Society

Tuesday

Nigel Jones

In defence of private members’ clubs

The members list of the men-only Garrick Club in London’s West End has remained a closely-guarded secret – until now. King Charles, Richard Moore, the head of MI6, and Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, have been named as members of the club after the Guardian revealed what it called ‘the roll call of (the) British establishment’. But is anyone surprised that the great and the good are signed-up members of the Garrick? The club’s critics condemn the Garrick for being exclusive, not least because it doesn’t allow women to join. But the endurance of the traditions of the private members’ club is something to celebrate, not condemn. London’s gentleman’s clubs

Alexander Larman

Will the conspiracy theories about Kate ever die?

At last, the matter should have been settled. After the innumerable articles, social media posts and television pundits all speculating as to what, exactly, has happened to the Princess of Wales, it was revealed over the weekend that she had been seen with her husband, looking in good health, visiting a farm shop – that bastion of well-heeled Englishness. The story seems designed to reassure anyone that she is one of their own, as well as, one day, the future queen. There was, of course, some scepticism about the Sun’s initial revelation, given that it was not substantiated with pictures or videos. So the development that there is, indeed, footage

Alexander Horne

Why climate protestors lost the right to cause criminal damage

Yesterday, the Lady Chief Justice, Lady Carr, delivered a judgment on protest law which may close a remarkable loophole which had been exploited by climate change protestors who engage in direct action to promote their cause. Protestors who have damaged property with paint or smashed windows have been cleared in recent years after telling juries they ‘honestly believed’ that property owners would have consented to the damage if they had known about the impact of climate change. Now, the Court of Appeal judgment should ensure that this defence is removed from many of those seeking to rely on their philosophical and political beliefs when engaging in destructive direct action. The

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The middle classes let Banksy get away with vandalism

This is a tale of two murals: one painted on the side of a building in Greenwich by an artist commissioned by the owner, the other scrawled on a building in Finsbury Park by a fly-by-night graffiti artist. You can probably guess which one the local authority has ordered to be removed under threat of enforcement action and a large fine, and which one has been welcomed by the local MP Jeremy Corbyn, who said he was ‘delighted’. Once again, the law has been shown to be blatantly on the side of middle class taste. Chris Kanizi, who owns the Golden Chippy in Greenwich, just wanted to brighten the area

Elliot Keck

Revealed: the extent of Sadiq Khan’s splurge of taxpayers’ cash

Londoners don’t agree on much, but on one subject many of the capital’s residents are united: Amy Lamé, the mayor’s ‘night czar’, is a colossal waste of money. Whether you’re on the left or right, a cyclist or motorist, religious or not, it’s hard to defend her £120,000-a-year salary for ‘ensuring London thrives as a 24 hour city’. But Lamé isn’t the only beneficiary of the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s largesse: more than 1,100 staff working for various public sector organisations in the capital, including City Hall, Transport for London (TfL) and the Metropolitan Police, were paid more than £100,000 last year. Khan certainly thinks these fat cats are worth

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

How Justin Welby should have responded to Gove’s extremism crackdown

When the government raises big questions about our national values, one has a choice: to see it as an opportunity to say something constructive, to deepen the debate. Or one could respond like a cynical intern at the Guardian, saying, in effect: how dare they try to sound all high and mighty? Where’s some holes we can pick? The Church of England is unfortunately inclined to the latter course, with the archbishops issuing a statement raising concerns that Muslims might be targeted by a redefinition of extremism.  What Michael Gove announced was hardly earth-shattering What the communities secretary Michael Gove announced was hardly earth-shattering. He gave a new but not

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Princess Kate, photographs, and the great thirst for significance 

When Photogate, or Kategate, or whatever we end up calling it, first became news, I remember taking one look at social media and thinking: you people have lost your damn minds. An anodyne photograph of the Princess of Wales and her children was issued to the press agencies by Kensington Palace to mark Mother’s Day. First, the amateur sleuths of Twitter spotted some visual inconsistencies in the image. Then the conspiracy theorists came out to play. And before long the major press photo-agencies had withdrawn the photo, with a great show of fastidiousness, from circulation.   It is a bellwether of the way we consume news in the digital age:

Sunday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

How was the puberty blocking scandal ever allowed to happen?

Remember when Irish singer Róisín Murphy was set upon by the mob last year? Her crime: she criticised puberty blockers and said we should stop dishing them out like candy to vulnerable kids. The blowback was furious. Armies of activists damned her as a transphobe, a bigot, a bitch.  They pronounced her ‘over’, which is PC-speak for ‘unpersoned’. They threatened to boycott her gigs. Virtually every review of her new album, Hit Parade, contained a swipe about her sinful utterance. The most shameful was the Guardian’s. It’s a great record, the reviewer said, but it comes with the ‘ugly stain’ of its creator’s evil views.  It was the liberty blockers

Leon Mangasarian

An ex-German diplomat’s withering verdict on Berlin’s ‘flawed’ Russia policy

Arndt Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven couldn’t have had a worse start as Germany’s ambassador to Poland. Germany’s fraught historical legacy with the country – six million Poles killed in the Second World War and Prussia’s role in wiping Poland off the map from 1795 to 1918 – inspired Freytag von Loringhoven in his final posting to push hard to improve ties with Warsaw. But the Polish government saw things differently. His approval as ambassador – a role he finally took up in 2020 – was delayed by members of Poland’s then ruling PiS party, who campaigned against him using Nazi slurs. They targeted him because his father, Bernd, was a

Robin Ashenden

The trials and tribulations of Orthodox Lent

The Russian Orthodox Church, which I converted to in 2018, has disgraced itself in the years since. Its Patriarch Kirill has oiled up to Vladimir Putin and his war effort on every possible occasion since Russia invaded Ukraine. My feelings about this strand of Christianity may be highly ambivalent now: what good is its staggering beauty if it fails to properly call out mass murder? How is Putin, as we’re constantly told, a ‘devout believer’, when it seems he’s simply ticking his way through outraging the Ten Commandments? But my fondness for some of its rituals, including Orthodox Lent, which starts this week, remains. Lent was designed to be a

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Will France’s Olympians embarrass Macron?

France host England tonight in the final match of the 2024 Six Nations. ‘Le Crunch’, as this fixture has come to be known, is never for the faint-hearted but this evening’s atmosphere is likely to be especially febrile. The match is being played in Lyon, in the south-east of France, instead of the Stade de France in the north of Paris. There’ll be 20,000 fewer fans because of Lyon’s smaller stadium but the noise they will generate will be far greater than the corporate crowd in Paris. Lyon is rugby territory. There are several famous clubs within a 100 mile radius and the chance to barrack les Rosbifs ­– the French retort

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The price we’ll pay for citizens’ assemblies

Citizens’ assemblies will transform Britain. That’s the promise made by activists from groups like Extinction Rebellion. Labour has also mooted introducing the assemblies if it wins power, even if it did later backtrack on the plans. In Waltham Forest, north-east London, the revolution has already begun: a citizens’ assembly is underway there that will determine ‘the future of neighbourhood policing.’  I entered a large gym where about 50 delegates and volunteers, seated around six tables, were listening to presentations from criminologists and youth workers. The procedures of the assembly are multi-layered and distracting, as if designed to keep everyone engaged by giving them small chores at regular intervals.  This sounds

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How did this London townhouse become the world’s greatest research centre?

If you were asked to name the world’s greatest research centre in terms of discoveries per square yard, the answer wouldn’t be an Oxford or Cambridge lab. Nor would it be anywhere in America. Or China, for that matter. The correct answer would be a handsome Georgian townhouse in the heart of London.  For it was at the Royal Institution (Ri), in the 19th century, that Sir Humphry Davy identified nine new elements in the periodic table. And it was there that Michael Faraday teased out the relationship between electricity and magnetism, which enabled the creation of our modern electrified world. And it was there that, in the 20th century,

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How to sell The Spectator

No foreign power will ever be allowed to buy a UK newspaper or magazine: that’s the upshot of this week’s debate in parliament. The new law, due in a few weeks, is also expected to rule out minority stakes. So what next for us – and the Telegraph? It has been said that the Emiratis may have been our best bet because no one else wants to invest in newspapers and magazines. The opposite is true. It’s a point that needs to be more widely understood, so I’d like to say something about the auction we came so close to completing last December. Neither The Spectator nor the Telegraph need a penny of anyone else’s money Some 22

James Lewisohn

How Ozempic fattened up Denmark’s economy

It’s official: weight-loss wonder drug Wegovy (also marketed as Ozempic) makes US celebrities shrink but makes the Danish economy grow. This week, the most amusing Oscars clickbait featured not the typical best- and worst-dressed actors, but instead celebrities who have experienced recent miraculous weight loss. The Daily Mail helpfully split this award category between those confirmed to have taken Wegovy, and others who have merely inexplicably and rapidly shrunk. Their collective weight loss is Denmark’s economic gain: this week, Denmark’s statistics agency confirmed the Danish economy grew 1.8 per cent in 2023 – but without the contribution of Wegovy’s owner, Novo Nordisk, it would instead have shrunk 0.1 per cent. Free market

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How the Church of England patronises African Christians

17 min listen

In this episode of Holy Smoke, I’m joined by The Spectator’s features editor William Moore, who asks in this week’s issue of the magazine whether the Church of England is ‘apologising for Christianity’. A report by the Oversight Group, set up by the Church Commissioners to make reparations for African slavery, not only wants to see unimaginable sums transferred to ‘community groups’ – its chair, the Bishop of Croydon, thinks a billion pounds would be appropriate – it also deplores the efforts of Christian missionaries to eradicate traditional religious practices. But, as Will’s article points out, those traditional practices included – at their most extreme – idol-worship, twin infanticide and cannibalism. Are

Alexander Larman

Can Meghan reinvent herself as a ‘lifestyle queen’?

It is a known, and lamented, fact that the rivalry between the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of Sussex has led to a series of incidents of one-up(wo)manship. It is surely no coincidence that in the midst of the Harry and Meghan brouhaha on Netflix, the princess was photographed looking suitably radiant and selfless, helping out with good causes and generally being a credit to the royals, rather than a thorn in their side. And now that she has become the most discussed woman in the world by dint of her disappearance from the spotlight, a certain Montecito resident might be forgiven for feeling that her elegant nose has been put out of

Thursday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How WFH engineers caused an air traffic control meltdown

How lovely that engineers working for National Air Traffic Services (Nats) can work from home rather than having to slog it in to the company’s headquarters at Swanwick, Hampshire. Lovely, that is, for the engineers rather than for air passengers. A report by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has revealed the reason behind the meltdown in air traffic control which led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights last August Bank Holiday, inconveniencing millions of passengers. The system need to be reset by a ‘level 2’ engineer, but none were actually working in the office that day, so one had to be called in – which took 90 minutes. Such is

Andrew Scott

Is our ageing society good or bad news?

A remarkable transformation is underway across the world. Falling fertility rates and rising life expectancy mean there are fewer young people and more older ones. The result is an ageing society, characterised by a rising average age and a growing proportion of older people. This is often seen as a bad thing: most old people don’t work, they need a pension, and their health care is costly. The result is rising government debt and an economy staggering under the burden of a high old-age dependency ratio. But this negative approach is a strange way to frame one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements. When I was born in 1965, the

James Heale James Heale

Can private schools survive Labour’s VAT raid? 

As Labour edges closer to power, any hindrance to that goal is being ruthlessly removed. The £28 billion pledge in green spending has been dropped; plans to elect the House of Lords delayed. Bankers’ bonuses will remain uncapped. City financiers are subjected to prawn cocktail offensives at £1,000-a-head soirées to hear Rachel Reeves preach fiscal probity. ‘My instinct is to have lower taxes,’ the shadow chancellor insists. Yet it’s an instinct that seems absent when it comes to easy targets such as the 2,500 independent schools in England and Wales on which Reeves wants to levy VAT and business rates. Both publicly and privately, Labour insists this pledge will remain.