Society

Thursday

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 October 2025

Sometimes the stars align in such a wondrous way that the team they are favouring cannot go wrong. Such a line-up fell upon my team in last week’s World Bridge Tour in lovely Copenhagen. First star that kerchunked into our constellation was that I couldn’t play, which left six professionals with no weak link who couldn’t spot a Vienna Coup if it was staring her in the face. The second was having Denmark’s best pair playing with us: Dennis Bilde and Martin Schaltz. And all the other stars needed to win a top-level tournament, fell neatly into place. The play started with four days of qualification: the top four teams

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

What is the West without the Jews?

To the studio! Podcasts, if you ask me, are the one good thing to have come out of the digital revolution. My new one, The Brink, which I present with hulking former Parachute Regiment officer Andrew Fox, has hosted three guests so far: American media supremo Bari Weiss, former Israel defence minister Yoav Gallant and Mossad spymaster Yossi Cohen. What are we? Well, we’re not Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. The highlights? Weiss observing that society is not facing a crisis of trust but of trustworthiness: ‘You should not trust something that’s not worthy of your trust.’ Then there was Gallant’s message to the West: ‘We all think war is

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Palestinian nationalism has come to Cornwall

This is West Cornwall, land of fishing, jam first and Trotskyite crafters. There is a sizeable community of nutters yearning for a Cornish intifada: the freedom within, and the freedom without. The old joke is: the duchy is shaped like a Christmas stocking and all the nuts are in the toe. Extinction Rebellion (XR) used to be the big thing down here. My cleaner, a serious deal in XR, screamed at me when my husband put a Tory sign in our garden for the 2019 general election campaign – but fashions change. There are other things to be extinguished now. Since 7 October 2023, the nutters have embraced their own

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The frustrations of the Tory mindset

‘The facts of life are Conservative.’ This sentence is often attributed to Margaret Thatcher, whose centenary falls next week. The exact words are ‘The facts of life invariably do turn out to be Tory’ and were not hers. They appeared in the first major policy document produced under her leadership, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976). The author was probably Chris Patten, the document’s drafter and more of a ‘wordsmith’ – her coinage – than she. (There might even have been a deliberate Patten double-entendre of the sort that always escaped Mrs T since, in those days, the phrase ‘the facts of life’ meant the sex lessons given by embarrassed parents and

Douglas Murray

The increasing fear felt by Britain’s Jews

If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the day well – Tuesday was the second anniversary of the 7 October massacre, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage. Tuesday’s hate-fest was not, of course, an unusual event. The first demonstrations in support of the 7 October massacre of Jews took place in west London on the day of

The Spectator

What we need from our new Archbishop of Canterbury

There have been 106 Archbishops of Canterbury since Gregory the Great declared Augustine his ‘Apostle to the English’ in 597. Their number has included Catholics and Protestants, progressives and traditionalists, academics, politicians, even a tank commander. But none had ever been a woman. Sarah Mullally’s appointment is a historic moment for the Church but it comes at a moment of peril for Anglicanism. The Church of England seems to be in a state of perpetual crisis. Few would argue that it serves the world’s more than 100 million Anglicans well or that it sits at the heart of public life. Sunday attendance has fallen by 40 per cent in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Synagogue attack, pro-Palestine protests and a new Archbishop of Canterbury

Home Two men at a synagogue at Heaton Park in Manchester were killed on Yom Kippur when Jihad al-Shamie, 35, drove a car at bystanders and went on the attack with a knife. He was a British citizen of Syrian descent, on bail after being arrested on suspicion of rape. He was bravely prevented by those present from breaking into the main building. Police shot him dead; they also accidentally shot a worshipper who died, and wounded another. Six people were arrested on suspicion of terrorist offences. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, appealed for a pause in pro-Palestinian protests but police arrested 488 people around Trafalgar Square demonstrating on Saturday

Wednesday

Patrick West

The problem with Lenny Henry’s demand for reparations

The desire to seek restitution from those who have harmed or wronged us is normal. Our instinct for justice is inbuilt. Yet, in recent decades, there has emerged in the West a perverse distortion of this impulse: the demand for financial compensation from people who have done no wrong, made by people who have not been wronged. Long-established campaigns calling on Britain to pay reparations for slavery are founded on this strange premise, and the latest figure to join their ranks is Sir Lenny Henry. The comedian and actor makes his case in a new book, The Big Payback, co-authored with Marcus Ryder, a television executive and charity boss. He argues

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Should Stephen Lawrence’s killer be freed?

David Norris was convicted of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 and now wants to be released from prison. Should he be? That is a question the Parole Board will consider as Norris has now served the minimum custodial term of a life sentence imposed in 2011. This body has the power to direct his release or refuse it on the grounds of risk to the public. While it is independent of politics, the profile of the perpetrator and the seriousness of the case means the new Justice Secretary, David Lammy – who has described the murder of Lawrence as a ‘seminal moment’ in shaping his understanding

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry’s white saviour complex has been dealt another blow

You’ve got to feel sorry for Prince Harry. After some of the best headlines he’s had in years during his well-received return to Britain last month, that goodwill has swiftly been dismantled under a blizzard of bad publicity. There was the accusation that he or someone around him leaked sensitive information about his brief meeting with his father to the papers. And now the revelation that one of the charities he’s closely linked to, African Parks, has been described as no longer fit for purpose. Or, to be exact, ‘indelicate and disrespectful’. The calamitous and scandalous collapse of Sentebale earlier this year has now been followed by this less dramatic

Luke Coppen

Islam and the Bible are fuelling France’s ‘baptism boom’

You have probably heard that something extraordinary is happening in the Catholic Church in France. The French bishops’ conference announced in April that more than 10,000 adults were due to be baptised in 2025 – a 45 per cent increase on the year before. France is seeing what the media call a ‘boom biblique’: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible It’s not just adult baptisms that are booming. A record 19,000 people, many young, attended this year’s Paris to Chartres pilgrimage. An unprecedented 13,500 high school students took part in the 2025 Lourdes FRAT pilgrimage, a major annual youth event. The country is also seeing what French media call a ‘boom biblique’: a rapid rise in

Tuesday

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

The ghost of October 7 haunts one Israeli kibbutz

A little over two months ago, I stood in the fallow murderscape of the Nir Oz kibbutz facing towards the barbed border fence with Gaza. Once, this village in southern Israel was a thriving community of 400 Jewish people, known for their left-wing ideologies and progressive ideals. But, two years ago on this very day, 500 Hamas terrorists smashed holes in the security wall, poured into Israel and stormed this quiet kibbutz. Nir Oz suffered the worst violence per capita of any village in the country that day, with a quarter of its population either slaughtered or taken hostage. Now only burned and looted cottages remain in this deserted memorial

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Lord Nelson wasn’t queer

After extensive research I can reveal that Adolf Hitler was not, in fact, gay. Nor was he black, transexual, secretly a woman or neurodiverse. He was, it turns out, a straight, white, cisgendered male. As for history’s good guys – now that is a different matter. The latest to be claimed as belonging to some kind of fashionable minority is Horatio Nelson who, according to a Liverpool art gallery, was queer. If activists want to go around trying to claim historic figures as their own, then fine. But I’m not sure why taxpayers should be funding this guff It makes this claim based on the nothing but the old chestnut of

Joanna Williams

Why do students think a bake sale is the way to mark October 7?

How best to commemorate the horrors of October 7th, 2023? How to mark the day on which hundreds of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, slaughtering almost 1,200 people, injuring thousands more, and taking 251 hostages? For students at the University of Liverpool, the answer seems to be a ‘bake sale’. That’s right. In remembrance of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, students will eat cake and raise money for Palestine. ‘Time for Dessert’ is the event’s sickening slogan. Protests are expected to take place today at universities throughout the UK Sadly, Liverpool is far from unique. Protests are expected to take place today at universities throughout the UK. Not demonstrations

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The sorry sight of the ageing protestor

Among the 488 arrests at the weekend at what the media is still pleased to call ‘pro-Palestine demonstrations’ were many, going by the video and photographic evidence, who were considerably beyond their first flush of youth. Grey hair and wrinkles abounded – one of the decrepit demonstrators was pictured dressed in a charming garment juxtaposing the Star of David with a swastika. As with many demos of late, the age of these miscreants is being held up by the movements in question as if to say ‘look how harmless they are’. I’m afraid for me it just brings to mind the saying that there’s no fool like an old fool.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Immigration isn’t working

The Manchester synagogue attack requires us to ask three questions: where are we, how did we get there, and where now? Where we are is British Jews attacked on Yom Kippur, two dead, more injured, countless more afraid. This requires an acknowledgement by the governing classes that multiculturalism and mass immigration are false doctrines which have severely harmed this country and its people. Jihad al-Shamie is the latest in a grim roll call of first or second-generation immigrants to be welcomed to Britain only to repay that welcome with carnage. Instead of being taboo, the varying societal costs brought by different nationalities should inform the criteria for accepting migrants The

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Islamists are the true cry bullies

When I invented the term ‘cry bully’ in this very magazine ten years ago, I had no idea how much bigger both theory and practice could get. It already seemed to have reached such a tipping point that surely ‘The Grown-ups in the Room’ of the time, or subsequently, would put a tin lid on such flagrant stupidity. I wrote, in part: This is the age of the cry bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political, from Celebrity Big Brother to the frontline of Islamism… Cry bullies do end up isolated, as their determination to

Angela Epstein

The case for staying put: why this Jew isn’t leaving Britain

Is it time for the wandering Jews to once again pack up and go? It’s a question that has been troubling communities of the Diaspora – especially in this country – ever since the atrocities of October 7th unleashed, in the words of the Chief Rabbi, unrelenting waves of hatred against our people. How much more of a warning did we need? Sometimes we muse in the abstract. Idling around the Friday night dinner table over a fragrant bowl of chicken soup and wondering if this is the time for ‘the Exile’. At others, the tone hardens. Not least on strident Facebook feeds where the gathering storm clouds of prewar Germany are invoked

Philip Hensher

Jilly Cooper’s novels could well become classics

Dame Jilly Cooper, who has died at 88, had a remarkable career, turning herself from a sparkling writer for newspapers into the author of novels which survive, decades after they came out, very well. Few of the huge bestsellers of their day are read 40 years on – The Manxman, Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, Scruples all faded away. When one of Dame Jilly’s 1980s novels, Rivals, was filmed in 2024, it didn’t revive a forgotten favourite: like almost all her other novels, it had never disappeared from readers’ affections. Her books stand every chance of turning, in time, into classics of our literature. What makes the novels work