Society

Saturday

Patrick West

The trouble with protest mask chic

We in Britain have become used to the hallmarks of anti-Israeli protests. There are the slogans decrying ‘genocide’. There are chants in sympathy of terrorist organisations. There’s the explicit or insinuated anti-semitism. But one sinister feature making its transition across the Atlantic is the appearance of the face mask. Wearing a mask at a demo is the perfect expression of radical chic Footage widely circulated online this week showed an Israeli supporter in New York being attacked by a pro-Palestine activist, who proceeded to stamp and spit on the Israeli flag while shouting profanities. Nothing new here, you might say. It’s all part of the vitriol we expect these days,

Friday

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

There’ll never be another tennis hunk like Rafael Nadal

In the pantheon of all-time tennis hunks, Rafael Nadal sits at the apex. The hunkiest ever to do it. In his prime, which remarkably lasted close to two decades, he seemed to conceal within the archetypal Mediterranean love god physique a kind of tennis supercomputer, capable almost always of finding impossible-seeming angles from which to smash winners. Adonis with a magic racket, in other words. He was thrilling to watch. Do we all die a little when sport stars retire? This status, hunkmeister-in-chief, was apparently not lost on the Spaniard. In 2018, he shut down a journalist’s whining about the gender pay gap in tennis with the same disdain he

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

France is finally opting for austerity

After the binge, the bill? The new French government of Michel Barnier presented the main lines of its proposed 2025 budget on Thursday evening, promising to cut public spending by £50 billion while raising taxes across the board. It’s belated austerity for a state with a fiscal policy that has previously resembled dine and dash.  The intention is to reduce the deficit to 5 per cent of GDP next year, before trying to go below 3 per cent in 2029. Meanwhile, France’s debt of 3.3 trillion Euros will increase.   This is a punishment beating for the most successful and productive companies and individuals in France Like one of those

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Does the Guardian need reminding that Hamas are the bad guys?

The Guardian has found a new minority it wants to shield from offence. A new oppressed group it might shed some virtuous tears over. A put-upon section of society that urgently requires the warm, loving hug of Guardianista pity. And you won’t believe who it is. It’s the mad militants who invaded Israel on 7 October last year. I probably shouldn’t call Hamas gunmen ‘mad’ – the Guardian might accuse me of ‘demonising’ them. In possibly the most crackpot piece it has published this year – and that’s saying something – the Guardian has slammed a new documentary about the 7 October attacks for ‘demonis[ing] Gazans as either killers or

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Princess Kate has shown why she is so vital to the royal family  

The news that the Princess of Wales has been able to return to public-facing duties is both hugely welcome and, after a lengthy period out of the limelight due to her cancer diagnosis, a reminder that she remains the most dutiful and committed of all the members of the royal family.  Yet her first official engagement after her cancer diagnosis was no soft or easy commitment. Instead, she took on a challenging and emotionally demanding responsibility, namely heading to Southport to meet the families of those who were injured or killed in July’s atrocity in the town.  The Princess has often been regarded as the Firm’s most obviously empathetic and

Henry Jeffreys

It’s time to stop the war on Malbec

The German historian Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz wrote about British tastes in alcohol in the eighteenth century: ‘In London they liked everything that is powerful and heady.’ Not much has changed since then. Blame it on the weather, blame it on the food or blame it on the good times, the British have always liked their drink strong.  But for how much longer will we be able to cheerfully knock back the Malbec when a new duty system is implemented in February? Wines between 11.5 per cent and 14.5 per cent ABV will have their own bands per 0.1 increment of alcohol. Which means the tax on your favourite 14.5 per cent

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Wimbledon won’t be the same without line judges

It will soon be the end of an era at Wimbledon. From 2025, the All England Club has announced that the services of line judges, who ringed the court and were responsible for crying ‘out’ and ‘fault’ on serves, will be dispensed with. From then on, all line calls will be decided entirely by the Hawkeye electronic line calling system (ELC). The move comes in the wake of the Association of Tennis Professionals’ (ATP’s) decision to adopt ELC across the men’s tour from 2025, and is thus perfectly logical. But it is not without controversy, and it will not please everybody. There is something slightly sinister about this takeover by Hawkeye

The Spectator

Who works as a bouncer or security guard?

Farewell, Chagos The government announced that it would hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. There are 13 other British Overseas Territories, only ten of which have a permanent population. The most populated are: Cayman Islands 78,554 Bermuda  62,506 Turks and Caicos 38,191 Gibraltar  33,701 British Virgin Islands 31,758 – Pitcairn Island is the only British Overseas Territory in the Pacific Ocean, which has been integral to the claims that, even now, the sun never sets on the British Empire – even if there is an overlap of just 20 minutes between sunrise in Diego Garcia and Pitcairn Island in June. – With the Chagos Islands gone, the sun

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Meeting the Chagos islanders of Crawley

Departing Gatwick train station, with nine minutes till Crawley, I tried to get in the head of a Chagossian. In 2002, Tony Blair gave everyone from the Chagos Islands British citizenship, permitting 10,000 Chagossians to live wherever they liked in the UK. About 3,500 have chosen Crawley. And what a weird thing to do. They took a 6,000-mile Air Mauritius flight to Gatwick airport to start a new life, then settled just a mile from the runway. Why so close? I was visiting Crawley to meet these people I didn’t understand, to find out what they made of our government handing over their islands to Mauritius. On the train I

Luke McShane

Rushed finish

There’s a piece of chess clickbait which occurs with tiresome regularity. The players are deep in the endgame, but have so little time remaining that the game cannot be concluded with dignity. Pieces land in between squares, or get dropped and clatter across the board. In their final seconds, players will attempt to move before their opponent has completed their own move, which is just as farcical as it sounds. One should not blame the players: against a well-matched opponent, such situations are inevitable from time to time. The arbiters sometimes get flak for not intervening, but in the heat of the moment, nobody knows if a rook landed cleanly

Luke McShane

No. 822

Black to play. Mamedyarov-Maghsoodloo, Global Chess League, October 2024. Maghsoodloo chose wrongly here. Out of 1…Kd3, 1…b2+ and 1…c2, which one is the best? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 October. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qxh7+ Kxh7 2 Rh3# Last week’s winner Roger Holdsworth, Marlborough, Wilts

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Space to think

Competition 3370 invited poems about the predicament of the Nasa astronauts stranded on the ISS – thanks to Paul Freeman for this suggestion. There was a wide range of ideas about how they could use their time, from self–improvement to… other things. Due to a different space issue, many good entries had to be jettisoned, but those below win £25. Five miles a second, travelling at speed,Recycling the water we’ve formerly weed,Dusk follows dawn every hour and thirty,There’s too much to do to be shouty or shirty – We came for a week, but our taxi was iffy;No need to be uppity, none to be sniffy –The wires need testing,

Marcus Walker

Why C of E bishops are so bland

Nolo episcopari. These were the words a person was expected to say on being offered an episcopal see. It basically translates as ‘Don’t bishop me!’ and goes back to at least St Ambrose, who so wanted to avoid being made a bishop that he skipped town. The Church of England has worked itself into a new position, Nemo episcopari: nobody will be bishoped. In the past year, the process for appointing new bishops to Ely and Carlisle fell apart as the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) decided not to appoint any of the shortlisted candidates. This has created a sense of crisis in the Church, and an emergency meeting of the

Douglas Murray

Does Keir Starmer have a soul?

One of the main arguments against hereditary peerages is that talent and ability are not always passed down across generations. There is much to this. Students of history will know that all the great dynasties see some kind of falloff in capability. Whether the Habsburgs, the Plantagenets or the Kinnocks, the families produce a man – or occasionally a couple of men – of quality, only to see their heirs and successors squander everything. The same rule exists in a meritocratic age. Someone in a family makes a fortune. The next generation spends it. A generation after that, the family is back to square one. Give or take a generation,

Fieldfare

2675: Over the sea

The unclued lights give various things which two lovers took or used on their journey. These include two of three words (one split over two lights) and one of two. The name of one lover is hidden in the grid and should be highlighted. Ignore two accents. Across 1              In a way, round university stifle speech (8) 6               Almost extinguish not initially far distant light (6) 11            Commotion as Irish stick said to need strapping (5-5) 12            One fool, with hidden conscience (5) 13            Bard’s to efface mild sin, reforming (7) 15            Hot wind no friend to Honduras (5) 16            Is worried about pillar of ice (5) 17            Old food allowances

Peter Jones

Plutarch’s lessons for Labour

The lives of those daily in the public eye are bound to attract attention, especially when they are politicians telling us what to do. The Greek essayist Plutarch (d. c. ad 120) wrote at length on this topic. How does Labour match up to his ancient ideals? A politician’s aim, Plutarch said, was to win the trust of the people so that they would accept his authority ‘without being frightened off like a suspicious and unpredictable animal.’ To do this, the politician had to put his private affairs in order since the moral standard of the rulers determined the moral value of their regime. So he had to ensure his

The Spectator

2672: Seamless Schemes – solution

The unclued lights are all gems. The title, ‘Seamless schemes’, cryptically suggests ‘stratagems’ without ‘strata’. First prize M. Barret, Boxmoor, Hemel Hempstead, Herts Runners-up Kim Christison, Larbert, Stirlingshire; Mary Caldecott, London W12

Alexander Downer

Britain’s foreign policy is increasingly feeble

For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, it’s heartbreaking to watch the western countries fail to defend the interests of liberal democracy. The free world is being challenged on three fronts, by Russia, Iran and China, all of whom threaten the international order established so painstakingly after the second world war. The West should be standing up for its values, yet even Britain, the great bastion of democracy, the country that heroically held out alone in 1940-41, seems to have lost the will to fight. The fact that the government has transferred sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is symptomatic of a country that no

Toby Young Toby Young

Yvette Cooper wants to lock up your sons

In his independent review of the Prevent programme last year, Sir William Shawcross warned that something had gone very wrong with Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy. Instead of focusing on Islamism, Prevent was wasting its time investigating complaints of ‘far-right’ extremism from left-wing teachers, e.g. 14-year-old boys ‘caught’ watching TikTok videos of Nigel Farage. He has pointed out that 75 per cent of MI5’s caseload is taken up with Islamist threats, but 11 per cent of referrals to Prevent are related to Islamist terrorism. The result, Shawcross said, is a ‘dangerous’ surge in anti-Semitism, as we can see from the pro-Palestinian marches that have disfigured our cities for the past year. These