Society

Wednesday

Sarah Vine

I’ve had enough of Sadiq Khan

To the Garrick, for a festive feast with my dear ex-husband and offspring. My daughter and I decide to make the pilgrimage from Turnham Green by taxi, owing to a combination of torrential rain, vulnerable blow-dries and high heels. Schoolgirl error: we could have flown to Manchester in roughly the same length of time – and at a fraction of the price. Thank you, Sadiq Khan. What a splendid job you’ve done turning London into a giant car park. We eventually arrive, half an hour late, dodging the garish rip-off rickshaws blaring headache-inducing yuletide tunes which now infest the West End (again, take a bow, Mr Khan), and enter the wood-panelled

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: backlog bluster, New Year honours and tornados in Manchester

Home James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, said that all 92,000 ‘legacy’ applications for asylum (made before 28 June 2022) had been processed, but 4,500 were reclassified as ‘complex’ and 17,000 were withdrawn. Of 112,138 applications subject to an initial decision in 2023, 67 per cent were granted. The number of migrants to cross the Channel in small boats came to 29,437 in 2023, 36 per cent fewer than the 45,774 in 2022. Flooding in a tunnel under the Thames led to cancellation for a day of all Eurostar trains across the Channel. Doctors below the rank of consultant began a six-day strike. A surge in scabies was reported amid a

Dot Wordsworth

How do events become unrecognisable?

I grabbed my husband by the lapel outside Waitrose and he leapt – if not like a young deer, then like a deer in retirement that had spent a long time grazing undisturbed in a bean field. ‘Sorry, darling,’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t recognise you.’ It was not as though I was wearing a balaclava. Recognition can say as much about the recogniser as the recognised. It’s particularly true of recognising a ‘characterisation’, a fancy word for a description. When the PM was asked in a Commons committee before Christmas whether he recognised the characterisation of ‘a Blob wandering down Whitehall thwarting the ambitions of ministers’, he replied ‘No.’ He’s not

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I stop house guests stealing my phone chargers?

Q. I have been invited (solo, not with my long-term partner) to a wedding next year. The format appears to be: ceremony, drinks reception, then the main wedding party is dining together before we all get back together for an evening celebration. In the hiatus, guests are encouraged to eat in one of the local restaurants – a list is provided. How do I discreetly find out which of my friends might be attending? I texted a friend who I assumed would be invited, only to get ‘NFI’ as a response. I’m now wary of approaching others. – Name and address withheld A. It is quite acceptable to go directly

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The box-tickers shall inherit the Earth

Back in the late 1960s, a Welsh surgeon was returning home late, fell asleep at the wheel and fatally crashed into a tree. My aunt, a doctor, remarked that 30 years earlier a surgeon of such eminence would have had his own driver, and the accident would not have happened. Probably true. And it reminds us of a time when people who did useful things were given people to work for them so they could do useful things more easily. These were drivers, secretaries, assistants and orderlies. They made useful people’s lives easier. What is the great-grandson of the 1930s chauffeur doing? There is a worryingly high chance that he

Toby Young Toby Young

Could a 100-bottle limit help me cut down on drinking?

My New Year’s resolution is to cut down on my drinking. I’m not talking about bringing it within the NHS’s recommended limit, obviously. I’ve never met anyone who confines their alcohol intake to 14 units a week, which amounts to a bottle and a half of wine, ideally spread over many days. I’m thinking of something more in the region of two bottles a week. Why not simply stop altogether? Partly because I’ve tried that before and don’t have the willpower. The longest stretch I’ve gone without a drink was in the two years leading up to my marriage in 2001, because I didn’t think Caroline would go through with

Matthew Dennison

Why it’s time to bring back wassailing

Before the Industrial Revolution shrank Christmas celebrations to two days, many workers across rural England might have spared a minute or two over Christmastide to bring out the family wassail bowl. Wassailing – sometimes in houses, sometimes in apple orchards – was a ceremonial toast to the health of friends, family and neighbours, or a ritualised routing of the bad spirits that lurk among fruit trees. Orchard wassailing, intended to guarantee bumper crops in the year ahead, was a rambunctious affair of gunshots, the banging together of trays and buckets and the blowing of cow horns (to scare away evil spirits), singing, drinking and bonfires. Amid the bucket-banging, harvesters found

Sinclair McKay

What progressives get wrong about Winston Churchill

Please be advised that the following article contains outdated racial representations and views some readers may find distressing. Only joking! Yet that always seems to be the unspoken line running through modern academia’s head whenever the subject of Winston Churchill is raised. This year sees the 150th anniversary of Churchill’s birth; it will also see cohorts of academics jostling to tell us just how horrifically racist, imperialist, sexist and probably transphobic he was. As though that could be a surprise. Yet what might genuinely surprise many now is to learn that in certain respects, Churchill was in the vanguard of the woke movement. He was a progressive pioneer. Churchill was

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

My election advice for Starmer? Offer a new Citizen’s Charter

A giveaway Budget in March preceding a general election in May against an improving economic backdrop: that, we’re told, is Downing Street’s favoured scenario. But still the election is Keir Starmer’s to lose, so here’s my start-the-year advice to him. Don’t bang on about Rishi Sunak being too rich; don’t make immigration the issue, because you have no solutions; don’t pretend to admire Margaret Thatcher; but do channel John Major – to whom you bear much closer comparison – and offer a new Citizen’s Charter. What? Isn’t that 1991 exercise in footling managerialism, forever associated with the ‘cones hotline’, remembered as a laughable failure? Maybe, but its intention was good:

The Spectator

Letters: the genius of Morten Morland

Beyond good and evil Sir: In your Christmas issue, both James Macmillan (Composer’s Notebook) and Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, in his interview with Andrew Roberts, refer to the ‘war between good and evil’, as if most of us experience life on Earth as a continuous struggle of this kind. But many issues cannot be polarised so simplistically, and our understanding of religion and psychology has moved on. Who is to decide which people are good and which evil? Some fundamentalist Christians regard the Dalai Lama as evil. In international relations, it is surely dangerous to use this kind of language: while the actions of Hamas are undoubtedly evil, I doubt

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Hell hath no fury like the left scorned

Over a leg of lamb, I joined five other expat Americans for Christmas. Our topic du jour was which faction in our homeland we were most afraid of. Revisiting that boisterous conversation appeals, because in this re-enactment, I’m the only one who gets to talk. With forbidding rapidity, one armchair assertion has gone from audacious augury to trite truism: that whichever party wins the presidency, a substantial proportion of the losers will not accept the result as legitimate. Imagine, then, that it is Wednesday 6 November 2024, and a presidential victor has been declared. Whose indignation would pose the greater threat to American civic order – the left’s or the

Colin Brazier

Farming is fighting its own culture wars

I have come late to farming. There was no epiphany, no eureka moment watching Clarkson’s Farm. The blame lies partly with my neighbour, who’s my running partner and a fellow Pony Club Dad. He’s an agronomist and would enliven our jogs along country lanes with talk of crop rotations. In the end, that other form of muck-raking – journalism – provided the shove I needed. After 24 years at Sky TV, I joined the first presenter line-up (of many) at GB News. I went in the hope of a fresh start at an exciting new channel, only to be thrown out of it when my ratings failed to pass muster. So,

Douglas Murray

Why I’m considering a life of crime

Some people may have noticed the happy new guidance released between Christmas and New Year by the National Police Chief’s Council. This guidance to police in England and Wales was that police officers ought to try to go to properties that have been burgled. Even better, they should try to do so within an hour of the burglary being reported. This seems to me to be an eminently sensible piece of advice. After all, if you get to the scene of a robbery within an hour, you might be able to track down the stolen goods, log evidence while the crime scene is fresh, or even – imagine – find

Peter Jones

How the ‘gangsters’ code’ took over the world

Cicero’s statement salus populi suprema lex esto (‘Let the security of the people be the ultimate law’) has been the motto or guiding principle of any number of institutions and thinkers from the state of Missouri to Hobbes and Locke. Benjamin Netanyahu is well aware of this and knows that, whatever action he takes, his failure to keep Israel secure from Hamas’s inhuman attacks on civilians will be the end of him. Cicero (d. 44 bc) was the first person we know of to produce a code of conduct for warfare. In it, he argued that battle should be confined to the military and civilians should have no involvement in

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 6 January 2024

One of the things I like most about bridge is that it allows you to be sociable without actually having to talk to anybody. At the Year End Congress, held between Christmas and the New Year, it was lovely to see all the familiar faces. But what a relief not to have to answer the sort of bland questions people usually ask. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ etc. I much prefer people asking about things they really want to know, like: ‘Do you play standard count?’ As for that dreariest of greetings – ‘How are you?’ – must I really bore us both with my reply? But it’s never

Matthew Lynn

Bitcoin’s bounce back has proved its critics wrong again

The charlatans had been exposed. Its flimsiness had been confirmed. And the bubble had finally burst. Rewind to just over a year ago, and with the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and the arrest of its billionaire founder Sam Bankman-Fried it seemed as if the legions of skeptics of the digital currency Bitcoin had been proved completely right. But hold on. Over the last few months, its price has soared again. In reality, Bitcoin has made fools of its critics once again.  In the wake of the FTX scandal, Bitcoin, along with its digital imitators, seem headed for history’s dustbin. After all, the collapse seemed to confirm all the

Melissa Kite

Will our horse make the 12-year-old vet faint?

‘The vet’s here and he’s 12,’ I called over the farmyard gate where the builder boyfriend was waiting with the injured cob. I don’t think the lad heard me as he got out of his car. I hope the Irish ones don’t faint, I thought, because we had a nice gory cut for him. The best you can hope for with horses is that your six-monthly freak injury is a near disaster. So when the smaller of the two black and white cobs reared up into a tin roof it was cause for celebration that he nearly had his eye out. You’ve only got two options with horses. Either they

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The wonder of Jon Pertwee and his frilly shirt

 When a friend asked if I wanted anything for Christmas I took a deep breath and replied: ‘Well, maybe I finally need to watch this.’ I handed him a video cassette retrieved from my sister’s attic and he took it to a place that digitises such things. On Christmas Day I nervously plugged in the memory stick. There we were: Carmel and I, aged about seven and nine, bathed in late-1960s sunshine in the garden of our mock-Tudor house in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. (I emphasise ‘Surrey’, because in those days Carshaltonions were in Margo Leadbetter-style denial over new local government boundaries that landed them in – shudder –

Ross Clark Ross Clark

House prices aren’t falling any time soon

Economic forecasts rarely survive far into the New Year. Just look at last year’s prophecy by the IMF that the UK economy would shrink by 0.6 per cent in 2023, which was already being revised by March. But we are only three days into 2024 and already the forecasts of falling house prices are beginning to look somewhat questionable. In November, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) forecast that prices would slip by 4.7 per cent over the year. The Halifax followed that up by forecasting a 2 to 4 per cent slide. Yesterday, however, the Halifax became one of those banks which has started slashing fixed rates. A two year fix is suddenly