Society

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron’s search for a prime minster is a complete farce

Who will be the next prime minister of France? Almost two months after the centre lost its majority in the National Assembly, the potential candidates range from the improbable to the ludicrous.   The latest semi-crazed idea is that Emmanuel Macron should call on Ségolene Royal, the former wife of François Hollande, a socialist party machine politician hated in equal measure by both the extreme left and populist right and who generates no enthusiasm from either the moderate Republicans or the residue of the president’s centre.  Admittedly, this idea is floated by Royal herself and has been met with general derision. Or perhaps Bernard Cazeneuve, a moderate socialist who was Hollande’s

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why did the Grenfell Inquiry take so long to tell us what we know already?

Predictably enough, and not unreasonably, the 1700-page final report into the Grenfell disaster apportions the bulk of the blame with the companies who manufactured and sold the flammable cladding and insulation.  The report doesn’t spare the London Fire Brigade What has emerged from this inquiry is astonishing: you hardly need a degree in engineering to work out that it is not a good idea to wrap a tower block in combustible material. That manufacturers seem to have ‘deliberately concealed’ the risk that their products posed is something which is almost inevitably going to be picked over further in the courts. Why it has taken seven years to produce this report

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

There’s no shame in being ‘weird’

Are Conservative politicians ‘weird’? A series of focus groups carried out by More in Common suggests that voters – particularly in seats won by the Lib Dems – find elected Tories increasingly strange. It’s hard to disagree, but this isn’t the party’s only problem. Who cares if a politician is weird? As the Tories battle it out to elect their new leader, the reality is that hardly anybody out there recognises any of the candidates. The one that rings the most bells is Priti Patel. This is because, as anybody who has ever worked in marketing will tell you, she possesses an alliterative name. Tom Tugendhat also scores here, but

Niall Gooch

Stop trying to make ‘weird’ happen

Where American left-liberal rhetoric leads, British left-liberal rhetoric invariably follows. Hate speech, reparations, decolonisation, white fragility; there is no intellectual fad so inane that it will not be enthusiastically mimicked, with childlike credulity, by journalists, academics, civil servants and broadcasters, regardless of whether it even makes sense in a British context. The impression you get is of status-conscious provincials seizing, herd-like, on the latest fashions and conventional wisdom from the imperial centre.  The accusation of weirdness is a striking example of the decline of political rhetoric So it is that barely a month after the Democrats and their allies in the US media adopted ‘weird’ as their attack line on

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

How long can Macron ignore French voters?

It was way back in the first week of July that the French went to the polls to elect a new government. Fifty-nine days later and there is no new government and it’s anyone’s guess who will become the fifth prime minister to serve under Emmanuel Macron. As one left-wing politician, Mathilde Panot, quipped on Monday: ‘If Macron could nominate himself, he would.’ Macron and Scholz, Europe’s two most important leaders, seem determined to turn a blind eye to voters In the parliamentary election, Macron’s Renaissance party finished third, receiving 6.3 million votes. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won the biggest slice of the popular vote with 10.1 million votes,

Tuesday

Patrick West

Robert Jenrick is wrong about the culture wars

To some people, the culture wars don’t matter. They are an irrelevance, an indulgence. A distraction from the material, bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary people, like paying the bills or finding an affordable place to live. This sentiment was echoed by Robert Jenrick, the Conservative leadership contender. As reported in the Times yesterday, Jenrick told a meeting of young activists that he didn’t want his party to ‘go down a rabbit hole of culture wars’, and that the public were more concerned about the cost of living and public services than gender issues. The culture war is not an idle luxury. It is timely and necessary While it’s true that politicians should focus

Eliot Wilson

The truth about Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Independent Alliance’

Jeremy Corbyn has teamed up with four other MPs elected as independents at the general election to form an ‘Independent Alliance’. This, the former Labour leader was quick to point out, makes the new group the joint-fifth largest in the Commons, sharing that accolade with Reform UK and the Democratic Unionist Party. But in the battle for attention in parliament, Corbyn and his colleagues are going to be disappointed. What is the point of the Independent Alliance? Labour’s majority of nearly 180 means that Corbyn’s alliance won’t give Keir Starmer sleepless nights, even if the group has already reached out to the seven Labour MPs who were suspended from the parliamentary

Debbie Hayton

Why are a record number of Brits applying to change their gender?

The number of people applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) has reached a new record. Government figures revealed that there were 1,397 applications in 2023-24 and, of those, 1,088 were granted. Labour has vowed to simplify the process of changing gender, meaning that the numbers could rise further. Almost 200 applicants for a Gender Recognition Certificate were under 25 Is this something to celebrate? Or should we be worried? These are already big numbers for a life-changing process that was originally envisaged to serve a vanishingly small group of people. The stats from 2023-24 aren’t a one-off: since the pandemic, the numbers have been growing year-on-year. To put it

Monday

Charlie Walsham

Why is the BBC so positive about the Notting Hill Carnival?

The BBC’s coverage of the Notting Hill carnival has been almost relentlessly positive. But the rosy view of the festivities was finally shattered this weekend when the Metropolitan Police released a statement confirming the death of two people who were attacked at the event. The force said both killings were now being treated as murder investigations. Smiling photos of the victims – 32-year-old mother Cher Maximen and 41-year-old chef Mussie Imnetu, who was visiting London from Dubai – accompanied the reports, their carefree expressions underlining the senseless destruction of two lives. Why is the BBC so determined to give such favourable coverage to an event with a lamentable track record

Andrew Tettenborn

Scrapping one-word Ofsted verdicts is a mistake

The decision to scrap one or two-word Ofsted inspection grades for England’s schools is good news for teachers – but bad news for just about everyone else, not least parents and pupils. Many school staff have never liked the labelling of schools as ‘Outstanding’, ‘Good’, ‘Requires Improvement’ and ‘Inadequate’. They say that it doesn’t give the full story and heaps pressure on staff during inspections. In one case last year, a head teacher took her own life after her school received an unflattering report. What happened to Ruth Perry was a terrible tragedy. But while some reform was no doubt necessary, getting rid of straightforward Ofsted summaries is not the

Euan McColm

How Creative Scotland was corrupted by gender ideology

Loath as I am to indulge in the national pastime of Scottish exceptionalism, we do pretty well when it comes to producing writers. From the mainstream to the fringes, and across the world, many key literary figures were born, or are based, north of the border. Creative Scotland is over. The organisation has managed to make itself hated by both politicians and artists. It exists only to feed itself and its infantile staff  There are the commercial giants. JK Rowling, whose Harry Potter and (as Robert Galbraith) Cormoran Strike books show her dizzying talent for making the epic deeply personal. Ian Rankin, whose knotty Rebus novels are more a chronicle of the

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The war on smokers has gone too far

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to wick off the people who don’t already hate him, our new Prime Minister might like to bask in a few weeks of good vibes. Things, after all, can only get worse from here. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like Mister Popular for a bit?  The original ban on smoking indoors was illiberal, but it was illiberal to a very legible purpose Sir Keir Starmer, it seems, has a stronger character than would to succumb to that temptation. Already, even his own cabinet ministers are briefing that they think he’s

James Tidmarsh

The strange case of Pavel Durov and Emmanuel Macron

The arrest of Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging app Telegram, has not only raised questions about the charges against him, but also about the peculiar relationship between the tech entrepreneur and the French government. In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron extended an olive branch, inviting Durov to lunch and offering him French citizenship in the hope of bringing Telegram under greater French regulatory oversight. Fast forward to today, and Durov finds himself under arrest, facing serious charges. This series of events – from lunch invitations and citizenship to sudden detainment – suggests both cooperation and coercion have characterised France’s approach to Telegram. Macron’s actions since Durov’s arrest suggest he

Sunday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

The AfD is set to win its first ever state election

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland party is set to make history and take control of at least one of Germany’s state parliaments for the first time. According to exit polls released on Sunday, the AfD is on course to become the largest party in the state of Thuringia. While the final results of the election are unlikely to be confirmed before tomorrow, the AfD is predicted to win at least 30 per cent of the vote in the state. One projection by the pollster Infratest Dimap places the party’s vote share at 30.5 per cent, while a poll conducted on behalf of the state broadcaster ZDF puts the party on

Limor Simhony Philpott

Why Netanyahu is being blamed for the Israeli hostage deaths

The heartbreaking news that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have recovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages has caused rage in Israel against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. All six hostages – Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Master Sergeant Ori Danino – were kidnapped alive on 7 October. They were brutally executed by Hamas terrorists, possibly hours before they were found yesterday in a Hamas tunnel near Rafah, in the southern area of the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu has been accused of sabotaging negotiations for a ceasefire Although Hamas bears the primary responsibility for murdering the hostages, many in Israel see Netanyahu as partly responsible for

Alexander Larman

The cynical manipulation of ‘dynamic pricing’ for Oasis tickets

Given my unequivocal feelings about the Oasis reunion, I was, apparently, one of the few people in Britain who was not attempting to obtain tickets yesterday for one of their stadium gigs next year. As is usually the case these days when a much-hyped act returns for a series of mega-concerts, the wall-to-wall publicity that the concerts had attracted meant that it seemed almost obligatory for the average punter to extract their credit card, gulp, breathe a silent prayer and at least try and secure their place in Manchester, London, Dublin or any of the other venues that the Gallaghers will be gracing next year. Had they done so, they would have experienced a

Mike Parry

A four-day week is bad news for workers

When I was a young reporter on the Daily Express in the 1980s I was sent to Belfast to cover the IRA’s hunger strikes campaign. It was a fast moving story, focused not just on the men who were dying from refusing food but all the riots, bombings and killings that accompanied their deaths. When you heard dustbin lids being banged on the pavements outside the Divis Flats on Belfast’s lower Falls Road at 2am it was the signal that another protestor had died. Employees could be able to insist on finishing their contracted week’s hours on Thursday It was an incredible story in which to be involved. But after

Saturday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Joan Collins, Owen Matthews, Sara Wheeler, Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Tanya Gold

30 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Joan Collins reads an extract from her diary (1:15); Owen Matthews argues that Russia and China’s relationship is just a marriage of convenience (3:19); reviewing The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering by Daniel Light, Sara Wheeler examines the epic history of the sport (13:52); Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks at the life, cinema, and many drinks, of Marguerite Duras (21:35); and Tanya Gold provides her notes on tasting menus (26:07).  Presented and produced by Patrick Gibbons.  

Charlotte Henry

Tottenham’s ‘Yid Army’ chant isn’t antisemitic

‘They tried to stop us and look what it did. The thing I love most is being a yid.’ So chanted the Tottenham Hotspur fans 44 seconds into their side’s 4-0 thrashing of Everton last weekend. That often-repeated song refers to previous, unsuccessful, attempts to try and stop Spurs fans using the ‘Y-word’. The bile underneath the social media posts announcing the deal was as depressing as it was predictable Ask any Spurs fan singing that and similar tunes why they do so, and they will likely say that it started as a response to antisemitism from opposing fans because of Tottenham’s connection to the Jewish community. Chanters would undoubtedly

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Oasis’s reunion is a moment of joy – but I won’t be buying tickets

As someone who was around pop stars from a very young age, I’m not inclined to get over-excited about them. I learnt to play it cool the day the pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde asked the 17-year-old me if I wanted her to teach me to play the bass, assume the name ‘Kicks Tart’ and join a motorcycle-themed band she was thinking of forming. From the sublime – Noel – to the ridiculous – Liam – I’m feeling such happiness at the idea of an Oasis reunion ‘Thank you, but I’m keen to be a writer,’ I said sweetly. Since then I’ve become a very good writer, extremely adept at putting pop