Society

Madeline Grant

The Epping migrant delusion

The origin of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is difficult to pin down: could it be 19th century Denmark or 14th century Spain, 13th century India or the 500s BC in Greece? Perhaps the fact that all of these cultures and times are viable options confirms the truth of it: never underestimate the capacity of those in power to believe their own nonsense. One of the inherent problems with the government’s strategy to ‘educate’ people out of their concerns about immigration is that the narrative it requires is based on myth, not history British politics is an excellent example of this. I’m fascinated by Angela Rayner’s words – leaked from

Charlotte Henry

James O’Brien’s apology isn’t enough

When the story of how the British media responded to the October 7 atrocities is told, there will be a number of villains. High up on the list will be James O’Brien. The LBC host is smugness personified most of the time, but gets even higher on his horse whenever Israel is the topic, which it is frequently. Obviously. James O’Brien is smugness personified, but gets even higher on his horse whenever Israel is the topic Things reached a new low this week. On Tuesday, O’Brien read out a text from someone called ‘Chris’. This person said his Jewish wife had, as a child, attended something called ‘Shabbat School’. There

Ursula Buchan

The secrets of the Palm House at Kew

The news that the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, will begin a £60 million, five-year renovation in 2027 brought back to me a slew of memories from 1978, when I worked there for several months. The extraordinary fame and innovative nature of this unique Victorian building, with its curvilinear, cruciform shape, designed by Decimus Burton and constructed by Richard Turner, seemed to confer a kind of grandeur and significance on an otherwise pretty lowly and scruffy horticultural student. The special treat was the periodic ‘weekend duty’ when, after turning the enormous iron key in the door at eight o’clock on a weekend morning, for two blissful hours

Peter Jones

How ‘cosmopolitan’ is Lord Hermer? 

The Telegraph reports that Attorney General Lord Hermer has ‘been accused of asserting the primacy of human rights law over British government and politics’. Is he then a latter-day Diogenes (4th century bc), who saw himself as a ‘cosmopolitan’, i.e. a citizen of no one place, but rather of the whole world (kosmos, ‘the ordered world’ + polites ‘citizen’)? At one level, obviously not. Diogenes, we are told, travelled from place to place, rejected all conventional values, often lived in a large stone wine jar and performed all natural functions in public, like a dog – kunikos in Greek, whence our ‘cynic’. Self-sufficiency, freedom of speech, indifference to hardship and

Today

The Spectator

Letters: Don’t blame Andrew Bailey

The Bank’s breakdown Sir: Your cover story with its attack on Andrew Bailey (‘Broke Britain’, 19 July) tells only half of the grisly story. All the major central banks had a sort of collective nervous breakdown during the Covid crisis, but none of the others lost its mind quite like the Bank of England. The banks printed money by buying in their country’s sovereign debt, at high prices. Most concentrated on short-dated stocks, where the potential capital loss from rising interest rates was smallest. The Bank bought in long-dated debt at prices which looked like madness to some of us at the time. These stocks are now being sold back

Douglas Murray

MAGA, Epstein and the paedo files

Bill Clinton published another memoir last year, entitled Citizen, and I take it that everyone read the book the minute it came out. For those who somehow didn’t, there’s a striking passage that can be easily found by standing in a bookshop, going to the index and searching under ‘E’ for ‘Epstein’. This leads to a single page reference in which the 42nd president gives a terse and somewhat legalistic account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, explaining that he never went to Epstein’s island, borrowed his plane only to support the work of the Clinton Foundation and cut off contact before Epstein’s first arrest in 2005. In a brusque

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The High Court’s war on truth

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The assertion is intentionally absurd. If every-one adopted their own idiosyncratic lexical definitions, language wouldn’t function, and we’d all blither unintelligibly in a Tower of Babel. But then, Humpty missed his calling as a British High Court judge. Sitting on the bench rather than a wall, the big egghead might never have had that great fall. Contorting once-standard vocabulary whose meaning we recently all agreed upon is commonplace on the left During this Afghanistan data leak scandal, we’ve learned that Afghans deemed

The Spectator

How happy are private renters?

Coined terms Liz Williams, a Reform UK council candidate in May’s local elections, began a High Court action trying to overturn the result after she lost on the toss of a coin, having tied with the Green candidate Hannah Robson. The toss of a coin has been used several times to decide local elections. Has chance favoured a particular party? 1987  Labour candidate Bob Blizzard defeated the Conservative May Reader in Pakefield Ward of Waveney District Council after the toss of a coin. 2000  Labour defeated the Conservatives on the toss of a coin in the Worksop North East ward of Bassetlaw District Council. 2007  The Tory Christopher Underwood-Frost defeated

Nicholas Farrell

Our seven chickens are ruling the roost

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna All seven chickens we recently acquired are now laying eggs – except the one called Giovanna, which is walking with a limp thanks to our youngest child Giuseppe, who is ten. The other day, Giuseppe somehow shut Giovanna’s right foot in the back door as he shooed her out of the house. These chickens are proving portentous. I am convinced they are the catalyst, if not the reason, for why our middle daughter, Magdalena, 17, has just split up with her boyfriend Simone after three years together. Simone, a truly brilliant pianist, is terrified of chickens, a fairly common phobia apparently, though that is not why we

Toby Young Toby Young

The lanyard class is imploding – and it can’t blame Musk

I was surprised to read a report by Sunder Katwala’s thinktank British Future saying the UK is a ‘powder keg’ of community tensions and warning of further unrest this summer. In a foreword by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, who are co-chairing a commission looking into last year’s riots, Britain is described as ‘fragmented’ and ‘fragile’, seemingly only one newspaper headline away from descending into civil war. Aren’t these the same public intellectuals and politicians who, until ten minutes ago, were cheerleaders for multiculturalism? I thought the arrivalof hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year was enriching our street life, improving our cuisine and revitalising our art and literature? Isn’t

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The roundabout is a symbol of British liberty

In my last article, I introduced you to the ‘paceometer’, which shows how the relationship between an extra unit of speed and the consequent saving in journey time is anything but linear. For any given distance, the time saved by increasing your speed by an additional 10mph may be immense or almost irrelevant depending on how fast you are travelling already (accelerating from 5 to 15mph cuts 80 minutes off a ten-mile journey; accelerating from 60 to 70mph over the same distance saves little over a minute). It’s a useful insight: avoiding slowness is a far more important element of time-saving than pursuing ever higher speeds. It helps us understand,

Melissa Kite

Lefties on a Plane: my real-life horror movie

Trapped in the middle seat next to a Dublin businessman in the window seat, I was subjected to a monologue on the ‘far right’. ‘It’s not Islamic extremism we need to be worried about,’ he said. I wanted very badly to say it absolutely is Islamic extremism we need to be worried about, but I kept my mouth shut. If it had kicked off between us, the pilot might have decided to turn around and do an emergency landing. Snakes on a Plane was a silly movie, completely unrealistic. I have an idea for a much more convincing sequel about being trapped on an aircraft with a terrifying menace, and

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Help! My neighbour keeps getting me drunk

Q. We have a neighbour who always overfills my glass. I beg her not to. Even if I commit the solecism of holding my hand over the glass to stop her, she will wait and then sneak up behind me and pour more in. I like her but I always reel away from her house pie-eyed, and wake with a hangover. What do I do? – D.S., Delhi, Catskills, USA A. Punish your neighbour by stocking up on silicone stretch lids, as used by the fastidious to cover the likes of yoghurt pots in the fridge. Having extracted a promise from her that she will not sneak up to refill

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The magic of Danish dream cake

I am, for the most part, a rule follower and a people pleaser. It’s one of the reasons I love baking, which essentially amounts to a set of instructions designed to make something to be shared and bring joy. But if someone recommends something to me, I can be resistant to it for ages. The farcical element is that once I capitulate and try out the novel, TV show, restaurant or biscuit recipe, I inevitably discover that my tastes are extremely mainstream, and I love whatever it is. It took me years to listen to Taylor Swift before immediately accepting her greatness and becoming her no. 1 fan. There’s no

Luke McShane

Freestyle Grand Slam

Levon Aronian took the $200,000 first prize at the latest leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, held in Las Vegas earlier this month. The fifth event of the tour’s debut year, scheduled for Delhi in September, has been cancelled due to a lack of sponsors, but Carlsen tops the leaderboard ahead of the final, which remains scheduled for December in Cape Town. The game below was played in the semi-final, and had as a start position: Ra1, Nb1, Kc1, Nd1, Be1, Qf1, Rg1, Bh1. Black’s setup mirrors that: Ra8, Nb8, etc. Arjun Erigaisi-Levon Aronian Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, Las Vegas, July 2025 1 a4 d5 2 g4 c6 3 f4

Dot Wordsworth

What’s the score on ‘score’?

The courtship rituals of the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility last ten weeks. The consummation is a fiscal event, such as the Budget coming in the autumn, if we survive. Eligible young ladies used to have dance cards on which to enter the names of their suitors. The Treasury has a scorecard on which its proposed measures are drawn up for the OBR to score. The analogy is with the cricket field rather than the ballroom. The OBR score indicates its forecast for spending, receipts and public debt. It also takes into account knock-on effects of a policy change. This is called dynamic scoring. I had to ask

Luke McShane

No. 860

Black to play. So-Keymer, Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, Las Vegas 2025. Keymer’s next move forced So to resign. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 28 July. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Bf1! trapped the queen.  Firouzja tried 1…Rb5 but 2 Qxb5 Qxe3+ 3 Rxe3 axb5 4 Bxb5 was easily winning for Gukesh. Last week’s winner Ray Fisher, Shepley, W. Yorks

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: Family matters

For Competition 3409 you were invited to submit parental advice courtesy of famous writers. Kurt Vonnegut’s father’s advice to his son gave me the idea for this challenge: ‘Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect.’ Your entries were witty and imaginative and there were many more potential winners than we have space for. Congratulations all round, and a special mention to George Simmers’s Georges Perec, Joe Houlihan’s Truman Capote, David Silverman’s Shakespeare and Max Ross’s Wordsworth. The following take the £25 John Lewis vouchers. We assume today that an adult’s duty is to keep children entertained. This assumption can only

Pabulum

2713: Outdressed

Clockwise round the grid from the square between 6 and 7 runs a quotation which could have referred to the three unclued lights, and its source (7,2,3,3,5,3,3,7,4,3,2,5,5). Across 9 Top part is the place to go in ships (5) 10   Wild party girl cycling (4) 11   Ex-president twice cut back tropical plants (5) 12   Unbounded profusion bewildered lunatic (7) 13   Article on devilish debonair Michael Gove? (10) 15   Microstate near heart of Burundi hoards gold (5) 18   He might steal object inside present (8) 19   But for squaddies we may serve mocktails (6) 21   Rebecca’s boy, second in hunt after sea snakes

The Spectator

2710: The clash – solution

The four anagrams were 1A TROUNCES (defined by 7 BEATS), 12 COUNTERS (27 PARRIES), 21 CONSTRUE (10 INTERPRET) and 25 RECOUNTS (13 RELATES) First prize Lisa Bramley, Shaldon, Devon Runners-up Nick Huntley, Darlington; Lewis Osborne, Newton Mearns, Glasgow

The Spectator

Recognising Palestine isn’t a path to peace

The children of Gaza are enduring horrendous suffering. The control of aid has been restricted. Innocent lives have been set at nothing. Ruthlessness well beyond the terms of realpolitik has put hundreds of thousands at risk. The people responsible deserve global condemnation. But instead it seems they are to be rewarded. It is Hamas which is responsible for the suffering in Gaza. The terrorist organisation has, for years, used its thugs to control international development assistance to enrich its leaders and subdue the population. Its murderous – indeed, genocidal – intent was made manifest on 7 October 2023 when it unleashed an assault on innocent Israelis which resulted in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Epping protests, votes at 16 and Ozzy Osbourne dies

Home Six people were arrested during a protest by 1,000 outside the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, which houses asylum seekers; an asylum seeker had earlier been charged with sexual assaults in the town. The Conservative leader of the council said: ‘It’s a powder keg now.’ The number of migrants arriving in England in small boats in the seven days to 21 July was 1,030. The Lionesses, the England women’s football team, decided not to take the knee before winning their semi-final Euro game, after a player, Jess Carter, had been inundated with racist abuse on social media during the tournament. The Chief Constable of Northumbria Police ordered the removal

Cleo Watson

The nostalgic joy of Frinton-on-Sea

For the recent heatwave, it was my mission to escape our little Wiltshire cottage, where it hit 35°C. It has one of those very poor structural designs unique to Britain that, like plastic conservatories or the Tube, is useless in hot weather. First, we went to stay with friends in Frinton-on-Sea with our English bulldog, who was born in nearby Clacton and is shamelessly happy to be back among his people. Some years ago I lived in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, a living museum of America’s pre-revolutionary settler history. Frinton doesn’t go quite that far – there are no ersatz yeomen milking doleful cows – but to visit is to enter