The Spectator is Britain’s oldest and most influential magazine, with incisive political and economic analysis, unrivalled books and arts reviews, and unmissable lifestyle writing, plus the funniest cartoons. It’s more cocktail party than political party, and we’d love it if you joined us.
Wilful blindness
The Spectator Australia
CONTRIBUTORS
Just following the rules • Bondi arrives in the nick of time
Marvellous Miseries of Multiculturalism • Cut immigration and bring back assimilation or end up as tribal as Beirut
Business/Robbery, etc • Bondi – Labor’s deadly disaster
Our first Islamist terror attack • A century has passed but not much has changed
Sorrow Without Reckoning • Bondi, Islamism, and mistaking posture for judgment
Limit the right to vexatious protests • Don’t give the pro-Palestine mob a megaphone
We have been warned • A burgeoning bureaucracy serves itself not the public
A qualified tick • Trump gets US national security mostly right
A massacre foretold • Albanese shut his eyes but the writing was literally on the walls
Britain’s potential
PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
DIARY
The Boring Twenties • Good British fun is being taxed, regulated and squeezed out of existence
Predicament
Don’t bet on it • Can racing survive Labour’s taxes on gambling?
14 questions for 2026
To be or not to be • Should we fear falling birth rates more than overpopulation?
BAROMETER
Walk this way • Life is too short to sit through boring shows
David Walliams deserves to be cancelled
Age limits • Stop using children as political human shields
Doomsday thinking
Holy order • Why I felt called to become a priest
We’ve got all our priorities wrong
Rhyme without reason • The march of lazy children’s books
‘Islamist’ is a dishonest confection
The last Noël • Christmas with my soon-to-be-ex-wife
Faithful resistance • The plight of Iranian Christians
LETTERS
Tips for 2026: shares up but pubs, schools and water in crisis
Ingenious adaptations • Stephen Bayley celebrates the work of Carlo Scarpa, the Italian architect renowned for marrying the past with the present
Beware the long memory
Getting to know the General
A city shaped by the sea
The good, the bad and the contrary
Grand illusions
Incompatible but inseparable
Stranger than fiction
January
The jottings of a genius
Spare the horses
Culture clash
Uzbek spring? • Bukhara now has an art biennial. Alex Diggins wonders if he is a useful idiot visiting it
Men Without Hats: On The Moon
Twin peaks
This is going to hurt
By the book
Double Diamond
Divine comedy
Rebels and Rivals
BuzzBallz
Dolce vita
Real life
Aussie life
Language
Howler
Forward thinking
2733: Balancing act
Beware the Toby hoax
The Battle For Britain
Mean business
DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Madeira, m’dear?
Bloody
Labor’s two decades tolerating antisemitism • Albanese abandons Jews merely for electoral advantage