Society

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why The Spectator didn’t cancel Karol Sikora

Before the year ends, I’d like to tell the story of Karol Sikora and attempts to have him removed from a Spectator-sponsored discussion on the NHS at the last Tory conference. It offers an insight not just into how we work at 22 Old Queen Street but the dynamics of sponsored discussions. The Tory conference has become the Edinburgh Festival of political discussion: a place where ministers, activists, advisers, corporates and journalists converge to discuss pretty much everything. As with Edinburgh, the real action is on the fringe rather than the official lineup. When I became editor in 2009, The Spectator had no presence at the conference; now we host

Rod McMillan

The case against the XL Bully ban

In just a few hours’ time, Bully XLs will be banned in England and Wales: breeding, selling, advertising, rehoming, or abandoning a Bully will become illegal. In February, the crackdown will continue: from 1 February 2024, it will also become illegal to own an XL Bully dog unless it is registered on the Index of Exempted Dogs. Rishi Sunak has said the breed is a ‘danger to our communities’. But this law, which will condemn innocent dogs, will fail. Britain has already had breed-specific legislation in place for many years, but the statistics show that the Dangerous Dogs Act (DDA), introduced in 1991, is ineffective: between 1999 and 2019, dog

Stephen Bayley

The eccentric genius behind Big Ben

One test of great architecture is whether it, and the city it stands in, can be recognised from its silhouette alone. There is Spavento’s campanile – or bell tower – in Venice by St Marco’s Basilica and Giotto’s by the Duomo in Florence. London has a campanile too, perhaps more recognisable than its Italian precedents. Designed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the clock tower of Parliament houses the bell known as Big Ben. New Year’s Eve 2023 marks 100 years since its bongs were broadcast to the nation for the first time. A century on from that televised spectacle, the eery, throbbing noise of Big Ben remains one of the

Saturday

Robin Ashenden

Why New Year trumps Christmas in Russia

What a difference a decade makes. Exactly ten years ago, Russians celebrated New Year by watching Goluboi Ogoniek (‘Little Blue Light’) the traditional TV programme – full of glitz, music, Moët and laughter – which ushers in 1 January. Three men dominated Goluboi Ogoniek that particular year. On YouTube, anchorman Vladimir Soloviev can be seen smiling like a pussycat over the merrymaking. Co-presenter is Maxim Galkin, the Soviet-born Israeli comedian married to singing legend Alla Pugacheva. But the biggest surprise is the third of the trio – a compact, intense little man with black hair and a gravelly voice, singing, capering and cracking up the Russian audience with his one-liners.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Why are theatres so cowardly?

Looking back at the year’s West End theatre, a few shows stand out. First, the best. Vanya, starring Andrew Scott at the Duke of York’s Theatre, was an audacious and frankly barmy attempt to reimagine Chekhov’s sprawling family melodrama, Uncle Vanya, as a monologue. The risk was that it might come across as a lengthy pitch for a TV show performed by an incorrigible show-off. But Scott made it work. Copycat projects are bound to follow. One of the year’s worst efforts, A Little Life, was based on an American novel about sexual torture and self-harm. The star, James Norton, spent most of his time on stage at the Harold

Alexander Larman

Was 2023 Meghan and Harry’s annus horribilis?

If ever Prince Harry writes another volume of memoir, he may choose to look back on 2023 as his annus horribilis. The year began in high-profile fashion, with the publication of his autobiography Spare. This book swiftly became the fastest-selling non-fiction work of all time; he marked its appearance with promotional interviews that alternated between defensive, irritable and unduly arrogant. Yet Harry’s year is ending with myriad humiliations. These include losing one of his apparently innumerable court cases, he and his wife, Meghan Markle, being described as the ‘biggest Hollywood losers’ and a much-ridiculed video clip of the various endeavours of their charitable foundation Archewell over the past twelve months.

Friday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why can’t the BBC leave Agatha Christie alone?

I would like to report a murder. It took place in the evening of 27 December in millions of homes around the UK simultaneously. The victim was Dame Agatha Christie – well, one of her works, and to an extent her posthumous reputation. But unlike in the great Dame’s novels, there was no beguiling mystery about the culprit: it was the BBC, a serial offender. Yet again, in what has now entered the list of modern Christmas traditions, our national broadcaster chose to ‘reinvent’ and thus more or less kill, one of the Queen of Crime’s novels. Christie’s Murder is Easy was retrofitted to suit the BBC’s obsession with racism

Nigel Biggar

The British Museum is the best home for the Elgin Marbles

Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece’s argument, put forward recently by the country’s foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well rehearsed: the Marbles, he claimed, were ‘essentially stolen’ from their rightful owners by Lord Elgin at the turn of the 19th century – and they belong in the Acropolis, not the British Museum. Only when the looted sculptures are reunited with their siblings in Athens, we’re told, can the ensemble reveal its authentic meaning. The reality is rather more complex. The case for the British Museum returning the Marbles to Athens – albeit by the legal fiction of a ‘loan’ – is weak.  The facts are these. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands,

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

A Labour government could spell trouble for trans people like me

This has been a year to forget for the transgender lobby. This time last year, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government had just forced its Gender Recognition Reform Bill through Holyrood following an acrimonious late night sitting in the run up to Christmas. It seemed likely then that anyone over the age of 16 would be able to change their legal sex much more easily, without the need for a psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria. For some of Sturgeon’s Scottish Green allies, the only regret was that they had not gone far enough. Maggie Chapman MSP suggested that consideration should be given for allowing children as young as eight to be able

Natasha Voase

The decline and fall of banking’s barrow boys

Before the ‘Big Bang’, which led to the deregulation of financial markets in London in the 1980s, the city was dominated by two types of person: the often Oxbridge-educated spreadsheet warriors who ran merchant banks; and the ‘barrow boys’, students of the school of life who worked as traders. While the former are still thriving in London, the latter are now something of a rare breed. It’s a pity. What the barrow boys lacked in formal education, they made up for in exuberance. Often the children of market traders who put their quick maths to use on the trading floors of the City, the barrow boys came to epitomise the

Wednesday

Sean Thomas

Why wokeness really is like fascism

If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary forms: ‘wokeness’, ‘wokery’, ‘wokerati’, ‘the great awokening’, ‘woquemada’ – seems ubiquitous, and very much part of the verbal furniture. And yet woke has a surprisingly short history as a notable term. Though it was birthed in the 19th century, with noble origins surrounding the struggle for civil rights, it achieved its present, greater and much-changed salience as late as the 2010s – the Oxford English Dictionary only included it in 2017. The argument that woke cannot be defined is bogus. It is difficult to

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Did Richard Dawkins’s ‘New Atheists’ spark a Christian revival?

The battle between New Atheism and religion was never likely to have a clear winner. It was never very likely that the arguments of Richard Dawkins and co would topple the towers of theology. Nor was it likely that the atheists would provoke the sleeping giant of faith into rising up and crushing the impertinence for good. I suppose atheists can claim that their cause is making steady progress, with organised religion continuing its gentle decline in the West, but the more honest among them might admit that the energy of their movement fizzled out long ago. Secular idealism opted for identity politics instead, making the pontifications of white male

George Llewelyn

Mad dogs and Putin’s shells: A dispatch from Kherson

Browsing the shelves at Tsum, a supermarket in the centre of Kherson in Ukraine, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Whole Foods in Kensington. The deli and the grocery are as well stocked and diverse as any in London and, in the patisserie, the smell of freshly baked brioche permeates the air. Every day, people walk the aisles, gathering not only essentials but exotic fruits, kombucha and even Christmas decorations. In many ways, Tsum is emblematic of this city’s resilience in the midst of war. On the upper floors, its windows are either smashed or missing altogether; at street level, its doors are appended with large protective

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

UK becomes first G20 country to halve its carbon emissions

A major milestone has just been passed: Britain has become the first major country to halve its carbon emissions. The rapid pace of UK environmental progress means that our output is now below 320 million tonnes – less than half the 652 million tonnes of our 1970 peak. This is in spite of Britain now having a far larger population than 50 years ago and an economy more than twice the size. Had things gone the other way – if our carbon emissions had doubled, for example – this would be front page news. But I’m not sure you can expect to read about this good news anywhere other than The Spectator.

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The trouble with Boxing Day

You are bloated and binged. Your bloodstream is 35 per cent blood, 60 per cent a mix of Nurofen Plus, Gaviscon and acetaldehyde and 5 per cent Quality Street. You will either be making more mess, or clearing up the mess that everybody else is making more of. There are tiny pieces of plastic everywhere, perhaps even in you. If you’re with your family, all of them, including you, will have reverted to their personality and status of 1993 at the latest. Television – merely horrible and chiding throughout the rest of the year – has suddenly dumped on you a ginormous dollop of sickening sugar and thick, choking starch. 

Madeleine Silver

The do’s and don’ts of Christmas thank you letters

My late great-aunt would arrive for Christmas from Edinburgh with a stash of pre-written thank you letters. She’d leave gaps for the specifics of the present and the rest was a scramble of generic, suitably gushing adjectives. The turkey pan would still be soaking and my great-aunt not yet north of the border when you’d be ploughing through her two-sider. My own list of overdue thank you letters – weddings, children’s birthday presents, an impromptu late August BBQ – sit on my to-do list like immovable marker pen, never quite shifted. Great Aunt Pammie’s clinical efficiency is not something I’ve inherited. But in an age of WhatsApp, there seems to

Robin Ashenden

Can Jilly Cooper wreck your life?

What do the names Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, and Imogen all have in common? If you don’t know the answer to that, you’re probably – unlike our current prime minister – not a fan of Jilly Cooper. Cooper has just published her latest bonkbuster Tackle, one of the doorstep-sized Rutshire Chronicles series that also includes Riders and Rivals. These books are set in a fictionalised Cotswolds and are as reliably comforting as a tin of Quality Streets. But in the good old, bad old days of the seventies and early eighties many of us came to this writer through her ‘name-books’ – six romantic novels (and one collection of short stories)

Monday

David Shipley

How I found the true meaning of Christmas in prison

What do prisoners eat on Christmas Day? Some tabloid reports might lead you to think ‘lags’ are ‘gorging’ themselves on turkey with all the trimmings. Even the official prison menus from the Ministry of Justice make lunch on 25 December sound appetising: inmates at HMP Manchester, a high-security jail, get ‘Traditional Turkey Dinner with stuffing, roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, vegetables (and) sausage wrapped in bacon & gravy’ served up with ‘Christmas pudding & white sauce and Christmas cake’. As you would imagine the reality is very different.  In a typical British prison this afternoon, inmates will be carrying flimsy blue plastic plates down to the servery to receive a slice

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

When will the BBC’s Julia Donaldson obsession end?

The BBC thinks it wouldn’t be Christmas without an adaptation of a Julia Donaldson book. This is another dispiriting example of the invention of a faux Christmas tradition. This year, it’s the turn of Tabby McTat, a story about a musical cat and a busker, which will be broadcast this afternoon. This isn’t the first time a Donaldson book has been adapted for the BBC’s Christmas line up; it was The Smegs and the Smoos last year. And Superworm, Zog And The Flying Doctors and The Gruffalo have all received the animation treatment over the last decade, and are on BBC iPlayer in case you didn’t catch them the first time. Isn’t it time the

Sunday

Miles Windsor

Algerian Christians will face persecution this Christmas

During this Advent, churches across Britain will once again open their doors to both the regular faithful, along with not-so-faithful but much desired and warmly welcomed seasonal visitors. The pews in many churches will swell with those looking for their Christmas fix of candlelight and choral songs. We take for granted that these places of worship will be open for us to meet together weekly, or perhaps less regularly, for our corporate acts of worship. In Algeria, those who long to gather to celebrate their Saviour’s birth don’t enjoy that certainty. Of the 47 churches of l’Église Protestante d’Algérie (the EPA), 43 have been issued orders to close by the