I switch personalities at Spectator parties, depending on who the guests are: For our readers’ tea party, I am a warm and gracious semi-host, swigging scotch but graciously answering questions about my drinking, love life, and writing habits. For our summer Speccie spree, I turn into a tight-lipped, street-smart tough guy, conscious of my brave obscurity but determined not to give in to the Rachel Johnson syndrome of ...

I was going through my paces in Hyde Park, sweating out the booze, raising the heartbeat with short wind sprints, keeping my mind off the weekend’s debauchery and the ensuing Karamazovian hangover. I then sat down on a bench and took off my sweaty polo shirt, opened The Daily Telegraph, and took in some rays. That is when a police officer approached me, but with a smile: “Are you by any chance Taki?” “Guilty as charged, ...

A funny thing happened on my way to lunch last week. I opened the Daily Mail and read a few snippets about the Camilla-Charles saga by Penny Junor, stuff to make strong men weep with boredom, but then a certain item caught my eye: “Camilla and the Queen finally met in the summer of 2000, when Charles threw a 60th birthday party at Highgrove for his cousin King Constantine of Greece…. They shook hands, smiled at one ...

A major Greek shipowner, whose political knowledge matches his wealth and business acumen, explained to me what the Qatar brouhaha is all about. My friend had the foresight to invest in LNGs, natural liquid gas carriers, among the most expensive of ships to build but big-time moneymakers. Why is it that it takes a major shipowner to know what’s really going on, rather than the bull put out by American hacks whose minds ...

Once upon a time the American Establishment enjoyed business paragons such as David Rockefeller, Daniel Ludwig, William Paley, Henry Ford II, not to mention Thomas Watson and his son Thomas Watson Jr. Toward the end of the 20th century, that old power elite had gone with the wind, replaced by people that Hilaire Belloc used to refer to as money shufflers, hustlers who never created anything, but employed a few secretaries while ...

The most famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel of a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes, and it is “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” I thought of the novel as I was driven up to Gstaad during last week’s heat wave. Disembarking in Geneva, I felt I was back in Nairobi circa 1970, on my way to Mombasa and a romantic interlude among the ...

They"€™re falling like dominoes, starting with the great Robert E. Lee, whose statue went down with a yank of a crane in a jiffy, after standing tall on his New Orleans perch for 133 years. Jefferson Davis is also down, and the great Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who partnered the heroic General Johnston on his left flank in the battle of Shiloh, has also bitten the dust. Removing statues of great American generals ...

I was busy explaining why the election was not a disaster to a 23-year-old American girl by the name of Jennifer. She is a Spectator reader and wants to work in England, preferably in politics. She called the results the worst news since her father abandoned her mother. I begged to differ. Actually, it was a far better result than if the Conservatives had won a plurality of 100, I told her. She gasped with disbelief, but soon ...

Main Street is a place, but it’s mostly an idea. It’s locally owned shops selling stuff to hardworking townies, as we used to call the locals back when I was in boarding school. The townies worked dependable blue-collar jobs in auto plants and coal mines. Their sons played American football hard, cut their hair short, and married their high school sweethearts. I went back to my old school recently with my old buddy Tony ...

I feel like an obituary writer, what with Nick Scott, Roger Moore, Alistair Horne—all great buddies—having recently passed away, and now my oldest and closest friend, Aleko Goulandris, dead at 90. Mind you, they all had very good lives: plenty of women, lots of fun, accomplishments galore, and many children and grandchildren. And they all reached a certain age; what else can you ask from this ludicrous life of ours? Well, ...

Although both guilt and innocence fascinate me, I’m not so sure there is such a thing as redemption. I know, it sounds very unchristian, but there you have it. For me, bad guys remain bad, and good guys ditto. In the meantime, I didn’t make it to Rupert Deen’s memorial service, nor that of my first Spectator editor, Alexander Chancellor—two friends not known for feeling too guilty, nor for their innocence, come to think ...

The dinner party at an old friend’s house was as chic as it gets. Then a Trump insider asked, “Who is the American president who had an affair with a French president’s wife?” It was an easy one. And it’s been out there for years: The Donald has claimed he did Carla long before she got hitched to Sarkozy, but she has vehemently denied it and called him a lunatic. Perhaps this is grounds for impeachment, for ...

Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak show. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and the name of it is the Met Gala. Once upon a time, the Metropolitan Museum’s gala ball was fun. Serious social-climbing multimillionaires competed openly for the best tables and for proximity to blue-blooded socialites like C.Z. Guest and her ilk. Pat Buckley, wife of ...

I’m sitting in my office room and the place is still. The rest of the house is dark. Everyone’s out and I’m here writing about the death of a friend. I haven’t felt such gloom since my father died 28 years ago. The question of Why did he have to die? is implicitly followed by that of How did he live his life? The answer to that is easy: recklessly. Learning how to die, according to Montaigne, is unlearning how to be a ...

Twenty-five years ago this week, Los Angeles was burning because of Rodney King’s beating by the fuzz and I had my shoulder sliced open by a doctor in order to repair torn ligaments. My shoulder hurt more than Rodney’s ribs, because I saw him on TV get up and gesticulate freely after being whacked rather hard by four cops. I didn’t lift my arm for months. Lesson to be learned: Better to have four cops beat you than to run ...

If any more proof were needed that Brexit is the best thing to happen to Britain since 1066 and all that, here it is: Geologists have at last assembled a picture of the forces that tore a 10 million-year-old land bridge away and turned Britain into an island, rather than a peninsula of Europe like Denmark and Scandinavia. Yippee! It was God himself who ordered it. The bridge ran from Dover to Calais and deep into Cheeseland, ...