Society

Wednesday

Melissa Kite

Is it really possible to get Covid for a fourth time?

‘I can’t go through this again!’ I groaned, as I lay in bed encased in icepacks, one on my eyes and the other round the back of my neck. Covid – which seems to be alive and kicking this summer despite being pronounced over by the World Health Organisation – always strikes at my nervous system and sets off existing problems, including my fragile emotional stability. The builder boyfriend brings me orange juice and breakfast on a tray, walks the dogs, feeds the horses, goes to work and comes back to find me huddled under the duvet, sobbing. He is weather-beaten from his day on a roof, and feeling rough

Taki

The glory of Paris has long past

Gstaad A reader’s inquiry as to why I think Paris belongs to yesterday (12 August) has me remembering times past. When did the party end? According to many night owls it was when the ‘Queen of the Night’, Regine, shut down her club New Jimmy’z and moved to London in the 1970s, where she flopped. Others believe it was ‘les événements de soixante-huit’, the student-worker revolt against De Gaulle that did Paris in. Certainly, any way one looks at it, the events of 1968 did signal that the party was over; and it has stayed over ever since. Mind you, the high jinks had been waning for some time. I

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The truth about the backlash to France’s abaya school ban

The intellectual infirmity that has laid low much of Europe’s left this century had been painfully exposed this week in France. On Monday, the country’s new minister of education, Gabriel Attal, announced that when pupils return to the classroom next week none will be permitted to wear the abaya, a conservative form of Islamic dress that is worn to preserve one’s modesty. Justifying the interdiction, Attal said the abaya contravened France’s strict rules on the wearing of religious symbols to school. ‘Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,’ Attal explained. ‘You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the students’ religion by looking at them.’ France

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Ulez could mark the end of the road for Sadiq Khan

The metropolitan bohemian Withnail, played by Richard E Grant in the film Withnail & I, is so appalled by life away from inner London that he declares: ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.’ Among the metropolitan bohemians who run the Tory party in the capital, the selection of Susan Hall as mayoral candidate was regarded with similar abject horror. Only in their case the sentiment was: ‘We’ve chosen a real Conservative by mistake.’ One of their usual more-liberal-than-the-liberals types was supposed to have glided to the nomination. But Dan (Daniel Korski) and Moz (Mozammel Hossain), called up from the open-necked shirt brigade of smooth talkers, both self-immolated during the campaign.

Kevin Toolis

Why this year’s Edinburgh fringe was so obsessed with death

The Edinburgh Festival is finally over, but why was this year’s event so obsessed with dying? Death is the new Black, at least according to the artists at the fringe where our mortality has been eviscerated, diced, disembowelled, deconstructed and fed back in a torrent of death shows to an army of avid theatre goers ever hungry, it seems, for new interpretations of our predictable demise. Death Suits You, When We Died, You are All Going to Die, The Last Show Before We Die, Hello Kitty Must Die, and the Dead Dad Show are just a few of the catchy morbid show titles proudly performed in defiance of the usual

Tuesday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Meet the soldiers clearing mines for Ukraine’s counteroffensive

Nearly three months into their counteroffensive, the Ukrainian army has finally found a way to breach the first line of Russian defence. Ukraine has moved through minefields, ‘dragon’s teeth’ defences and swarms of drones. They have retaken the village of Robotyne which lies on the highway to Tokmak, the next objective on the way to Melitopol (one of the main Ukrainian targets for blocking the land corridor to Crimea). Russia is trying to reinforce its defences, while Kyiv is anticipating a much-needed breakthrough.    Russian forces have built some of the most extensive battlefield fortifications seen in Europe since the second world war to defend those borders it has managed to establish. To date,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is one badly filed flight plan really to blame for the airport chaos?

A faulty flight plan filed by a French airline is unofficially being blamed for the meltdown in our national air traffic control system on Monday. While Nats (National Air Traffic Services) has declined to comment, it should come as no comfort if it turns out to have been a cock-up rather than – as many initially feared – a cyber attack. If one badly-filed flight plan can cause delays for days on end – as the airlines are warning us – it is an alarming reminder of how vulnerable our transport infrastructure has become. It wouldn’t take much input from a hostile state to bring the country to a halt. You can see

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Biddy Baxter and the perils of remembering the past

I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend, but I wouldn’t sell you a pup). There is always fun to be had in the gap between the transmitted, necessarily anodyne, product of children’s TV and the real-life shenanigans backstage, and the story of the often forbidding Biddy serves this up in satisfyingly salty dollops. In the collegiate, committee-ridden atmosphere of TV production, Baxter was a rare tyrant but one who always put the viewer ahead of any other consideration. Making TV is a battle; the reason so much of it is so bad is that the people involved

Monday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why weren’t police forces investigating every theft?

Police must investigate every theft. This is the message from the Home Secretary as the government heralds an agreement from all 43 police forces in England and Wales to follow up on any evidence where there is a ‘reasonable line of enquiry’. In practice, that means the police should investigate low-level crimes such as stolen bikes, phones and shoplifting when there is reasonable lead such as a GPS tracker, CCTV footage or a doorbell video. As I noted earlier this month in a cover piece for the magazine, ‘investigate every crime’ doesn’t sound like a particularly novel concept. It raises the question: Why weren’t police investigating every theft? Over the

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

What Jeremy Vine gets wrong about cyclists

I can’t believe we need to say this, but here goes: Motorists should not pull over to allow cyclists to overtake. I know it’s obvious, but the cycling elites have been agitating for this ridiculous rule-change, led by Jeremy Vine. In an interview yesterday, he upped the ante in his general campaign to turn the country’s drivers into a second-class citizens. ‘I’m starting to think I want cars to pull over if they see me behind them because they know I’m faster,’ he told the Sunday Times. Thus the shark was jumped. I’m a cyclist myself and I’d wager I’m quite a lot faster than Vine. I’m younger, for a

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Who’s more useless – the Tories or the England rugby team?

In a curious way the decline of English rugby mirrors that of the Conservative party. Four years ago there was a spring in the step of both. England had trounced the All Blacks in the semi-final of the World Cup in Japan, and although they lost to South Africa in the final a week later there was a belief that the future was bright. As the Daily Telegraph summed it up in a headline, ‘England’s squad unity demonstrates cause for optimism’.   Four years on and England are anything but optimistic ahead of next month’s World Cup. Under new coach Steve Borthwick they have won just three of their nine matches

Nicholas Farrell

How Georgia Meloni plans to stop the boats

Few can deny that the arrival of 100,000 illegal migrants to Britain from France by small boat since 2018 is nothing short of a catastrophe.   So what word would best describe the arrival in Italy by sea from North Africa of 100,000 illegal migrants already this year?  So Meloni’s main focus is not on dealing with the migrants once they are in Italy but on stopping them getting to Italy That is well over double the number of migrant sea arrivals in Italy during the same period in 2022. It means this year’s total will almost certainly break the record set in 2016 of 181,436. This weekend alone more than 4,000 migrants arrived by boat on

Alice Sullivan

What went wrong at the Open University?

The Open University is a cherished British institution. The sociologist Michael Young, who went on to become a Labour peer, conceived this ‘university of the air’ as a force which would democratise university education, bringing learning to the masses via lectures broadcast by the BBC at the crack of dawn.    One can only imagine how horrified Young would have been to learn that the beloved OU, which has given second chances to so many students, is currently facing three legal challenges from staff and students who say they have been discriminated against because they dared to express the ‘gender critical’ view that sex matters.   When EDI departments take control,

Lawrence Newport

Why is the RSPCA defending the American Bully dog?

Britain is caught in the jaws of a dangerous dog.    In the past two years, fatal dog attacks in the UK have increased dramatically. It used to be that around three people a year were killed by dogs. In 2022, that rose to ten people – including four children. Another five people have already been killed by dogs in 2023.   This rise is disproportionately explained by one breed: the American Bully, a close relative of the already banned American Pit Bull Terrier, which was cruelly bred to fight other dogs to the death. The American Bully now accounts for over 70 per cent of deaths from dogs in the UK since

Sunday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

A woke witch hunt has taken over the arts

Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between how the arts are treated in the UK versus a dictatorship. In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must be grateful. But perhaps we should refrain from being too pleased with ourselves. Woke – or if you don’t like the word, identitarian – movements rather than authoritarian governments can still force degrading confessions to ideological thought crimes. Friends can still denounce each other, as if we were in America during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of

Christian Wolmar

Why is HS2 costing so much?

The members of the Denham Waterski Club are among the few people in the Chilterns who are grateful for HS2. They have a superb new clubhouse overlooking the tiny lake where their motorboats whizz round in ever tighter circles, thanks to the fact that their old one was in the way of the massive viaduct being built over the Colne Valley for the new line. The heavy concrete structure does somewhat blight their view but they are undoubtedly delighted with their Faustian deal. The escalating costs and the dithering of ministers have meant that many of the original advantages of HS2 have been lost The few hundred thousand pounds this

Saturday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Things look grave for Luis Rubiales after his World Cup kiss

What’s in a kiss? More perhaps than just a moment of bliss. It was really rather stupid of Luis Rubiales, the president of the Spanish football association, to grip the women’s team captain Jenni Hermoso, as if she herself were the World Cup trophy, and plant a smacker full on her lips in the medal ceremony following the team’s victory over England. But he can hardly have expected the Spanish inquisition that has followed.  Rubiales’ defence is undermined not only be Hermoso’s outright rejection but by his own description of the kiss as ‘spontaneous’ Rubiales’ moment of giddy Latin exuberance/hateful misogyny (depending on your take) has completely overshadowed his country’s triumph in the

David Gunnlaugsson

How trans ideology took over Iceland

Just as I sat down to watch the Friday evening news last week, I received a distress call. On the phone was a man I had never met. He was desperately searching for a venue for a lesbian, gay and bisexual organisation wishing to hold a one-day seminar taking place the next day. This was at the height of Iceland´s annual pride week and the organisation had arranged to hold their conference at an auditorium rented out by the National Museum of Iceland. A few days earlier the museum had suddenly cancelled the event following complaints by activists, who objected to their views on trans rights. How did we get

Lawrence Goldman

Gladstone, the BBC and the contempt for national history

A BBC news story this week about members of the Gladstone family visiting Guyana to apologise for their ancestral links to slavery in the Caribbean has all the historical errors and elisions we have become used to in reports and investigations on the subject of slavery. The authors do not appear to know the difference between parliament’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and its emancipation of slaves in the British empire in 1833, and they have William Gladstone giving his first Commons speech in 1831 when he was still an undergraduate in Oxford.   Gladstone is collateral damage, guilty by association, and held responsible for decisions and investments

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why did the Co-op debank feminists – but let Rose West keep her account?

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any madder, you find out the following: at the Co-operative bank, if you’re a murderer of women you can keep your account, but if you accurately describe women as adult human females, you can’t. According to news reports, the Co-op bank, which prides itself on being super-ethical, allowed the serial killer Rose West to keep her account. But then it debanked a feminist group on the basis that it is hostile to the rights of transgender people. A new level of lunacy has been reached We don’t know which feminist group it was, or what exactly it says about trans rights. But we