Society

Sunday

David Abulafia

Tracey Emin and the problem with museum trustees

The Royal Academy has nominated Tracey Emin to be a trustee of the British Museum. There is quite a fanfare about the appointment – she is the first female artist to join the Board. Emin’s ability to shock and to push at the boundaries of what might be considered art, often invoking her own sex life, has made her into one of the best-known artists in modern Britain. And she is well on the way to becoming a National Treasure, despite all the controversy her artworks have generated. I do not much like her work, but it is hard not to recognise its originality, and her charitable work over the years

Saturday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Everton’s problems are only just beginning

Pity the poor Everton fans. Just as their once mighty club, now a perennial relegation battler, seemed to have a climbed a few ladders in recent weeks to low mid-table, they land on a snake. Yesterday the Premier League handed them a ten point penalty for financial irregularities, plunging them back down into the danger zone of relegation. Everton admitted the offences and pleaded mitigation: unexpectedly high interest payments on their new stadium project, the loss of a Russian sponsor due to UK government sanctions in the wake of the war in Ukraine and losses (estimated at £10 million) incurred as a result of criminal charges brought against a ‘player

Philip Hensher

The brilliance of A.S. Byatt lives on in her writing

Dame Antonia Byatt, the novelist A.S. Byatt, has died after a long illness. With her goes part of the conscience of English fiction; its heart, its power to think, its capacity for feeling both wild and exact. She was one of the most generous people I ever knew.    One of the things you had to accept if you were a friend of Antonia’s was that she was interested in a lot of things that you knew nothing about. One of these, in my case, was sport. One day I dropped in on her in her house in Putney, and found her glued to the TV, bright, almost gleeful with

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Do we really need more diversity on Gardener’s World?

Boo. Monty Don is retiring in a couple of years as presenter of Gardener’s World, because it’s getting to be a slog and a treadmill. But he’s already doing his bit to influence the BBC’s choice of his successor. He told Times Radio that he thought the show needed more diversity – and that the BBC should think ‘ten times’ before picking an Oxbridge-educated middle-aged man again as its lead presenter: ‘In a truly just and fair society, we wouldn’t care what someone’s colour or race or creed or sex was. But the truth is that it’s much more delicate. And I think that I’m absolutely persuaded that in order to

Friday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

When will the CofE have an honest debate about homosexuality?

At the Church of England’s General Synod on Wednesday morning, I had a good view of the sign-language person. In a bored moment (sorry for the puerility), I tried to see what the sign for ‘sex’ was. I failed to discover this, but happened to be watching him while an evangelical spoke of progressive teaching leading people to hell. He made a pleasing little one-handed goat-horn sign. The whole debate could have been summed up in a couple of gestures. Maybe a sad face and heart sign, for the progressives’ tireless emphasis on the pain and exclusion of homosexuals, and the need for loving acceptance. For the evangelicals, maybe a

Nadim Koteich

Victory over Hamas will be hard to achieve

‘If you want peace, destroy Hamas. If you want security, destroy Hamas. If you want a future for Israel, the Palestinians, the Middle East, destroy Hamas,’ Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week. Given its formidable military capabilities and the considerable international support it receives, Israel holds the upper hand in the ongoing war. But if the Middle East has taught us anything, it is that the notion of ‘victory’ is an elusive endeavour.   The total defeat of Hamas will be a difficult, if not impossible, task for Israel. Following the devastating terror attack on 7 October, Israel has found itself ensnared in a brutal war. But as the

Alexander Larman

In defence of The Crown

Since 2016, we have cultivated a new national pastime: moaning about the latest series of The Crown. Every time Netflix’s royal soap opera appears on our screens, we become united in our determination to spot errors of fact and taste in Peter Morgan’s show, ranging from the trivial to the major. No wonder that Morgan, in a tetchily defensive interview with Variety last month, said ‘I just don’t like talking about it. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sensible conversation about The Crown in the United Kingdom.’ Morgan will have felt vindicated, perhaps, by the dismal response the first four episodes of the sixth series have received from

Debbie Hayton

What Labour’s Lisa Nandy needs to know about trans rights

Lisa Nandy could not have been more wrong when she waded into the transgender debate this week. The Labour MP, who has been criticised by JK Rowling over her stance on trans rights, said that ‘when we look at the way we reduce the debate to things like bodily parts, I think when we look back in history we will be utterly ashamed of ourselves.’ Those of us who understand that human beings have bodies, and those bodies matter, have no need to feel ashamed of anything, now or in the future. Men and women have a sex and, in some contexts, we need separate services because of that sex.

Nigel Jones

Of course Richard III killed the Princes in the Tower

When archaeologists digging beneath a Leicester car park in 2012 uncovered the battered skeleton of King Richard III, it made headlines around the world. The discovery was hailed as the most exciting archaeological find since the unearthing of the boy king Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Now England’s most notorious king is back in the news. The woman behind the dig that discovered the missing monarch, an amateur historian called Philippa Langley, has come up with new evidence that the crime for which Richard is generally held responsible by history, the murders of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, never happened at all. The theory goes that the boys survived into adulthood

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Jess Phillips and the shame of Labour’s ceasefire rebels

I can’t decide if last night’s Labour revolt was an act of pointless narcissism or sinister appeasement. Maybe it was both. On one hand it will make not the slightest difference to world affairs that 56 Labour MPs defied their party leader and backed an ‘immediate ceasefire’ in the Israel-Hamas war. They ignored Keir Starmer’s plea for party unity on the right of Israel to defend itself against the anti-Semitic terrorists of Hamas and put their names to an SNP amendment calling for an end to the ‘collective punishment of the Palestinian people’. Will the Israelis be quaking in their boots that such political luminaries as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Naz

Alexander Larman

Could Prince Harry be brought in from the cold?

For those of us who believed that hell would freeze over before the Duke of Sussex was welcomed back into the bosom of his family, it will have come as a surprise when it was revealed that Prince Harry would be telephoning King Charles on his 75th birthday this week. It has been reported that the call went well: over the course of a warm conversation, during which Meghan also spoke to her father-in-law, plans were set in motion for more regular chats between the two. Another call has reportedly been scheduled for next week. It was also briefed that the King was sent a video of his grandchildren Lilibet

David Gunnlaugsson

Iceland is used to living in the shadow of a volcano

Iceland’s twelfth biggest settlement has been abandoned. For the past few weeks, Grindavík, a thriving town with a strong community of working people and a long history going back as far as 930 AD, has experienced terrifying earthquakes. The population was then evacuated after a magma dyke started pushing its way up to the surface. The dyke stretches for several kilometres, past an important geothermal power plant and the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, then directly under the town and into the ocean. The magma is searching for a way up and getting closer to the surface. An eruption might begin at any moment, even before I finish this article. Hopefully

Cristina Odone

How the Tories failed stay-at-home mums

We know that Westminster politicians do not always listen to ordinary voters. But there are few issues on which our representatives are more impervious to entreaties from their electorate than childcare. Too many politicians look on children as the impish impediment to both parents being in paid employment, the obstacles to Mum and Dad paying into Treasury coffers through taxes and national insurance contributions. Parents look on children as their life’s work. There is a particular cohort for whom this clash of priorities has been uniquely painful: parents who stay home to raise their own children. Conservative governments always talk of choice; but this government’s childcare policy robs these mothers

Bruce Anderson

I hope David Cameron will find time to drink the odd good bottle

Back in 1989, a most unsatisfactory fellow called General Aoun started a civil war around Beirut in the hope of seizing control of the Maronite Christian portions of Lebanon. He ended up with political wreckage, which has endured. Château Berliquet 2015 is a fruity St Emilion that deserves to be better known During the fighting, I spent a few days cut off in the British ambassador’s summer residence, watching the battle going on below. We felt safer than we probably were, partly because Pauline Ramsay, the ambassador’s enchanting wife, tried to turn the crisis into a house party. So British: so best of British. We watched, helpless, as one block

Wednesday

Julie Bindel

The interview that exposed the ridiculousness of trans ideology 

On hearing that a trans-woman, the activist Steph Richards, was to be appointed CEO of an endometriosis charity, many feminists rolled our eyes, wondering if parody was dead.    There has been huge pushback against appointing a biological male as head of an organisation concerned with women’s gynaecological health, for obvious reasons. Many newspapers covered the issue, and I figured this would be one of those moments that might convince sceptics or even the ‘trans-women are women’ crew that this has all gone way too far.  When it was announced that Steph, along with Jodie Hughes, founder of Endometriosis South Coast and the Chair of Trustees (who appointed Steph to

The Spectator

Sunak only has himself to blame for the Rwanda ruling

It is seven years since the British public voted by a slim majority to leave the European Union. The idea was to ‘take back control’ by retrieving powers of sovereignty that had been given to Brussels. But there was another part of the equation that was less talked about: the power over law that had been given to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. When the Rwanda scheme was thwarted last year, some argued it was time to pull out of the ECHR. It’s hard to blame Strasbourg now that the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has just thwarted the Rwanda plan. The court’s verdict is a

George Osborne

David Cameron? He’s doing just fine, thanks 

It’s a week for improbable comebacks. The Beatles are back at number one, Chelsea are scoring goals again and David Cameron is in Downing Street. The return of my friend to the front line is a Rishi Sunak relaunch that I can warmly welcome. There is a lot of goodwill out there just waiting for our current Prime Minister to find his groove. Now he’s given up trying to appease the unappeasable nationalist right, or claiming to be better than all that’s gone before, he has a decent chance of being listened to. Not every occupant of No. 10 would have had the courage to appoint a predecessor – the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: King Charles turns 75, Cameron returns and Gaza fighting continues

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister appointed David Cameron, prime minister 2010-16, as Foreign Secretary and sent him to the Lords for the purpose, though there was a delay before the peerage was gazetted. The Speaker of the Commons asked the government how the Foreign Office would be held ‘properly accountable to this House’. There were rumblings in Brexitward quarters. Richard Tice, the leader of the Reform party, said: ‘The champagne will be flowing in the Reform party headquarters tonight.’ Eluned Morgan, Lady Morgan of Ely, a Labour minister in the Welsh Senedd, apologised for saying: ‘What next? Thatcher’s hearse arriving at No. 10?’ The surprise was precipitated by the need

Dot Wordsworth

Is orthogonal nonsensical?

Even with ruler and compasses I couldn’t make sense of a remark I found on Twitter or X, as we all pleonastically call it. Someone had posted this observation: ‘One’s bank balance and number of children are orthogonal to social media usage.’ I knew the prefix ortho– meant ‘straight, perpendicular, right’. So orthogonal meant ‘right-angled’. But how could children be at right angles to social media usage? I hadn’t cottoned on to the fashion for using orthogonal figuratively to mean ‘unrelated’, ‘irrelevant’. That is quite a stretch, for things at right angles are not unrelated. But there is no stopping orthogonal now, though the term seems unhelpful. It’s not even