Status anxiety
Why can’t we talk about the Great Barrington Declaration?
You probably haven’t heard of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is a petition started by three scientists on 4 October…
Boris Johnson’s human shield
At a Conservative party conference fringe event last Sunday, Lord Bethell, a health minister, was asked where he thought Britain…
Laurence Fox is a political force to be reckoned with
From the moment I started criticising the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis people have been urging me to start…
The creep of internet censorship
Kristie Higgs, a 44-year-old school assistant, didn’t realise that criticising the sex education curriculum at her son’s school on Facebook…
I admit it: I was wrong to back Boris
A friend emailed me earlier this week in despair about the Prime Minister. ‘Boris reminds me of a hereditary king…
Being a do-gooder did me no good at all
Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, has a lot to answer for. Some armchair psychologists think the reason I…
The best leader we never had
I spent Monday afternoon with The Wake Up Call, a new book by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge that lambasts…
The BBC’s future is hanging by a thread
Reading the speech Tony Hall gave to the Edinburgh Television Festival, I was struck by his upbeat, confident tone. The…
Spare a thought for next year’s A-level students
Three years ago I was contacted by an official at the Department for Education to see if I was interested…
I’ve started a dating site for lockdown sceptics
I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of…
The proof that free speech in universities is in peril
About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude…
How to get into a club and on to a plane
Disaster struck the Young family last Friday. My 12-year-old son Charlie woke up with a temperature. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t matter,…
My plans for a Covid inquiry
The public inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has already started. Not the official one, which won’t…
How did I end up in Epstein’s little black book?
Every time Jeffrey Epstein is in the news, I start getting calls from strangers wanting to scream abuse at me.…
Does the curriculum really need ‘decolonising’?
Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ education spokesman, has written to Gavin Williamson urging him to do something about ‘systemic racism’…
We’re facing a tsunami of censorship
It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of…
Who watches the broadcast watchdog?
At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the government’s response to the coronavirus…
The antibody test that proved my wife wrong
Back in April, The Spectator ran a feature in which the partners of regular contributors wrote about what it was…
The protestors have brought down the lockdown
I wasn’t surprised to see that a woman whose father died at a care home in Bicester in April has…
Why is YouTube so afraid of free speech?
On Sunday, the hosts of Trigger–nometry, a YouTube show, posted an interview they’d done with Peter Hitchens. They labelled it…
Unfortunately our new puppy is not just for lockdown
Will the huge surge in demand for puppies and kittens during lockdown lead to a lot of abandoned pets when…
Liberal fears are contagious
It has become a commonplace among social psychologists that one of the characteristics that unites conservatives is our sensitivity to…
This lockdown may kill me
I have a new job, which is maintaining a website called Lockdown Sceptics (lockdownsceptics.org). It’s a compendium of evidence that…
Professor Lockdown’s spell has been broken
I originally had Neil Ferguson down as a kind of Henry Kissinger figure. The professor of mathematical biology at Imperial…
Did anyone really believe what my wife wrote about me?
One of the nice things about having a column in The Spectator is that I get a chance to reply…
