The Battle for Britain | 8 November 2025
Society
Thursday
The maverick magnificence of Henry Pollock
‘Gosh he seems full of himself’ was how my friend’s wife reacted when she came in to see Henry Pollock celebrating his stunning try against the Aussies at the weekend. And she was spot on too: 20-year-old Pollock, England rugby’s latest prodigy, whips up emotions, not least the desire from anyone who has played against him – and plenty who haven’t – to give him a good belting. He’s swaggering, confident, brash, with rockstar charisma and a bleached blond mop, and he can wind up opponents until they need a bomb disposal expert to calm them down. Referees might soon want to tell him to rein it in. That’s youth
Dear Mary: Do we turn up at a party even though no written invitation arrived?
Q. An extremely old friend is a successful purveyor of high-end goods. Last time we saw him he invited us to a forthcoming Christmas party in Mayfair for his clients and people who have helped him get clients. We never got the email invitation, so I texted him and he said: ‘Oh I’m so sorry, I didn’t send it. I’ll do it today.’ But two weeks later, still no sign of it. Do we just go to the party or not? If we don’t go we fear he might be cross that we had ‘taken offence’ when no written invitation arrived. Yet we also fear that he may have decided
Bagels that even New York can’t beat: Panzer’s Delicatessen reviewed
That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get. I keep telling non-Jewish friends: when we burn, you will burn with us. Though I mean it as consolation, they tend to run. St John’s Wood has always existed on the edge of hysteria. Edwardian psychopaths put their mistresses here, and I once went to a children’s birthday party where Peppa Pig couldn’t park, and
Stench of failure: Britain’s shameful surrender in the war on drugs
The New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that rare figure in politics – a progressive who followed the facts. The contrast between his grown-up moral clarity and the adolescent ideological posturing of New York City’s latest Democrat darling, Zohran Mamdani, could not be starker. Moynihan was a welfare reformer who knew that incentivising work, not subsidising idleness, was the route out of poverty. He was a resolute supporter of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, backing the victims of two millennia of prejudice against terrorists and tyrants. By way of contrast, Mamdani demonises that state as a proxy for what he considers the wider western sins of colonialism and
We have to stop looking away
I learnt not to intervene on a late summer’s afternoon nine years ago. My son was still a baby and I was pushing him in his pram across a busy road in a responsible way, only after the green ‘walk’ man had lit up. I was about halfway over when a boy of about 14 on a moped scorched through the lights and past us, nearly hitting the pram. I yelled at him, and as I yelled felt the spirit of civic duty rise within me. If we middle-aged mothers don’t set the kids straight, who will? The boy skidded to a stop and turned to face me. I can’t
Portrait of the week: Train stabbing attack, Mamdani takes New York and the Andrew formerly known as prince
Home The King ‘initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew’, who is now known as Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor; his lease on Royal Lodge, Windsor, was relinquished and he made a private arrangement with the King to live on the Sandringham estate. His former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will find her own accommodation. Their daughters remain Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice. Richard Gott, who resigned as literary editor of the Guardian in 1994 after The Spectator accused him of having been in the pay of the KGB, died aged 87. Gopichand Hinduja, the head of Britain’s richest family, died aged 85. Eleven people were
My life after Today
Nearly a year after my final Radio 4 shift, my new interview podcast has launched, and the weeks are more varied than anything I’ve previously experienced. The main focus is of course the guest and the content of the next episode. But we’re often at different stages of two or even three interviews at the same time, and production questions take us in multiple directions. How recent is the headshot the illustrator is using for artwork? What’s the best headline for each version: audio, video, text, social? What about practical arrangements or special requests for the next recording? On that note, an interesting contrast between the two political leaders who
You can’t trust the BBC
You may remember that in February the BBC found itself in a spot of bother regarding a film about the conflict in Gaza which, it transpired, had been narrated by the son of a Hamas minister. Some people, not least Jewish people, wondered if such an account perhaps might accidentally stray into the realms of partisanship, and the BBC was forced to withdraw the documentary forthwith. It then commissioned an internal report into why this young lad had been chosen to front the film, rather than, say, Rylan Clark or Clare Balding. As a consequence of the investigation, the BBC’s head of news, Deborah Turness, sent a round robin email
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and the ancient struggle with shame
The most extraordinary thing about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is that he seems to have no sense of shame. That word in Greek was aidôs, which covered everything from a sense of shame, inhibiting one’s own behaviour, to respect, i.e. sensitivity to the feelings, status and claims of others. ‘When I consider that I am doing wrong, I feel aidôs to look my friends in the face’ (Agathon) is a typical example. This feeling is a major feature of Greek literature. In Homer’s Iliad, Hector the Trojan hero challenges the Greeks to single combat, but ‘they felt aidôs to refuse, but were afraid to accept’. They knew what society expected of
Wednesday
The cowardly publishing world betrayed Kate Clanchy
Has the vibe shift finally hit the publishing world? There might just be some hope that one of the industries most captured by woke scolds, by the nonbinary heirs of Mary Whitehouse, has finally clocked which way the cultural winds are blowing – away from cancel culture and identity politics and towards something freer and saner. This apology will be cold comfort for Clanchy, whose brush with cancel culture was particularly brutal – and totally unearned You may remember Kate Clanchy, the celebrated author whose cancellation in 2021 was among the most heinous of the post-BLM mania. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her hit memoir about her
Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?
So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offence? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Women’s rights have been broken on the wheel of the trans ideology Ms Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered
Keir Starmer is letting China abuse our libel laws
The enormous cost of British libel law is a threat to national security. For the sake of enriching London barristers, Keir Starmer is preserving an unreformed and rapaciously expensive legal system that is wide open to abuse by oligarchs and dictatorships. And he knows it. When he was a young barrister in the 1990s,Starmer represented Helen Steel and David Morris. McDonald’stried to crush the two environmental activists because they had criticised its treatment of animals. The 1997 ‘McLibel’ affair remains notorious as the longest trial in British history. ‘This case shows the absurdity of the libel laws,’ Starmer said at the time. Now almost 30 years on, he is prime minister,
The Rosetta Stone does not belong in Egypt
It was inevitable that the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo would accompany its much-delayed opening with demands for the restitution of several of the most famous objects that have survived from the days of the Pharaohs. It was inevitable too that this effort would be fronted by the irrepressible Zahi Hawass, formerly the government minister in charge of antiquities, and now one of the most voluble ambassadors for ancient Egyptian civilization. The history of the Rosetta Stone is not simply an Egyptian history Fortunately he is not asking for the return of everything. If he was, the largest museum of Egyptian antiquities outside of Egypt, in Turin, would be left
Tuesday
We should mourn the loss of Rome’s medieval towers
The Torre dei Conti, next to Rome’s Forum, partially collapsed yesterday. A construction worker who was carrying out restoration work on the tower was trapped and eventually killed, but this is not the first time the Torre dei Conti has been involved in the death of Romans. The 45 or so remaining medieval towers of Rome are not high on the list of most visitors to the city, but they stand testament to a fascinating, violent and formative period of Rome’s history. The Torre dei Conti was built in the thirteenth century by the Conti family, the family of Pope Innocent III, as a fortified residence to defend and strengthen their
John Lewis’s Christmas advert might be its worst yet
John Lewis’s Christmas advert is back – and this year’s effort is even more mawkish, unfocused and wearying than ever. The latest promo, conceived by advertising veterans Saatchi & Saatchi, is yet another underwhelming instalment in the store’s increasingly desperate attempt to sell their wares. Everyone’s favourite bastion of middle-class sensibility has latched on to increasing sales of vinyl records as the market to go after. And so, the two-minute film tells the story of a middle-aged dad given a record as a present by his son. The old man is briefly transported back to his clubbing days in his nineties heyday, as soundtracked by the once-popular Alison Limerick song
Can the last ‘working person’ in Britain please turn out the lights?
Early morning surprises can be lovely, but not when they involve Rachel Reeves. Probably the last thing anybody wants to see as they wipe the sand from their eyes is the Chancellor looming over them. The sudden, unexpected appearance of Reeves at cock crow this morning – ‘My office, first thing, sharp!’ – felt like a dawn raid, the age-old military tactic for attacking when the human body is at its weakest. Well, it didn’t work. The recent wranglings over the exact definition of ‘working people’ wouldn’t fool a four-year-old We learnt today that despite Reeves having ‘fixed the foundations’ last year (don’t laugh!), ‘the world’ keeps throwing ‘challenges’ her
Is it all over for Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie?
There is a saying, variously attributed either to Euripides or Shakespeare, that is something along the lines of ‘the sins of the father will be visited upon the children.’ By anyone’s reckoning, this is deeply unfair and wholly undeserved, but the treatment of Prince Andrew’s children, the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, will soon bear out the dread-laden maxim. Virtually all the international attention has so far come upon their parents, the Andrew formerly known as Prince and the unduchessed Sarah Ferguson. But now, with the inevitability of good hangings preventing bad marriages, interest is going to alight upon them. A pile-on towards these young women is coming, and it will
Monday
Terror is becoming worryingly familiar in Britain
After the very latest mass casualty attack on Saturday night, on a busy London North Eastern Railway train in Huntingdon, police and government quickly told us not to speculate about the motives of the alleged attacker. Eleven people were hospitalised in the attack, with one in a critical condition at the time of writing. It’s hard not to speculate when a banal experience most of us are familiar with – a train journey – is brutally upended in this way. It is hard to ignore the fact that we are seeing more and more people with no ideology resorting to extreme, often spontaneous violence But we must stop there, apparently,
Harry and Meghan deserve the same fate as Andrew Windsor
The King acted with decisive authority to strip his brother, Andrew, of his Royal title and evict him from his Windsor mansion. The former Duke of York is now known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and he must vacate Royal Lodge for private accommodation at Sandringham. No formal Letters Patent were issued, nor was parliamentary legislation required; the King’s prerogative sufficed. The action, though severe, reflects a man whose associations – never proven criminal – had become untenable for an institution whose legitimacy rests on public trust. Andrew Windsor’s punishment was just and proportionate. The Sussexes’ case is more complex Yet another challenge persists: the conduct of the Duke and Duchess