Society Archives

Saturday

27 May 2023

What Phillip Schofield teaches us about public morality

On one level it’s all fluff and gossip, but the Phillip Schofield story actually raises some interesting questions about what remains of our idea of public morality. Let’s start from the beginning. In early 2020, Schofield very publicly came out as gay. He posted a statement on social media that emphasised his gratitude for the loving support of his wife of 27 years and his two daughters. The strong implication was that he had not acted on his homosexual inclinations, that he was the utterly devoted family man, plunged into an impossible situation. ‘With the strength and support of my wife and daughters, I have been coming to terms with

Gavin Mortimer

French sport has been plunged into crisis

The head of the French Olympic Committee has resigned just over a year out from the Games’ opening in Paris. Brigitte Henriques announced her decision at the Games’ committee’s general assembly, the result according to the French media of ‘a year-and-a-half of internal squabbling.’ There was much fanfare when Henriques was nominated to the role in June 2021, winning 58 per cent of the vote to triumph over her nearest rival, the former Judo Olympic champion Thierry Rey. The then 50-year-old Henriques was lauded as the first female president of the French Olympic committee, the culmination of a career that had included a stint as the vice-president of the French

Julia Lewis

American bully XL dogs should be banned

The American bully XL is, despite its name and reputation, said to be good with children and a friendly dog. However, it can turn, with terrible consequences. A father of two young children was killed by a dog, believed to be an XL bully, in Leigh, Greater Manchester, last week. Jonathan Hogg, 37, had apparently been playing with the dog when it suddenly went for his throat. Hogg didn’t stand a chance against such a powerful creature. Since 2021, XL bullies – and one XL cross – have killed seven people in the UK, three of them children: Bella Rae Birch, 17 months, Alice Stones, four, and ten-year-old Jack Lis. The

James Esses

How trans ideology came for therapy

One afternoon in May 2021, as I was sat at my desk, an email notification from my university course appeared on my screen. ‘Termination of Contract’ was the subject line. I crumbled into pieces on the floor. I was fortunate to be at my mother’s house at the time and she comforted me. But the truth was that I was inconsolable. I had devoted four years of my life towards training to become a psychotherapist. I had spent tens of thousands of pounds in the process. In one email, my hard work and future aspirations had come crashing down. The question going round and round inside my head was:

Friday

26 May 2023

Patrick O’Flynn

The misdirected talent of Mizzy, the ‘TikTok terror’

Tessa Jowell once ignited a furious political row by claiming that inner-city youths active in criminal gangs were exhibiting a misdirected spirit of enterprise. ‘These people have very formidable entrepreneurial skills which they have put to bad use,’ she claimed. I was put in mind of her observation when watching the teenage TikTok miscreant Mizzy being grilled by Piers Morgan on television this week. For the benefit of the vanishingly small number of people still unaware of the exploits of Mizzy, real name Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, this youth has become notorious for videoing himself carrying out extremely unpleasant and traumatising ‘pranks’ on unsuspecting members of the public. These have included taking

Gavin Mortimer

Does a ‘Pride progress’ flag really make rugby more inclusive?

The Rugby Football Union will fly the ‘Pride Progress’ flag at Twickenham this weekend, when a World XV team play the Barbarians invitational side. According to the Daily Telegraph, the RFU’s decision is ‘in response to the selection of Israel Folau’ in the World XV. The 34-year-old Folau was a regular in the Australian team for a number of years before he was sacked in 2019 for airing his views on homosexuality. A devout Christian, Folau has subsequently represented Tonga, from where his family – and faith – originates. Why do some bourgeois progressives appear incapable of respecting the beliefs of Christians and Muslims? It is 200 years since missionaries from

Damian Thompson

The Vatican and the Mafia – why Italy can’t seem to shake off organised crime

35 min listen

The Sicilian Mafia is one of the most murderously amoral organisations on the planet – yet babyishly sentimental when it comes to Italian peasant Catholicism. And, like other branches of Italian organised crime, questions exist over whether they have allies in the Vatican, some of whose senior officials are as keen on money-laundering as the Mafia, only not so good at covering their traces. The relationship between the hitmen and the hierarchy casts an exotic shadow over a new series of thrillers by Alexander Lucie-Smith, the first of which, The Chemist of Catania, has just been published. To quote A.N. Wilson, Lucie-Smith’s plots are fast and his characters unforgettable. ‘Menace, suspense,

Ross Clark

Online shopping has not killed off the high street, yet

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, not at the beginning of the year when the wise and good were confidently predicting that Brexit-bound Britain would turn out to have the worst economy in the developed world in 2023. The UK economy would be contracting, they said, while almost everyone else’s expanded. We have had enough of trying to buy clothes online, though we are happy to buy other stuff in this way Now, as Germany descended officially into recession this week, more evidence emerges that Britain, so far, has avoided the same fate. The Office for National Statistics’ retail figures for April show that sales volumes were up

Zoe Strimpel

Martin Amis and the death of the lascivious young man

In the days since Martin Amis died at 73 of oesophageal cancer, the papers have been full of tributes. Mostly by men, mostly admiring, and clearly envious of Mart’s gutsy, mad way with words and his lusty, hard-living literary life, full of the cigarettes that killed him and more booze and women than today’s young literary chaps could ever hope to get anywhere near. Amis was, it seems clear in memoriam, a man’s writer. Except that he wasn’t. At least, he wasn’t for young women like me. Primed already by the total horniness of Philip Roth’s narrators, and particularly Alexander Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint, I dove happily into the fervid

Thursday

25 May 2023

Philip Patrick

Does Gary Lineker deserve Amnesty’s human rights award?

‘We need to be careful with the language we use,’ said Gary Lineker as he picked up an award from Amnesty International in Rome for his ‘strong commitment towards immigration and human rights issues’. It was an interesting line to take, given it was Lineker’s intemperate tweeting – particularly his referencing of 1930s Germany in relation to language used by Home Secretary Suella Braverman – that boosted his social justice warrior profile and probably helped win him the award. Having collected his gong, Lineker claimed in a waffly interview with Channel 4 to be a believer in freedom of speech. ‘But,’ the Match of the Day host said, ‘in my

Debbie Hayton

What Parkrun gets wrong about trans rights

Siân Longthorpe’s record breaking time of 18 minutes and 53 seconds in the Porthcawl Parkrun highlights all that is wrong with a policy that allows runners to self-declare their sex and then pick up records and awards. Longthorpe finished the race over a minute ahead of Anneliese Loveluck, according to the Parkrun website. But it is Loveluck’s name that we should remember. She appears to have set the fastest time in that race for a biological female – someone who was born as a girl and who went through female puberty. Her experience in life has been rather different to mine and Longthorpe’s. Like me, Longthorpe is a ‘transwoman’. We are male

Patrick O’Flynn

When will the Tories come clean on their migration plan?

Net annual immigration – which successive Tory manifestos promised the electorate would be brought down below 100,000 – has just topped 600,000, an all-time record. During 2022 some 606,000 more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it, according to official figures from the Office for National Statistics. As a result, we must all look around for a new major city to use as a yardstick. The places traditionally deployed to give people an idea of the enormous scale of the influx such as Hull (population approx. 320,000) or Sunderland (340,000) or Rishi Sunak’s home city of Southampton (250,000) will no longer suffice. We are moving into the

Melanie McDonagh

Just Stop Oil’s Chelsea Flower Show protest is a new low

You have to sink low, very low, to target the Chelsea Flower show for an environmental protest. But the boys and girls of Just Stop Oil are, it seems, up for tormenting even the most blameless and benign element of society: gardeners. One of the show gardens, designed by Paul Hervey-Brookes, was sprayed with orange powder. I’m not sure what was its offence. Hervey Brooks can’t have been sponsored by Shell. Maybe there’s a clue in what one of the protesters shouted before being marched off by security: ‘What’s the use of a garden if you can’t eat?’. Well, I agree that this particular garden wasn’t big on fruit and veg. It

Ross Clark

Electricity is to blame for stubbornly high energy prices

So much for price-fixing. The energy price cap is finally set to fall, with the result that the average household should have to pay no more than £2,074 a year for its energy from 1 July. The price cap itself has fallen from £3,280, but bills were in practice limited by the government’s other great intervention in the energy market: the energy price guarantee. This was, in effect, a cap on the price cap which limited prices at a level where the average household paid no more than £2,500 a year. As a result, household bills will fall from an average of £2,500 to £2,074 – a drop of £426.

Olivia Potts

Confit: the best (and most delicious) way of cooking duck

Of all the myriad ways of preserving, confit always strikes me as wonderfully improbable. The ability to preserve meat just through cooking it slowly in its own fat feels particularly wild. And the fact that this simple, unlikely process makes the meat more tender, more flavoursome than any other way of handling it only adds to the magic. Of course, if I pause for a moment and engage my brain, it’s very obvious why it’s such a successful method: most preservation relies on salting to reduce water levels, or excluding oxygen from the preserved food, both of which prevent bacteria from growing. Duck confit takes a belt and braces approach.

Tanya Gold

Wuthering Heights in Devon: the Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island, reviewed

The Pilchard Inn sits at the entrance to Burgh Island, a minute tidal island off the coast of south Devon. The island is home to the Burgh Island Hotel, an eerie Art Deco masterpiece built by the son of a screw mogul, which dominates the view from Bigbury-on-Sea like Coney Island: it is more apparition than hotel. The hotel is faded, fascinating, plated in Art Deco and decorated with vast screws. I wonder if this is a joke: there is little information about the early years of the house, which vibrates with depravity and things unsaid. To compound the mystery, Agatha Christie wrote here in a shack by the sea,

Roger Alton

Is Uefa just useless – or is it worse than that?

It’s not clear how many readers of this journal will be affected, but anyone planning a stag weekend in Prague ought to steer clear of the first week of June. That’s when the city hosts the Uefa Conference League final at the 20,000-capacity Eden Arena, home to Slavia Prague. The finalists are West Ham – average home gate a 60,000 sellout – and Fiorentina, average gate 25-30,000. Which raises the question: is Uefa just utterly useless or is it worse than that? This game could have filled Wembley twice over; now it’s like holding the coronation in a parish church Both finalists have been allocated 5,000-odd tickets, with the remainder

Wednesday

24 May 2023

Rod Liddle

Welcome to the theatre of the absurd

Iam on the horns of a dilemma, I am in a moral quandary. I had intended to spend this morning reporting a hate crime to the Metropolitan Police regarding the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the forthcoming appearance by a duo called Tambo & Bones. According to the blurb, this performance invites the audience to ‘join their journey from comedy double-act, to hip-hop superstars, to activists in an America at the epicentre of the global Black Lives Matter movement’. And therein lies my problem, because – if I am being honest – I would rather have my wisdom teeth extracted without anaesthetic by Helen Keller than join Tambo & Bones

Melvyn Bragg

My lunch with Salman Rushdie

I have just come back from spending some days with David Hockney at his house in Normandy. We are making a film about him – the longest film about a single subject I have ever attempted. Like Monet’s, Hockney’s environment is his subject. The great sequence of ‘The Four Seasons’ is from his grounds. He finds all the different blossoms he needs there, and there is a river and a pond. His friend has turned an old barn into a magnificent studio. David is in his mid-eighties but is as sharp as he was the first time I interviewed him for The South Bank Show in 1978. Since then, there

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rioting in Cardiff, rising migration and falling inflation

Home A crash in which a 15- and a 16-year-old boy riding on an electric bike were killed led to rioting, the burning of cars and attacks on police in the Ely estate in Cardiff; social media had said the deaths followed a police chase, which the police denied. But video evidence seemed to show a chase. During the riot, one of the boys’ mothers posted a Facebook message: ‘Please I beg you all to stop and let my son be moved to hospital so I can see him.’ A woman hit on 10 May by a police motorcycle escorting the Duchess of Edinburgh died. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister,