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Michael Gove in conversation with Jeffrey Archer

Society

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

John Boyne and the bitter truth about the Polari Prize

The news that the Polari Prize for LGBTQ+ writing is not to be awarded this year after outrage that the novelist John Boyne was included on the longlist represents one of the more head-scratching reversals that the world of books has seen in a considerable time. Boyne’s novel Earth was selected on merit, but the Irish author, who proudly describes himself as a ‘Terf’ and has dared to be photographed with JK Rowling, the nemesis of the trans movement, was swiftly pilloried as soon as the longlist was announced on 1 August. Judges resigned in disgust and other longlisted writers called Boyne’s views ‘disgusting’ Judges resigned in disgust, other longlisted

Jimmy Nicholls

Childfree zealots are anti-humanity

Few things in life are more French than a dispute animée about holidays. While the Spanish enjoy an easy relationship with mañana and the Italians savour il dolce far niente (sweet idleness), the French will incite a riot over any threat to their leisure time faster than you can say faire une pause. It’s therefore little surprise to witness the ardourof government officials in condemning childfree resorts, a rare but growing feature of French holidaymaking. Saint-Delis in Normandy is but one hotel offering an ‘ever more exclusive and peaceful experience’ with ‘absolute relaxation’ for only €334 a night. Much of this comes downstream of intellectual attempts to paint child-rearing as a

Monday

Joanna Williams

Why women trust Farage more than Starmer

Labour’s attack dogs have Nigel Farage firmly in their sights. A vote for Reform will leave women and girls at risk from all manner of online nasties, is their latest salvo. Apparently, only Labour can offer us women the protection we need. Well, as one such woman, I would far sooner have a pint with Farage than be looked after by Starmer. When it comes to protecting women and girls in real life, the Labour government does not have a leg to stand on First came technology secretary Peter Kyle, who, at the end of July, accused the Reform leader of ‘wilful disregard for the safety of children online’ after

Alexander Larman

Terence Stamp bent the Swinging Sixties to his will

There are two famous images of the late Terence Stamp, one taken from one of his films, the other from a photoshoot by Terry O’Neill in 1963. In the first, he is shown in his regimental outfit, in character as the dashing but weak Sergeant Troy from the 1967 adaptation of Far From The Madding Crowd, with his inamorata Julie Christie, who played Bathsheba Everdene, beside him. In the second, he is shown looking intensely directly into O’Neill’s camera next to another lover of his, the model Jean ‘The Shrimp’ Shrimpton, in a startlingly modern image that looks as if it could have been taken today. In both cases, Stamp

Sunday

Max Hastings

Was the Treaty of Versailles really to blame for the rise of the Nazis?

The 1919 Versailles peace conference that followed the end of the first world war became the most famous, or notorious, diplomatic negotiation in history. Much influenced by John Maynard Keynes, an impassioned sympathiser for the German predicament, it was branded for the rest of the twentieth century as a failure, the injustice of which bore heavy responsibility for the rise of Hitler. Scholarly historical opinion about Versailles has moved MacMillan’s way, since the publication of Peacemakers Then, in 2001, along came Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, comparatively unknown outside the academic world, and her book Peacemakers. This was not only a commanding narrative of what took place in Paris during the

Alexander Larman

God save the great British pudding!

There are certain names of puddings that, if whispered to an Englishman of a certain age, will bring back near-Proustian reveries about their childhood. Rhubarb crumble. Bakewell tart. Sticky toffee pudding. The most naughty-sounding of them all, spotted dick. These, and many more, are often dismissed with the sobriquet ‘nursery food’, but in fact only the most well-heeled of dessert-munchers would ever have enjoyed such fare in their nursery. In fact, they were mostly likely to have been encountered at various fee-paying institutions, firstly as a staple of the boarding school lunch or supper. They then would have kept popping up in different guises throughout life, whether served at Oxbridge

Peter Oppenheimer

Oxford is being consumed by bureaucracy

The governance of Oxford University is plumbing new depths – and this doesn’t mean dons or deans, but the university’s 2,000-strong central bureaucracy based in Wellington Square. Everyone thinks of Oxford in terms of colleges but there is a whole other layer of university administration that has been steadily encroaching on the parts of the university which are responsible for teaching and research – the colleges and the academic faculties and departments. The latest grim example of the trend is a new consultation document from the bureaucrats called the Strategic Plan 2025-2030. The draft copy I have seen runs to a dozen pages and at the moment is only available

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The real problem with Surrey’s cat-calling crackdown

When I was young, the song ‘The Laughing Policeman’ always spooked me a bit; I’ve grown out of most fears, but this one if anything has grown over the decades. Because never before has it seemed more obvious that the police are amusing themselves with us – and the end results, far from beingamusing, are really quite scary. Never mind, ladies – there’s going to be a crackdown on wolf-whistling, that’ll keep you safe As taxpayers, we pay the police a lot of money to solve crimes and catch criminals. But it appears that we are not exactly getting bang for our buck, with criminal behaviour becoming ever more acceptable

Matthew Wilcox

Unesco status is killing Bath

Last month, the Trump administration announced that the United States would once again withdraw from Unesco, the Paris-based UN cultural agency responsible for World Heritage Sites, education initiatives, and cultural programmes worldwide. The official line? Unesco promotes ‘woke, divisive cultural and social causes’ and its ‘globalist, ideological agenda’ clashes with America First policy. Predictably, the Trump administration framed it as a culture-war grievance. But, set aside the politics, and it soon becomes clear that Trump might not be entirely wrong. The designation treats the Georgian crescents and Roman baths as inseparable from the supermarkets, car parks, and 1970s infill Unesco – founded in 1945 with the lofty mission of promoting peace

Hugh Thomson

Why won’t young people pick up the phone?

‘So you mean rather than writing something out, you could just talk to somebody from a distance? But that would be so cool. And so much quicker. And so much more real.’ ‘Exactly!’ There was a distant time when phone calls were in themselves seen as the cowardly opt-out way of communicating rather than just doing it face to face Imagine if after decades of just being able to text, phone calls were only invented now. Everyone would be all over them. But instead the telephone is something used exclusively by  sad old people to talk to each other. No self respecting teen would talk when they could text. Or

Friday

Madeline Grant

Ricky Jones and the reality of two-tier justice

This may be looked back on as the week when two-tier justice moved from being an accusation to a statement of incontrovertible fact. The stark difference in treatment of Ricky Jones, the former Labour councillor accused of encouraging violent disorder as he mimed a throat being cut at a protest and Lucy Connolly, the mother who sent a nasty tweet shortly after the Southport massacre, is no conspiracy theory, despite the state’s best efforts to pretend it is.  Crucially, like most of those arrested at the time, Lucy Connolly was denied bail To recap, Jones was filmed at an anti-racism rally after the Southport riots calling protestors ‘disgusting Nazi fascists’, and

Patrick West

What’s wrong with a St George’s Cross flag?

Flags have become a contentious and defining issue of this year. You only have to witness the furore that has surrounded the increasing proliferation of the Progress Pride and Palestinian flags in this country to recognise this. So it was only a matter of time before that other increasingly common sight, flags denoting pride in Englishness and Britishness, should have been drawn into the fray. As reported in the Daily Telegraph this morning, Birmingham Council has ordered the removal of Union and St George’s flags from lamp posts. In response to initiatives made by residents in the fortnight approaching VJ Day to install hundreds of the flags in the predominantly

Alexander Larman

King Charles’s poignant VJ Day reminder

It has been one of the hallmarks of King Charles’s reign so far that, when he makes a commemorative or ceremonial address, especially when he is remembering Britain’s wartime victories, he usually manages to hit the correct note. He has become very adept at persuading even the most dyed-in-the-wool republicans that he is the right man at the right time. Therefore, when it was announced that he would address the nation in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of VJ Day – the grimmer, less obviously triumphal cousin of VE Day – expectations were high that the King would once again deliver. What was less expected was how personal the speech

Adam Sisman

How the second world war shaped the sons of its soldiers

The 80th anniversary of VJ Day today marks the passing of the generation that took part in the second world war. The few surviving veterans must now be a hundred years old, or virtually so. They are departing; most have already left. This seems an appropriate moment to reflect upon the next generation, those whose fathers fought in the war and who grew up in its shadow. Much has been written about the luck of the ‘baby boomers’, those born in the two decades after the war, who benefitted from post-war prosperity, buying houses cheaply and seeing their values soar. Later generations have envied their affluence. But less has been written

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Bournemouth police are losing control

Who is Ritchie Wellman? He is a father, a boyfriend, an assistant operations manager at a local business and a part-time paedophile hunter. Right now, however, at 7 p.m. in a dusty car park down the road from Bournemouth pier, Ritchie is the commander of his own private policing unit, briefing his officers before their first patrol. He tells them not to assault anybody, not to be provoked, not to drink or smoke on the job, and to reassure the public if they are concerned by this new authority on their streets: ‘This is not a takeover.’ Ritchie is a normal guy, and he and his officers and others in

Patrick Kidd

Patrick Kidd, Madeline Grant, Simon Heffer, Lloyd Evans & Toby Young

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Patrick Kidd asks why is sport so obsessed with Goats; Madeline Grant wonders why the government doesn’t show J.D. Vance the real Britain; Simon Heffer reviews Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea; Lloyd Evans provides a round-up of Edinburgh Fringe; and, Toby Young writes in praise of Wormwood Scrubs – the common, not the prison. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Uefa’s ‘Stop killing children’ banner isn’t fooling anyone

Who does Uefa think it’s kidding? It says the huge banner saying ‘Stop killing children’ unfurled at a Super Cup match last night was ‘not political’. It was ‘about humanity’, insists an insider. ‘In fact, you could just say it is common sense’, they said. They must think we were born yesterday. Everyone whose moral faculties have not been entirely fried by the Gaza war knows this banner was likely a political dig at that state it is fashionable to hate – Israel. To display such a banner ahead of a Spurs match – a team with deep links to Britain’s Jewish community – is especially egregious The banner said

Madeline Grant

Thought for the Day and the elite empathy problem

Like much of Radio 4’s output, Thought for the Day is something of a curate’s egg – sometimes enlightening and a source of inspiration or comfort. Often, however, it’s sanctimonious; auricular masturbation for the comfortable. Comfortable England has an empathy problem; it is willing to contort itself into paroxysms of emotion for migrants yet remains incapable of listening to concerns of the communities affected by mass migration The BBC has been heavily criticised for its segment on Wednesday morning, featuring Dr Krish Kandiah, a theologian and author, discussing ‘fear’ in relation to the migrant crisis. His reflections amount to a series of boilerplate platitudes beloved by open borders advocates. He calls

Limor Simhony Philpott

Why the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust error matters

The Imperial War Museum is supposed to be one of Britain’s guardians of historical truth. Yet in its description of the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi edicts that laid the legal groundwork for the Holocaust, the museum claims they defined Jews by religious observance. It’s a small phrase, but it’s entirely wrong. And it matters. When Jews are erased from their own history, it becomes easier to downplay anti-Semitism in the present The Nazis did not care whether you kept kosher, went to synagogue or even believed in God. The Nuremberg Laws defined Jewishness by ancestry: if three of your four grandparents were Jewish, you were Jewish. You could be baptised, married

Chas Newkey-Burden

Can Taylor Swift save us from the Oasis bore-off?

The news that Taylor Swift is releasing her 12th album in October will thrill her fans but perhaps we should all be grateful because this might mean we can move on from the endless chatter about the Oasis reunion tour. From the moment the Gallaghers announced their lucrative concerts it was clear that a lot of people were going to absolutely lose their minds. News of the shows and ticket sales hit the front pages and stayed there for months. Would the brothers fall out before a note was sung? The suspense could have killed us. Celebrities and brands have hopped on the Gallagher bandwagon to try and cash in