flat white

ALBO, THE COFFEE WHISPERER – Labor might be the worst economic managers of all time | S3 Ep 22

In this episode… Albo’s ‘not-so-cheap’ coffee. ☕️ Is Jim Chalmers a good Treasurer? Is the 5% house deposit scheme causing…

GLOBALIST IN CHIEF – Albanese accepts his award & Trump cancels ‘Fake News’ Media | S3 Ep 21

This week… Javier Milei ‘rips the United Nations to shreds’. Albanese’s good little globalist award. Digital Duty of Censorship… I…

SILENCE OF THE ROYALS – Spencer’s memoir and the death of the last Royal carriage maker | S3 Ep 20

This week with Professor David Flint. Does the ghost of Princess Diana still pose a threat to King Charles’ legacy?…

Third anniversary, October 7

The release of the Coalition’s immigration policy coincided with the third anniversary this week of the horrific 7 October massacre,…

Albo’s out of control spending

Almost fifty years ago, in his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan said, ‘We don’t have inflation because the…

10 Oct 2026

Cowardly corporate crony capitalists rule

Last week, I attended the annual conference of the H.R. Nicholls Society. The society is ‘dedicated to advocating for sensible…

10 Oct 2026

Giggle v. Tickle v. Macbeth

Talking recently with an old acquaintance, now a barrister, I spoke of how disappointing it was that the High Court…

10 Oct 2026

Go directly to jail!

Having addressed the position of the ever-shrivelling teals last week, I was well into drafting a piece turning to focus…

10 Oct 2026

Business/Robbery, etc

There’s now a coal boom in Asia that the ideology-driven, anti-coal Albanese Labor government doesn’t want to know about –…

10 Oct 2026

En garde! China and AI

Early in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch finds himself facing the intimidating Harvey Logan, who has decided that…

10 Oct 2026

Painted clay

‘The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation: that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.’ That’s…

10 Oct 2026

Hamas: Triumph of the intellectuals

On 7 October 2023, the world experienced in a real-time livestream what the absence of a secure Jewish state meant…

10 Oct 2026

Australia on a road to ruin

Australians’ pessimism about the future of the country is now probably at its highest level. Polling suggests an extraordinary two…

10 Oct 2026

Return of the King

King Coal is back! This week the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission gave permission for two coalminers in the…

Brown study

I don’t know if Anthony Albanese actually learned anything from his recent sojourn at the United Nations, but I doubt…

3 Oct 2026

The British Muslim Trust’s mosque attack claims don’t add up

This week, The Spectator exposed how the British Muslim Trust (BMT), paid millions of pounds by the Government as its official monitor…

9 Oct 2026

Zack Polanski is on the brink after his Holborn by-election defeat

Zack Polanski’s failure to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election is not just a disappointment; it undermines the Green…

9 Oct 2026

Labour’s by-election triumph is a sign of Burnham’s signal achievement

Labour has comfortably won the Holborn and St Pancras by-election with 45 per cent of the vote, leaving Zack Polanski…

9 Oct 2026

Why Labour doesn’t want to talk about NHS waiting lists

Remember NHS waiting lists? They used to be a political priority for the Labour government, which would claim it was…

9 Oct 2026

Who’s to say Simon Pegg doesn’t have ADHD?

Simon Pegg has announced his diagnosis of ADHD, a condition now so well known that its abbreviation is normally left…

9 Oct 2026

The mudslinging midterms

This is not an edifying election. That’s putting it delicately. An honest look at the quality of the candidates and…

9 Oct 2026

Mothin Ali’s by-election day blunder

Oh dear. It is polling day in Holborn and St Pancras and the Greens are staring down the face of…

9 Oct 2026

Andy Burnham looked ill at ease in Berlin

Andy Burnham has been in Berlin today – his first bilateral diplomatic visit since entering Downing Street nearly three months…

9 Oct 2026

Rubio picked the wrong Athenian

The Pnyx is a scrubby hill west of the Acropolis where Athenian citizens once crammed together to argue, vote and,…

9 Oct 2026

A small victory for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Whisper it, but the tide may be turning for one of Britain’s most unpopular, and unfortunate, men. The news that…

9 Oct 2026

The irony of Labour’s crackdown on fake gay asylum seekers

On Tuesday morning, three people were arrested by Home Office immigration enforcement because of their suspected links to a criminal…

8 Oct 2026

The decade of Trump has been a necessary corrective

The past two centuries have been the era of mass production, of people as well as things. To a degree…

8 Oct 2026

Britannia Shield won’t keep the UK safe from Russia, but Israel might

When Donald Trump announced with great bombast his plan for an American ‘Golden Dome’, he promised an all-encompassing shield that…

8 Oct 2026

My best friend Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer was my closest and dearest friend for 40 years. I first met him in 1986 when we were…

8 Oct 2026

Burnham’s Berlin visit won’t give Merz the boost he’s hoping for

Andy Burnham makes his first visit as Prime Minister to Germany today in an attempt to further strengthen the country’s…

8 Oct 2026

France’s student protests always go the same way

The world is watching alarming scenes in the burnished boulevards of Paris where riot police are using batons and tear…

8 Oct 2026

Why you shouldn’t shrug at New Zealand’s greyhound racing ban

Greyhound racing ended in New Zealand on August 1. Those who neither own a greyhound nor care for the sport…

9 Aug 2026

A New Zealand republic in Jacinda Ardern’s lifetime?

New Zealand’s former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, believes the nation will become a republic within her lifetime. We have heard…

21 Jun 2026

The row over English becoming an official language of New Zealand

Parliamentarians in New Zealand have been limbering up for an oddly unedifying debate over what ought to be the most…

4 Mar 2026

What they don’t tell you about Christmas in New Zealand

‘I still think New Zealand the most beautiful country I have ever seen,’ Agatha Christie marvelled in 1922. Evidently she’s…

22 Dec 2025

Aussie life

Damian Thompson’s recent recollection in these pages of British cleric Brian Brindley’s 70th birthday blow-out was as much a cautionary…

10 Oct 2026

Language

One of my Speccie colleagues, Kerry Wakefield, recently alerted me to a new word, ‘snerdle’, which, she said, names ‘a…

10 Oct 2026

On whim-whams, whim-woms and wing-wongs

‘The festive decoration of my childhood Christmases,’ wrote Geoff Cunnington (Letters, 26 September), ‘featured a concertina-like, bell-shaped paper object which…

10 Oct 2026

Dear Mary: What can I do about the squalor of an all-male household?

Q. At a recent party I walked over to chat to my friend’s father. Because he was clearly wobbly (he’s…

10 Oct 2026

A literary romp: Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson, reviewed

It is hard to imagine a setting better suited to bureaucratic absurdity than the lead-up to the 1951 Festival of…

10 Oct 2026

All the big hitters are here: scenes from the golden age of boxing

In 1891, in Thomas Edison’s makeshift film studio – a shack in West Orange, New Jersey – two men put…

10 Oct 2026

Winning hearts and minds: propaganda of the Spanish Civil War

History, as the aphorism frequently attributed to Winston Churchill would have it, is written by the victors. This certainly holds…

10 Oct 2026

A bullying monster: the infamous Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s early mentor

For several decades, Roy Cohn (1927-86) was the man you needed to know if you wanted to get to know…

10 Oct 2026

Famous for being famous – the scandalous life of the Countess of Castiglione

‘The whore of the Risorgimento’ or ‘the divine Countess’ – Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione was among the most extravagantly…

10 Oct 2026

Adventures of the Time Traveler’s daughter: Life Out of Order, by Audrey Niffenegger, reviewed

There is only one problem with this beautiful, elegiac novel, a glorious hodgepodge mash-up of time travelling and apocalyptic eco-fiction:…

10 Oct 2026

They don’t make men like Erroll Prior-Palmer any more

Erroll Prior-Palmer had one decision to make on D-Day. It wasn’t as momentous as Eisenhower’s to launch the invasion, having…

10 Oct 2026

The mystery of Easter Island’s still undeciphered script

When British and Ottoman forces defeated the remnants of Napoleon’s army in Egypt, General Menou, the Frenchman in charge of…

10 Oct 2026