Society

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The strange obsession with Phillip Schofield

As I have noted before, there is always another circle. I thought that last week’s scandal (originally entitled ‘Suellagate’ or ‘speedgate’ by the papers) could not be surpassed for its sheer vacuousness and pointlessness. But then I did not foresee that the next week would be one in which every newspaper and news bulletin would lead with a story about a morning television presenter. Yet here we are, after more than a week of national debate about Phillip Schofield. I first became aware of Schofield when he was presenting children’s television from the BBC’s ‘broom cupboard’ with Gordon the Gopher. I have not followed the career of either character very

Peter Jones

Jeremy Clarke would have felt at home in Pompeii

Classical literature has the reputation of being pretty serious stuff, far removed from the world that Jeremy Clarke inhabited. But he would have felt perfectly at home in Pompeii. Take the conversation decorating the grave monument of the bar-owners Lucius Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas (beat that, Frankie Howerd!): ‘Innkeeper! The bill!’ ‘You’ve had a sextarius of wine, and bread: one as. Relish, two asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘The girl, eight asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Hay for the mule, two asses.’ ‘That mule – it’ll be the ruin of me.’ Jeremy would also surely have admired the lifestyle and works of the scandalous author Petronius, whom the historian Tacitus described as follows: ‘He slept

The Spectator

Letters: Jeremy Clarke was an example to us all

Goodbye, Jeremy Each week I opened The Spectator at Low Life in part to read that brilliant column and, more recently, to see how Jeremy Clarke was coping with his deteriorating health. Always hoping the column would be there; that he had, despite excruciating pain, penned us another. Like very many of his regular admiring readers, I had found the last two weeks disturbingly sad and last week we learned that he has died and is free at last from his suffering. As an oncologist, during a career treating thousands of patients, at first ones with prostate and other urological cancers, and later ones with breast cancer, I have seen

Matthew Dennison

Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter

I spoke too soon. Beatrix Potter, I suggested in an afterword to my 2016 biography of the author and illustrator, had escaped the distortions of sexual and racial revisionism that now blight so many eminent and long-dead British writers. But no longer. Last week a specialist in postcolonial literature at a northern university accused Potter of failing to acknowledge her indebtedness to an oral storytelling tradition of enslaved Africans working on American plantations. Welcome, please, a new Potter for the 21st century: exploitative, colonialist, dishonest. Potter’s concealment, claims Dr Emily Zobel Marshall, ‘[feeds] into a damaging and recurring appropriation of Black cultural forms that continues today’. Blimey. Zobel Marshall’s hypothesis

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

How Ireland lost its craic

So, which country is putting health warnings and calorie counts on bottles of alcohol for the benefit of its citizens? Nope, not Canada or New Zealand. But you’re getting warm… It’s Ireland, the country that gave us Guinness, Jameson, Bushmills and, for those who like that kind of thing, Baileys. That’s right: a health warning just like for cigarettes. But instead of rotting lungs, presumably there’ll be a lovely picture of a liver with cirrhosis. What effect will it have on me? None, dear reader, none. I drink to forget this sort of thing. But that’s the way Ireland is going (actually has gone) for a generation: not so much

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 03 June 2023

Three enormous cheers for Thomas Charlsen, Norwegian International and great friend and teammate, for setting up and working day and night to organise the World Bridge Tour ‘hybrid’ invitational, which last week saw the first live tournament held in Sopot, Poland’s Brighton-on-sea. Twelve teams competed at the wonderful Grand Hotel where we stayed and played.  Waseem Naqvi and Lee Rosenthal, both living in London, formed a team with a strong Polish pair, previously unknown to them, and they did very well indeed. Today’s hand shows their most spectacular result (See diagram). Lee and Waseem are not a regular partnership but they both have the same ethos and don’t mind an

Robin Oakley

The science of horse racing

Everybody in racing is looking for an edge. With 7-4 the field, the punter is looking for a 2-1. The racecourse executive wonders which pop group will add 4,000 to the gate if booked for after-racing entertainment. The jockey on a confirmed front runner plans to slip the field out of the stalls. Trainers all seek an extra ingredient to help win them races consistently. At Sarsen Farm, a state-of-the-art new yard in Upper Lambourn built on the site of what was once a decrepit farmhouse then a Jockey Club tractor depot, Daniel and Claire Kubler are hoping that what a famous if ungrammatical advertisement for white goods used to

Melissa Kite

The BB wants to put my dream farm on a skip

‘Have you got your passport? Your phone? Your wallet?’ The builder boyfriend patted his pockets and told me not to worry as we drove through the Gatwick drop-off lane where they charge you £5 to open your car door for three seconds and push someone out. When I arrived back home, he texted: ‘I left my euros in the pocket of my work jeans.’ No matter. He could draw out cash when he got there. It had been a last minute rush to get him on a flight to Cork to view this dream farm I had found, in the sun-drenched valley. It was really a modest white bungalow but

Taki

The death of fair play

New York He’s oilier than Molière’s Tartuffe but gets away with more. His latest move involves the martial art of jiu-jitsu, where he managed to get a referee to reverse his decision. I’ve been competing in martial arts for close to 60 years now, and have rarely, in fact never, witnessed a ref reverse his or her decision. But I’m no bad loser like Zuckerberg. Some of you old-timers may even remember something called fair play. Bad calls are inevitable in sport, and one is used to taking the bad ones with the good ones because in the end they all even out. Facebook’s honcho ended up a multibillionaire under

Debbie Hayton

Kathleen Stock and the rejection of reality

Last night, Professor Kathleen Stock told the Oxford Union that we need to talk about ‘reality’. She is absolutely right. Make no mistake, Stock is a reasonable voice in a political debate where many appear to be living in some sort of fantasy world. Her views are what many would consider to be mainstream. For example, that human beings are sexually dimorphic, and it is sometimes appropriate to provide separate services for each sex. But by voicing those ideas, Stock has been subjected to opprobrium. In 2021, she was hounded from her job at Sussex University. The scenes surrounding Stock’s talk last night were depressingly familiar. Young people – who

Tuesday

Kenneth Payne

Can regulation stop artificial intelligence wiping out humanity?

The arrival of super intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) could wipe out humanity. That’s the fear of leading AI figures, who have today signed an open letter calling for AI safety to be a ‘global priority’. Geoffrey Hinton, a legendary figure among AI researchers, recently left Google and sounded the alarm. ‘It’s the first time in mankind’s history that we’re on the brink of developing something smarter than us,’ he told The Spectator. ‘We may be history’. Sixty-one percent of Americans polled recently by Ipsos agree with him that AI is a threat to civilisation. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and the chief architect of ChatGPT, is an enthusiastic advocate for more powerful AI and

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Succession: five nightmares for the next pope

14 min listen

A charming octogenarian who plays ruthless games with the people who think they’re going to succeed him: I reckon Logan Roy would have recognised a kindred spirit in Pope Francis, despite their diametrically opposed politics. Like many of you, I’m heartbroken that Succession has come to an end – but if you’re missing the back-stabbing melodrama then you could always start following the real-life struggle to shape the Catholic Church after Francis. Plenty of cardinals would like to swap their red cassocks for a white one. But, as I suggest in this episode of Holy Smoke, whoever eventually takes the job will have to confront at least five nightmare situations, most of them created by the camera-friendly but privately ferocious current occupant of the See

Andrew Tettenborn

The university union may be beyond redemption

Life is not terribly good these days for most university teachers. Colleges, once centres of collegiate administration run on a principle of de facto equality and open expression of opinion, are now top-down managed by a cadre of bosses more interested in spreadsheets than seminars, and image more than erudition, where an injudicious word can cause serious trouble. To add insult to injury, jobs at the lower end, previously fairly safe, are now precarious and pretty wretchedly paid. You might have thought the lecturers’ union UCU would be an effective counterweight to all this, especially since universities are to all intents and purposes public sector employers, with union representation correspondingly

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Succession’s only real flaw

It’s strange to reach the end of something you’ve relished with a sense of relief. HBO’s Succession has given me and many others lashings of pleasure, but I was glad as the credits rolled on the final episode. Fascinating though they were, it was satisfying to wave goodbye to the Roys, every one of them both great viewing and utterly repulsive. One of the many great things about Succession, which makes it almost unique in our stultifying didactic age, is that it didn’t tell the viewer what to think Like The Iliad, which stops when its stated theme, the anger of Achilles, is over, and never gets to the fall

Monday

Dr Philip Mortimer

How much compensation should contaminated blood victims get?

The Financial Times estimated on 10 May that the impending compensation relating to the UK haemophilia treatment misadventure around 1980 will reach £12 billion. The Times has suggested the figure is £8 billion. These are very large sums indeed, and they relate to previous UK government failures to engage with a problem that the press now refers to as a scandal. ‘Scandal’ implies gross maladministration and/or professional incompetence, and the current (third) inquiry into the matter, under Judge Langstaff, now needs to resolve the problem without any further delay. Judge Langstaff has undertaken to report by the autumn of this year, and he has already recommended interim awards of compensation.

Liam Duffy

The French academic paying a heavy price for probing the Muslim Brotherhood

Loitering by the entrance, I clock a large gentleman with tattoos crawling up his neck from underneath his collar. It’s immediately obvious he’s not there for lunch: he is there on behalf of the French state to prevent an assassination. Specifically, the targeting of the academic I am meeting: Dr. Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who’s been living under police protection for the last six weeks since the reaction to her book on the Muslim Brotherhood took a turn. The Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps the most significant Islamist organisation in the world. A political party founded against the backdrop of 20th century colonialism in Egypt, it arrived in the West via students and exiles fleeing repressive

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The trouble with Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra

It’s the worst thing to happen to Cleopatra since that snake in the mausoleum. Queen Cleopatra is the second season of African Queens, a revisionist Netflix strand touting itself as a documentary series on black monarchs. Produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, it is an attempt to repackage history for a contemporary audience. Queen Cleopatra purports to explore ‘the real woman’ and ‘her truth’ as a female warrior who ‘bowed to no man’. Cleopatra was a tenacious leader and a canny strategist but her reign ended in suicide after her defeat to Octavian at Actium destroyed the Ptolemaic dynasty. No doubt there’s an audience for kickass girlboss history but there’s

Sunday

Julie Bindel

The malign influence of Mermaids is becoming increasingly clear

While I was writing about the latest scandalous revelation involving the children’s charity Mermaids and the Tavistock Gender identity development service (GIDS) it occurred to me that readers of these pages will already be familiar with the key planks of this terrible tale. You will doubtless have seen countless articles critiquing gender ideology and the medical treatments on vulnerable children over the years that have become normalised, and will be aware that gender ideology has seeped into pretty much every key institution in the land.   The consequences of gender ideology for women as well as children have been grave, as it has led to the push for men to legally be

John Armstrong

Diversity and inclusion doesn’t belong in the maths curriculum

In March, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – an independent body which oversees standards and quality in UK universities – released new guidance on curriculum design in mathematics. This guidance states: ‘Values of EDI [Equality Diversity and Inclusion] should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience.’ At least on the face of it, this guidance seems odd. University lecturers are not teaching racist courses on calculus or sexist proofs of the prime number theorem. There is, therefore, no need for the QAA to tell them that they shouldn’t do this. Can saying 2+2=4 be racist? Astonishingly, there is a hardcore of postmodernists who would say that

Tom Goodenough

Let’s call time on football’s absurd beer ban

When Qatar announced an alcohol ban at last year’s football World Cup, there was uproar. The decision, made public a few days before the tournament kicked off in November, was proof for critics that the event should never have been held in the country. But in English stadiums today a similar – and perhaps even more bizarre – rule relating to alcohol is enforced. Fans at Premier League, Championship, League One and League Two games are banned from drinking ‘in sight of the pitch’. They can booze to their heart’s content in stadium bars, but if they take a drink back to their seat, they risk being arrested and fined.