Police
What do you do when there’s drunken aggro after closing time? Send in the street pastors
Heroic volunteers are bringing down crime in cities across Britain
Osborne's ringfence cycle
By now, George Osborne had hoped to have completed his austerity programme. Instead, he finds himself making what is, still,…
Don’t get on the Clapham omnibus; you might never get off
I got on a bus. Well, I wasn’t to know, was I? I just saw a bus stop by the…
How they tried (and failed) to make ‘La Marseillaise’ nicer
Friendly words England football fans sang ‘La Marseillaise’ in a friendly match at Wembley. The anthem has not always been…
Should the first modern Olympic drug cheat get to keep his gold?
A marathon of cheats Russian athletes may be stripped of the medals they won at the 2012 Olympics, but what…
The Church of England’s shameful betrayal of bishop George Bell
The Church of England has rushed to posthumously condemn one of the greatest men it has produced
Four great demolition disasters
Bang goes the plan The demolition of six tower blocks in Glasgow failed when the top half of two of…
Barometer
The death of Diesel The Volkswagen scandal has brought into question the future of the diesel engine. A century ago…
How common is adultery? Much more common than getting caught
How many cheats? More data on members of extramarital dating site Ashley Madison were put online. How widespread is adultery?…
Powder to the people: the new deal for the cocaine market
Fierce competition is forcing drug dealers to adjust their sales methods
What Tacitus would have made of the Heath rumours
The press and police have been condemned for the way they fall on mere rumour and plaster it across the…
‘Not to worry, just a gang killing’: the mantra of the metropolitan middle classes
Another stabbing in my new neighbourhood, not with an axe or with a samurai sword this time, but a machete.…
The gangs of LA are caught in an unending bloody vendetta
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after…
The police persecution of middle-class women
Aren’t the police getting younger nowadays — and ruder, and scruffier and more intolerant of middle-class women? In other words,…
I once tried to buy coke from the head of Manhattan detectives
This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking…
In praise of the pit bull terrier
Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains…
Whose fault is the jihadi bride? Certainly not her astonishing dad
Like you, I suspect, I have been terribly worried these last few weeks over the plight of 15-year-old Amira Abase.…
How (not) to poison a dog
Deadly to dogs An Irish setter was allegedly poisoned at Crufts, using beef containing slug pellets. Some other substances with which dog-show rivals…
The shocking truth about police corruption in Britain
We like to think we have the cleanest police in the world. We may no longer be right
How the driverless car will liberate us all (except smokers, of course)
I was listening to the radio the other morning to hear people complaining about the huge cuts in the number…
When did we become a nation of police informers?
There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that.…
Jaw-dropping confessions of a very un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
Why must every ‘accident’ be an ‘incident’?
I had thought that the saying ‘Accidents will happen in the best regulated families’ was a vulgar reference to children…
How did Britain ever have unarmed criminals?
Once, both police and criminals in Britain routinely did without guns. How did that happen? And why did it change?
Spectator letters: In defence of the GMC and Ukip members, and how Rachmaninov spelled Rachmaninov
Nothing to fear Sir: So long as we are not breaking any law, we have nothing to fear from the…
