Society

Sunday

Patrick West

Why football fans stopped watching Match of the Day

That hoary aphorism ‘be careful what you wish for’ may be a hackneyed one, but there’s nothing football pundits like more than a sagacious cliche. I dare say Gary Lineker used it on more than one occasion during his long tenure as Match of the Day presenter. And many people were glad and relieved when the lavishly-remunerated pundit was forced to relinquish that role in May, following a stream of unwise political interventions on social media. But, as the saying goes, they may now regret that their wish came true. The new direction taken by Match of the Day represents the thin end of the wedge The new incarnation of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

How did faith shape Thatcher?

38 min listen

How did faith shape Margaret Thatcher’s politics? To mark the centenary month of Margaret Thatcher’s birth, Damian Thompson introduces a conversation between the Spectator’s Natasha Feroze, Thatcher’s biographer Lord Moore and Bishop Chartres who delivered the eulogy at her funeral. They discuss her relationship with faith, how both her family background and her training as a scientist influenced her beliefs and her understanding of the relationship between wealth and society based on Jesus’s parables. Plus – what would Thatcher have made of the much talked about ‘Christian revival’ in the West? Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Natasha Feroze.

Saturday

Arnout Nuijt

The flag wars have come to the Netherlands

The small community of Uithoorn, just outside Amsterdam, has unexpectedly found itself on the front line of Europe’s flag wars. Late last week, Dutch national flags – in bold red, white and blue – began appearing across the town. Their purpose? Perhaps a spontaneous show of resistance to a planned asylum centre earmarked for the suburb. Or perhaps something more calculated: a shrewd piece of political theatre ahead of the country’s elections on 29 October. No one can say for sure. But the response was immediate. With Pavlovian swiftness, the town council began removing flags from public spaces – although they left those flying from private property untouched. The council

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

How sumo wrestling bounced back

Sumo is the featured attraction at the Royal Albert Hall this weekend in a rare foray for the ancient sport outside of its spiritual home of Japan. The five-day tournament started on Wednesday and features 40 rikishi (wrestlers) (about six-tonnes’ worth) squaring off in a specially constructed dohyo (ring). Reinforced chairs and upgraded toilets have been installed for the exclusive use of the 28-stone ‘naked ambassadors’ (as they are being called here in Japan). Like test cricket, sumo wrestling is set apart and sustained by its antiquity It has been a huge success so far. Tickets sold out long ago but can be picked up for hundreds of pounds on

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The farce of the Maccabi ban

Tel Aviv Bemusement seems to be the main emotion in Tel Aviv following the UK’s mad ban on Maccabi fans. A Maccabi supporter sipping an espresso in bustling Dizengoff Square doesn’t get it. ‘You’re keeping the fans out because you’re worried they’ll be attacked?’ He screws up his face. ‘You should stop the attackers, not the fans.’ He has a point. Britain seems to have rustled up a novel way to deal with Jew hatred – just hide away the Jews. No Jews, no anti-Jewish mob. No Maccabi fans, no violent outbursts of Israelophobia from that unholy, unhappy union of Islamists and leftists who think Israelis are demonic. Problem solved. 

Laurie Wastell

Students shouldn’t be arrested for speech 

‘Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground’, Oxford student Samuel Williams appeared to chant at a central London pro-Palestine demonstration last Saturday, footage of which has since gone viral on social media. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a 20-year-old man presumed to be Williams (although this remains unconfirmed by the police) was arrested in Oxfordshire by the Metropolitan Police for stirring up racial hatred and held in custody. He was also suspended from Oxford University. That we are having this conversation at all shows the grim extent of speech restrictions Brits currently suffer under Since this is now a live case, there is a limit

Edward Skidelsky

The battle for free speech in universities has only just begun

Earlier this week at HMS President – the Royal Navy Reserve’s base on the Thames – the government’s free-speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, delivered a quiet but unmistakable warning to the higher-education sector. Academic freedom, he told an audience of academics, politicians and policymakers gathered for a conference on the future of open inquiry, could not be regarded as secure merely because Parliament had legislated for it. It felt oddly appropriate that the message was delivered on the famous Tideway, just ‘downstream’ of Whitehall. At Durham University, ajob advert posted this month still contains requirements that appear to breach the new guidance At first glance, his claim might sound counter-intuitive. After

The Spectator

Piers Morgan: Woke Is Dead with Andrew Doyle

Watch Piers Morgan in conversation with Andrew Doyle to discuss Piers’s provocative new book, Woke Is Dead, and share their unfiltered views on the state of the world today, exclusively for Spectator subscribers. Rather than celebrating the death of woke, Piers’s book advocates for the return of common sense and a less divided, more sensible society. Piers Morgan: Woke Is Dead with Andrew Doyle will explore why Piers believes woke culture is on its way out, what a return to common sense might look like, and how the cultural tide is shifting across politics, the media and everyday life.

Nigel Jones

Banning Israeli football fans from Villa Park is a disgrace

The message could not be clearer: Israeli football fans are not welcome in Birmingham. I am no lover of football, but that doesn’t stop me feeling outraged and sickened by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being told not to attend their Europa League game against Aston Villa next month. The seats at Villa Park that had been allocated to the Israeli visitors for the fixture will now remain empty. In Amsterdam, Maccabi supporters were attacked by anti-Semitic mobs The appalling decision to tell fans of the Israeli club that they are not permitted to attend the 6 November game – meekly accepted, of course, by West Midlands Police and Villa –

Danny Shaw

The harrying of a Met firearms officer

‘No case to answer’. Those were the four words that finally ended an outrageously protracted legal and disciplinary case against a police firearms officer who fatally shot a man during an operation targeting a violent organised crime network in north London.  The firearms officer, whose name has not been revealed and is referred to only as W80, had to wait almost a decade to hear the chair of a misconduct panel utter those words. But the case should never have been brought in the first place, and its inevitable outcome is confirmation the police misconduct system needs urgent reform. The firearms officer, whose name has not been revealed and is referred

Nick Boles

Nick Boles, James Ball, Andrew Rosenheim, Arabella Byrne & Rory Sutherland

27 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Nick Boles says that Ukraine must stand as a fortress of European freedom; James Ball reviews If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, by Eliezer Yudowsky and Nate Sores; Andrew Rosenheim examines the treasure trove of John Le Carre’s papers at the Bodleian; Arabella Byrne provides her notes on skip-diving; and, in the battle of the sexes, Rory Sutherland says the thing to fear is not feminisation, but emasculation. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Who’s to blame for Britain’s slowing economy?

The economy is slowing down. GDP grew 0.3 per cent in the three months to August. As ever, services propped up Britain, growing by 0.4 per cent, while the production sector shrank by 0.3 per cent, according to Office for National Statistics data. We could have news of a stagnating economy confirmed just in time for Rachel Reeves’s Budget That growth over the last three months though was helped by a bumper June with the economy flat over the latest two months. If things don’t improve in the September data, then we could have news of a stagnating economy confirmed just in time for Rachel Reeves’s second Budget. Inflation too,

Eliot Wilson

Nato is far too complacent about Russian drones

Something is afoot in Nato’s airspace – but the alliance’s complacent response to the various incursions is rather troubling. In recent weeks, suspicious drones have intruded into the jurisdictions of Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Norway; identifiable Russian drones were tracked over Romania and shot down over Poland. Three Russian Mikoyan MiG-31 fighters violated Estonia’s airspace and loitered for 12 minutes before retreating when Italian F-35 aircraft were scrambled to intercept them. Putin is testing the alliance, pushing it little by little, upping the ante by increments to see what response he finds You might think that these various incidents would shake Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, out of his usual

The Spectator

Georgia Toffolo: In defence of my husband James Watt

Rough justice Sir: The Church Commissioners’ plan to establish a £100 million (rising to £1 billion) fund for ‘reparative justice’ is indeed ‘the most egregious example of lanyard Anglicanism’ as your leading article says (‘Laud’s prayer’, 11 October). It is deeply flawed in conception, substance and process – and is especially ill-judged when parish clergy are atrociously paid and many parishes face an existential crisis. The critique made by the Policy Exchange paper ‘The Case Against Reparations’, written by Professor Lord Biggar, Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert and me, is reasonably well known. What is less appreciated is that since at least May last year, the Commissioners have known they have

Arabella Byrne

Confessions of a skip-diver

Call me disgusting, but I like rubbish, and I like it best from a skip. I am also in good company. In his 1967 poem, ‘The Bin Men Go on Strike’, Raymond Queneau riffs on the fantasy of bins stuffed with works of art, the ‘Mona Lisa’ lying askew by the spent toothpaste tube, or a Géricault smeared with pigeon shit, jettisoned by an ignorant philistine. This is an elaborate joke, bien sûr, designed to make us reconsider aesthetics in general, but its point holds: can we conjure art from the soiled and fragmented? Can we overturn economic values – and even meaning – as the ragpickers or, as Baudelaire

Rosie Lewis

The parents gaming special educational needs

As a foster carer and adopter, I’ve spent more mornings than I care to count coaxing my 13-year-old daughter into her uniform and then into the car. She has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the UK’s most underdiagnosed neuro-developmental condition, which leaves her with a brain wired for impulsivity, memory lapses and emotional storms that no local school can contain. Each day, I drive her across several counties to the only specialist placement that can meet her needs. Four hours a day, every week day. While I’m grinding through the traffic, taxpayers are footing bills that could fund whole classrooms. Councils and schools spent a record £2.26 billion on special educational

Poppy Pearce

French parents do it better

I arrived in Paris as an au pair in 2022. I was in my early twenties and armed only with GCSE French and a suitcase that could barely fit in my chambre de bonne – nine square metres of ‘characterful’ living space under the eaves, with a window just large enough to glimpse the Eiffel Tower if I leaned out at a dangerous angle. How did I end up here? After graduating, I wanted to immerse myself in a new city and polish my French. A few years on and I am still nannying, though I have returned to London. It seems I’ve become a career nanny by accident. But

The Spectator

How many people admit to using their phones at the dinner table?

King’s speechless There will be no state opening of parliament this year and consequently no King’s speech. This is only the seventh year since 1900 in which this has happened: the others were 1915, 1925, 1949, 2011, 2018 and 2020, though 2019 saw two state openings in just over two months, on 14 October and 19 December. The controversial proroguing of parliament in September 2019 – later ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court – came at the end of what was the longest session of parliament since 1900: it lasted 352 sitting days against an average of 143. Nobel calling What are the nationalities of all Nobel Peace Prize winners

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Legal immigration is an absolute nightmare

A personal note this week, as 15 October 2025 marked an occasion of sorts: when my husband’s and my Portuguese residency permits expired. Isn’t that a bit sloppy, you might ask, allowing your permission to remain in a country where you live to lapse? On one party’s part, very sloppy, but not ours. At least a dozen people must have exclaimed to me: ‘Oh, I’ve thought about moving to Portugal!’ After emigrating from London in 2023, I’m not issuing a warning exactly. We don’t regret the move. Landscape gorgeous, food great, people nice, wine cheap. But this country is notoriously bureaucratic, and the paperwork side of playing Mother, May I?

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Yoga is slow-motion pole-dancing for grannies

It’s hard work being rich. I gave up trying years ago. You must waste money on everything, even the basics, to advertise your status as a big spender. Food and drink are easy. You buy organic veg from a dim-witted aristocrat at a farmers’ market. And you choose sparkling water filtered through the porous flanks of a Malaysian volcano. A tougher challenge is oxygen. The rich need top quality air as well. But how do you let people know that your breaths are costlier and more refined than the inhalations of the mob? Well, yoga. Yoga turns breathing into a five-star indulgence. You hire a servant (known as a ‘guru’