Status anxiety

What I’ll miss most in Lockdown II

7 November 2020 9:00 am

A second lockdown won’t cause me much suffering. I don’t have a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods (e.g. books) that will…

There’s nothing neutral about Wikipedia

31 October 2020 9:00 am

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek ran an article attacking Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, for engaging in a…

Why are the devolved nations so ungrateful?

24 October 2020 9:00 am

One of the things I hadn’t anticipated about the pandemic is that it would turn me into an English nationalist.…

Why can’t we talk about the Great Barrington Declaration?

17 October 2020 9:00 am

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

10 October 2020 9:00 am

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

3 October 2020 9:00 am

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

26 September 2020 9:00 am

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

19 September 2020 9:00 am

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

12 September 2020 9:00 am

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

5 September 2020 9:00 am

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

29 August 2020 9:00 am

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

22 August 2020 9:00 am

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

15 August 2020 9:00 am

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

8 August 2020 9:00 am

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

1 August 2020 9:00 am

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

25 July 2020 9:00 am

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?

18 July 2020 9:00 am

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’?

11 July 2020 9:00 am

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

4 July 2020 9:00 am

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?

27 June 2020 9:00 am

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

20 June 2020 9:00 am

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

13 June 2020 9:00 am

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?

6 June 2020 9:00 am

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

30 May 2020 9:00 am

Will the huge surge in demand for puppies and kittens during lockdown lead to a lot of abandoned pets when…

Liberal fears are contagious

23 May 2020 9:00 am

It has become a commonplace among social psychologists that one of the characteristics that unites conservatives is our sensitivity to…