Spectator - The Magazine

How to restore Britain's military standing

, 06 Jan 2009 14:04:02 GMT

Rachel Sylvester’s column today, highlighted by Pete this morning, raises the question of who should take the blame for the decline in Britain’s utility as a combat ally. This is principally a result of this country fighting wars on a peacetime budget. It was one of Tony Blair’s great failings that he did not tell Gordon Brown that the need for a serious and sustained increase in defence spending was non-negotiable. (When Brown became Prime Minister, the military had to fight two wars for a year without even a full]]>

Dwelling on the past will damage Brown

, 05 Jan 2009 11:42:04 GMT

The whole economic meltdown is less of an opportunity for the left in Britain than the US for the simple reason that Labour was in power here in the years leading up to it. Today, Jackie Ashley bemoans that Brown’s refusal to admit that mistakes were made means that the left might miss the opportunity presented to it by this crisis:

“We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes.
Yet to properly exploit that, Brown and his ministers have to change their tune about the

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Here's to a transparent 2009

, 02 Jan 2009 17:31:21 GMT

What's this? Yet another delay to the publication of ministers' private interests? Yep, and this time it's because some of the "new minsters" introduced during the last reshuffle have - according to the Times's source - "required quite a bit of investigation". The Times adds 2 + 2 together and comes up with Peter Mandelson; who's "declared the bare minimum in a voluntary entry to the Lords Register of Interests."

Sure, it's easy to speculate over this kind of thing; especially with the prompt that Mandelson hasn't yet clarified his "links to Oleg]]>

New year; same old Gordon Brown

, 01 Jan 2009 14:06:02 GMT

No.10 has come up with an ingenious solution to what could have been a yearly presentational problem: to have Gordon Brown's New Year's Message as a disembodied voice, with no video at all. You can listen to it here.

And that voice observes that an “old era of unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered out”. Remind us, who was Chancellor during the last ten years? It’s typical of Brown’s pettiness that he also includes in his New Year]]>

Apocalypse 2009?

, 31 Dec 2008 12:50:45 GMT

Splendid to see Boris developing the Apocalypse Now theme for 2009 which he road-tested in the Spectator Christmas issue. Here's what the Mayor says in his New Year message:

I want to quote Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now when he says 'Some day captain, this war is going to end', and some day, this recession is going to end. We can speed the demise of this recession if we all help the poorest in our community and if we make the vital investment that we need in our mass

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The race to recovery in 2009

, 31 Dec 2008 10:36:50 GMT

Among the things to look out for in 2009 is whether - and when - our economy starts to recover. Thanks to Alistair Darling's optimistic prognoses in the Pre-Budget Report, there's already plenty of room for embarrassment for the Government over this. Their growth forecast for 2009 (of between -0.75 and -1.25 percent of GDP) is out of whack with the forecasts of almost every other major analyst (which averaged -1.7 percent in December). And the idea that the economy will start recovering by the third-quarter of 2009 has also been widely]]>

Division and misrule

, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land. The glib opener is a taste of what’s to come. It is both annoying and accurate. The 20th century created Pakistan, after all, and — apart from eight most difficult years since the turn of the millennium — the country has known no other. But Pakistan’s first 50 years certainly were troubled and the knowledge that the emergent nation was badly treated (over the division of assets with its neighbour in 1947 and India’s grabbing of Kashmir)]]>

And Another Thing

, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This is the time of year when I repeat Christina Rossetti’s lines

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone.

November was as cold as I remember this once-muggy, foggy month. And December even harder. The Met Office says the rest of winter will be severe, and this is the first of a cold series. I am prepared. I have two lovely, comfortable scarves, one of white, of pure cashmere, bought at an Armani sale by that Prussian beauty Lady Niti Gowrie, which somehow found its way to]]>

Not just for Christmas

, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I live with a supermodel — excessively fussy about diet and grooming. Sadly this gorgeous creature has four legs not two, and is a boy not a girl. He is a Pekingese dog and, five years ago, he was a birthday present from my wife. (She, too, of course, is a supermodel.)

My Pekingese is extremely special. Every British Pekingese is currently extremely special. In figures published recently, the Kennel Club lists only 567 pekes in the country, with only seven accredited peke breeders. This works out at around one peke per 100,000 of population. This challenges the principle of]]>