The Spectator

The Spectator is a weekly magazine from the UK that leans towards conservative viewpoints. It was established on July 6, 1828, making it the longest-running magazine in the English language. The publication is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also own The Daily Telegraph through their company, Press Holdings. The magazine mainly focuses on topics related to politics and culture.

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English

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#12932

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#553

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#47

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Articles

The health nutters are winning

1 day ago | spectator.co.uk | Stephen Pollard

The woman two tables from me at a branch of Pret in the City was talking about her chemotherapy. Her male companion asked her how her treatment was going, and she replied that it was gruelling. She was on a short break and was dreading the next round. I have leukaemia, and know the pattern of these conversations. What usually follows is sympathy, or empathy if someone has been through it themselves or knows someone who has. But there was no sympathy or empathy offered.
Could the Winter Fuel Payment fiasco bring down Rachel Reeves?

1 day ago | spectator.co.uk | Ross Clark

When the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she was withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from most pensioners on the same day, last July, when she awarded fat pay rises to many public sector workers she perhaps imagined herself as striking a blow for inter-generational fairness. Working people would get more money – at least if they worked in the public sector – and wealthy retirees a little less. Yet it is fast becoming the an issue which could prove her undoing.
Richard Hermer’s campaign against Britain

1 day ago | spectator.co.uk | Douglas Murray

Five years ago, the man who is now Lord Hermer gave an interview to the Times. The then QC was asked how he’d want to be remembered. The answer he gave was curious.
Leave our period dramas alone!

1 day ago | spectator.co.uk | Madeline Grant

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any article about Jane Austen must begin with a mangled, platitudinous variation on her most famous line. Irritating though this is, it’s rather a good metaphor for the state of the wider treatment of Austen – and her near contemporaries – by popular culture. When it comes to adaptations of novels from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian periods, and even longer ago, we find ourselves in a deep trough.
It didn't take Starmer long to morph into Brezhnev

2 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Madeline Grant

It has taken Sir Keir Starmer just under 11 months to enter his Brezhnev era. Portly, autocratic and reliant on past glories, the Prime Minister began today’s PMQs by reading a list that would make Borat proud of the infrastructural benevolences to make benefit glorious region of Red Wall. In Sir Keir’s world, there is no decay or decline: the economy is booming, pensioners and children are well cared for and the streets are safe. The praesidium – sorry, Front Bench – lapped this up.
The EU can’t resist empire-building

2 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Charles Moore

A wearisome aspect of modern political polarisation is feeling forced to take sides. Until recently, I felt I could contemplate last Sunday’s Polish presidential election with friendly neutrality. Both sides, after all, strongly resist Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.
Wake up, babe, new Dot Wordsworth just dropped

2 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Dot Wordsworth

On X, that old-fashioned site still used by people like me, someone called Henri tweeted: ‘babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped’. Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It turned out to have been put together with the help of an online device called Penguin Classics Cover Generator, which allows you to use your chosen picture to design a paperback.
No, I’m not a British spy

2 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Nicholas Farrell

The youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, nine, received the Eucharist for the first time on Sunday. He and the other 12 new communicants looked angelic in their white robes. They all had impressive wooden crosses hanging from their necks and the five girls had wreaths of tiny flowers in their jet-black hair. Once Don Mauro had finished dispensing the Body of Christ, the bells peeled as if a wedding had taken place.
Ridiculously enjoyable: Doom - The Dark Ages reviewed

2 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Sam Leith

In the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they called it the First-Person Shooter, and lo, they gave up leaving their bedrooms altogether. The original Doom (1993) really was the genesis of a genre: dark, intense, relentless, addictive.
Labour won’t win back the north with new trams

2 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Ross Clark

So now we know how Labour intends to try to head-off the threat from Reform UK. It is going to fight them on the tram lines. Rachel Reeves will announce this morning £15 billion worth of new tram lines in the Midlands and the North as part of a £113 billion package of public investment.