Society

Friday

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

The vindication of Michael Vaughan

It’s perhaps still too early to tell if the Jewish and Muslim communities, here in Britain and indeed throughout the world, were brought closer by the actions of the former Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq.   How refreshing it is to see the quaint concept of proof being demanded before a man’s life is ruined Rafiq, you will remember, in November 2021 went to hear in person from Holocaust survivor Ruth Barnett, 86, about her experience of being on the receiving end in Nazi Germany of what you’d probably have to say was on balance worse than anything you could possibly experience in or around a cricket ground. He did this, no

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The battle over female Catholic priests has just begun

16 min listen

This week we heard the unfamiliar sound of one of the Catholic Church’s most influential cardinals turning the handle of a door that has remained firmly shut for 2,000 years. It’s marked ‘Catholic women priests’, a development – such is the pace of chaotic change under this pontificate – that is now a real long-term possibility. Pope Francis says he’s against this innovation, but he relentlessly promotes bishops who favour it. Until now, they’ve been discreet about their views. Now, to use a fashionable cliché, they’re saying the quiet bit out loud. As I point out in this episode of Holy Smoke, Catholic conservatives are confident that women will not

Debbie Hayton

The trouble with Joe Biden’s trans declaration

Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility – just like the preceding 89 days of 2023. But, jesting aside, it has prompted an astonishing proclamation from the White House. ‘Transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,’ president Joe Biden has announced. Really? Who did Biden have in mind? Maybe he was still entranced by Dylan Mulvaney, a self-absorbed social media influencer who shot to fame last March after documenting a gender transition. Since then, Mulvaney has relentlessly taken to TikTok chronicling each ‘day of girlhood’ in nauseating detail. Biden is scaremongering On day 222 of this egregious series, Mulvaney was invited to the White House to interview Biden. Trans privilege really

Jawad Iqbal

Elon Musk is wrong to call for a pause on the AI race

On 2 August 1939, Albert Einstein – at that time the most famous scientist in the world – put his name to a letter addressed to President Franklin D Roosevelt. In it he warned that the Nazis might be developing an atomic bomb and could bring about a chain of events that would lead to the end of civilisation. Einstein urged the United States to begin work on its own atomic weapons to save humanity. His warning changed the course of history. The Manhattan project was born and the United States won the race to make the A-bomb. Self-awareness is not a strong point in these would-be Cassandras This week

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Why did Guy Pearce apologise for this trans tweet?

Hollywood actor Guy Pearce has apologised for posting a pro-trans tweet. That’s where we’re at now with the culture war. The Twitterstorms don’t even need to make sense anymore, as the bizarre case of the LA Confidential star’s recent comments about trans actors has made abundantly clear. Pearce took to Twitter earlier this week and posed a string of very good questions. ‘If the only people allowed to play trans characters are trans folk, then are we also suggesting the only people trans folk can play are trans characters?’, he asked. ‘Surely that will limit your career as an actor? Isn’t the point of an actor to be able to

Thursday

Kara Kennedy

Is this the reason Harry and Meghan stepped down as working Royals?

Stepping down as working royals would ‘provide our family with the space to focus on the next chapter, including the launch of our new charitable entity,’ Meghan and Harry wrote in their infamous bombshell statement of January 2020.  Just one month before, the Sussexes had launched their Archewell website, with childhood photos of themselves with their mothers, Doria Ragland and the late Princess Diana.  ‘I am my mother’s son, and I am our son’s mother,’ the official letter read. ‘Together we bring you Archewell. We believe in the best of humanity. Because we have seen the best of humanity… from our mothers and strangers alike.’ Anybody who has been keeping

Joanna Williams

How trans ideology took over our schools

Concern with what schools are teaching about sex, gender and relationships has been growing. Parents worry their children are being exposed to inappropriate sexualised content and that they are being taught to question their gender identity. Some even report discovering their children are using new names and pronouns while at school without their knowledge or consent. Yet these fears are frequently dismissed as reactionary parents trading in anecdotes and panic. Nothing to see here, has been the message from schools and campaigning organisations alike. Until now. A report from Policy Exchange reveals the extent to which gender ideology is being promoted in schools and the shocking ways in which this

Ian Silvera

Amsterdam’s lazy campaign against British tourists

Amsterdam has launched a campaign telling rowdy Brits to stay away. Men between the age of 18 and 35 are being targeted with videos showing what happens to those who overindulge. Brits who search online for terms like ‘stag do’, ‘cheap Amsterdam accommodation’ and ‘pub crawl Amsterdam’ will be served with the warning adverts featuring tourists being locked up or hospitalised. To put it in wrestling terms, we’ve well and truly become the ‘heels’ of Europe. Brexit, it seems, has catalysed the unfair ‘bad boy Brit’ persona of a sometimes sluggish, mostly uncultured and drunken nation which urinates and swears its way across the continent while ordering beige grub in

Andrew Tettenborn

The Tories should think again on targeting Netflix

If you want to understand the curious attitude of our government towards media freedom, look at two provisions in the draft Media Bill, published yesterday. One is refreshingly liberal; the other curmudgeonly and authoritarian. First, the good news. The Bill reads the last rites over the Leveson Report of 2012. A worrying document embodying lofty patrician contempt for the popular press, this had called for highly intrusive controls over it. This included closer supervision of what journalists were allowed to do and editors to publish, an increase in damages for breach of privacy and a noticeable tightening of the dead hand of data protection on newspaper information-gathering. And, to cap

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Putin’s crackdown on Russia’s school children

In Russia, nowhere – and no one – is safe from the insidious reach of Putin’s war in Ukraine. In April 2022, during a school art class, twelve-year-old Masha Moskaleva drew a picture of a Russian and Ukrainian flag with missiles flying at a mother and child. Inside the flags, she had written ‘Glory to Ukraine’ and ‘No to War’.  Masha’s art teacher saw her drawing and called in the head teacher who then called the police. Officers interrogated her and her classmates, but Masha managed to slip away after giving them a false name. The following day, as her father, Alexei, was picking her up from school, the two were apprehended by police and taken for

Christian Wolmar

The new age of sleeper trains

It’s a fabulous combination: travelling by train and sleeping. And the good news is that the concept of sleeper trains is being revived. The bad news is that, like trams and trolleybuses, a wonderful form of travel was allowed to decline in the first place. The first sleeper carriages – as opposed to trains you happened to fall asleep on – were introduced in the US in the late 1830s, but these provided little more than hard wooden benches. It was George Pullman who built the first luxury sleeper coaches when he founded his eponymous company in 1867. America, with its vast expanses and a newly opened transcontinental line, was

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Eat here now: Darjeeling Express reviewed

Darjeeling Express lives at the top of Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, which was once the world-famous embodiment of Swinging London but now seems the global capital of the sports shoe. No matter – Kingly Court, which is built in the shape of a medieval coaching inn, is a happy nook: it is shut away, which means you can’t see sport shoes from the window. It is small in scale; it is for Londoners in their thinning melting pot. Kingly Court already has a superb restaurant in Imad’s Syrian Kitchen. Darjeeling Express, newly opened, joins it on the second floor. My companion calls the chicken kati the platonic ideal of

Roger Alton Roger Alton

In praise of Sharron Davies

It’s been quite a while since we celebrated any of Sharron Davies’s considerable achievements in the pool – well, a bronze and a silver in 1990 at Auckland was the last time – but I would bet a box full of brand-new Speedos to a secondhand pair of goggles that nothing has made her prouder than her part in World Athletics’ decision to ban transgender women from competing in female international events. She has campaigned for this for years with great courage and at considerable cost. Without her energy and bravery, it is possible that Seb Coe could have fudged the solution announced last week, when he ruled that he

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Bring back the savoury!

For a while now, we’ve been living through a renaissance of classical British cooking: a whole host of restaurants have been embracing the joy of the old school, the pies and puddings, the traditional and the retro. But there’s something missing. Bring back the savoury! An Edwardian favourite, a ‘savoury’ was an extra course that came towards the end of the meal, either just before or after pudding, or as an alternative to it. A savoury should be small – a ‘morsel’ – and strongly flavoured. To this end, the main ingredients are usually cheese, smoked or salted fish, bacon, or spice in the form of devilling. It is often

Lucy Holden

A toast to the old man pub

I’ve always preferred ‘old man pubs’ to bars, old man pubs being the kind decked out in mahogany and offering up a gin and tonic to anyone clueless enough to ask for a cocktail. Having just moved to Glasgow, I find myself surrounded by these sorts of places, Scotland practically being the home of pubs so wooden they’d float. There’s a joy in walking into a pub and the staff knowing your name. I’m 33 and I’d like to meet someone, but I also want to make friends. My initial idea was to use dating apps to contact people in Glasgow. I recced Hinge from Bath, where I last lived,

Wednesday

Constantin Eckner

Why Germans are going wild for King Charles

King Charles III is going down a storm in Berlin. Hundreds of wellwishers have turned out to greet the King during a reception at the Brandenburg Gate – and the monarch, who is on his first trip abroad since taking the throne, seems relaxed. But amidst the selfies and Burger King hats (which many of those who turned out to see the King have opted to wear), there is serious business to be done – and German politicians are optimistic that Charles’s visit can repair some of the damage caused by Brexit. While Charles’s mother Elizabeth was seen as apolitical, the King’s past commitments to social and ecological causes have

Annabel Denham

In defence of landlords

Whisper it millennials, but YIMBYism (Yes In My Back Yard) might be gathering momentum. Recent surveys have found more people agree than disagree that there is a housing crisis in their local area, and more would support building houses than oppose it.  They may be given the chance to do so. Last year, government announced plans to give residents the power to opt into more development on their own street through ‘street votes’. And the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill includes ‘community land auctions’, which would give councils much stronger incentives to permit more housing development.  We shouldn’t let politicians wriggle out of difficult conversations over the housing shortage But while YIMBYism

The Spectator

The lessons of the trans debate

The World Athletics Council has taken the decisive step of announcing that transgender women who underwent male puberty before their transition will henceforth be excluded from female events. The decision has been made, according to the council, to ‘protect the future of the female category’. World rugby has already made a similar ruling and other sports are expected to follow suit. It has been a long and heated debate, but a consensus is emerging on the side of common sense. Those who overreached on this issue are counting the cost. Nicola Sturgeon’s bizarre gender self-ID law that would have granted women’s rights to anyone who wanted to claim them went

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The rule of lawyers

Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used to be bombarded with injunctions to attend my local clinic, but not any more. This is a shame because a new study suggests that unless I am properly up to date with my injections, I may soon be involved in a serious car crash. The research, published in the American Journal of Medicine, shows a very strong correlation between someone’s Covid vaccine status and the probability of them being involved in a very bad road accident. The correlation suggests that those who have not been vaccinated are 72 per cent

Dot Wordsworth

What’s the difference between rocks and stones?

‘You rocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,’ exclaimed my husband, misquoting Shakespeare as though it were an improvement. In English a rock is different from a stone and it can be annoying when news reports, especially on radio and television, speak of crowds throwing rocks. This Americanism has not yet ousted stones in British English. ‘It is one of the peculiarities of the dialect of the people in the westernmost states, to call small stones rocks,’ wrote the Revd Samuel Parker in his Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838). My husband had been set off by a report from France. During the disorder there, the