Martin Vander Weyer has had a front row seat for some of the biggest economic developments of the last 50 years – both as a banker and as business correspondent for the Spectator. His new book The Good, the Bad and the Greedy argues that scandals like the mis-selling of PPI and the fixing of […]
BBC bashing is something of a national pastime (just ask Nadine Dorries), but it found new expression last week when a protester scaled Broadcasting House to knock chunks off a statue with a hammer. The perpetrator apparently objected to the depiction of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Ariel because the artist who created it, Eric Gill, was […]
For some, reading has been an escape from the loneliness of lockdown, for others this year has been more about getting by than improving the mind. So to round off 2021, we asked CapX writers and editors which books – new or old, fiction or non-fiction – helped them make it through. Robert Colvile Due […]
Politics went back to the playground this week, with Peppa Pig and babies in parliament dominating the headlines. But despite appearances, it’s actually the latter row that’s the silliest. To recap, Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, was reprimanded by Commons authorities for having her 13-week-old baby in a sling while she spoke in a […]
What does a red blazer have to do with climate change? When Carrie Johnson met other G20 leaders’ wives in Rome wearing a jacket that she’d previously sported at the Conservative Party Conference, it was interpreted in some quarters a sign of her ‘eco-credentials’. Cue Twitter wags claiming they must be Greta Thunberg because they […]
Picture a world in which Covid killed children and pregnant women. Questions about schools, social distancing and personal responsibility would be framed completely differently, and the cost/benefit calculations radically altered. It’s difficult to imagine a slogan as drily institutional as ‘protect the NHS’ if thousands of babies were dying. We’re now getting a harrowing glimpse […]
Rome was the greatest city of the ancient world, commanding an empire that spread from Damascus to York and encompassed a quarter of the world’s population. It’s a civilisation whose splendour and eventual decline has inspired generations of painters and poets for more than a thousand years. But as businessman and historian George Maher argues […]
The year is 1979. Britain is facing an energy crisis and looming inflation, the Conservatives have a formidable leader and meanwhile Labour are having an almighty scrap over how to elect theirs. If all this sounds wearily familiar, it’s because Labour have been having the same arguments for 40 years. Now, as Keir Starmer looks […]
Petitions are one of the bluntest instruments in politics. Two of the biggest petitions ever to appear on the UK Parliament website called for Britain to stay in the EU and Donald Trump to be banned from a State visit to the UK – both were demonstrable failures. Likewise unweighted surveys are a good way […]
Gynaecologically speaking, I’m practically geriatric. By 35, women are told we’re dangerously old to be mothers and at greater risk of miscarriage, stillbirth or having babies with conditions like Down’s syndrome. That’s if we’re able to get pregnant at all, which, if you believe the scare stories about the precipitous decline in fertility women experience […]
Usually it’s only the keenest Westminster watchers who complain about ‘the comms’. Most people take little notice of the content of government announcements, let alone the manner in which they are delivered. But when it comes to travel restrictions, the effect of changes at the border on thousands of families will be immediate and tangible […]
Tomorrow is ‘freedom day’ or, as the Government has rebranded it, ‘personal responsibility day’. For those of us who’ve argued that continued constraints on our freedoms were not justified given the success of the vaccine rollout, the end of legal requirements on masks and social distancing couldn’t come soon enough. So why doesn’t it feel like a […]
A day after the NHS was given the George Cross, a report found that two in five maternity services in England are not safe enough for mothers and babies. So that’s a gallantry award for East Kent NHS Trust, which plead guilty to causing the “wholly avoidable” death of baby Harry Ritchford at just seven […]
Thank God that’s over. The Batley and Spen by-election has been a grim spectacle and no-one should be celebrating the result. For Labour, holding a seat in a by-election by 323 votes is hardly a great victory. In fact, at 35%, the party secured its lowest share of the vote since 1983. Some might argue […]
If football does come home, it will be met with at the border with restrictions so bafflingly arbitrary it may wish to turn back. Amid the ongoing confusion and uncertainty around international travel, the Government has quietly introduced an exemption that will allow business leaders coming in from ‘amber list’ countries to leave quarantine for […]
Imagine watching the past 15 months back in montage. There’d be plenty of moving footage of NHS workers, people looking plaintively out of windows and the heroic vaccine effort. But there’d also be certain scenes that made you think the nation had lost its mind. Roped off toys in Welsh supermarkets, police tape on park […]
Westminster’s take on Keir Starmer’s tear-strewn appearance on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories seems to be that it will make absolutely no difference to his political fortunes. The viewing figures weren’t particularly impressive – 1.6m people tuned in compared to the 3.7m who watched Coronation Street immediately before it aired. In other words 2.1m people switched […]
No one who’s actually watched Princess Diana’s interview with Martin Bashir could doubt that she was saying exactly what she wanted to. The brutal honesty with which she spoke about her troubled marriage, her post-natal depression and her bulimia was the opposite of the stiff upper lip we expect from the Royals. In this Oprah […]
Backlash and rebellion against the establishment consensus have become the prevailing themes of British politics. But have rumours of the death of the centre ground been exaggerated? Dominic Cummings doesn’t think so. He tweeted that the very concept is a pundit fiction which “DOES NOT EXIST” (emphasis his). The Centre for Policy Studies’ Alex Morton has […]
It may seem like the London mayoral election offers something for everyone. There’s Count Binface for the Boomers (his manifesto promises London will join the EU and London Bridge will be renamed after Phoebe Waller – only a dad would think that was funny); Laurence Fox for UKIPers who don’t have enough to be angry […]
