Society

Wednesday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

What I’ve learned from a lifetime of travelling

In the language of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, futa (I’m told) means ‘river’ and leufú means ‘big’. So Spanish–speaking Chile could have called it the Rio Grande but instead have kept the indigenous name, Futaleufú, for this sinuous, deep, swift-flowing river, hurling its clear turquoise waters at the black basalt that flanks its roaring gorges. That this is one of the finest white-water rafting and kayaking rivers in the world is uncontested. And the river has given its name to the small town nestling beneath snowy Andean peaks and glaciers, past which it flows. Before crossing the border into Argentina on a dirt road, six miles upriver, I spent

Sasha Hinkley

The James Webb Space Telescope and the search for life in the universe

The James Webb space telescope, the most powerful telescope ever built, has gathered some extraordinary images since it was launched by Nasa just over a year ago. There have been shots of stars on the cusp of death, of stars violently colliding together, and even of ancient galaxies that have challenged our very understanding of the cosmos. But it’s the study of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – that, for me, really justifies the telescope’s $10 billion price tag. 1 / 4 James Webb space telescope full-scale model (NASA) 2 / 4 James Webb space telescope mirror (NASA/Desiree Stover) 3 / 4 Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket launches with James

Douglas Murray

The joke is on America

I was brought up on Dan Quayle jokes. You know the ones – like the gag that the then vice-president had turned up in Latin America and apologised for not speaking Latin. Thankfully vice-presidents are no longer a laughing stock. Today we have Kamala Harris. Anyway, probably the most memorable line about Quayle was that people were surprised he was able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yet recently such a feat has indeed come to seem extraordinary to the American right. Today’s Republicans seem to believe that America can have a foreign policy or a domestic policy, but not both. Just consider the main talking points

The Spectator

Letters: The dangers of certainty

Uncertain times Sir: Kate Andrews’s article on the era of economic certainty (‘Crash test’, 18 March) is not the first article I have read – especially in the financial press – telling us that we live in uncertain times, as though at some stage in the past everyone knew exactly what was going to happen. I am unable to recall such a time. I would argue that what we really should worry about is certainty. When people start talking about the end of history, claiming that there is a certain fortune to be made in buying cryptocurrencies or when ‘everybody’ knows the most important thing is to achieve net zero,

Kara Kennedy

The killer next door: growing up in the murder capital of Wales

It was about this time last year when I stopped receiving the daily messages. At first, I had replied politely. He was from my hometown, so it felt weird to ignore him. A man who knew all of my friends, had even dated some of them, and would often walk past me in the pub couldn’t be that bad, right? The messages started with the usual: ‘How are you, Kara? Do you fancy a drink?’ When I began to reject him, making it clear that I wasn’t interested, he became manic. He would ask me if I wanted to meet him in a forest not far from where I lived,

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 25 March 2023

Maybe I’m wrong but I can’t think of another sport, Mind or otherwise, where you can play against world champions as soon as you have learned the basics. The American Nationals are probably the best events for superstar watching and there are always a few players in the bar happy to chat and encourage newbies. My first National was in New Orleans. We played the Reisinger, made the final, didn’t come last and generally felt rather pleased with ourselves. I remember asking one of America’s best what he thought was the hardest thing for most keen players. He thought about it and said: ‘It’s very difficult to switch trump suit

Robin Oakley

There was more than one superhorse at Cheltenham

Aficionados came to this year’s Cheltenham Festival hoping to celebrate in Champion Hurdle contestant Constitution Hill a super-horse, a horse being spoken of after only five races as a potential Arkle. We left exhilarated by the exploits of three. Looking at Constitution Hill in a field of grazers, you would not pick him out as an obvious star. As his owner Michael Buckley told me two days after his triumph in the Champion Hurdle: ‘He wouldn’t win a trot in the indoor school.’ He just eats, sleeps and wins races. Says trainer Nicky Henderson: ‘We worry about him but he doesn’t worry about anything.’ As for the future, ‘You could

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The police have used a ‘wokescreen’ to cover their racism and misogyny

Where to start, with a police force where decent behaviour seems to be the exception rather than the norm?  For a quarter of a century since the murder of Stephen Lawrence caused the Macpherson report to call the Metropolitan police ‘institutionally racist’ we’ve been comforting ourselves – in the manner of frightened children humming in the dark – with the Few Bad Apples theory. It’s just so silly to say that. There are bad apples in all professions, but a milkman doesn’t have the right to arrest people and strip-search them, last time I checked. As Doreen Lawrence said, ‘It is not, and has never been, a case of a few ‘bad apples’ within the

Melissa Kite

The builder boyfriend is no figment of my imagination

The lady who walks her dog past my horses every day was obviously eager to tell me something. I have exchanged only a few polite words with her in the past but as she made her way slowly towards my field gate, she lingered, cutting a lonely figure. ‘Let’s go and talk to that lady,’ I said to the builder boyfriend, who was busy holding Darcy the thoroughbred by her lead rope, scratching her neck as she likes him to do, while I put her rug on. I always like to reach out to locals who seem friendly because the vast majority of passers-by in this neck of the woods

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of my wedding day

It’s been all go. After breakfast Treena brought a basin of warm water, a bar of soap and a face flannel into the bedroom. Not wanting to cede control of my personal hygiene, on top of all the other recent great and small losses of personal autonomy, even down to cutting up my own food, I have until now resisted her offer to wash me.  She pulled my T-shirt over my head. I lifted my arms and she gently soaped my armpits, an act which seemed more intimate somehow than making love. Now, with my arms aloft, seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject. ‘How about,’

Taki

The lost art of lunching

Gstaad As everyone knows, the balder, shorter and more repellent the seducer, the more lavish the lunch he produces for the dumb blonde. Lunch is that symptom of decadence and dalliance for which there is no longer room in today’s functional world. These days, a rare civilised lunch has only two purposes: the seduction of a lady or the exchange of serious ideas. The latter was achieved last week at an outdoor lunch with impeccable service and views of snow-capped mountaintops. My friends John and Irina Mappin chose a fresh day and civilised surroundings to discuss Ukraine and introduce me to a 26-year-old blonde, blue-eyed beauty, an AFAB, as we

Andrew Tettenborn

The UK is right to refuse entry to a Quran-burning activist

Nobody came well out of the Quran-scuffing incident at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield last month. Following calls from Islamic fundamentalists for severe measures to suppress any insults to Islam, the headmaster of the school concerned largely took their side rather than dismiss the incident as the school triviality it was; the council that employed him was equally pusillanimous. The police also chose to appease the hotheads by initially recording an entirely inadvertent cause of offence as a hate incident: only later it seems, with bad grace, did they condescend to gently reprimand a child over death threats to the boy who had dropped the book.  It is hard to see all this as anything

Tuesday

Alexander Horne

Does Boris Johnson’s partygate defence stand up to scrutiny?

This morning, Boris Johnson’s response to the accusations against him was published in a substantial dossier to the Privileges Committee. It comes just a day before the unprecedented hearing that is likely to determine his political future. This submission was a long time coming. In its interim report, published on 3 March, the Committee noted that it had first written to Johnson asking for his version of events as long ago as 21 July last year. Spectator books editor Sam Leith – who worked with Johnson in his former role as Daily Telegraph comment editor – suggested that this late submission was very much ‘on brand for the great man’. What

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry’s new project to challenge ‘gender norms’

What are Prince Harry’s pronouns? The obvious ones, of course, are ‘he/him’, but the mischievous might suggest that ‘heir/spare’ are just as likely. In either case, the Duke of Sussex has struck most of the world as a man who is in touch – if perhaps not through his own volition – with contemporary gender recognition. Therefore, it’s not a vast surprise that the latest charity that he and Meghan have chosen to support is one that has planted its flag in these areas, albeit with a twist. As with so many things that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are involved in, there is a gap between commendable intentions

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The UN’s global net zero target isn’t realistic

Does UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres really have any hope of persuading rich countries to commit to achieving net zero by 2040? This was a target he declared was vital as he launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Sixth Assessment Report yesterday. He will have his work cut out. The trouble is that while a handful of mostly European countries have enthusiastically set legally-binding targets to eliminate carbon emissions, mostly by 2050, the list is not really growing very fast at all. According to the ‘net zero tracker’ published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, there are currently 17 countries which have bound themselves by legal net

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Has government borrowing really been brought under control?

To what extent have the public finances really been brought under control? This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics reveals that public sector net borrowing reached £16.7 billion in February. This is more than double the figure from February 2022 of £7.1 billion, and also well above the consensus estimate of around £11 billion.    It is the highest February borrowing figure since records began, primarily driven upward by the Energy Price Guarantee, which continues to see the government cap the unit price of energy and subsidise the rest. Last February, Russia was only starting its illegal invasion of Ukraine; now the public sector net borrowing figure reflect all that’s

Danny Shaw

The Met police is in a dire state

For the past 12 months, the Metropolitan Police has been in the organisational equivalent of a body scanner. Every vital organ of this 194-year-old beast has been examined in detail by Baroness Louise Casey and her review team enabling them to understand the Met in a way that no one has done before. The results, from top to toe, are alarming – and demand emergency surgery.  Scotland Yard commissioned the report after one its officers, Wayne Couzens, was jailed for life for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021. The backdrop also includes a string of other shocking scandals that has contributed to plunging levels of

James Heale James Heale

Five things we learned from the Casey review into the Met Police

Today Louise Casey has published her report into the Metropolitan police – and it makes for damning reading. The review was commissioned in the aftermath of the rape, kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met PC Wayne Couzens in March 2021. Baroness Casey was appointed by the Met to lead an independent probe of its culture and standards of behaviour. She has today concluded that it can no longer be trusted to police itself because of ‘systemic and fundamental’ issues. Below are five key takeaways from Casey’s review. Women abandoned by the Met The Met has continued to throw the protection of women ‘to the side’ even after

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

In praise of the dashcam citizens policing our roads

Jeremy Bentham, thou shouldst be alive and doing a ton through the Mickleham Bends at this hour. Bentham’s great contribution to carceral theory, as most readers will know, was the panopticon. He imagined a prison where the cells were arranged in a rotunda so a guard in the middle could watch every prisoner without having to clop round from cell to cell. What was so clever about the idea, and why it fired Michel Foucault’s imagination, was not that it saved shoe-leather. It was that, because the prisoners didn’t know whether they were being watched or not at any given time, they would be forced to assume that they were and behave accordingly.  Now,

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

It’s no surprise the pandemic boom in cycling is over

In modern society, we live with a conundrum: there’s no need to endure physical discomfort of any kind, but unless you embrace it via exercise, it comes for you in the form of chronic illness. Good exercise can be very painful, however. In the case of the sport of cycling, agonisingly and unnecessarily so. Put it this way, the news today didn’t surprise me. Sales of bicycles have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years, apparently, as the pandemic boom in cycling has turned to bust. Or to put it another way, as tens of thousands of people come to their senses. I speak, of course, as a cyclist