We are losing the war to save red squirrels
Matt Ridley
Two years ago I watched a red squirrel climbing a pine tree at my home in Northumberland. I fear it may be the last time I have that thrill. Twenty years ago they were everywhere in our woods and regular visitors to my bird table. Then in 2003 we saw the first grey squirrel. Almost […]
Did Covid really originate in Wuhan’s seafood market?
Matt Ridley
There is new evidence pointing to the origin of Covid being in the seafood market in Wuhan. That, at least, is the substance of a breathless piece published in the Atlantic. Specifically, Katherine Wu, the journalist who wrote the piece, had evidence suggesting that ‘raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying […]
Matt Ridley
If you are a bird, any kind of bird, the current pandemic of avian influenza rampaging through your kind is far more terrifying than anything the hairless apes on the ground below experienced in 2020 and 2021. Britain’s seabirds – guillemots, gannets, gulls, kittiwakes and skuas – have been hardest hit because they breed in […]
How to be PM: ten rules for the next Tory leader to live by
Matt Ridley
You’ve just become prime minister. The public finances are in a mess, the Bank of England has stoked inflation, cutting taxes may make it worse, energy prices are through the roof, people are hurting so you can’t cut social spending, the Health Service is lengthening its waiting lists despite record budgets. What can you do? Given that […]
Britain is in danger of repeating its post-war mistakes
Matt Ridley
My article for Spectator: In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some […]
Matt Ridley
The evolution of Covid is not random My article for The Spectator: In the genetic diaspora of an epidemic, there is ferocious competition between strains of virus to get to the next victim first. That leads to apparently purposeful outcomes, as if the virus had a mind. One of the things people find hardest to […]
The contenders – and challenges – in the race to cure Covid
Matt Ridley
There are reasons to be optimistic about the therapies being tested My article for The Spectator: A striking feature of Covid-19 is how medieval our response has had to be. Quarantine was the way people fought plagues in the distant past. We know by now that it will take many months to get a vaccine, […]
We are about to find out how robust civilisation is
Matt Ridley
The hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known My article for Spectator: On Sunday, lonely as a cloud, I wandered across a windswept moor in County Durham and passed a solitary sandstone rock with a small, round hollow in the top, an old penny glued to the base of the hollow. It […]
Why have so many of our recent viruses come from bats?
Matt Ridley
Coronavirus is far from the first disease they’ve passed on to us My article from The Spectator: I’m no Nostradamus, but 20 years ago when I was commissioned to write a short book about disease in the new millennium, I predicted that if a new pandemic did happen it would be a virus, not a […]
We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously
Matt Ridley
Little of this made the news, because good news is no news My article from The Spectator: Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent […]
