Society

Thursday

2 Oct 2025

To win, the Tories should be the party of motorists

The path to electoral success at the next election is straightforward. Just follow what I call the Channel 5 strategy. Channel 5 is a rare success story in the world of free-to-air broadcasting, a feat attained by following a simple playbook: making programmes the public likes to watch, but which people working in television are mostly too precious to make. Channel 4 got there first. By broadcasting American football, it found a sport which was far more popular with the public than most ‘people in television’ realised. Every NFL game played in London since 2007 saw sold-out crowds at Twickenham or Wembley; when the Pittsburgh Steelers made an appearance in

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: do my AirPods make me look like an imbecile?

Q. My printer is broken, so I asked my neighbour to print off a letter for me. It was from my doctor. I wanted to show it to my husband, who hates reading things on a computer. I hadn’t realised it had two attachments on the bottom with information of a very personal matter. Our neighbour kindly came round with the print-offs, including the attachments. We used to walk our dogs together but now I am so embarrassed I can’t look him in the face. What can I do? – Name and address withheld A. Contact the neighbour to arrange a dog walk as per normal. When you meet up,

Olivia Potts

Bacon and egg pie, the perfect throw-it-together, please-the-whole-family dish

There are a handful of elements that make me nervous about tackling particular classic recipes. First, if it’s a dish that I didn’t grow up with and can’t speak to personally; secondly, if it’s a dish that a lot of other people did grow up with, and feel very strongly about. Thirdly, if it requires an ingredient that we don’t have in Britain, which I then have to imitate, or simply ignore. That can be pretty restrictive. I didn’t encounter a Staffordshire oatcake until I was 28, so they’d be out. Risotto, which I’m fairly sure doesn’t hail from the north-east coast of England, would be untouchable. Gorgeous vintage puddings

Bruce Anderson

Drink early, drink often

As readers will be aware, and without sounding too immodest, this column is absolutely committed to diversity. In an earlier era, that might have seemed unnecessary. A British oenophile did not need to search out bottles from great distances. He could merely take his pleasure from the first growths of Bordeaux and the grands crus of Burgundy, with perhaps a little dalliance on the Rhine or the Rhône. Nor was this only a British modus operandi. I covered the French election of 1981 from Burgundy (there were good political reasons for doing so, as well as other ones). The Burgundians knew that wine was made on the banks of the

Dot Wordsworth

No, you don’t ‘diffuse’ tensions

Harry Cole wrote in the Sun that ‘like the sweating hero trying to diffuse a bomb in a Hollywood movie, Sir Keir Starmer looked a little green around the gills’. For his part, the top cop Gavin Stephens said: ‘Anybody in a leadership position should think about how we can reduce and diffuse tensions.’ Or so the BBC reported. The Guardian reported that he called on them to ‘reduce and defuse tensions’. What you do with a bomb in a Hollywood movie is to defuse it. Its fuse might be ticking away and you remove it. Tensions can be reduced by figuratively defusing them. But very often tensions and situations

Lloyd Evans

Nutrition is a bogus creed

Time to think about my diet. A test kit arrives from the NHS screening team who want to inspect a stool sample to see if a hostile cluster of cells is growing in my guts. What I eat horrifies everyone – except me. I live on Bran Flakes and Frosties straight from the box, and I enjoy chocolate bars or digestive biscuits coated with redcurrant jam (Lidl, 51p). Each year I spend about £600 on food – mostly processed pap full of fructose and additives. ‘Chemical rubbish,’ my mother called it. I avoid restaurants because I can do better at home. I like boiled rice or noodles smothered with sauces

Melissa Kite

Why are vegans so philosophically confused?

The solar panel fitter was eating his fried breakfast when the talkative vegans came into the kitchen. They surveyed his plate of bacon, eggs, sausage and black pudding with a look of disgust before helping themselves to cereal, which they doused in the soya milk they had gone to the supermarket to buy, because I refuse to stock milk alternatives. What people eat is now a political issue hotter than the Middle East. It would be easier and safer for me to ask a B&B guest’s views on a two-state solution than say: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ When I ask a guest what they want for breakfast, the

Aidan Hartley

The search for a Kenyan Stonehenge

Cradle of Mankind Paleoanthropologists tried to kill me a few days ago. Luckily I was saved by Max Mutkin, a young Londoner who had come along with me to track down a Neolithic monument in Kenya’s searing-hot northern deserts. Our guide was B—, a local man I’d been assured ‘knows everything there is to know’. We were aiming for the shores of Lake Turkana, known as the Jade Sea, and in that vicinity I’d heard there was a site where people had erected a little Stonehenge 5,000 years ago. En route Max regaled me with stories of what it was like to be at university during Covid, and life ahead

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 4 October 2025

Recently, at the end of a gruelling bridge tournament, I must have been deliriously tired, because as I was thinking about how hard it is to focus on every aspect of the game, a nursery song popped into my head: ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, Heads, shoulders, knees and toes…’ Actually, I don’t think it was as mad as all that. I’d been momentarily transported back to childhood because my struggle to focus simultaneously on each bid, lead and card, had reminded me of being a toddler trying to coordinate different parts of my body all at once. Back in June, I was watching the Polish Premier League online –

Luke McShane

Emerging prodigy

The boy they call the ‘Messi of Chess’ achieved a milestone result at the ‘Legends and Prodigies’ tournament, held in Madrid last month. Eleven-year-old Faustino Oro, from Argentina, won the tournament with 7.5/9, thereby achieving his first grandmaster-level performance. The requirement is for three such results before the title is awarded. But in Madrid he cleared the bar with room to spare, and becomes the youngest player ever to achieve an international rating above the symbolic 2500 level, approximately grandmaster standard. Since 2021, the youngest player to qualify was Abhimanyu Mishra, at 12 years and four months. Energetic middlegame play against a young Spanish master set the scene for

Luke McShane

No. 870

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Franz Dittrich, Ceske Listy Sachove, 1897. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 6 October. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qc5! threatens Nh6#, and 1…Bg7 2 Bxg7 wins easily Last week’s winner Jeremy Forgan, Middlesbrough

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: what day is it?

For Comp 3419 you were invited to write a poem to mark National Vodka Day (4 October) or another spurious designated day, actual or invented. There were several good vodka poems, by Adrian Pascu-Tulbure, D.A. Prince, Tanya Dixon–Clegg, and Helen Baty – I was sorry not to be able to fit them in. Ditto David Silverman’s celebration of National Crisp Day (the ‘Feast of Crispian’), John O’Byrne’s Baked Beans Day, Alan Millard’s Gobbledegook Day, Bill Greenwell’s National Plagiarism Day, Andy Myers’s Breakfast Wine Day, Jayne Osborn’s No Talking About Your Ailments Day, Frank Roots’s Self-ID Day, George Simmers’s Lemon Meringue Pie Day (15 August), and others besides. The £25

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Keir vs Nigel, ID cards and Trump’s peace deal

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, addressed delegates at the Labour party conference in Liverpool who had been issued with little flags of the home nations to wave. He said Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, ‘doesn’t like Britain, doesn’t believe in Britain’. He had earlier put forward the difficult argument that Farage’s party was ‘racist’ in its migrant policy while Reform supporters were not racist but ‘frustrated’. Asked seven times whether there would be VAT rises, he repeated that ‘the manifesto stands’. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised to keep ‘taxes, inflation and interest rates as low as possible’. Ofgem raised the energy price cap

Rachel Johnson

How not to be a spy

Like our former ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson, I was once vetted by the security services. My brush with the spooks started, as in a Cold War spy novel, with a meeting on a bench in St James’s Park after a distinguished foreign policy wonk of my acquaintance had suggested lunch. As the weather was fine, we decided to pick up sandwiches from the café and sit admiring the pelicans. The diplomat explained the Foreign Office was scouting for new blood for the Policy Planning Staff. I was at the Financial Times and had never knowingly had a blue-sky thought in my life but this sounded… different. The

Stephen Hough

What’s wrong with elitism?

There was a time when the serious business of concert-giving closed down for the summer. Artists were expected to take time off – to rest, to fish, to learn repertoire. But now many of the most important musical events happen during the resting, fishing months, not least the BBC Proms. This year I was determined that vacation should mean just that, as I swapped the stage for the stalls, from Janacek’s Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne to Top Hat at Chichester to Good Night, Oscar at the Barbican. It was an idyllic break, but it’s back to work. My new season began in New York, a second home since 1981 when

Douglas Murray

The Murray Test for TV drama

It is almost a century since Ronald Knox wrote his ‘Ten Commandments’ for detective fiction. Most of them still hold true. For example, his edict that twin brothers and other lookalikes must not be introduced to the story unless the reader has been prepared for them. Also the forbidding of more than one secret passageway or room in any story and the insistence that the sidekick, Dr Watson-like figure should never keep a thought to himself, while having thoughts slightly below the anticipated intelligence of the average reader. My favourite rule is number five. ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story.’ In reality this is an extension of rule one,

Charles Moore

Sir Tony’s doomed crusade in the Holy Land

It amuses me that the two main parties most averse to the idea of honours, monarchy, chivalry etc are led by knights – Labour by Sir Keir Starmer and the Liberal Democrats by Sir Ed Davey. This is entirely fitting, since they accurately reflect the dominant Blob establishment world-view and so were rewarded by being made Sir rather than staying plain Mr Blobby. But I wonder if the title has electoral disadvantages. Some voters must be subliminally more annoyed by Sir Somebody telling them to be radical, make sacrifices, save the planet and not to be racist than they would be by an untitled politician. On the other hand, it

Fire

2723: Not like us

Five pairs of unclued lights are similarly linked. Across 12 Finally, favourite coastal town gets special treatment (3,6) 13 Seafront apartment housing readily available (2,3) 15 Conductor is in Costa in confusion (9) 16 Get comfortable in finest Levis! (6) 20 Shell-like gold relic smashed (7) 21 Could be made in reverse? (6) 22 Passionate time following Forest (6) 26 Openings of the best satirical poetry in little volume (4) 27 Pull to the left in Winnebago (3) 29 One of these? (4) 32 Dominic’s ending former right to work (8) 34 Aim in German for distinction in grammar (6) 35 Canoes sunk here? (6) 37 Looking for moving trains

The Spectator

2720: Black and white – solution

Unclued lights all follow MAGIC. (41A MOUNTAIN and 42A FLUTE should be preceded by ‘The’). First prize Ronnie Hind, Llandygwydd, Cardigan Runners-up Deirdre Hartz, Medstead, Hampshire; Stephen Rice, London SW1

The Spectator

ID cards are Labour’s alibi for its failure

Questions of identity permeate our politics. What is it to be English, to be British? The Prime Minister sought to reclaim patriotism for the left in his conference speech, but his invocation of football stadium flag-waving and Oasis swagger was a remix of Britpop themes which were tinnily jarring two decades ago and beyond tired today. It was karaoke Cool Britannia. A much more thoughtful consideration of what modern patriotism requires, and where the dangers in an exclusively ethnic approach to national loyalty lie, came from the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. In both her conference speech and her comments at a fringe meeting with The Spectator, Mahmood navigated questions of