Society

Wednesday

Harriet Sergeant

How the culture war came for Kenwood Ladies’ Pond

‘Not another step!’ The large women in an old T shirt stretched across her bulging shoulders glared at my father. We were standing under a canopy of trees on Hampstead Heath in north London. Sunshine dappled through the leaves onto my face. I was 12 years old and clutched a wet and muddy costume. Through the greenery was a glimpse of lake and naked limbs.  My childhood oasis of tranquillity is under threat My father had come to pick me up from swimming in the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. He had started up the path only to be confronted by the lifeguard. ‘Women only.’ she growled and pointed to the board

Geoff Hill

Will South Africa’s unemployed rise up?

Beginning in the year 2000, Robert Mugabe began snatching white-owned farms for ‘redistribution’ and giving them to the black majority in Zimbabwe. The best properties were given to ministers, generals and retired ambassadors. Many used them as weekend retreats from the city. Mugabe’s wife, Grace, took a vast citrus estate east of the capital, Harare. In a short time, a country that for half a century had fed itself and exported the surplus was bankrupt, and hungry. The president’s plan was not so much about agriculture as politics. Young people in the city voted mostly for the opposition. He would put them on five- or ten-acre plots way out of

Tuesday

Debbie Hayton

The significance of J.K. Rowling’s defence of Kemi Badenoch

The opinion polls might be projecting a massive Labour majority, but there is a dynamic to this election that could yet derail Keir Starmer’s plans for government. Yesterday, J.K. Rowling spoke for many women when she fired off a volley of tweets on sex and gender. Her frustration was palpable, but also notable was her defence of Kemi Badenoch. While pointing out that ‘Kemi Badenoch and I might not agree on a lot’, Rowling chose to support the Tory minister for women and equalities, who was in turn under fire from Ian Dunt and Alistair Campbell. It felt personal as Rowling added: ‘And what’s the issue with her [Badenoch’s] manner, Ian? Did she fail

Sergey Radchenko

Tiananmen Square remade the modern world

Thirty-five years ago today, China’s leaders ordered tanks into Tiananmen Square to disperse a student encampment. The death toll was never made public; it is likely that several thousand people were killed.  June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom The brutal suppression of the pro-democracy protesters came as a shock and was an aberration. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Communist regimes toppled one after another, mostly peacefully. Only Tiananmen spoiled the celebratory mood.  June 4, 1989 planted the seeds of a much darker, more complicated world than we in the West cared to fathom.

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Even Nigel Farage will struggle to make this election exciting

Unlike Brenda from Bristol, I usually love elections – but not this one. Theresa May’s self-destruction in 2017 was one of the most fascinating events I’ve ever seen. The high-stakes tension of Boris vs. Corbyn in 2019 had me gripped to the TV. Even as a child, I couldn’t get enough of the high drama of politics: on Friday June 10 1983, I threw a sickie from school just so I could sit at home and read all the newspapers about Thatcher’s triumph: it was my pitiful idea of fun at fifteen years old. Yet Sunak vs. Starmer feels like even more of a foregone conclusion than 1997, when Tony

Monday

Debbie Hayton

Sunak’s gender attack will hurt Labour

If the country has not had enough sex by now, it may have by the election. Political sex, that is – Rishi Sunak has clearly spotted an opportunity for a fully frontal attack on one of Labour’s weak spots. This morning, the Prime Minister promised that if re-elected, his government would rewrite the Equality Act to make it clear that sex means biological sex. It would be a sensible move away from the current confusion where nobody is really certain what the law means. Perhaps in 2010 the outgoing Labour government never imagined that the definition of sex would be controversial? But the text of Labour’s Equality Act – ‘a reference

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

It feels like the social order is crumbling in Germany

I’ve been in and out of Germany a lot in recent months, and it’s hard not to gain the impression that its society is falling apart at the seams. Wherever you go, there seem to be angry political rallies and street protests. The news is full of violent attacks on politicians and activists. The fear is of a resurgence of far-right sentiments nearly eight decades after the fall of the Nazi regime. The concept of irrational German angst has become a bit of a cliche over the years, but this time the threats to social cohesion feel very real.  The sheer brutality of the attack is enough to appal people,

Sunday

Patrick West

Gary Lineker and the problem with celebrity boycotts

One of the country’s most cherished footballers, and one of its most irritating right-on social media commentators, Gary Lineker, has been at it again. In a post on X on Friday night the former Barcelona striker declared his support for their arch-rivals Real Madrid in the Champions League final. Why? Because, citing an account that monitors politics in football, Madrid’s opposition, Borussia Dortmund, recently signed a three-year sponsorship agreement with the weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall, a firm that sells arms to Israel. Never slow to jump on a bandwagon, Lineker may have been watching the events unfolding this week at the Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival, both of which

Carolin Duttlinger

What would Franz Kafka have thought of ‘Kafkaesque’?

Franz Kafka is one of a handful of writers whose names have become an adjective. First coined in the 1940s, the ‘Kafkaesque’ was originally used as a byword for state-sponsored terror, whether fascist or Soviet, but since then its scope has vastly expanded. Today’s uses range from the more trivial frustrations of daily life to serious miscarriages of justice, such as the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. During his 2023 trial for ‘discrediting’ the Russian army, which resulted in a 2.5 year prison sentence, the human rights campaigner Oleg Orlov pointedly sat in the courtroom reading Kafka’s The Trial. More recently, Kafka’s novel has been evoked by the US far-right

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

What’s behind the boom in Japanese fiction?

‘There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine’.  This is a quote from the novel Butter by Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki, which was published in translation last month to great acclaim. It’s billed as ‘a novel of food and murder’, inspired by the true story of a gourmet chef/serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case. It sounds gruesome but has plenty of descriptions of ‘scrumptious food’ apparently. I’m tempted to give it a go. What is it about these oriental offerings that has bookworms so enthralled? As are many others it seems. Butter is just the latest in a string of Japanese novels claiming prime display

Saturday

Nicholas Lezard

Peter Parker, Wayne Hunt, Nicholas Lezard, Mark Mason and Nicholas Farrell

33 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Peter Parker takes us through the history of guardsmen and homosexuality (1:12); Prof. Wayne Hunt explains what the Conservatives could learn from the 1993 Canadian election (9:10); Nicholas Lezard reflects on the diaries of Franz Kafka, on the eve of his centenary (16:06); Mark Mason provides his notes on Horse Guards (22:52); and, Nicholas Farrell ponders his wife’s potential suitors, once he’s died (26:01). Presented and produced by Patrick Gibbons.  

Niall Gooch

The triumph of Labour’s centrists

Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale, male and stale than the Garrick: Labour leaders who have won a majority in a general election. He will be only the fourth since the party first fielded candidates in a general election, after Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.  The conventional wisdom about such victories – particularly about those achieved by Wilson and Blair – is that they are the fruit of Labour moderates taking control of the party from the left, thus reassuring the conservative-minded middle classes. You still see this narrative about Starmer surprisingly often. He

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The enduring ghastliness of Sarah Ferguson

When I was a kid in the music business, I became aware of a funny phenomenon whereby visiting American bands would suss out which British punk groups were good and which were bad – and then hire a bad one as their support band, with the ignoble purpose of making the headline act look better in comparison. Seeing Sarah Ferguson in the news once again, I can’t help wondering whether the wily old Firm are after a bit of the same. Long before Harry and Meghan decided to let the Firm down big-time with their grasping and lazy behaviour, Fergie was the template Surveying her achievements online, you notice that

Friday

Iain Macwhirter

The Edinburgh Book Festival has bowed to the eco mob

This week, the Edinburgh Book Festival has joined the Hay Literary Festival in abandoning its sponsorship deal with the investment group Baillie Gifford, due to the firm’s investments in the oil industry and its supposed links to the war in Gaza.  The decision to ditch Baillie Gifford comes after a campaign by Fossil Free Books, whose leading organisers include the ‘anarchist gardener’ Ellen Miles. I know literary folk love to say they’re writers not fighters but you might’ve thought they would have shown a little more courage defending free speech  The chair of Edinburgh Book Festival, the BBC TV journalist Allan Little, explained that:  ‘Our team cannot be expected to deliver a safe and

Patrick West

Why we need the word ‘woke’

Has the word ‘woke’ become a lazy, all-too-common cliché? The novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver thinks so. During an appearance at the Hay Festival, she has lamented how the word has become ‘horribly overused’. The author says: ‘I’m as tired of it as you are. There have been other people trying to coin something else, which we’d also get tired of, but they usually have more than one syllable so they don’t catch on.’ Readers of Shriver’s journalism and fiction will know she has become one of the most unforgiving critics of woke. Her latest book, Mania, imagines a society in which those beholden to this ideology fight against ‘cognitive discrimination’, insisting

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Wannabes: are any of them ready?

36 min listen

On this week’s Edition: Wannabes – are any of them ready? Our cover piece takes a look at the state of the parties a week into the UK general election campaign. The election announcement took everyone by surprise, including Tory MPs, so what’s been the fallout since? To provide the latest analysis, The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls joins the podcast (2:00). Then: Angus Colwell reports on how the election is playing out on social media, and the increasing role of the political ‘spinfluencer’. These accounts have millions of likes, but how influential could they be during the election? Alongside Angus, Harry Boeken, aka @thechampagne_socialist on TikTok, joins us to share their

Nigel Jones

The sad decline of the Evening Standard

It’s always a sad day for journalists when a newspaper goes to the great printing room in the sky. But for all Londoners, the death of the capital’s last surviving evening paper is particularly poignant. The Evening Standard has announced that it is to cease publication as a daily paper – remaining alive only as a weekly edition. The news is not entirely unexpected: for years the paper has been a shadow of its former self, and was no longer an essential read for home-going commuters. Owned since 2009 by Russian born Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny, who has a 63 per cent majority stake, the other 24 per cent is owned

Andrew Tettenborn

Fewer kids should go to university

Rishi Sunak said on Tuesday what many of us have quietly suspected for some time. As a nation, we have too few apprentices and too many university students. Why not, he said, look hard at the higher education courses we provide at public expense, and where we see high drop-out rates, or poor employment and earnings prospects, be prepared to axe them and use the money to support apprenticeships? Predictably, the call for a cut in the number of university students has led to yelps of dissent, both from Labour with an election to win, and also from the higher education establishment with sales to safeguard. For all that, however,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Bury the Canaletto, now

I’m not on the guest list for the Duke of Westminster’s wedding, but I wish him luck anyway. Mind you, the young seventh duke – Hughie to his friends – hardly needs more luck than has already come his way in the form of the £10 billion Grosvenor property empire in London and elsewhere. When the playboy second duke known as ‘Bend’Or’ died in 1953, Pimlico had to be sold to pay record death duties. But the Grosvenor family has taken a firmer grip on tax planning since then, their fortune multiplying despite the dukedom passing through three cousins to reach the father of today’s incumbent, who inherited via reportedly

The Spectator

Letters: why the Tories need to lose

Back to blue Sir: What a pity your leading article (‘The valley of death’, 25 May) did not reach Downing Street in time. It might have dissuaded the Prime Minister from ruining a good suit, rushing off to Belfast to associate himself with Titanic and allowing himself to be photographed on an aeroplane under a sign proclaiming ‘Exit’. The coming Labour landslide does, however, present an opportunity for the Conservatives, if they are willing to use the wilderness years wisely. The years in opposition before 1979 enabled Margaret Thatcher to devise and refine a programme of radical right-wing policies. If a new leader can be found of her iron determination