Status anxiety

My kids think my move into the garden shed means divorce

28 November 2020 9:00 am

I’ve moved out of my home. No, Caroline and I haven’t broken up. It’s just that we’re having the house…

The dangers of censoring anti-vaxxers

21 November 2020 9:00 am

Earlier this week, the Labour party wrote to the government urging it to bring forward legislation so that social media…

Will my kids report me for hate speech?

14 November 2020 9:00 am

When Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for justice, announced that his new Hate Crime Bill would remove the ‘dwelling…

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…