 10

The Spectator

Steerpike

Has Burnham gone shy on welfare reform?

Will the government ever get around to reforming the welfare system? I ask because Andy Burnham seems to have bottled out. It seems that there will be...

latest 6

The Spectator

Ross Clark

Ceuta’s migrant problem shows no signs of ending

Just under a month has passed since the sudden, mass arrival of approximately 80,000 mostly Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans in the Spanish exclave...

latest 10

The Spectator

Jim Lawley

The fight for France’s future is underway

The fight for France is underway. The 2027 presidential campaign began last night as the leading candidates clashed in a live debate on the centre...

latest 8

The Spectator

Gavin Mortimer

Trump’s stalemate with Iran looks set to limp on

The standoff between Iran and the United States has currently reached stalemate. Iranian hopes to use control of the Strait of Hormuz as a lever to...

latest 7

The Spectator

Jonathan Spyer

Ante-post tips for the big September meetings

Newmarket trainer James Fanshawe is a patient man and he has resisted the temptation to run his stable star KIND OF BLUE since he turned in a...

latest 10

The Spectator

Penworthy

Ring cycle / Tolkien knew the truth about power

One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni. Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister...

latest 8

The Spectator

D.j. Taylor

Mail order / Cut the price of stamps to save the Christmas card

Readers with a nervous disposition should turn the page because I’m going to be sprinkling the C-word across the next few paragraphs. It’s still...

latest 8

The Spectator

Sophia Money-Coutts

Presenter’s notebook / Piers Morgan, I’m coming for you

I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the...

latest 7

The Spectator

Vanessa Feltz

‘We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn’: the reality of lecturing Chinese students

Shanghaiing, the practice of drugging and kidnapping men on the US West Coast for service on ships bound for China, was made a federal offence in...

latest 8

The Spectator

Patrick Drury

The Kremlin’s threats against Britain shouldn’t scare us

The latest statement from Maria Zakharova, the reliably acerbic spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, has generated considerable interest and...

latest 8

The Spectator

Mark Galeotti

The dying art of a good eulogy

Like any freelance writer I’ve taken on some tough gigs. I wrote a book about Paris Hilton. I interviewed the hardman footballer Julian...

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The Spectator

Chas Newkey-Burden

England’s cricketers must fight for their right to party

England’s cricketers are developing a reputation, though not for sporting prowess. Despite dominating the Pakistanis at Headingley, the humiliation...

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The Spectator

Joseph Dinnage

Is AI really taking young people’s jobs?

We’ve had three announcements this week that paint a worrying picture for the job prospects of young people. First, the job search website...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Sam McPhail

Why would Germany want to help fund Trident?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the Cold War ended and the main rationale for enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons largely disappeared,...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Eliot Wilson

Don’t bet against Nvidia – yet

Last night revealed another set of outstanding results from Nvidia. Its quarterly revenues were up by 105 per cent year-on-year, comfortably ahead of...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Matthew Lynn

Middlesbrough’s crime wave exposes the truth about broken Britain

The ugly scenes in Middlesbrough over the last week would not look out of place in a war zone. In the early hours of Saturday, five youths and two...

yesterday 7

The Spectator

Andrew Tettenborn

Ridley Scott’s latest is a ‘hang on, what?’ movie

Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars is his third film in four years after Napoleon (disjointedly strange) and Gladiator II (not very...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Deborah Ross

When did the Cure become universally beloved?

My, how other so-called legacy acts must envy the Cure. There are plenty of bands of 40 or 50 years standing where the original fanbase brings along...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Graeme Thomson

A classic Alan Ayckbourn that’s made for Roger Allam

How the Other Half Loves is the play that established Alan Ayckbourn’s name as a writer of farce. Frank and Fiona, a posh, sophisticated couple,...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Lloyd Evans

A perfect little exhibition on the Isles of Scilly

I was in the most south-westerly pub in Britain, the Turk’s Head, on the Scilly island of St Agnes (population: 75) when I noticed a poster...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Hermione Eyre

A true visual spectacle: Edinburgh’s The Galloping Cure reviewed

Those lights! Thinking back on The Galloping Cure, Missy Mazzoli’s new opera for the Edinburgh International Festival, that’s what lingers:...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Richard Bratby

The terror of Russian prisons

The competition must be pretty stiff for ‘World’s worst airport to be caught with drugs in your baggage’: Bogota? Miami? Singapore? Ciudad de la...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

James Delingpole

An agreeable new 2D fighter

The final boss of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, who’s called the Champion (they could have tried harder), is up front about his philosophy....

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Piers Morgan, I’m coming for you

I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the...

yesterday 1

The Spectator

Vanessa Feltz

My cave house’s wonderful history

Looking back on it, apart from this year’s wildfires, the stultifying heat of high summer in Provence isn’t so bad if you accept that the time to...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Catriona Olding

Mail order / Cut the price of stamps to save the Christmas card

Readers with a nervous disposition should turn the page because I’m going to be sprinkling the C-word across the next few paragraphs. It’s still...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Sophia Money-Coutts

Any other business / The stock market crash is coming

Margaret Thatcher famously told the Commons in 1988 that ‘there is no way in which one can buck the market’. She meant that it would have been...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Martin Vander Weyer

History lesson / How Prague cured me of my communism

Proust can keep his soggy madeleine. For me the word ‘Prague’ is a trigger of memory like no other. It stirs me up like some plaintive half-heard...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Peter Hitchens

Disability / Call me a cripple

In case you missed it (well done, if so), last week Will Self wrote an extraordinary rant on Substack attacking various journalists for how they wrote...

yesterday 9

The Spectator

Julie Burchill

Politics / Is Andy Burnham ready for the world stage?

If Andy Burnham has a golden rule, it seems to be this: do the opposite of Keir Starmer. The new Prime Minister has made a habit of differentiating...

yesterday 8

The Spectator

James Heale

Royals / Harry and Meghan deserve a second chance

A little while back I came across a copy of Ted Hughes’s Laureate poems which had an inscription to some friends. Inside was an unpublished squib by...

yesterday 8

The Spectator

Douglas Murray

Inside A Table for Fortune, William T. Vollmann’s magnum opus

Inside A Table for Fortune, William T. Vollmann’s magnum opus

William T. Vollmann’s subject is 9/11. Always is, always was. Even before the attacks happened, they were somehow his thing. An Afghanistan Picture...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Max Jeffery

How the Ramones redefined punk rock

Is popular music truly an art form? This question has never met a straightforward answer, either from the musicians themselves or the public, and it...

yesterday 8

The Spectator

Christopher Sandford

How a young inventor with no printing experience revolutionized the newspaper world

Here’s a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted by Edward Laning in the 1930s. It’s called ‘The...

yesterday 6

The Spectator

Dennis Duncan

A much-deserved revival of John McCabe, a formidable British composer

‘Cheltenham Symphonies’, they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Richard Bratby

Could China colonize Mars before America?

Could China colonize Mars before America?

A 20-year-old Chinese researcher dressed in a red crayfish costume has become a symbol of Beijing’s ambition. At a scientific conference in Paris...

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Ian Williams

Trump has bet everything on Mars

Trump has bet everything on Mars

America has what might be the best evidence for life on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover has gathered rock samples that could contain compelling...

yesterday 7

The Spectator

David Whitehouse

Have I lost 10 IQ points for every child I’ve had?

I sometimes feel like I have lost ten IQ points per child. If my husband and I ever have a fourth, I might have to quit writing altogether and find a...

yesterday 7

The Spectator

Helen Andrews

Lee Greenwood is Trump’s court bard

Lee Greenwood is Trump’s court bard

The stage lights flicker. The MAGA faithful whoop at the first tinkle of piano keys. They’ve been here a hundred times. They know what’s coming....

yesterday 10

The Spectator

Matt McDonald

Learn to stop worrying and love data centers

In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing...

yesterday 8

The Spectator

Spectator Editorial

Who should pay for Meghan and Harry’s security?

It isn’t long now until the joyous day that Harry and Meghan once more make Britain their home, but several aspects of their return are still...

yesterday 7

The Spectator

Alexander Larman