Society

Friday

Ed Condon

Can Pope Leo fix the mess left by Francis?

The numbers, as the saying goes, don’t lie. And heading into the conclave two days ago, anyone who could count had reason to expect a pope at least in the mould of Pope Francis, who appointed the majority of the cardinal electors. Even so, few predicted the first American Bishop of Rome to emerge in the person of Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost – and the second pope in a row to arrive in Rome from South America. The most important unknown about the new pope isn’t what he will teach but how he will govern The joy of the crowd in Rome was sincere, it always

Rory Hanrahan

Why do some Irish people hate Israel so much?

It was a quiet lunch shift at the pub in Oxford where I work, the kind of day when the bar feels more like a confessional than a business. A lone customer, a woman with a light accent I took for Dutch, had just finished her meal and approached to pay. Playing the host, I made small talk. How bad have things become for Israelis here? “Where are you from?” I asked, expecting the usual tourist’s reply. Her face tightened, her voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Israel,” she said, bracing herself as if I might leap over the bar and chase her out into the street. I reassured her –

Thursday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Comparing a colleague to Darth Vader isn’t offensive

Calling someone Darth Vader. If that’s as bad as your workplace banter gets, I’d suggest you find a more entertaining place to work. Yet, incredibly, an NHS worker not only took enormous offence to being compared to the bucketheaded villain of the Star Wars franchise, she also took her employers to a tribunal. She’s just won £30,000 in compensation for her trouble. Snowflakery has become endemic among the British workforce Lorna Rooke claims she was prompted to leave the NHS Blood and Transplant service after an incident in 2021, when a team-building exercise turned to the dark side. In Rooke’s absence, her workmates filled out a Star Wars-themed personality quiz,

Alexander Larman

No memorial to Elizabeth II is better than these monstrosities

After Elizabeth II died on 8 September 2022, it became of paramount national importance that a suitable memorial was constructed in memory of her and her unparalleled reign. Since it was announced that some of the leading architects in the country would be in competition to come up with something that would act as a fitting testament to her, there has been fevered speculation as to which design would be triumphant. Something suitably stately and reverential, perhaps, to remember the late Queen as a public figure? Or perhaps something brilliantly daring and unusual, which would have the artistic establishment in raptures at its encapsulation of the country’s greatest ever monarch?

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Bring on the Indian invasion

More Indians? Bring them on. The more the better. The prospect of a forthcoming tidal wave of immigration following Labour striking a trade deal with India is the best news in years. The last tidal wave of Indians arrived from Uganda and they were a shot in the arm of moribund Britain – where because of half-day closing, you couldn’t even buy a pint of milk on a Wednesday afternoon.  That changed after August 1972 when Ugandan dictator Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of approximately 80,000 South Asians (primarily of Indian descent) from Uganda, giving them 90 days to get out and changing Britain massively for the better, not least because

Arabella Byrne

Mothers need more than a mental health hub

New mothers everywhere, rejoice, for the NHS has your back. And your sanity, apparently. Data released last week shows that 64,000 women accessed specialist perinatal mental health services last year, a rise in demand of 10 per cent compared to 2023. Describing the newly provisioned services as ‘lifesaving’ to perinatal women – the period encompassing pregnancy and one year postpartum– the NHS went on to detail the importance of maternal mental health, adding that it was ‘vital that women did not suffer in silence’ or ‘feel stigmatised’. Given that suicide is still the leading cause of maternal death in the UK, access to mental health support should be a welcome development

Niall Gooch

VE Day and the taboo of victory

I was born in 1983, and when I was a child, the second world war still had a significant cultural presence in British life. The youngest veterans – men born in the mid-twenties – remained relatively sprightly. The war was recent enough that there were men around who had been senior officers or otherwise involved in important decision-making. War films were a staple of Sunday afternoon and Bank Holiday TV, and we played ‘English versus Germans’ in the playground. Not until 2007 did the House of Commons lose its last member who had been under arms in 1939-45: the Indian-born Piara Khabra died just a few days before Tony Blair

Nicholas Farrell

It’s been a tough week for the frontrunner to be pope

The 133 cardinal electors participating in the conclave entered the Sistine Chapel yesterday, singing Veni Creator Spiritus. As they conducted their first vote – which resulted in black smoke – they were no doubt unable to avoid contemplating the highly damaging stream of revelations that have plagued the frontrunner to be the next pope, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. The cardinals will be locked inside the chapel surrounded by Michelangelo’s astounding frescoes – incommunicado with the world but not with God – until two thirds of them coagulate around a single name. In the 13th century this process once took 1,006 days. But in the past 150 years the longest conclave has lasted

Chas Newkey-Burden

Long live David Attenborough

Britain can sometimes feel like it’s no country for old men. Our elderly folk get a hard time; they’re blamed for society’s woes, accused of messing up the planet for younger people and hogging houses which families struggling to get on the ladder could never afford. How is Attenborough, who joined the BBC in the 1950s, still making breathtaking television eight decades later? This ageist stereotyping, and the narrative of intergenerational unfairness which puts the blame on older people for anything that younger people don’t like, has pitted generations against each other, but is it as fair as we think? A national treasure who turns 99 today is a one-man

Francis Pike

For most of the world, VE Day did not mean peace

While drinking, dancing and laughter were the order of the day in Britain on the VE Day, things were not so hunky dory in Germany. At the liberated Belsen concentration camp situated 65 miles to the south of Hamburg, nurse Joan Rudman cut a depressed and lonely figure. She recalled: ‘One could hardly think of peace when there’s so much human misery here.’ Meanwhile for many Germans, there were mixed feelings. Relief that the war was ended combined with bitterness and a sense of humiliation. These were feelings that led to most Germans blotting out their memories of this period. In Germany is known as Tag der Befreiung (day of

The Spectator

Letters: Our private schools are China’s next target

Ka-shing in Sir: Ian Williams highlights (‘Chasing the dragon’, 3 May) the degree to which the Chinese state has acquired interests in the UK. Yet he overlooks a few tentacles of the Asian octopus that have curled around my home region of eastern England. Swathes of high-quality arable land are being subsumed into solar farms, panels for which are manufactured in China. The resultant electricity will be distributed by UK Power Networks, controlled, as Ian points out, by Li Ka-shing. East Anglia’s biggest brewer, Greene King, has been China-owned since 2019, held by Li Ka-shing through CK Asset Holdings. Our government seems craven in its attempts to lure Chinese fast-fashion

John Power

How to bring down Britain’s power grid

At the end of last month, a fire at an electrical substation in Maida Vale caused chaos in west London. Homes lost power. Transport services ground to a halt. It came in the same week as outages across Spain and Portugal and just a few weeks after a fire at another substation caused Heathrow airport to shut down. We also know that the British government is drawing up contingency plans for Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. All of this raises an important question: how resilient would the British state be in the face of a determined effort to cripple its power grid? The blunt answer is: not very. David Betz,

Christa D’Souza

Hell is having house guests

Since we moved into our house in the Cyclades a few years ago, I’ve come to accept that if you own a home on the beach in Greece with plenty of spare rooms, people will come to stay. But what is it about house guests abroad? Do they need fresh towels at home every time they wash their hands? Do they have to have three cooked meals a day? Do they have chauffeurs in normal life, or do they become allergic to driving only when they are on holiday? ‘We didn’t bother renting a car because we don’t want to go anywhere.’ If you want to make a host’s shoulders

The Spectator

What was the first cyber attack?

19th-century cyber crime M &S and the Co-op have suffered cyber attacks. Cyber crime didn’t quite begin with the internet. The first record of an attack on a communications network was in the city of Tours in 1834, where the Blanc brothers traded government bonds in Bordeaux and bribed the operator of the country’s telegraph system. He placed extra characters in the telegraphs before they were sent on to Bordeaux, providing secret messages that could be read by the Blancs watching the receiving station in Bordeaux. Unlike the M&S and Co-op attacks, however, the ‘hack’ went unnoticed for two years.  All change Friedrich Merz should become only the 11th Chancellor

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Who stamped out the postal service?

Tried to send a parcel lately? Or a letter? If it involves a trip to a post office, all I can say is, give it time. A fortnight ago, I was posting a book to a friend and took it to the nearest post office – the central, City of London one. It’s housed in a convenience store: handy if you want a samosa but lacking dignity, somehow. All the electronic terminals were out of action, four or five of them. The queue was patient but prohibitively long. Thinking bad thoughts about privatisation, I made my way to the post office in Kensington Church Street, which is a proper outfit;

Peter Jones

Who could persuade you to fight for Britain today?

This week we celebrated VE Day. When Pericles remembered the dead from the war against Sparta in his famous Funeral Speech of 431 bc, he was not celebrating victory – the war would end in 404 bc with Athens’s surrender – but doing something quite new: he was reflecting on what Athens stood for and why it was worth dying for. Pericles began by ticking off a number of important features of dêmokratia, ‘people-power’: the system ran in the interests of the many, not the few; men of distinction were given scope to win promotion on the grounds of merit (‘people-power’ was always thought to deny them that opportunity); but

Hannah Moore

My hunt for the perfect ‘mum van’

I spent my childhood being ferried around in my mom’s minivan, a hunter green Ford Windstar. Compared with most family cars on the road today, it was like Air Force One: magisterial and bigger than was strictly necessary. I loved that minivan. It was roomy and comfortable, with a two-seater half-bench in the middle row to allow access to the full three-seater third row. The Windstar saw my two sisters and me through our primary years, to twice-weekly basketball and volleyball practice. In the summer, we would head to the lake, all the kit housed neatly in the back. Apart from the handful of times I threw up in the

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why don’t men ask questions?

I’ll bet most women under 50 in relationships with men have found themselves wondering when on earth the man is going to get round to asking them a question. The man gets home. We ask about his meetings, his lunch, his colleagues, showing empathy and imaginative curiosity. Then we wait in vain for our turn. That sounds too passive. ‘Waiting in vain’ doesn’t begin to summon the way mild pique turns first to incredulity, then actual rage and despair at the man’s apparent lack of interest. ‘Tears are pooling on your collarbones again,’ my husband used to observe quite regularly on date nights in our courting days. ‘Is it because

Toby Young Toby Young

Are you a ‘tidsoptimist’?

Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I discovered, is ‘someone who is overly optimistic about how much time they have, often underestimating how long tasks will take and therefore frequently running late’. That perfectly describes me. Caroline is punctual to a fault, often arriving early to appointments, and she finds my tardiness intensely irritating. Whenever I have to meet her anywhere – at a friend’s house for dinner, for instance – she will pretend I’m expected 15 minutes beforehand, so when I’m quarter of an hour late I will actually be on time. At one point, she

William Atkinson

The conservatism of Thomas the Tank Engine

Ringo Starr is mostly known as the second or third best drummer in the Beatles. But for me – as for many children of the past four decades – he will forever be the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine.  This week marks 80 years since the publication of The Three Railway Engines, the first book in the Revd Wilbert Awdry’s Railway Series. The series is based on stories Awdry told to cheer up his son Christopher, who was recovering from measles. More than 40 books followed, alongside the television programme, films, theme parks and toys. Together, the franchise has been valued at more than £1.2 billion. Despite its success,