Society

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Easter special: assisted dying, ‘bunny ebola’ & how do you eat your creme egg?

34 min listen

This week: should the assisted dying bill be killed off? Six months after Kim Leadbeater MP launched the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a group of Labour MPs have pronounced it ‘irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law’. They say the most basic aspects of the bill – having gone through its committee stage – do not hold up to scrutiny. Dan Hitchens agrees, writing in the magazine this week that ‘it’s hard to summarise the committee’s proceedings except with a kind of Homeric catalogue of rejected amendments’ accompanied by a ‘series of disconcerting public statements’.  With a third reading vote approaching, what could it tell us

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘Jordan Peterson is a sad and angry man’: an interview with Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has a new book out, a slim, thoughtful introduction to Christianity. But that’s not quite why I went to Cardiff to visit him. I went because, although I admire the superstar culture warriors of the right, there’s something Williams is witness to which they lack. Like many readers, I think Rowan Williams pretty loopy on most subjects – Brexit, Islam, immigration, the dreaded trans debate – but Rod Liddle always says that Rowan is a holy man, and Rod is right. We sit opposite each other drinking tea in his book-lined living room. The 104th Archbishop of Canterbury is looking amiable but confused. ‘The Spectator

Nigel Biggar

How I found Christianity

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So when, at the age of 12, I screwed up my courage and came out as a Christian, Dad put his hand on my shoulder – for the only time – and said: ‘It’s OK, son; it’s just a phase.’ Now, as my Christian phase approaches its seventh decade, I find myself looking back and wondering

John Rutter

The world reveres British music

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs, no one has yet highlighted the importance of music as a British export. As a representative of our choral tradition, I was treated with something like the reverence that would be accorded to a Brazilian footballer or a Russian chess player. My host, the regional choral supremo, knew all about our British choirs. His CD

James Innes-Smith

Admit it: Creme Eggs are vile

Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite Easter egg’. Its popularity sometimes verges on cultlike. In 2016, when Cadbury opened a pop-up café in Soho called Crème de la Creme Egg Café, people queued down the street to eat something they could have bought at any old corner shop. In 2019, a mega-fan from Liverpool had a Creme Egg tattooed on her hip. I have never understood the love for something so mediocre. Creme Eggs are a cheerless chocolate. What I find perplexing is why anyone would find a confectionary that resembles the albumen and yolk of

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Lamb is for life, not just for Easter

Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are falling out of love with lamb. Meat consumption in Britain is at its lowest level since records began, and according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), lamb has been in particular decline for the past 20 years. We may feel we are supporting the sheep-farming industry, but the truth is a little more complicated There are a number of reasons for this: some people are trying to eat less meat for environmental or ethical reasons, while others don’t enjoy the richer taste of lamb compared with other meats.

Cosmo Landesman

Is there sex after 70? 

When I turned 70 in September, I had a panic attack. I was certain that my romantic life was over. I’d finally crossed over from middle-age into old age and had joined that sad tribe of the unshaggable. My time as a fun-loving lothario was at an end. Goodbye hot wild monkey sex – hello hot cocoa. These days, thanks to my chronic arthritis of the knee, I can’t raise my leg, much less get it over Concerned female friends told me I was guilty – once again – of premature self-pity. They assured me that there was sex – and plenty of it – after 70. And just as

The Spectator

How much steel does Britain produce?

Double date This year, Orthodox Easter is on the same date as the western Easter, 20 April. How common is that? The Orthodox Church has a different date for Easter because it still calculates the date according to the Julian calendar, which runs 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. But the dates coincide when the first full moon after the spring equinox occurs relatively late. The dates last coincided in 2017, but eight years is a relatively long run without this happening. This year is the ninth occasion this century when western and Orthodox Easters have been on the same day. A common date for Easter will next happen in

Melissa Kite

Aren’t women wonderful?

The mole specialist was wearing a pink Chanel-looking suit and pink diamanté shoes. By mole specialist, I don’t mean someone turned up dressed in Chanel to deal with moles on our land. I mean I went to see a top London dermatologist about a mole I was worried about, and when I walked into her office she looked so fabulous all I wanted to do was talk to her about her Jackie O miniskirt and jacket, given a twist with the sparkly stilettos. Before I could do that, however, she complimented me on my long striped coat. ‘Villa Gallo,’ I said, sitting down in front of her desk on the

Aidan Hartley

I’m losing the will to hunt

Laikipia, Kenya When I was eight I used to go fishing in the Indian Ocean beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar with Mohamed. Once we pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin – a filusi. In Spanish it’s known as the dorado, referring to its iridescent golden flanks. As we watched the fish suffocate in the tropical air, its pigment, sheathed with a patina of stippled green, was transfigured for a brief instant like a beam of sunshine on a church mosaic. Then the dorado’s brilliance faded, and by the time Mohamed picked up his knife and sliced open her belly, removed the guts and tossed the

The Spectator

Letters: Donald Trump’s messiah complex

He’s not the messiah Sir: To Freddy Gray’s meticulous dissection of Trumpian chaos theory (‘Shock tactics’, 12 April) I would add one element: religion. Donald Trump seems to believe the blood he spilt in the failed assassination attempt anointed him his country’s Redeemer: ‘I was saved by God to make America great again.’ Messiahs look to a higher authority than rational argument. Whatever ideas pop into the President’s head he judges right by definition. Tariffs will achieve miracles and wars will cease at his command. There is a strong Gnostic element to this cult, its followers believing Trump has some secret knowledge guiding his apparently wayward actions. To keep him

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 19 April 2025

Just like having a natural aptitude for drawing or music, some lucky people seem to be born with a gift for bridge. My friend Oliver Burgess is one of them. He plays with effortless elegance, visualising end-plays or spotting chances to false-card while most of us are still struggling to marshal our thoughts. Ollie’s gifts were obvious early on – but I hadn’t realised quite how early until I came across this hand from the Junior European Championships 22 years ago. Ollie (West) was just 18: North’s 4♦️ showed a raise to 4♠️ with six good diamonds. 6♣️ showed two keycards and a void. South’s 6♥️ asked for the trump

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

No one wants American cars

The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners stage-managed it with that in mind. Or perhaps the heroic tale of shop stewards confronting villainous Chinese managers while rescue teams scoured the horizon for emergency shipments of iron ore and coking coal was a different kind of smokescreen – to hide the fact that British steelmaking has been doomed for decades and what just happened is a job-saving nationalisation that will be a massive drain on public funds for as long as it takes to admit that the last British blast furnaces belong to history. I’m sorry to take

Henry Williams

Where have all the rabbits gone?

It’s spring and in this corner of rural Sussex, the bluetits are at the window, newborn lambs are bleating in their pens, and all the rabbits are dead. The burrows are still there, but the chewed grass, the little collections of brown pellets, the white bobtails scattering before your headlights at night, they are gone. I first noticed this in spring 2020, when the ancient nest of burrows in our local woods was suddenly empty. Around that time of year, the scores of rabbits gingerly setting out for the evening made a great meal for the fox cubs who first showed their faces around Easter. Both predators and prey have

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The simple elegance of fondant potatoes

In 1999, a relatively unknown American chef wrote an essay in the New Yorker uncovering the secrets of restaurants. ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ lifted the lid on both the underworld of professional kitchens and the mentality of chefs. In it, the writer meticulously took down ordering fish on a Monday (old), eating steak well done (for ‘philistines’), brunch as a concept (despised) and vegetarians in general (‘Enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit’). The no-punches-pulled writing, which was both lyrical and graphic as well as funny and forthright, was the first published essay by Anthony Bourdain, who would go on to become one of the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The unsayable case for cars

Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of any countervailing evidence, either because the display of such opinions confers status on the holder, or else because adherence to them is an article of faith among some social or professional group in which you need to be seen to belong. The only approved vision of the future involves extracting people from their cars and cramming them into mass transit Such beliefs are hence closer to religious creeds than to any conventionally formed opinion. Consequently, any contradiction of such accepted beliefs in public, however intelligent, is treated as heretical: a

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is it acceptable to go to bed before my guests do?

Q. I am a self-employed travel specialist, concentrating on holidays in Asia. Friends (and even friends of friends) plague me asking for tips on flights and itineraries. Then they go online and book direct instead of through me. Sometimes I have spent hours putting the holiday together for them. How can I politely say ‘no’ to people seeking such one-way favours? — M.B., London SW11 A. Clearly the petitioners do not realise that they will pay the same for the reservation either way, but that if you make it for them you will be rewarded with a small commission from the airline or hotel. Gush to the next enquirer: ‘I’d

Bruce Anderson

The Chinese tried to get me drunk

China: what next? Around the time of the millennium, I wrote that during this century, many of the world’s great questions would be answered in Chinese characters and that great fortunes would be made, and lost, in the China trade. That is one prophecy which might hold good. No one ever says that they could take or leave Maotai Churchill said that the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward, and it is worth following the Chinese example and thinking in epochs. Consider one of the most significant might-have-beens in history: the career of the 15th-century eunuch admiral Zheng He. He commanded an enormous fleet and