Society

Tuesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

It’s time for Pope Leo XIV to make some tough decisions

13 min listen

Nearly everyone loves Robert Prevost, the unassuming baseball fan from Chicago who unexpectedly became Pope Leo XIV this year. But as he prepares to spend his summer in Castel Gandolfo he has some difficult decisions to make. Is he prepared to clear up all the doctrinal confusion created by his predecessor Pope Francis? And will he allow liberal bishop to continue to persecute Catholics who prefer the ancient Latin form of Mass?  Damian Thompson gives us his thoughts in advance of Recovering the Sacred, a Spectator event at St Bartholomew-the-Great in the City of London on July 8 featuring debate and sacred music illustrating the recovery of tradition by a

Robert Taylor

Can Wimbledon learn to love Novak Djokovic?

It’s only when they get older and start losing that we start loving them. That’s how it was with John McEnroe. ‘Superbrat’ we used to call him in the early 80s, when he was pretty much unbeatable. But come the last years of that decade, and by then the underdog, fans were willing him on. Even if some in the Wimbledon crowd still haven’t forgiven him for posing as some kind of threat to public health they should surely now start appreciating his wonderful sporting talents while they have the chance It’s starting to be the same with an even greater player. The greatest of all time, in fact: Novak

James Graham

Why corporations won’t let Pride die

Pride month has finally come to an end. Did you notice? There has definitely been a reduction in the number of parades, banners, and flags this year. As Gareth Roberts wrote here, Pride has been damaged by its internal contradictions and the Supreme Court’s common-sense ruling on what a woman is. Why are brands still throwing money at charities promoting an ideology that the public rejects?r Still, hopeful as all this is, it seems that for some corporations, Pride still refuses to die. Whilst shopping I recently saw a jar of Marmite. Its label urged me to ‘Stand with Pride.’ The flag accompanying the statement included the transgender stripes, naturally.

Alexander Larman

The Royal Train’s retirement is a loss to Britain

King Charles is a man acutely aware that the monarchy has to be seen to provide value for money in these straitened times. Therefore, to coincide with the announcement that the royal household is to be given over £130 million of public money for the next two years to complete works on Buckingham Palace, it has been revealed that the cash-guzzling royal train is to be scrapped. It is true that, from any economic perspective, the regal locomotive does not represent a worthwhile investment; it only made two trips last year, each lasting two days, and the total cost was nearly £78,000. But the news that it will be decommissioned

Adam James Pollock

Northern Ireland is still paying a heavy price for Brexit

This week heralds the arrival in Northern Ireland of yet more overregulation, bureaucratic overreach, and political incompetence. No, Keir Starmer isn’t making an unannounced visit to Belfast. From this month, many thousands of food products imported from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will have to display warnings on their packaging highlighting that these goods are not to be brought into the European Union. The reason why is essentially a bungled Brexit deal for which thousands of businesses – and millions of customers – will pay the price. It is yet another reason for British firms to stop doing business in Northern Ireland The Windsor Framework – the result of the UK’s

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Adam Curtis: ‘modern power makes me cry’

Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but he doesn’t want to talk about them. ‘I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,’ he says, ‘just under another name. They’re probably out there somewhere…’ His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers at the kitchen table in the Soho townhouse where he works. He looks at me and repeats: ‘They’re private.’ For 30 years Curtis has been making documentaries for the BBC about how Britain became a sad place, or, in his own words: ‘What happened after the Cold War, mixed in with a deeper sense of…

Monday

The Spectator

The Spectator presents: Living with a Politician

Exclusive to subscribers, watch our latest event Living with a Politician live.  Join Sarah Vine, (author of How Not to Be a Political Wife), with Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson (author of Rake’s Progress, her own odyssey as a political candidate) and Hugo Swire (whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an MP’s Wife) as they discuss the losses and laughter involved in being married to politics.

Danny Shaw

How did the BBC end up broadcasting Bob Vylan?

Until last weekend, Bob Vylan were not a household name. I admit that I had never heard of the rap group before. If you’d have asked me, I’d have said he’s a very famous folk-rock star whose name has been misspelt on the publicity material for Glastonbury.  But that really doesn’t matter – because I’m not producing the BBC television coverage of the festival. And whoever was in charge on Saturday should have made it their mission to know everything about all the acts that were going to be featured. Too many managers shy away from hard decisions, such as calling out poor behaviour and challenging sub-par performance BBC editors and

Robert Taylor

The state needs to chill out about the hot weather

Since the year dot, it’s got rather warm in southern England at some stage most summers. Not scorching. In recent years, it’s usually reached around 30-ish. Sometimes higher. A bit cooler than the sort of weather millions tolerate when they go to the Med on their hols. So, do we really need to be subjected to yet more panicky government heat alerts? The UK Health Security Agency, set up by Matt Hancock in 2021, has warned that ‘significant impacts are likely’, including death, among people aged 65 and over. As if entering a teaching your granny to suck eggs contest, the agency then informs us that ‘using fans, wearing loose

Alexander Larman

Take me back to Glastonbury

Judging by the coverage of this year’s Glastonbury festival, and the reaction in certain quarters, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was little less than a hard-left, Jew-hating Nuremberg rally. It is an impressive achievement to unite the government, led by the Prime Minister, and the opposition in blanket condemnation of two of the acts performing. But the groanworthily named ‘Bob Vylan’ – and the more up-and-at-‘em Kneecap – managed to raise their profiles far beyond what their mediocre music warrants by making various anti-Israel, pro-Palestine comments during their sets. Living up to the old adage that all publicity is good publicity, their streaming numbers promptly went through

Stephen Pollard

Why I hate Wimbledon

Here we go: two weeks of wall-to-wall coverage of the sport for people who hate sport. The most boring game ever invented, played by the most boring athletes, watched by the most boring audience, interpreted by the most boring commentators. In case the penny hasn’t dropped, I am of course describing Wimbledon, the only sporting occasion at which the most controversial issue is the cost of strawberries, and the only major competition in which key analysis focuses on the decibel count of female players hitting the ball. Nothing exemplifies better how Wimbledon is the sporting contest for people with no interest in sport than ‘Henman Hill’, a patch of grass

Sunday

Rory Hanrahan

Red tape is ruining Britain’s pubs

Takings were falling. Regulars were drifting away. Our pub was in a bad way. It was clear that things needed to change. But, paralysed by fear of an employment tribunal in a legal system tilted against employers, we felt trapped. If we sacked the managers and replaced them, we could find ourselves embroiled in a messy legal case that could cost us everything. So, drowning in paperwork, warnings, hearings, improvement plans, and risk assessments, we endured. Running a pub felt less like hospitality than surviving a siege of bureaucracy. That was when I saw it. This wasn’t just one bad incident. Our beloved pub was being strangled in red tape.

Alexander Larman

How the drive-thru took over Britain

Britain has received many things from America that we have little reason to be grateful for: Black Lives Matter, Instagram, the word ‘gotten’ – and the brief and unlovely period that Meghan Markle was a resident of this country. Yet one of the most enduring American imports is something that we no longer much notice: the drive-through – or ‘drive-thru’ – restaurant. The all-American tradition of stuffing yourself with burgers and fries while sitting in the comfort of your car is here to stay. Thanks, America There are now over 2,600 drive-thrus in Britain. A good number, of course, are McDonald’s – 1080, to be exact – but such is

Saturday

Travis Aaroe

Henry VIII turned England upside down

Henry VIII, who was born on this day in 1491, is the only English monarch other than William the Conqueror who can claim to have destroyed a society and replaced it with a new one. Catholic apologists like Chesterton are right to see in the Henry VIII saga a sort of secular apocalypse; it was, in Chesterton’s words, the ‘dissolution of the whole of the old civilisation’. The new England that grew up in its place – by Henry’s unwitting patronage – was alien, denatured, dislocating, and altogether more worthwhile than the one that had gone before it.  The story of Henry VIII’s is the story of an eccentric clique

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Tom Skinner and the triumph of Essex Man

As a teenager, my first husband was an Essex Man. It ended badly – all my fault – but I still retain a fondness for the breed, who I associate with self-made can-do stoicism and optimism; the opposite of, say, Islington Man. An Essex Man is being spoken of as the one to give the ghastly ‘Sir’ Sadiq Khan a run for his money In recent decades, the county has become known as a glitzy, new-money Cheshire-on-Colne, due to the popular television show The Only Way Is Essex, a ‘scripted reality’ show in which a mutating cast of likely lads and luscious-lipped ladies make out and break up at bars

Laurie Wastell

Demographics is the new dividing line on the right

It’s an ominous time for a state-of-the-nation conference. Each week, the shores we defended against Hitler, Napoleon and the Spanish Armada are breached by hundreds of foreign men, while asylum seekers make up ‘a significant proportion’ of those currently being investigated for the grooming of British children. Earlier this month, there were days of violent anti-immigration riots in Ballymena. The five Gaza independents elected last year marked the grim rise of electoral sectarianism in the UK, a trend that is only set to accelerate. Academics and government insiders, despairing at the state of Britain, fret about looming civil war along ethnic lines. ‘Now and England’, a one-day conference hosted by the Roger

Octavius Black

The dark side of LinkedIn

I’d always assumed that LinkedIn is Instagram for people with lanyards. A place for earnest self-congratulation, polite emoji applause, and lightly airbrushed career updates: ‘Humbled to be speaking at Davos’; ‘Thrilled to have joined Deloitte’; ‘Grateful to my incredible team for smashing Q4 targets.’ That sort of thing. Sanitised, self-serving and safely anodyne with an easy trade: a like for a like, a ‘repost’ for a ‘funny’. Instead of an apology, I received a torrent of replies ranging from ‘you had it coming’ to ‘stop making a fuss’ So when I posted something mildly provocative, I expected at worst a few furrowed brows and an awkward silence in the comments.

Friday

Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan, Tim Shipman, Francis Pike, Hermione Eyre and George Young

42 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Peter Frankopan argues that Israel’s attack on Iran has been planned for years (2:00); just how bad are things for Kemi Badenoch, asks Tim Shipman (13:34); Francis Pike says there are plenty of reasons to believe in ghosts (21:49); Hermione Eyre, wife of Alex Burghart MP, reviews Sarah Vine’s book How Not To Be a Political Wife: A Memoir, which deals with Vine’s marriage to ex-husband Michael Gove (28:46); and, George Young reports on the French sculptors building the new Statue of Liberty (34:45).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Jawad Iqbal

Iran’s supreme leader looks more deluded than defiant

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has made his first public comments since the ceasefire with Israel took hold. Khamenei, who has ultimate authority over all major decisions in the country, has not been seen or heard from in more than a week. His pre-recorded speech, aired on state television, is meant to put an end to rising speculation about his fate after he went into hiding at the start of the conflict. In the televised address, the Iranian leader hailed his country’s ‘victory’ over Israel and vowed never to surrender to the United States. The Iranian leader was eager to tell anyone who would listen that the US bombing of

Arabella Byrne

Is your private school dumbing down?

Bankruptcy, as Ernest Hemingway famously said, comes ‘gradually, then suddenly’. For Britain’s private schools floundering in the wake of the VAT rise on fees imposed in January this year, the gradual decline is well underway. Not only have an estimated 11,000 pupils left private schools so far in an unprecedented – and poorly forecast by Labour – mid-academic year exodus and smaller private schools have closed, but now Chinese whispers have begun about the lowering of academic standards.   Pleading anonymity, several mothers muttered that pupils that would ‘never normally be through the door’ were found in their children’s classes According to unnamed sources in the Telegraph, headteachers are quoted as saying