Society

Sunday

John Jenkins

The UK still hasn’t come to terms with the Muslim Brotherhood

Earlier this month, the UAE announced it was sanctioning 11 individuals and eight rather obscure organisations for alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The UAE proscribed the MB as a terrorist group in 2014, so you might be forgiven for thinking this was routine. But it wasn’t. All eight organisations were based in the UK. Normally this works the other way round: the UK bans or sanctions entities elsewhere. Having an Arab country – especially one we claim as a friend – do that in reverse should set alarm bells ringing. There was a brief flurry of press interest, then silence.  The Muslim Brotherhood is the mothership of all modern

Nigel Jones

How Unity Mitford seduced Hitler

The Daily Mail has got a world exclusive on its hands. In great excitement it is publishing the secret diary of Unity Valkyrie Mitford, the star-struck young aristo who made a splash in the 1930s tabloids with her pursuit of her famous love interest. The thing was that the star she was struck with was Adolf Hitler. Unity was the scion of a posho family famous for its literary accomplishments and political extremism: she was one of the six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, a dim peer immortalised in the novels of the eldest daughter, Nancy, as ‘Uncle Matthew’. Known to his offspring as ‘Farve’, Redesdale was a reactionary

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

What Brewdog’s James Watt gets wrong about work-shy Britain

What’s the greatest divide in life? Is it between the dumb and the clever, the rich and the poor, the ugly and the beautiful? All have their points, but in my opinion it’s between those who can make a living doing a thing they love and those who do a job they don’t particularly care for. I don’t believe that anything else comes near deciding whether or not you’ll be consistently happy with your life. Personally, I have never stopped being delighted by the fact that, from the ages of 17 to 65 – even lying in bed as a newly-minted cripple – I can earn my living by writing. It’s

Eoghan Harris

Lockerbie and the forgiveness fallacy

It’s clear who was to blame for the Lockerbie terrorist bombing: Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi paid over a billion dollars to relatives of the 270 victims of the attack after accepting responsibility. But viewers of Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search For Truth, might feel that the USA and UK were somehow involved. Here’s a clue as to why that might be the case: it’s co-directed by Jim Loach, son of Ken, who seems not so much a chip off the old block as a chip off the old Trot block. Swire’s story resembles what a Sinn Féin critic like me calls the forgiveness fallacy Lockerbie’s hero is Jim Swire, who lost his

Angela Epstein

Why are so many BBC broadcasters going native?

Of the many characters created by the peerless Victoria Wood, one creation in particular lingers in the mind: namely the immaculately polished, but unashamedly snobbish television continuity announcer, who, with an assassin’s smile, treated her audience with utter contempt. ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the North. It must be awful for them,’ was one of her more cutting remarks. The hon hon hon bonhomie of French surnames – step forward President Macrrrrrron – is hard to take seriously Coming from Manchester, Wood was clearly making mischief with counterintuitive comedy. She was taking aim at how crisp, received pronunciation can make anything sound plausible. Had she not died in 2016, at

Robin Ashenden

Britain’s unending fascination with the Cambridge spies

Will we ever tire of the Cambridge spies? Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Burgess and Maclean – and to a lesser extent John Caincross, the fifth man in the circle – are names as familiar to us now as certain brands of detergent or the line-up of the Beatles. To compliment the countless books, dramas and documentaries about them, this week the national archives declassified MI5 files on the subject. They cover Philby’s recruitment and subsequent flight to Moscow, as well as the Queen’s nine-year unawareness that Blunt (who worked for Buckingham Palace) had confessed to his past as a Soviet agent. It seems that whatever we think of Burgess, Maclean

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Did Muslim leaders help conceal the grooming gangs scandal? A fierce exchange of views

28 min listen

Welcome to one of the most heated exchanges of views in the history of the Holy Smoke podcast. In this episode, Damian Thompson talks to the distinguished Islamic scholar Dr Musharraf Hussain about the controversy surrounding the Muslim background of some of the accused in the crimes of Britain’s ‘grooming gangs’.  Damian draws an analogy between the Catholic hierarchy’s cover-up of sex abuse by priests, and what he claims was the role of certain local Muslim community leaders in restricting debate about, and investigation of, abuse committed by men from Pakistani families. To say that there was no common ground between Dr Thompson and Dr Hussain would be putting it mildly, alas…

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why we’re horrified by Bonnie Blue and Andrew Tate

OnlyFans content creator Bonnie Blue claims to have broken a world record by sleeping with over a thousand men in twelve hours. I say ‘slept with’ but obviously the euphemism doesn’t really apply to this dubious feat. Blue, who was born in Nottingham but now lives in the United States, added to the glamour of the occasion by uploading a video of the aftermath, where she walks the streets with her face covered in what appears to be a pot pourri of male ejaculate. The reason Blue and Tate horrify us is that we mostly subscribe to a simple view: that men should treat women with respect If the 25-year-old

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

RedNote is breaking down the Great Firewall of China

I turned to Xiaohongshu during the pandemic. At a time when I couldn’t visit China, the Chinese social media app (also known as ‘RedNote’) was a little slice of the motherland when I was bored with Instagram or Twitter. I was hooked immediately: like Instagram, the app is good for beautiful pictures and well-produced reels. It also has cute animals and an excellent sample of the dry wit of Chinese millennials. I’ve probably swiped through hours, maybe days, of short videos of beautiful street scenes from Chinese cities, vlogs from people who have swapped mega-cities for rural villages, cooking videos from all corners of the country, Mandarin comedy skits and

Michael Gove

Michael Gove, Mary Wakefield, Mitchell Reiss, Max Jeffery and Nicholas Farrell

32 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove offers up some advice to Keir Starmer (1:33); Mary Wakefield examines the rise of the ‘divorce party’ (7:28); Mitchell Reiss looks at the promise and peril of AI as he reviews Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, a collaboration between the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft Craig Mundie, and the late US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (13:52); Max Jeffery listens to The Armie HammerTime Podcast as the actor attempts to reverse his spectacular downfall (20:45); and, Nicholas Farrell reveals the time he got drunk with the ghost of Mussolini (25:24).  Produced and presented by

Rakib Ehsan

Labour’s grooming gang plan doesn’t go far enough

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has finally bowed to pressure and announced five local reviews alongside a ‘rapid national audit’ into grooming gangs. But the plan falls short of the national inquiry that many, including some Labour MPs, want. Cooper’s plan is insufficient. Labour may well pay a hefty electoral price for it Cooper’s statement in the Commons yesterday encouragingly included a pledge to enact recommendations made by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which concluded with its flagship report published back in October 2022. These include the creation of a single core data set which covers the characteristics of victims and alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse, including age, sex,

Katharine Birbalsingh

What problem is the Education Secretary trying to solve?

Dear Education Secretary, I am worried your time in office will destroy the huge gains made over the last decade and a half in helping disadvantaged children across England. I don’t know if you are being ideologically blind and therefore ignoring the obvious negative impact of your decisions – or perhaps you just don’t understand the harm your changes will cause. I am hoping it is the latter and I am writing to offer my advice and help so that you might see that the road you are taking will have catastrophic consequences for the poor in this country. Cutting funding to schools just before the GCSE exams I say

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Why Corporate America surrendered the culture war

Like the sound of birdsong over the trenches after the machine guns have ceased roaring, the FT reports bankers are once again using the words ‘pussy’ and ‘retard’ in the course of their work with no fear of reprisal. The culture war is over. Hurrah.  How funny though for those of us who over the last decade have observed closely as corporate CEOs throughout the West have professed to be driven by so-called ‘purpose’ – rooted always in the ideals of social justice and far exceeding the generation of mere profit – to now see these same CEOs junking said purpose without a backward glance. It’s so wonderfully shameless.  Suddenly no one in corporate

Terry Barnes

Sydney’s G-string swimwear row is nothing but hot air

As the hot Australia summer rolls on, so too do the summer silly season stories. The latest is a Sydney council imposing bans on G-string bathing costumes at its public swimming pools.  When it comes to swimwear, Australia has had a long tradition of community standards conflicting with personal freedom. In the early years of the 20th century, anything not neck-to-knee got you ejected from Sydney beaches. In the fifties, as bikinis became popular, patrolling beach inspectors actually measured women’s bikini tops and bottoms to ensure they retained the requisite degree of modesty. Whatever happened to good taste and decorum? This summer, Blue Mountains City Council, in the eponymous hills

Thursday

Zoe Strimpel

Are we calling too many fat people obese?

Over the years I have learned not to take BMI measurements too seriously. I’m pretty healthy, touch wood, and fit, and don’t look remarkably like a porker. But by BMI standards, I am very definitely “overweight”, once or twice even bordering on the dreaded orange swathe of the chart that signifies obese (“severely obese” is shown in a screaming red). Podge is here to stay, so we need to adjust our scales for assessing it When I was younger and vainer I was more than once crushed by the chart’s verdict. I needn’t have bothered. What an as-good-as arbitrary crunch of simple metrics means for people of different propensities and builds

The Spectator

Christmas crossword: Organic Message solution

Letters omitted from across answers, read in clue order, give MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM SPECTATOR… the ‘organ’ in the title.  The first prize of £100, three prizes of £25 and six further prizes of Adrian Bliss’s The Greatest Nobodies of History: Minor Characters from Major Moments (Century) go to the following. The first four winners will each also receive a bottle of champagne. First prize Keith Williamson, Cambridge Runners-up Wendy Meredith, Exeter, Devon; Henry Machin, Gateford, Nottinghamshire; Lin Barrett-West, Billericay, Essex Further runners-up Kevin Ward, Quorn, Leicestershire; Kenneth Mills, Londonderry; Sarah Darlington, Acton Trussell, Stafford; J.J. Morris, Upper Nash, Pembrokeshire; Pam Bealby, Stockton-on-Tees; Jason James, Cambridge

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Rachel Reeves owes Brompton bikes an apology

I long to write less about Rachel Reeves and more about world-beating British businesses – such as Brompton, the folding bicycle maker whose fortunes I have followed since I bought the product and interviewed the founder-designer, Andrew Ritchie, 20 years ago. The latest Brompton news was that profits collapsed from £11 million in 2023 to breakeven for the year to March 2024 in the teeth of a post-pandemic demand slump; and that additional hiring has been put on hold after Labour’s NI increase added ‘hundreds of thousands of pounds’ of extra costs. A move from cramped west London premises to a new base at Ashford in Kent, with room for

The Spectator

Letters: The dangers of the ADHD ‘industry’

Nothing left Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the postmodernist-derived idea that reality can be radically reconstructed through control of what is, and is not, communicated. Its various fantasies – and the public-sector interests that depend upon them – necessarily involve suppressing our powers of rational cognition. Culture-control leftism has been able quite brilliantly to simultaneously pass itself off as a manifestation of ‘progressive

Kara Kennedy

The child-free influencers waging war on motherhood

At around five weeks into my pregnancy my phone found out about it, and from that point on I was subjected to a barrage of social media content about how much children suck. The first was a video by a woman with the username @childfreemillennial, who filmed herself walking through the children’s clothing aisle at a supermarket. She paused, turned to the camera and gagged. I was so shocked at the sheer nastiness and so hormonal that I cried. According to @childfreemillennial, the most loving thing we can do for our children is to never have them – in this economy, in this society, in this climate. According to @childfreemillennial,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why was everyone fooled by Rachel Reeves?

It is some time since I could claim any close acquaintance with the daily skirmishes of workaday Westminster. From risers and fallers on the stock exchange of parliamentary esteem I stand somewhat aside these days: no longer a war correspondent sending back dispatches from the battles between tribes in the febrile atmosphere and smelly carpets of that suffocating fake-gothic palace. Such warfare needs to be reported, but in this I yield to colleagues better placed to report. It seemed Starmer and Reeves had allowed themselves to be persuaded that what they were not was enough If I’ve had any useful contribution – if as a commentator I’ve shed any light