Society

Monday

Nigel Jones

The thankless life of a Post Office mistress

One of the fascinating aspects of the Horizon Post Office scandal is the way that the sub-post masters and mistresses who were victims of the bungling or maybe malevolent Post Office management, are represented as a class. They seem to sum up the qualities that used to be thought of as quintessentially English: honest, respectable, truthful, yet quiet and reluctant to make a fuss – even when they suffered a monstrous mass injustice. Their suffering in near silence is one reason why it has taken so long for the scandal to break through into public consciousness. Perhaps from a misplaced sense of shame, many of the unjustly accused sub-post masters and

Harold Thimbleby

The terrifying truth about the Horizon scandal

While everyone is rightly calling for the Post Office Horizon postmasters’ convictions to be overturned and for them to be given proper compensation, there is arguably a deeper issue at stake: how much society trusts technology.   We now know that the Horizon accounting software was not reliable. But during the sub-postmasters’ original trials, prosecutors for the Post Office argued that it was dependable and the courts took this for granted.   Why did the courts rely on the evidence of such a faulty IT system? The answer is a society-wide problem – with people falling into the trap of thinking computers are infallible. You might think they are no more likely to lie

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why didn’t the British Library pay a ransom to cyber attackers?

‘They’ve turned one of our most important pieces of national infrastructure into an internet café,’ was how my friend Marcus, a scholar of early modern literature, put it to me, talking about the cyberattack that crashed the British Library at the end of last year. He’s not wrong. Since October, when a ransomware attack by the Rhysida criminal gang knocked all the library’s digital services offline, there really hasn’t been much more to the library’s Euston headquarters than a large airy building with a couple of expensive coffee shops. The Integrated Catalogue, which is the means by which readers search the library’s vast collection and call books up from the stacks or down from its

Sunday

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

‘I still need to live’: Christian preacher Hatun Tash on the plot to kill her

When Hatun Tash went missing before Christmas her friends and family had good reason to be worried. In recent years, Tash has moved house dozens of times and been repeatedly warned by police about threats to her safety. She has been stabbed and wrongly arrested. Tash has been harassed on the street and followed by strange men outside her home.  Tash, who is 41, has been targeted because she is a Christian preacher who used to be a Muslim. Last week, an Islamist terrorist who tried to buy a gun to kill her had his jail sentence increased. Edward Little, a 22-year-old Muslim extremist from Brighton, will now spend at

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

‘Sir’ Ed Davey’s Lib Dems are the real nasty party

Growing up in 1970s working-class Bristol (before it went all poke: posh and woke) life was so tribal that you could get beaten up at school as a general election approached if it somehow emerged that your parents wouldn’t be voting Labour. (Our local MP for Bristol South-East was the dashing young Tony Benn, so you can see why we got a bit carried away.) Even more remarkable, you could be given a dry slap solely for not knowing who the correct candidate was during a council election; I’ll never forget a fearsome few weeks when a gang of boys went around the playground getting hold of other boys and

Jawad Iqbal

In praise of Sven-Goran Eriksson

Former England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has revealed that he has cancer and, ‘at best’, about a year to live. The sad news of his terminal illness prompted an understandable outpouring of support across football. The official England team account posted on X/ Twitter: ‘Sending our love, Sven’. Meanwhile, ex-England captain Wayne Rooney paid tribute to Eriksson as ‘a brilliant coach and a special person. Loved and respected by everyone. We’re all with you Sven, keep fighting.’ It is now largely forgotten how controversial it was back in 2001 to give the England job to a foreign coach It was under Eriksson that Rooney made his England debut in 2003, before bursting

Mark Hollingsworth

The vast corruption of Ukraine’s sanctions regime

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a former US government official visited Kiev to inquire how he could help to supply humanitarian aid to the people on the front line. He had formed a non-profit agency, raised $2 million and provided over 70 ambulances to help Ukrainian soldiers and citizens. But during his visit he was shocked to learn about the high level of corruption.    ‘Sanctioning successful companies should not be done to clear out competitors or punish someone you don’t like’ While driving to Nikolaev, George Tuka, a former deputy minister, briefed him on how corruption was endemic and intractable in Ukraine. ‘I don’t believe you’, replied the former

Friday

Iain Macwhirter

Humza’s humiliating XL Bully U-turn

Humza Yousaf has just executed an embarrassing U-turn and effectively banned XL Bully dogs in line with England and Wales. This has inevitably unleashed a pack of bad canine puns about the SNP making a dog’s breakfast of devolution. We always thought Humza Yousaf was barking, now we know. Boom boom.  This episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering Laughter aside, this episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering, something at which the SNP used to be so adept. When the UK government announced last September that there was to be a ban selling or breeding these aggressive animals, following a spate of attacks on people, Mr

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why do I keep falling for Boris Johnson’s charm?

On Saturday, I was in a public library, waiting for an old guy to finish with the Times. But he seemed to be reading every word of every section, and sort of peering at it frowningly in an annoying way. So I did something I hardly ever do: I picked up the Daily Mail.  I had forgotten that I might find Boris here. I wondered what I thought of him these days. One is meant to despise or at least disdain him, of course. But I’ve always struggled to. Oh, I often come very close. I came close the other week, when I read Rory Stewart’s memoir. Politicians should obviously be devoted

Thursday

Christopher Caldwell

In Europe, the centre will not hold 

For about five years, those longing for a centrist restoration have been declaring that the madness is on its way out and the sensibles are back. Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen: all of them were just temporary horrors. In Poland’s recent election, Donald Tusk was returned to power, with his whole entourage of Europhiles and progressive foundations. Europe can breathe once more. Or so the argument goes. But it’s becoming harder to make the case. Look around and we see Trump not only the runaway favourite for the Republican nomination but also on short odds for the presidency itself. Polls for the European parliament elections in June show

The Spectator

Letters: crime really does pay

Walking through treacle Sir: Rory Sutherland suggests that poor productivity can be correlated with the explosion of roles designed to support those ‘who do actual, useful work’ but, in practice, only act as anchors buried in the deepest mud, impeding progress (The Wiki Man, 6 January). Winston Churchill, frustrated at the length of the administrative tail of his armies in the North African campaign compared with the modest proportion of those actually fighting, defined them as ‘useless mouths’. The NHS offers an excellent example of this principle: the number of frontline clinical staff over several decades has increased but has been overwhelmed by those innon-essential posts. Sutherland pinpoints the bloated

Alison Kervin

Why I self-publish my books

Trying to publish a book used to be straightforward. You came up with an idea, spent months, if not years, writing it, then sent it off to an agent or publisher who rejected it by return. Life was simpler back then. We all knew where we were. Rejection wasn’t necessarily based on the quality of the work. Literature is a subjective business. Lord of the Flies earned William Golding 20 rejections. James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller suffered similar fates. Marcel Proust was rejected so many times that he decided to pay for publication himself. The much-repeated industry statistic is between 1 and 2 per cent of manuscripts are

The Spectator

How many criminal convictions are overturned? 

Power play The former energy minister Chris Skidmore resigned in protest at a bill to issue more licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. What are other countries doing? – US oil production hit a record 13.3m barrels a day last month, up from 10.8m five years ago. – Qatar is investing $150 billion toincrease oil production by 50% to 5m barrels per day by 2027. – Brazil plans to increase oil production from 3.1m barrels per day in 2022 to5.4m barrels per day by 2029. – Canada increased oil production by 375,000 barrels per day between 2021 and last year. Judgment call The Criminal Cases Review

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The US opioid crisis has come to Britain

‘Never do drugs, you’ll be hooked instantly,’ my mother used to say, and though I nodded, I never even considered paying attention. So I don’t expect my young cousins or my godchildren or my pill-popping friends to take a blind bit of notice when I tell them the same, but I mean it: don’t do drugs. It’s not worth it. Not any more. One of the reasons not to do drugs back in the day was: ‘You never know what you’re taking.’ The trouble now is not so much that you don’t know, but that you do. The way things are going, pretty soon most street drugs will be made

Natasha Feroze

Would you sign a relationship contract?

What makes a relationship work? I look at the happiest, most stable couples I know and wonder what the trick is. Did they spot problems early on and talk them through? Do they simply accept each other’s flaws? We all have foibles; a relationship is simply a matter of deciding which ones we can live with. I came across a couple recently who had their own approach: a relationship contract. Americans Simone and Malcolm Collins are big names in the pro-natalist movement. They have made it their mission to convince people to take relationships more seriously, ideally with a view to having children. They are now married, but prior to

Peter Krijgsman

Lesson one of ferret racing: don’t pick them up

The British are fond of ferrets. There is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I at Hatfield House holding one on a collar and lead. For Yorkshire miners in the 1970s, tales of ‘ferret-legging’ – an endurance test whereby two of the rodents were put down competitors’ trousers – were legendary. (The world record is held by Frank Bartlett, a retired headmaster, who managed to endure the bites and scratches for five hours, 30 minutes.) So it feels a little odd that ferret racing was invented in the United States. Rather than being conceived in the backroom of some raucous Jacobean tavern, it was a Friday night distraction for rednecks laying

Douglas Murray

Why aren’t the super-rich braver?

A lot of people dream of having what is known as ‘screw you’ money. In my observation, this is not simply in order to be able to live in a castle or own Ferraris or Van Dycks, or whatever is your wont. It is in order to be able to say those fine, demotic words to whomever you like. It should be noted that most people dream of saying the words to someone who is perceived to be above them: someone to whom they might once have been subservient in some way. A boss, for instance. Yet one of the strangest things about the mega-rich is that they do not

Peter Jones

Baroness Mone would have been infamous in Rome

The Baroness Mone-ing about allegations of fraud and bribery no doubt thinks everyone ‘has it in for me’. They do indeed. So would the ancients: it was standard practice to tar Roman merchants with infamia, a reputation that did them no good at all. The root of the problem for the ancient traders was the saying that ‘Profits in trade can be made only by another’s loss’. It was Aristotle who discussed how this came about. He argued that barter was a transaction that could be seen to be equal, i.e. did not involve profit, but when money came into the situation, everything changed, and transactions became unequal, involving profit

Philip Hensher

The beauty – and tragedy – of our nesting swans 

There won’t be any cygnets this year. The cob was on the lake this morning on his own, occasionally slapping the water, floating without any evident purpose. His last children were taken away to new homes a year ago. His mate of years, the pen, died last spring. People who live in the country always assume that no one in inner London has much idea of the seasons. But everyone who goes to the park notices some annual events. One used to be the nesting of the pair of swans, and the laying of eggs. The swans look like ballerinas to many people, but to me they always look like

Melissa Kite

Is it really a coincidence everyone seems to be dying?

The funeral drinks at McCarthy’s bar was splendid, and towards the end we got invited to another one. I was sitting at the bar with a bowl of soup and a plate of neatly cut cheesy sandwiches, while the builder boyfriend drank a pint of Murphy’s, when the bar owner leaned over and told us that the next one was at a different bar, so when we had all drunk up and the sandwiches were eaten everyone was going to be heading off down the road, if we would like to join them. I’ve never known so many people say it’s just a coincidence that so many people are dying