Get a free copy of Douglas Murray’s new book

when you subscribe to The Spectator for just $15 for 12 weeks. No commitment – cancel any time.
SUBSCRIBE

Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Do charities really deserve my mum’s data?

A letter from Archie Norman, chairman of M&S, popped into my inbox after I complained that I had run over my foot with a changing room door. It wasn’t a personal letter, rather a generic response, and this was a relief because I would not have liked the actual Archie Norman to have actually seen the complaint email I sent with a close-up picture of my bruised black, grazed and manky-looking foot. When you complain to a chain store about their weirdly heavy and not-quite-coming-all-the-way-to-the-floor changing room doors, the last thing you want, really, is a reply from someone you once had lunch with when you were suited and booted

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How to solve ‘range anxiety’

In ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’, Sherlock Holmes mentions ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’. ‘But the dog did nothing in the night-time,’ argues Inspector Gregory. ‘That was the curious incident,’ replies Holmes. You never hear anyone say: ‘We finally stumbled across a charming little petrol station nestling among the trees’ Along with Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘Unknown unknowns’, this is perhaps the most famous example of what you might call ‘perceptual asymmetry’. We mostly act instinctively based on what is salient, giving little thought to what is easily overlooked. It is hence surprisingly easy to change what people do simply by changing what they pay attention to. A

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: what should I do if a fellow passenger is reading porn?

Q. On a recent short-haul flight, I had the misfortune to be seated next to a much older man who read, for the entirety of the flight, an erotic novel on his Kindle. I tried to avert my eyes but the bright screen and lewd language kept catching my eye. I was stunned into silence for the 1.5 hours I was trapped next to him. Should I have said something, and if so, what? – L.R.B., Bristol A. Certain bridge players complain they can see others’ cards – and no doubt they can, but they don’t have to. Equally, lewd language on a next-door Kindle can only be seen with

Aidan Hartley

My battle with the dreaded ‘black cotton’

Laikipia, Kenya By the time I set off from the farm before dawn we’d had 22in of rain in the past month. At the bottom of the valley I saw in the headlights that our lugga, or seasonal watercourse, had become a roaring torrent of brown water after yet another downpour overnight. If I tried to cross the Landcruiser would be swept away in the flood. This rainy season the land has become a sea of mud, with a thousand streams of water splashing down from the plains, our days and nights serenaded by bullfrogs. Normally I would stay put, give up on any travel and wait it out. There

Bruce Anderson

How to become an old soak

Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed, there is virtually a consensus that red wine has almost medicinal properties. That said, a confusion about so-called units remains. When the measurement was explained to me, I said that it sounded adequate. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, that ought to be more or less enough.’ Then the cross-purposes were unscrambled. The 98 units or whatever – a figure clearly designed to give a bogus authority to the calculation – was a weekly total, not a daily one. There’s no reason whya normal wine-drinker should not live to be an old soak  There

Dot Wordsworth

Do sparks really fly?

‘Sparks,’ said my husband, after a short pause. I had asked him what one could spark. His answer was true but not all that helpful. I had come across a headline on the BBC News website that said: ‘Record hot March sparks “unchartered territory” fears.’ The inverted commas around unchartered territory were not meant as so-called sneer-quotes, but to indicate quotation. Later the same day the headline was amended to uncharted and sparks was jettisoned. There is such a word as unchartered. My distant relation by marriage, William Wordsworth, used it in his ‘Ode to Duty’, the one that begins: ‘Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!’ It is not

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 11 May 2024

I was chatting to my friends Alice Coptcoat and Natalie Hoff at the Acol last week, when Alice mentioned that she’d enjoyed Andrew Robson’s recent BridgeCast about a hand he played against Natalie at the Lederer Trophy. ‘Oh, that hand!’ Natalie exclaimed. ‘It was beautiful. I’ll never forget the way he dropped my singleton king, then played every card to perfection before end-playing me.’ I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone quite so elated at the memory of being beaten before, but when a player of Andrew’s calibre pits his brilliant brain against you, frankly it’s an honour. Natalie (West) led the ♣5, Andrew played low and East (Mike Bell) won

Slavoj Žižek

My Britney Spears Theory of Action

Every week I check the weather in Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard. It’s about as close as you can get to a gulag with a human face – a heap of wooden houses where around 2,000 people live. It has a couple of stores and restaurants, and even a very small university. Outside the two streets, there’s much open space in which to walk. You don’t have to go far before being greeted with warning signs: ‘Don’t walk beyond this line without a gun! Danger of polar bears!’ At the door to all the cafés there is another sign: ‘Please leave your guns at the entrance!’ How can you

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The science behind Olivia Colman’s left-wing face

The new hunting year formally began last week. Should I resubscribe? Politically, the outlook is bleak. In February, Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, announced that Labour would implement a ‘full ban on trail and drag hunting’, on the grounds that there were ‘loopholes’ in Labour’s hunting ban. This even though, when advocating the original ban, Labour said it favoured drag hunting (trail hunting had not then been invented) and was worried only about live quarry. Mr Reed included his ban promise in a speech in which he announced that his party would treat rural voters with ‘greater respect’. His two aims conflict. The idea that chasing a scented rag

Douglas Murray

We need to talk about Kevin Spacey

I am looking for a way to get £80,000. The sum would come in handy. I could put it towards buying a cottage on Saint Helena, a seat in the House of Lords or dinner in central London. The problem is that I’m stumped for ways to get it. Happily, this week’s news brings inspiration and I now realise that in order to make the necessary sum I will need someone – perhaps a dedicated reader? – to sing a Victoria Wood song at me in a suggestive, if not lewd, fashion. When you remove the baggage with the male-to-female power dynamic, other dynamics come into view For anyone who

Angus Colwell

Bugs, biscuits, trench foot: from the front line of the uni protests

On the grass in front of UCL’s main building, on Sunday night, there were about 30 tents and the portico was plastered in handwritten signs: ‘Students: You’re in debt so UCL can fund a genocide!’ Some protestors sat on chairs, eating biscuits. Others stood at the front gate chanting ‘From the River to the Sea’. ‘Do you want a tent, bro?’ asked one protestor. I explained that I was a reporter and was immediately whisked away to talk to a spokesman. ‘Spectator, Spectator … yeah, I think that’s left-wing. All good.’ A girl who had come along for the day received a keffiyeh tutorial and as night began to fall,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tory defections, local elections and a China defence hack

Home The local elections proved dreadful for the Conservatives but not quite perfect for Labour. The Conservatives lost 474 of the council wards in contention, ending up with 515; Labour gained an extra 186 to reach 1,158. Independents and others, some standing on the issue of Gaza, increased their councillors by 93 to 228, and took away Labour votes. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain got four seats. Reform won only two seats but took votes from the Tories; it almost came second in Blackpool South, where there was a by-election which Labour won with 10,825 votes to the Tories’ 3,218. Ben Houchen (Lord Houchen of High Leven) won a

Yascha Mounk

How universities raised a generation of activists

It was only a matter of time before America’s student protests spread to the UK. In Oxford, tents have been pitched on grass that, in ordinary times, no student is allowed to walk on. The ground outside King’s College in Cambridge looks like Glastonbury, complete with an ‘emergency toilet’ tent. Similar camps can be found at UCL, Manchester University and more. There have been no clashes with police, but that may yet come. In Leeds, for example, pro-Palestinian students tried to storm a university building, leading to bloody clashes with security guards. From the Sorbonne to Sydney University, the movement has gone global. Its ostensible cause is hardly ignoble. It’s

Wednesday

David Shipley

Releasing prisoners early is a mistake

Some prisoners will be freed up to 70 days early to ease overcrowding in jails. This isn’t the first time the government has resorted to letting prisoners go before the end of their sentence: Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary, announced in March that prisoners would be released up to 60 days early. This followed a 35-day early release policy announced in October. How long will ministers pretend that extending early release every couple of months is a serious solution to the dire state of Britain’s prisons? ‘Lower level offenders’ are the most likely to reoffend Letting prisoners go early makes a mockery of the idea that sentencing should be transparent.

Natasha Voase

The revenge of the blue collar workers

Last year was the year the scales tipped in the global job market. Layoffs in consulting and investment banking that started in early 2023 have continued to mount, and yet the wider jobs market has remained relatively resilient. Demand for engineers and healthcare professionals is reportedly increasing. Blue collar workers in industries such as mining, construction and manufacturing, whose skills graduates have often turned their noses up at, are also in demand. The country is coming to terms with the fact that, for years, it has been reliant on workers trained in other countries. Couple this with the growing importance of artificial intelligence and its ability to replace white collar

Alexander Larman

Did the King snub Prince Harry?

Prince Harry’s occasional visits to Britain are regarded by many with the sense of unease that most people reserve for unexpected tax bills, visits from distant relatives and Jehovah’s Witnesses turning up on the doorstep on Sunday mornings. It would seem that his father feels rather similar about the prospect of seeing his errant son, and it has been briefed that, although Harry is in London to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Invictus Games, there will be no meeting between Charles and the Duke of Sussex on this occasion, despite or perhaps because of the recent good news that the King’s cancer treatment is proceeding positively. The royal family

Patrick West

The delusion of the pro-Palestinian campus protestors

Much has been made in recent weeks, and especially in recent days, about the degrees of ignorance often displayed by those protesting for the people of Gaza and Palestine. To put it pithily, many don’t seem to know from which river and to which sea they chant about with such passion. Such ignorance has prompted some to conclude that these protests are less about showing solidarity with beleaguered Palestinians and more an excuse to vent incoherent anti-Western sentiment, or, more sinisterly, old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Some of the protestors have been replicating what they believe to be the conditions in Gaza Similarly, the cosplay in evidence at university campuses in the USA

Tuesday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Stephen Fry and the rise of the Pratriarchy

With Labour on course to win the next election, it’s worth asking again: why is it the only major political party in the UK never to have had a female leader? There still hasn’t been a satisfactory answer. Indeed, considering the enthusiasm for the Church of Transubstantiation within its ranks – Labour has more of what I coined ‘transmaids’ than all the other parties put together – it’s not altogether impossible that the first ‘woman’ to lead Labour could be the proud possessor of a penis, especially if the risible Izzard ever finds a safe seat willing to take him. Whatever the excuse, Labour look on like scared schoolboys at

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Brexit didn’t ruin Rufus Wainwright’s musical

Blaming Brexit for everything has become a kind of tic among the great and good. Like the buck-passing politicians who used to blame everything on Brussels, the cultural elites have taken to blaming all manner of ills on the British people’s revolt against the EU back in 2016. Economic stagnation? Brexit! Covid deaths? Brexit! Poor mental-health provision? That’s the fault of Brexit, too – according to some Guardianistas, at least.  One of the most underrated Brexit benefits is the periodic meltdowns it causes among our supposed betters Now we have learned of Vote Leave’s latest, innocent victim: Rufus Wainwright’s West End prospects. According to the singer-songwriter and composer, Brexit is to