Society

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

In praise of the Children’s Booker Prize

The Booker Foundation announced on Friday what it called its most ambitious project in twenty years: the launch of a Children’s Booker Prize. Well, heavens: what am I to do with that? As a columnist, most of my business is moaning and carping. Happiness, as it is said, writes white, and the default position of the comment hack in search of a subject is to find something that annoys him. Aerodynamically speaking, if you’re throwing something from the cheap seats towards the stage, you get a whole lot more range and accuracy when you’re throwing a beer-bottle full of piss than when you’re throwing a bouquet. And yet, here is something that, walk around it as I will, prodding and muttering, I can find nothing to

Sunday

James Graham

Avanti should get rid of its Pride train

My train pulled up at the Manchester Piccadilly platform and suddenly I was staring at what is apparently the largest Pride flag in the UK. Avanti’s ‘Progress Train’ is emblazoned with the latest iteration of the ‘Progress Pride’ flag – which dutifully incorporates ethnic minorities, transgender people and STD-sufferers. The more a company chooses to focus on its social values, the more sceptical you should be of its performance As a social conservative, it is strange to have to take a journey on a train which promotes such a contested ideological outlook – especially when that outlook is being challenged by the country at large. This year the British Supreme Court reaffirmed

Paul Burke

Why I don’t like gigs

I’ve been obsessed with music and collecting records ever since I can remember. I even played a lot of those records at clubs all over the country. And since I grew up in London in the 70s and 80s, a mere bus ride away from the Roundhouse, the Rainbow and the Hammersmith Odeon, you can imagine how many gigs I went to. Well actually, I went to hardly any. Because I have a shameful confession to make – I don’t like gigs. Never have, never will. Unfortunately, Live Aid changed everything. Gigs became huge, overblown and fiendishly expensive When I went along to my first one, aged 15, I truly

David James

Riot Women sums up everything wrong with the BBC

Picture the scene: five middle-aged male actors playing rockstars are lolling about on sofas in a recording studio. In front of them is an attractive young female producer; the men start making obscene gestures behind her about her bottom, sniggering and giggling like schoolboys, one sticks out his tongue through his fingers, intimating what he would like to do to her. Such a scene, if it was ever commissioned, would no doubt have been left on the cutting-room floor. It would be seen as puerile, sexist and outdated. Well, it was commissioned, and by the BBC, and is being broadcast this month in the final episode of Riot Women. Everything

Saturday

John Armstrong

Why I am threatening to sue the London Mathematical Society

Last month, in apparent defiance of the Supreme Court, the Council of the London Mathematical Society published a new Statement of Commitment to Trans Inclusion which states: ‘The LMS provides gender-neutral toilets and supports the use of facilities that align with a person’s affirmed identity.’ Many organisations have been slow to update their policies to reflect the Supreme Court’s April judgement that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means biological sex. However, the LMS have gone one further. They have chosen to write their first ever trans policy after the judgement and this policy appears to openly flout the Court’s ruling. Because the meaning of their statement isn’t

John Kennedy

Prince Andrew’s titles cannot be simply stripped

Back-bench MPs are again discussing how to ‘strip’ Prince Andrew of his titles. The frenzy and impulse is public-facing and moral, and while motivations may differ, the method proposed is mostly constitutionally illiterate and impossible. Royal dignities are legal instruments. They are not decorative honours that parliament may remove by political motion. Each exists in law in a distinct way and must be addressed by the procedure appropriate to it. The United Kingdom has clear mechanisms for doing so, but they are formal and precise, which is exactly why they work. Prince Andrew holds three peerages: the Dukedom of York, the Earldom of Inverness and the Barony of Killyleagh. All

Friday

The Spectator

Speaker Series: An evening with Bernard Cornwell

Watch Bernard Cornwell in conversation with The Spectator’s associate editor Toby Young as they discuss Cornwell’s new book, Sharpe’s Storm, and delve into his remarkable life and career via livestream, exclusively for Spectator subscribers. Author of more than 50 international bestselling novels, including The Last Kingdom and much-loved Sharpe series, Cornwell will discuss the real history behind his riveting tales of war and heroism, and the enduring appeal of historical fiction.

Stephen Pollard

The joyful return of racing at Cheltenham

Today is a perfect day. Not just any old great day, but the first truly perfect one for over six months. As I write this, I sit at my desk looking out over the green acres of a north London park. The leaves are that glorious autumnal reddish brown, the weather is crisp and bright, and God is in his English heaven. But those are merely some of the necessary parts of a perfect day. Because what lifts today from being merely wonderful to perfect is that, for the first time in half a year, there is racing at Cheltenham.    The first day of the annual two-day October fixture is the

David Shipley

Rudakubana’s school knew he was trouble

Quietly, day-by-day, the inquiry into the Southport killings is revealing how disastrous failures of the British state led to Axel Rudakubana murdering young girls in August 2024. Yesterday it was the turn of the killer’s former headteacher, Joanne Hodson, to give evidence. She first met Rudakubana in 2019 when he enrolled at the Acorns School in Lancashire, aged 13. The boy was sent there after taking a knife into his previous school.  Acorns is a specialist school solely for children who have been permanently excluded from mainstream education. It’s also a good example of such a school, getting many of its pupils into work or further education after their time

Andrew McQuillan

Bloody Sunday and the battle for Northern Ireland’s past

Soldier F, a former paratrooper accused of shooting dead two unarmed protestors on Bloody Sunday in 1972, has been found not guilty of their murder and attempting to kill five others. At court in Belfast, the Judge Patrick Lynch KC said the evidence before him ‘fails to reach the high standard of proof required in a criminal case’. The Bloody Sunday case points to a broader trend in Northern Ireland, of how the courts are being used almost as a proxy to rehash the battles of the past 1972 was the most violent year of the so-called Troubles, with just under 500 killed. However, the events of that January day

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The hate-filled campaign against professor Ben-Gad

If I didn’t tell you professor Michael Ben-Gad was an Israeli, you could probably figure it out from his response to a hate-filled campaign to drive him out of his job at City St George’s, University of London. On Wednesday, a masked, keffiyeh-wearing mob stormed his lecture hall and helpfully filmed themselves doing so. Asked for his response to the intimidation tactics, Ben-Gad told Sky News: ‘Their video is on social media and it makes for difficult viewing. They captured me in profile. I need to lose weight.’ It’s a very Israeli response. The economics don is being targeted because, as an Israeli youth in the 1980s, he did his compulsory

Joanna Williams

Why Prince Andrew gets more attention than grooming gangs

This week, a group of Pakistani-heritage men appeared in court. The 54-year-old alleged ringleader stands accused of preying on two vulnerable school girls, and abusing them ‘in the most humiliating and degrading way imaginable’. The girls were alleged to have been passed between six men in total, with prosecutor Rossano Scamardella KC telling jurors, ‘Unprotected sex was routine. The girls were lied to about it being forbidden for Muslim men to use protection. These men cared not a bit about sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies.’ It seems today we are more comfortable discussing the bad behaviour of posh, middle-aged, white men than the horrendous crimes Pakistani-heritage Muslims have been convicted of

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The significance of the King’s visit to Rome

In any other week – or month, or year – King Charles’s visit to Rome would have been a truly seismic occasion, laden with symbolism and religious importance. Some may have recalled the unexpected significance of that great Father Ted line, ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’, when the news was announced that the King would be praying with Pope Leo XIV.  The moment where the monarch and the pope came together in the Sistine Chapel in worship, and thereby celebrate the Papal Jubilee, was an unprecedented one. In this, as in many other regards, Charles’s reign represents a break from tradition Not since Henry VIII created the schism between

Maurice Glasman

Frank Field: a very English saint

Lord Glasman delivered a speech at the inaugural Frank Field Memorial lecture last week. Here is an edited transcript of the speech: I am honoured by your invitation to give this Frank Field inaugural lecture, more than I can say. And that is because I loved and admired Frank Field, more than I can say. I rarely to say of a person that they meant the world to me, but this is true of Frank.  One of my favourite episodes from the Bible is at the beginning of Genesis when Abraham is visited by the three Angels, they are not the Magi, yet, with the news that his wife Sarah, who was

Katie Jenkins

Strictly won’t survive without Claudia (or Tess)

Put down the glitterball. Mop up the sequins. The news – oh, the unthinkable news – has arrived: Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman are quickstepping away from Strictly Come Dancing.  ‘We have loved working as a duo and hosting Strictly has been an absolute dream,’ the pair announced on Instagram this morning. ‘We were always going to leave together and now feels like the right time.’ You can almost hear the wails from Broadcasting House: how sad, how shocking, how very bittersweet! Another era of prime-time ratings dribbling down the drain. The show wasn’t just about the ratings or the romance rumours or, even, the glamour. For viewers like me

Sam Dumitriu

Why is Britain trying to make our nuclear reactors ‘woke’?

Sit on a roundtable of small businesses – as I have on many occasions – and it won’t be long before the topic shifts to the maddening number of rules and regulations that companies have to comply with if they want to sell to government. At one point, vendors are asked about employing ‘people seeking asylum’. This is a strange and, fundamentally, unachievable request: British law bans asylum seekers from working. Since the Social Value Act passed in 2012, companies bidding on public tenders are not only graded on value for money for the taxpayer (note: that’s you reader), but also on an amorphous concept known as ‘social value’. What

Tim Kerr

The best books to read in prison

Like Nicolas Sarkozy, I knew I would be a disgraced former president going to prison. Okay, as the once co-president of my hospital’s junior doctors’ mess, perhaps my comparison is a bit grand. And where Sarkozy brought only a few books with him – including Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, perhaps manifesting an early release if his appeal is successful – I was bang to rights for drugs offences, so brought a suitcase full of books into the dock for my inevitable stretch. Books and prisons have a strained relationship. I regularly get letters from people in prison complaining that their prison won’t let books in for fear

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Left-wing Ultras, Reform intellectuals & capitalist sex robots

38 min listen

‘The Ultras’ are the subject of The Spectator’s cover story this week – this is the new Islamo-socialist alliance that has appeared on the left of British politics. Several independent MPs, elected amidst outrage over the war in Gaza, have gone on to back the new party created by former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. The grouping has got off to a rocky start but – as Angus Colwell and Max Jeffery write – there are expectations that they could pick up dozens of seats across the country. Can the hard-left coalition hold? Host Lara Prendergast is joined by the Spectator’s deputy political editor James Heale, commissioning editor

Taki

The irreplaceable Lady Annabel Goldsmith

During Jane Austen’s time, their roles would be reversed. Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who left us last week at 91, would be Darcy, with Mark Birley and Sir James Goldsmith as Elizabeth Bennet. Both her husbands were womanisers, well-born, but of inferior birth to her. I met her around 60 years ago, and she was as aristocratic as they come, and as down to earth as her puckish irreverence would take her. A quick smirk, a raised eyebrow would turn into something prurient and funny. Wonderfully mischievous, she enjoyed revving it up when the Austro-Australian Princess Michael would complain about me at Annabel’s annual summer party. Annabel would listen to the

The Spectator

Letters: Trump’s true heir

SEN and sensibility Sir: As a former teacher and long-standing chair of governors in a local school, I share Rosie Lewis’s frustration at the parlous situation regarding special educational needs (‘Fare play’, 18 October). I also sit on a weekly area admissions committee and many schools in our area are full, often with long waiting lists. The main reason given why children are denied a place is the number of SEN pupils already in a year group, normally, incredibly, in excess of 30 per cent – sometimes 50 per cent. To admit another pupil with special needs or behavioural issues would be detrimental to the education of children already there.