Society

I have found heaven in West Cork

A bay mare was standing over a foal curled up sleeping at her feet. Yawning and struggling to keep her eyes open, she was snoozing herself in the sun-drenched paddock of a small white farmhouse. If I had stopped the car to admire the scene every time the scene was this perfect, then I would not have made a mile’s progress on my third house-hunting trip to Ireland. In the country lanes, drivers slowed and waved to me on every bend. A cyclist put his foot on the ground and grinned as though genuinely pleased to see me. Everyone here has time. That’s how it seems anyway. The shop windows

Goodbye, my dear Low Life colleague

He bore his death sentence more gracefully than most heroes I’ve read about. As the end approached, his columns showed no self-pity or regrets. Meticulous detail was Jeremy’s forte, and atmosphere. Oh, how I envied his ability to convey the mood of a place, the setting that he was writing about. He could replicate a conversation in a pub as if he had recorded it, and it never once sounded made up.  He was the patron saint of the poor but happy. Unlike his predecessor Jeffrey Bernard, who weekly lamented about being broke and ill, Jeremy was the exact opposite, describing his cancer towards the end like a disinterested scientist

‘Protect the NHS’: The nanny state is waging war on life’s pleasures

British political discourse has barely progressed since David Cameron told voters in 2010 that he represented the ‘party of’ our revered healthcare service.  Over the past few weeks we’ve heard pledges – all clearly with an election in mind – ranging from the inconsequential to the ridiculous. Tired promises about community-led treatment. Receptionists-turned-‘care navigators’. School leavers working as doctors. But more often than not, they have been laced with the same pernicious message: that it is the behaviour of the British public that must change, rather than our healthcare model. That people must be regulated, even though failure is in the NHS’s DNA. This is nothing new, of course. For years,

Brendan O’Neill

We need to talk about Just Stop Oil’s class privilege

I have never felt such a strong desire to buy a man a pint as I did when I watched that builder clear Just Stop Oil protesters off the road. The clip has gone viral. We see an irate bloke take direct action against doom-mongering posh irritants. They were doing one of their funereal marches on Blackfriars Bridge in Central London, to raise awareness about the coming eco-apocalypse or some nonsense, when the man appeared out of nowhere, fuming. He ripped their daft banners from their hands. He pushed one of them off the road. He looked furious, and why not? A man being prevented from getting to work by

How the Cardiff riot was sparked by social media

After a traumatic night which saw rioters torch cars, volley fireworks at police, and indulge in nine hours of mayhem, residents of the close-knit Ely, in Cardiff, are left to deal with the reality of what a rumour can do in the social media age. It started on Monday evening. A tragedy which would usually define such a night was only the beginning of the destruction which followed. On Ely’s Snowden Road, two teenage boys said to be riding an off-road bike or scooter, were killed in a crash. Such a harrowing event was the catalyst for what reporters on the ground described as a ‘war zone.’ As news of

Prince Harry’s legal defeat will be particularly painful

Today, Prince Harry lost a court case. If the law of averages is to be believed, he has involved himself in so many that it was inevitable that at least one was not going to go his way. Still, this particular defeat is likely to be difficult for the Duke of Sussex to take, as it involves one of his most cherished concerns; that of his personal security. The High Court has ruled that the Home Office’s decision that Harry will not be allowed to pay the police to protect him when he is in the United Kingdom is fair and legal. The Home Office had argued that it would

Theo Hobson

Martin Amis and the idolatry of style over substance

To be a bookish young man in the late twentieth century was to be a Martin Amis fan. I was sixteen when I read The Rachel Papers, and it thrilled me as much as any novel ever has. In some ways more. For here, in its narrator Charles Highway, was a whole way of life. One could be into books, in an ambitious, obsessive way, and also be a cool dude, who smoked fags, chased girls, dispensed witty put-downs, sneered at squares. Here was a comprehensive ideal, mixing high and low, art and fun, the mind and the body, tradition and now. The novel is largely set in West London,

Elon Musk, George Soros and the blurring of life and art

Was Elon Musk antisemitic when he compared George Soros to Magneto, the apparently Jewish, Marvel Comics supervillain? Whatever one’s view on this question, Musk’s comments may be taken as a pointed marker of a time in which life and art are increasingly indistinguishable. Musk claimed in a tweet to his 140 million followers that Soros is akin to the X-Men anti-hero Magneto, of comic book and movie fame. Like Magneto, Musk said, Soros ‘hates humanity’ and ‘wants to erode the very fabric of civilisation.’ Not flattering, but the claim that it’s antisemitic, because the atheist billionaire Soros, aged 90, is ethnically Jewish, bears interrogation. The comparison of Soros to Magneto

Sam Leith

The price others pay for our next-day deliveries

When I was not more than nine or ten years old, I sent off in the post for a free poster that I’d seen advertised in a comic. It depicted Superman, whom I held in high regard, scragging a distinctly second-tier villain called Nick O’Teen; the relic of some lame early-eighties anti-smoking campaign. For reasons I can’t now fathom, I burned to have this on my bedroom wall. I remember it now not because of the poster, but because the wait for it to arrive. ‘Allow eight weeks for delivery’, it said. And it really did take eight weeks to show up – which, when you’re nine and you really, really want a Superman poster, might as well be a lifetime.  The very idea of waiting that long for anything, now, will

A tribute to my brother, Jeremy Clarke

My big brother Jeremy Clarke, or ‘Jum’ as he is affectionately known by me and my sister, was the most voracious reader of books you’ll probably ever meet. He will be known to most of you as a writer – The Spectator’s Low Life columnist – but to me he was a reader.  He had hundreds upon hundreds of books and had read them all at least twice.  He read standing up, sitting cross-legged in a chair, lying on his bed through the night or throughout the day, with brief pauses for mundane physical necessities such as eating a meal or making a cup of tea or going to the

Gareth Roberts

The fascinating obsession with Phillip Schofield’s downfall

The rift between Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, long-standing sobbing/giggling presenters of This Morning, has been one of the big talking points of recent weeks. A torrent of Holly ‘n’ Phil headlines has covered every twist and turn: Holly’s shock This Morning departure! (She clocked off ten minutes early to attend a function.) Shock This Morning farewell from Holly and Phil! (They’re taking a summer holiday like they do every year.) These headlines were all false tempters, but I’m only slightly ashamed to say I found myself clicking on every single one. Now, though Schofield really has gone for good: I was so used to these all-mouth-and-no-trousers false dawns that

The best of Low Life: Jeremy Clarke remembered

Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator’s Low Life columnist, died this morning at his home in France. He was 66. For 23 years, his column was, for many readers, the first page they turned to in the magazine. Here is a brief selection of the best of Low Life: On self-confidence  30 March 2002: ‘Two Christmases ago, Sharon gave her Mum a self-help paperback called The Duty Trap. The book is aimed at people who persist in unhappy, one-sided relationships out of a misplaced sense of duty. On New Year’s Eve, says Sharon, her Mum finished the book, went upstairs, packed a suitcase and walked out. She went back to the farmer, now

The confrontational genius of Martin Amis

Martin Amis had impeccable timing, as anyone who looks at his sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books ought to admit. He died 50 years exactly after the publication of his first novel, The Rachel Papers, and the beginning of this wayward, unflinching, confrontational genius’s hold on us, and on fiction expressed in English prose. Not many novelists, even the very greatest, have a career that lasts 50 years. Dickens’s lasted a little over 30; Henry James the same; Waugh not much more than that, and sometimes it’s very much shorter. Jane Austen’s was over in six years. A novelist who continues to claim our attention as long as Amis can reasonably expect

Julie Burchill

The sad truth about Phillip Schofield

You hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over professions in the near future – and I think television presenters should be particularly worried. Think about it. Robots wouldn’t expect salaries of hundreds of thousands of pounds. They wouldn’t jump queues. They wouldn’t have lurid headlines about paedophile brothers casting a pall over their shiny facade. And they wouldn’t show a cheery Doctor Jekyll-bot to the public and a nasty Mr Snide-bot to those they considered their inferiors. I’m thinking, of course, about Phillip Schofield. Amusingly, when you go to his Wikipedia page you find a line at the top saying: ‘This article is about the television presenter. For

Fraser Nelson

When will the Tories face up to Britain’s benefits scandal?

When researching The Spectator cover story last week, we came across a figure so shocking that I felt it had to be wrong: that Manchester, a city where 40,000 job vacancies are currently being offered, has an unemployment rate of 18 per cent. That is to say: almost one in five of the working-age population in the city (excluding children and pensioners) is on some kind of out-of-work benefits, including incapacity benefits. Not salary-tops, not supplementary welfare but benefits given to those who are not in work. In the middle of a worker shortage crisis, it’s quite the scandal. But one you will not have heard of because the figure

Fentanyl is being laced to become even more deadly

In February on a snowy Wednesday, I met a homeless man named David standing outside a Safeway panhandling for money. He was wearing a white hoodie with the words ‘Portland State University’ printed on it and holding two empty beer cans and a remote control. I asked him what it’s like to be homeless in Portland. ‘I know how not to be homeless, but there’s a reason I am out here and something’s not right,’ he replied. He told me that when he gets housed, he often gets kicked out quickly and doesn’t want to have to go through the effort again. Something bad happened to him when he was

Patrick O'Flynn

Will Starmer let Sunak off the hook again over immigration?

Despite the Conservatives having broken all their promises to bring down immigration volumes for 13 years in a row, conventional wisdom has it that migration is Labour’s Achilles’ heel. However high the Tories have allowed immigration to go, the public has generally suspected that Labour would push it still higher. Brits have long memories about the party ‘sending out the search parties’ for immigrants under Tony Blair – nor have they forgotten Gordon Brown’s dumbfounded reaction to the migration scepticism of the redoubtable Gillian Duffy on the campaign trail in 2010. This week is likely to see the collapse of that popular prejudice – not because of anything active that Labour