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Gareth Roberts

Gareth Roberts

The Spectator

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Politics / The voice coach row reveals how Keir Starmer will come unstuck

Politics / The voice coach row reveals how Keir Starmer will come unstuck
yesterday 20

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The triumph of Otto Schenk

The triumph of Otto Schenk
28.01.2025 60

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The strangeness and sanity of Donald Trump

The strangeness and sanity of Donald Trump
20.01.2025 4

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Why we’re horrified by Bonnie Blue and Andrew Tate

17.01.2025 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The ‘grooming gangs’ delusion is finally being shattered

The ‘grooming gangs’ delusion is finally being shattered
14.01.2025 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The grooming gang scandal needs to change our entire worldview

The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as...

07.01.2025 7

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The joy of Kemi and Farage’s Christmas feud

A feud can be very tedious and tiring if you’re one of the combatants. But let’s be honest: for onlookers, feuds are fun. Videos of spats in which...

31.12.2024 8

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Pulp have always been in the wrong place at the wrong time

Pulp, the legendary band fronted by Jarvis Cocker, have revealed that they’ve signed a new recording deal with equally legendary independent label...

27.12.2024 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Let’s hope Donald Trump doesn’t mess it up

There’s been a ‘vibe shift’. After the resounding victory at the recent US election, at long last things are changing, and heading towards some...

24.12.2024 4

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

What’s the truth about the New Jersey drone sightings?

What is going on with the drones buzzing over New Jersey in the United States? Reportedly ‘the size of cars’, sometimes flying low in formation,...

17.12.2024 5

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The Trafalgar Square Christmas tree is a truly sorry sight

It’s bad manners to complain about a gift of any kind, and very bad manners to complain about a Christmas present that comes with epic historical...

10.12.2024 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

World war twee: the hideous triviality of our times

I remember the moment I first understood that we, the British, had a national character. It was in the mid-1970s and my family and I were watching...

05.12.2024 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

I’m A Celebrity has been enjoyably dull

The current series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! has been a big contrast to the previous two. The 2022 and 2023 camps contained...

04.12.2024 5

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The truth about Labour’s ‘class war’

Keir Starmer’s critics might have you believe that the Labour government is fighting a class war. They point to Education Secretary Bridget...

26.11.2024 20

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Change the tune / Let’s banish Band Aid

There’s no need to be afraid, but 40 years since the advent of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ by Band Aid there is a dispute raging about the...

20.11.2024 2

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The origins of hate

Hate crimes, hate speech, hate groups… It is quite possible that we have less of these things today than ever before – they originated before our...

19.11.2024 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Farewell Gary Lineker, you won’t be missed

Gary Lineker is to leave Match of the Day at the end of the current football season, and to exit the BBC entirely after the 2026 World Cup. It was...

12.11.2024 2

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The Marsh family and the sad spectacle of Trump-bashing Brits

There is something slightly uncanny about the musical Marsh family of Faversham in Kent, who recently gathered millions of YouTube views with...

12.11.2024 2

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The cult of Paddington has gone too far

‘Kindness is like marmalade – a little goes a long way,’ Paddington Bear tweeted recently. But it isn’t only imaginary talking bears who take this...

05.11.2024 9

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Halloween indulges a very human obsession

Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so it feels like we have it more...

29.10.2024 1

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Paddington shouldn’t have been given a passport

Paddington has an official passport. The makers of the new Paddington film Paddington in Peru revealed this in passing to the Radio Times today. ...

22.10.2024 3

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The TV industry should be worried about AI

ITV are searching for an ‘AI expert’ to ‘create TV shows, films and digital content’, and to use this possibly baleful new algorithmic...

22.10.2024 2

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The unspectacular joy of quiz shows

Quiz shows on TV – the kind you can join in with at home by shouting the answer at the screen, rather than panel games or tests of skill – seem to...

19.10.2024 2

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Thank God for Elon Musk

Like many people this weekend, I couldn’t tear myself away from videos of the booster rocket of Elon Musk’s Starship shrieking back to earth, to be...

15.10.2024 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Why is Gary Lineker worth all the bother?

There’s been another development in the wearying saga of Gary Lineker, the over-salaried presenter of football on the BBC and banal takes on...

07.10.2024 6

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Doctors and the trouble with the BBC

The BBC’s daytime soap Doctors will soon vanish from our screens after 24 years. But while the final episodes make for excruciatingly bad...

04.10.2024 30

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

How doom scrolling changed TV for ever

Are you one of the growing number of ‘second screen’ television viewers? For all too many of us, it seems that watching one screen just isn’t...

01.10.2024 10

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Will things really get better under Labour?

Labour’s honeymoon didn’t last long. Keir Starmer won power less than three months ago with a vow to ‘change Britain’. But the Labour government’s...

24.09.2024 2

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Change of tune / Fans have ruined Wodehouse and Monty Python

Why do we decide something is not for us? This is a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve got older, and started to take a liking to various...

23.09.2024 3

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

When will EU flag wavers get the message?

Arguing about the last night of the Proms is as much of an annual tradition as the music itself. Usually this hubbub has something to do with it...

17.09.2024 60

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

We’re being ruled by a 1980s left-wing student elite

We are now governed by people who were left-wing students in the 1980s and early 90s. This is one of those facts that you try to forget, like...

10.09.2024 9

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

There’s no shame in being ‘weird’

Are Conservative politicians ‘weird’? A series of focus groups carried out by More in Common suggests that voters – particularly in seats won by...

04.09.2024 3

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

What Carol Vorderman gets wrong about the TV industry

Carol Vorderman has given a speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival, in which she complains that the TV industry is too middle class. This is a...

27.08.2024 1

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Why the ‘sensibles’ aren’t happy now the Tories are gone

I have to confess that, like many other commentators, I thought that the coming of the Labour government would mean – at least for a bit – that...

20.08.2024 4

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

The tyranny of twee

The horrific murders in Southport earlier this month were followed by horrific riots and horrific counter-riots. But fear not. Because then the...

13.08.2024 5

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Should civil servants be allowed to wear inappropriate clothes to work?

Does His Majesty’s Government have a policy on civil servants wearing fetish clothing in the workplace? It’s not the sort of question you’d...

06.08.2024 3

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Just Stop Oil and the curious power of the middle class

Just Stop Oil isn’t what it was. When a handful of protestors from the environmental group tried to block a departure gate at Gatwick Airport this...

31.07.2024 5

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

It’s not nice hearing your own voice

‘Do I really sound like that?’ is how people invariably respond when they hear a recording of their own voice. Or they used to, anyway. Your own...

30.07.2024 3

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts

Yes, minister / My life as a trainee civil servant

In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing,...

16.07.2024 6

The Spectator

Gareth Roberts