lockdown
How I’m making up for lost time after lockdown
The last time I went to a football game was on Saturday 7 March last year when my 12-year-old son…
Package deal
Restaurant-goers who cannot let go of restaurants — for professional or other reasons — are floating on a sea of…
Out of the picture
The inevitable listlessness of this year’s awards season
Barometer
Calculated risk It is a year since Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team published the paper that inspired the government to…
Why isn’t Britain adopting the Danish roadmap?
Denmark’s greatest philosopher, Søren Kirkegaard, experienced only one epidemic in his lifetime, the cholera outbreak of 1853, which occurred after…
Real life
‘Have you had your jab, Margery?’ said one Surrey lady to another in the queue for take-away coffee at the…
Diary
Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I…
Touching distance
Since the start of this year, cases of Covid-19 have been in decline. Hospital admissions have fallen 80 per cent…
The UK economy is suffering worse than most
Last week The Spectator highlighted new data from the OECD that offers a weekly update comparing a country’s current GDP…
Real life
‘Anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you have anything to say?’ I looked at the baby-faced police…
Will normality return on 21 June?
‘Alas’ is a word used many times by Boris Johnson during the pandemic. It is how he prefaces announcements that…
Forbidden love
When will it be legal to hug my girlfriend again?
Do we really want lockdown to end?
Despite it being highly unfashionable to change your opinion, my lockdown stance has shown agility. For most of last year…
Is there any end to this tunnel?
We should talk about horizons, and the setting of desirable ones. A newspaper gave it a go the other day…
Barometer
Target practice The government hit its target of giving a first Covid vaccine to 15 million of the most vulnerable…
On life and liberty
When the Prime Minister sets out his ‘roadmap’ for easing Covid restrictions on Monday, it will be against a backdrop…
The need for speed
Can we outpace Covid?
Rebuilding welfare
Amid the many failures of public policy during the Covid crisis, one success has gone largely unnoticed. The Universal Credit…
Tory nerves are growing over Boris Johnson’s Covid strategy
When the third lockdown was voted on in the House of Commons last month, there was a smaller Tory rebellion than the previous…
Isolation nation: how Australia is dealing with its pandemic
At 6.20 p.m. on Friday evening, Scarborough Beach, an oceanside suburb of Perth, looked like it always does: families picnicked…
Lockdown has added to the pain of my mum’s Covid death
Last week, my mum died. In just a few short minutes, she went from being a living, breathing human, to…
Holy relic
The Church of England as we know it is disappearing
Real life
The kitchen tap began dripping as if it knew perfectly well that this would land me in a predicament whereby…
The Spectator’s Notes
Some Leavers are perturbed that Lord Frost was suddenly stood down as the next National Security Adviser. This anxiety may…
All that is sacred
The church authorities’ priorities are all wrong
