Society

Thursday

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Campus tyranny

On this week’s episode of The Spectator Podcast we look at the issue of ‘safe spaces’ on campuses and beyond. We also discuss Donald Trump’s military strategy, and look at Indian independence, 70 years on. First up: In this week’s Spectator cover piece, Brendan O’Neill slams British universities for what he sees as a burgeoning liberal conformism within their walls. Is he right to despair? Or is this just a grumpy older generation railing against change? He joins the podcast along with Justine Canady, Women’s Officer for UCLSU, and Madeleine Kearns, who writes about her experiences at NYU in the magazine. As Brendan says: “In the three years since The Spectator named these Stepford Students, the situation

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Clive James

In this week’s Books podcast I speak to Clive James. Since he was diagnosed with leukaemia, Clive has been as it were on borrowed time. But what use he has made of that time: the last couple of years have seen a great late outpouring of poetry, most recently the wittily and wanly titled collection Injury Time.  I travelled to his home in Cambridge to talk to him about poetry, fame, late style, discovering Browning, being silly and serious, watching box sets, facing the end, and why he wants to be buried back home in Australia. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

University challenge | 24 August 2017

In a few weeks, a new intake of students will arrive, all fresh-faced and excited, at universities around the country. They’ll be thrilled at the prospect of escaping the wagging finger of mum and dad, eager to absorb new ideas. But I’m afraid they are in for a rude awakening. Unless they’re very fortunate, they will soon find themselves enveloped in a world that’s more censorious than stimulating and taught not to question ideas but to learn by heart the progressive creed. It will take a brave and resilient youngster to survive university with their intellectual curiosity intact. Every aspect of campus life, from what you can say to how

Madeleine Kearns

Unsafe spaces

As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma. During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’? The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence. Later I realised why: expressing bewilderment at the obsession with pronouns might count as a ‘micro-aggression’.

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron marches on

The rentrée politique in France next month promises to be the most exciting in decades as the dynamic superstar president Emmanuel Macron, aged 39¾, embarks on his mission to rescue France from its recent ignominy and restore it to glory. No matter that the polls are showing the shine may already be off this particular golden youth, and that a protest movement abruptly halted his wife, Brigitte, from having a formal First Lady role. President Macron marches on into the new political season, as full of confidence in his own abilities as he has always been. Many have been the comparisons of Macron to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 24 August 2017

Indian Ocean coast Like most men I wonder if I have been much good as a father, but one thing I got right was that I gave our children, Eve and Rider, the Indian Ocean. Before they could even walk my Claire taught her babies to feel happy splashing about in the sandy coral pools below my mother’s house, and this was where she taught them first to swim. They were still tiny, with curly blond locks, when they ran at the roaring breakers on the beach, getting completely lost in the white foam, then bobbing up to the surface with squeals of delight. They made up names for waves:

Bruce Anderson

The countryside’s eternal youth

I once witnessed a rarer spectacle than Halley’s Comet. I heard Ted Heath tell a funny story. It related to the mid-fifties. Le grand épicier, then chief whip, found himself bear-leading Field Marshal Montgomery on a visit to a racecourse. Pol Roger, a horse belonging to Churchill, was expected to win. The principles of betting were explained to Montgomery, who declared he would wager sixpence on Winston’s horse. Intakes of breath all round. Someone suggested sixpence would not quite do. Monty then agreed to hazard half a crown. There was only one problem. The nag did not oblige. In the face of defeat, some losers would have taken the war

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

We’re losing the cat-and-mouse terror game

I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the clue’s in the name — was waiting to board a flight when he started ‘harmlessly’ talking about 9/11. There is no reason to believe he has any connections with extremists, but he was kicked off the flight because of security concerns and had to fly out of the UK with another airline. Although he was later offered a refund, he is now suing, claiming he was ‘racially and religiously profiled’ by the Virgin staff. ‘I know this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been a white man in his sixties,’ Mo

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Want greater diversity? Try being less fair

In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within a company — the freedom to ask: ‘What if we’re wrong?’ A business culture that can attract and accommodate people with complementary talents benefits everybody. So even if you don’t believe Damore’s theories (in which case you probably shouldn’t hire any systems geneticists), he’s surely right to speak up if he believes the complex question of diversity has been hijacked by wishful dogma. It should be the province of first-rate scientific inquiry, not second-rate social theory. If the diversity agenda is pursued badly, the cure may well be worse than

Katie Glass

Puppy love

There have been times since the break-up when I’ve felt so low I’ve opened a bottle of Shiraz and spent the whole night flicking through my mobile-phone photos of the two of us: the sunsets we watched; the meals we shared. I’d remember long walks on the beach and longer mornings in bed. How you’d crawl up over the duvet and wake me by licking my head. Leaving the boyfriend was surprisingly easy but oh, the agony of losing the dog! My sweet double doodle (that’s a labra-doodle, goldendoodle cross). ‘Yes, she is pretty isn’t she?’ I’d say to the strangers who accosted us. ‘She’s 18 months old and she’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Saltburn-by-the-Sea

When towns are on the up, there is a brief period when they inhabit what I would call the Goldilocks Zone. Stuff has changed for the better and there are suddenly very agreeable things to do, places to eat etc, but the area has not yet been comprehensively and irredeemably arseholified by arseholes. There is still a retention of the old: it hasn’t all been expunged. For Notting Hill, I guess that would be the early 1970s — after the race riots and before Cameron et al moved in. For lovely Saltburn-by-the-Sea, 12 miles from Middlesbrough, it may be just about now. Or perhaps it is already drifting beyond the

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The Chloe Ayling story masks slavery’s sad truth

Do you believe Chloe Ayling? She is the 20-year-old glamour model whose dramatic story has been all over the newspapers throughout August. She claims to have been lured to a fake photoshoot in Italy, injected with ketamine, stuffed inside a suitcase and shoved into the boot of a car. So far, so just about credible. But the story becomes ever more bizarre. Ayling says she was then driven to a farmhouse, where she was threatened with being sold via an online auction as a sex slave to a man in the Middle East, who – we must assume – has a taste for busty blonde British babes. Not only was

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The dice men

‘I have a slight bone to pick with you,’ I tell Ian Livingstone as he makes me a cup of coffee in his airy open-plan kitchen. ‘This is a bone I have been waiting to pick for, oh, 35 years. That bloody maze!’ Livingstone chuckles. ‘That was Steve’s. He’s the sadist.’ That maze, in a way, is the reason we are meeting. The near-unnavigable labyrinth featured near the end of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain — the choose-your-own-adventure novel which launched the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy series. Here was an adventure ‘in which you are the hero’. Some 400 numbered paragraphs, connected in a web of decisions: ‘If you head

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The heartbreaking story of Pecky, a young green woodpecker

Ever since I was a child, I’d always yearned to see a green woodpecker. With its scarlet cap and lime-green body, it looks far too colourful and exotic to be a native species. But it very much is, as you can tell from the fact that it has a rustic nickname — the yaffle. This, incidentally, is how Professor Yaffle — the carved wooden bookend which comes to life as a drily academic woodpecker, the ‘font of all knowledge’, apparently based on Bertrand Russell — in the 1970s children’s TV series Bagpuss got his name. But I digress. The point is, I never did get to see a green woodpecker

Lucy Vickery

Reprogramming

In Competition No. 3012 you were invited to change a letter in the title of a well-known play and submit a programme note for the new production.   Thanks to Steven Joseph, who suggested this excellent competition topic. David Silverman’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Deaf started well but ran out of steam halfway through. Other promising titles that didn’t quite deliver included The Cheery Orchard, A Waste of Honey and The Wind in the Pillows. And no one, regrettably, did justice to The Bugger’s Opera.   I admired A.H. Harker’s Cook Back in Anger — ‘an intense investigation of the stresses that competitors in Bake Off and Masterchef bring to

Wednesday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

How can we encourage millennials to save for their retirement?

It’s a story we’ve become used to hearing in recent years. How millennials are the sensible generation. They’ve turned their backs on alcohol and going out every single night. They smoke less than other age groups, and have fewer sexual partners. And here’s another string to add to their bow – it turns out that they are also keen to invest in their retirement, even now, when that could be fifty years away. Research released today by Royal London show that auto-enrolment in workplace pensions schemes hasn’t put off those aged 24-35 from saving for retirement. 71% of those questioned said that they decided not to opt out of their

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Scotland’s vast deficit gives nationalists another dose of reality

Happy GERS day everyone! For the uninitiated, the publication of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland figures has become one of Scotland’s most-cherished annual political bunfights. It is a kind of Caledonian Festivus, during which certain rites must be observed. Some people enjoy the Festivus Miracles, others relish the Festivus Feats of Strength and magical thinking but everyone agrees that the true meaning of Festivus – and GERS – is only truly made apparent during the traditional and joyous Airing of Grievances. Today, happily, will be no exception. the latest GERS figures show some improvement in Scotland’s financial position. The deficit run by Scotland last year only amounted to £13.3

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Why western women are now the Islamists’ target of choice

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists’ war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Guy Verhofstadt’s well-paid side jobs

Guy Verhofstadt is a busy man. As well as his day job in the European parliament, Verhofstadt has the task of trying to thrash out a deal in his role as its chief Brexit negotiator. But that daunting task – and his dedication to the EU – isn’t stopping the Belgian politician from earning a small fortune for his side jobs away from his taxpayer-funded role. In fact, in a tally of all 748 MEPs, Verhofstadt comes second for his outside earnings – which tally up to at least £175,000 a year. As an MEP, Verhofstadt already pockets £93,000 a year. But the bulk of his income actually comes from his commitments