Timothy Wotherspoon

Former County Cllr for Cottenham, Rampton and Willingham. Former District Cllr for Cottenham Rampton and Oakington&Westwick Parish Cllr for Cottenham.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

One hour to go. Decisions, decisions! Neither appeals, but which of these two is more likely to keep the @Conservatives out of government for longer? KB is all over the place. RJ is set on leaving ECHR, and took a questionable planning decision but favours extra house building.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

At last, news worth reporting:

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

2¹³⁶²⁷⁹⁸⁴¹−1, discovered today, is the largest known prime. It's a Mersenne prime (2ᵖ-1), which are easier to find.

It took nearly 6 years for the GIMPS software to find it after the previous largest known prime. It was also the first Mersenne prime found using GPUs.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Do you genuinely believe that that is what happened?

[Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie]

Team Cleverly almost certainly’lent’ too many votes to another candidate

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

The party has a death wish.

[The Daily T @DailyTPodcast]

🚨 CLEVERLY OUT 🚨

In a shocking turn of events, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have made it into the final two in the Tory leadership contest after James Cleverly was eliminated...

🎧 Tune in for Kamal & Camilla's LIVE reactions at 5pm: https://t.co/5ntJ1ZAqoZ

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Yes, typical of the @Conservatives to chuck out the one candidate with any glimmer of hope of making the party palatable again. I hope they enjoy their decades in the wilderness.

[Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie]

UNBELIEVABLE

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

In which case I really hope they take the fight to Reform and campaign against it’s obnoxious policies.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

🔴 As Starmer’s honeymoon period draws to a close, polling shows Farage’s party has been capitalising on Labour’s summer woes

Read the full piece here 👇
https://t.co/7lBbhu7R8i

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Mercifully we are being spared BBC airtime given to this subject.

[Gordon Rayner @gordonrayner]

https://t.co/CQVY7KFLhE

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Of course: let’s continue to put these complex issues, currently resolved by centuries of careful deliberation, to a populist vote, inviting us all to make a protest vote against whatever it is we don’t like at the time of the poll. Another reason to keep the @Conservatives out.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

The front page of tomorrow's Daily Telegraph:

'Johnson: UK needs referendum on ECHR'

#TomorrowsPapersToday

Sign up for the Front Page newsletter
https://t.co/x8AV4Oomry

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

I wonder what all the Hamas apologists have to say about this, then.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

🇮🇱 A Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by Islamic State as a child before being sent to Hamas in Gaza has been rescued after more than a decade in captivity

https://t.co/hGAPk9luqh

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

But it’s the wonderful photograph of Charles next to Angela that grabs attention.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

The front page of tomorrow's Daily Telegraph:

'I took free clothes too, admits Chancellor'

#TomorrowsPapersToday

Sign up for the Front Page newsletter
https://t.co/x8AV4OoUh6

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

It’s a compelling starting point. If course it raises a huge number of practical problems. Those should be the focus of attention.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

🔴 Both MPs competing to chair women and equalities committee say trans women are women
https://t.co/pqgSuquwY2

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Well, this is indeed the end of an era. I liked The Spectator when I was at Cambridge. Maybe I should give it another go.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

My Farewell to The Spectator
1/2

It is with great sadness that I write to tell you I am resigning as Chairman of The Spectator, with immediate effect. I made it clear many months ago that I would step down when a new owner took over. That time has now come. 

It has been my immense privilege these past twenty years to have served as your Chairman. During that time we have transformed the oldest magazine in the world, established in the age of the quill pen, into one of the most successful publications of the digital age, growing revenues rapidly across all digital platforms while still maintaining a very healthy print circulation. 

In recent years The Spectator has never been more profitable, its reach never wider, at home and abroad (helped by our splendid Australian and American editions), and its journalism (under the peerless Fraser Nelson) never better nor more influential than it has been in its almost 200-year history. It is a testament to the efforts of everybody in every department, past and present. You should be proud of what you have achieved. I am certainly proud of you. 

A pertinent indicator of these achievements is that a magazine which was given a notional value of £20m two decades ago has been sold for around £100m today (I don’t know the exact price since, in a fit of pique after we stopped Redbird’s Arab-financed takeover, some of us were excluded from the sales process now coming to an end). But at a time when most “legacy” publications are struggling to retain anything like their pre-digital worth, this is an unprecedented increase in value. 

It is sad, even unfair, that nobody responsible for this success — that is, everybody at 22 Old Queen Street — will share in the upside. That is a result of the strange and surprising circumstances, definitely not of our making, we found ourselves in June 2023. Suddenly and without warning we were placed in receivership because our then proprietors had used us as collateral for massive debts unrelated to us (without ever telling us). They then failed to pay these debts. That explains the purgatory we’ve gone through these past 16 months and the peculiar nature of the sales process, in which those who’ve created the added value do not get to share in it. 

It is a tribute to your professionalism and dedication that, throughout these troubled times, you never missed a beat. You continued to publish in print and online as normal. No reader could ever have guessed the internal turmoil we were going through — at one stage there were more external advisers crawling over us than we had employees — because you never deviated from our high standards. 

My proudest recollection will always be the fact that, at a time when legacy print publications were relentlessly cost-cutting and regularly making huge numbers of good people redundant, I did not preside over a single compulsory redundancy in 20 years. Far from shedding folk we were always expanding and hiring. And we did so in a way that turned what once seemed like a largely Eton-Oxbridge fiefdom into probably the most meritocratic publication in the country.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Yes it is very well made.

[Brendan May @bmay]

You don’t have to be an ardent royalist (I’m not) to be a bit shell shocked by this extraordinary film - a quite incredible piece of communication from a family that normally keeps its most private battles and emotions from us. Really moving and superb.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Everything is so simple.

[Robert Jenrick @RobertJenrick]

Today is a day of shame for our criminal justice system.

The solution is simple: build more prisons and lock up prolific offenders for longer.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

I hope the @Conservatives are never forgiven for Brexit.

[James O'Brien @mrjamesob]

A simple truth, either wilfully ignored or still not grasped by swathes of Tory journalists & politicians.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

Why is the clip so short?

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

I want more!

[Mike Amesbury @MikeAmesburyMP]

Stockport woman enjoys her deserved holiday break with a dance to tunes in Ibiza - good stuff.

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

I like the notion of a “peaceful uprising”. Good luck with that. Or maybe just stop trying to foment riots.

[Ben Habib @BackBrexitBen]

The UK is being dragged into chaos under Keir Starmer's rule! It's time for a peaceful uprising to protect our freedoms and stop his reckless agenda. We won't stay silent while he dismantles our democracy!

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

It really is shocking!

[Timothy Wotherspoon @timcotramwil]

He’s actually on top of the science too!