Society

Saturday

David Loyn David Loyn

Is the West preparing to sell out the Afghan people again?

While the Taliban continues to double down against women in Afghanistan, the UN appears to be wanting to normalise relations with them. Women in the country are already blocked from almost all jobs and all education. Yet a week after the extremist group barred females from working for the UN, the organisation’s deputy secretary general Amina Mohammed said it was now time to take ‘baby steps’ towards ‘recognition (of the Taliban)’.   As UN spokespeople tried to limit the damage, protests poured in from Afghan opposition groups. One statement from a wide group of Afghan artists and human rights activists slammed nearly two years of ‘futile regional and global diplomacy’

Kim Thomas

The troubling truth about ‘gender affirming’ mastectomies

When Sinead Watson had a double mastectomy in June 2017 at the age of 26, she was initially ‘quite euphoric.’ Although born female, she had been taking testosterone for two years and was using the name Sean. The mastectomy, or ‘top surgery’, was the last step on her transition. ‘I was so glad that I’d finally got it done – no more binders, no more being paranoid that I was a man with boobs –  so I did feel really good about it,’ she says. After the surgery, however, she discovered she had no sensation at all in her chest area, something that continues to this day. ‘I realised after

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

There is hope yet for Britain’s car industry

The UK car industry is, of course, doomed. First we lost our native manufacturers and then, post Brexit, overseas manufacturers like Honda started to close down their UK factories, too. Finally came the farce of BritishVolt: the Tyneside factory which was going to transform the UK car industry by pumping out batteries, but collapsed before a spade could be put into the ground (what there is to buy, which is little more than a plot of land, has since been bought by an Australian company). Light commercial vehicles are on the ascendant as online shopping expands the market for deliveries The above narrative has become so engrained that it comes

Katy Balls Katy Balls

BBC chairman Richard Sharp resigns – what next? 

Richard Sharp has resigned as BBC chairman following a report into the circumstances of his appointment after claims that he had helped to facilitate a £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson while he was in 10 Downing Street. The report – by Adam Heppinstall KC – found that he had breached the code on public appointments by failing to declare his connection to the loan, which his acquaintance Sam Blyth (a distant cousin of Johnson’s) guaranteed for the former prime minister.  The whole affair is leading to questions over the role performed by Simon Case Announcing his resignation this morning, Sharp said that he accepted he had breached the ‘governance code’.

Alexander Larman

Are we about to witness the comeback of Meghan Markle?

Seasoned observers of Meghan Markle – and by now, surely, there cannot be any other kind – might be forgiven for wondering why the Duchess of Sussex has been keeping a comparatively low profile so far in 2023. Her husband seems ubiquitous, whether popping up in the law courts to denounce the media, plugging his memoir or keeping a nation guessing before announcing that he will, in fact, attend his father’s coronation. Meghan, on the other hand, has been notable by her absence from the public gaze. Yet it might be that she is preparing to make a grand comeback. The news broke recently that the Duchess has signed up

Thursday

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Yorkshire puddings: is there anything as satisfying?

My mother, a Yorkshire woman, would occasionally take shortcuts in the kitchen, but not when it came to a roast, and certainly not when it concerned a Yorkshire pudding. She even owned a specific Tupperware shaker for the job: like a plastic cocktail shaker, in 1970s orange colour, with a propellor insert, and a lidded pouring spout. The batter would be prepared in this shaker and handed to anyone foolish enough to pass through the kitchen, and woe betide anyone who stopped shaking before they were so instructed. There are few things more satisfying than filling a perfect Yorkshire pudding with gravy I didn’t inherit my mother’s Yorkshire pudding shaker,

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Faultless food with the promise of vengeance: The Trough, reviewed

Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land Daylesford Farm has sprouted leaves. It is no longer a farm shop, which should be a humble thing. I went to the Chypraze farm shop at Morvah last month, for instance. The proprietor only had honey, he said, and also pork, because he had just killed a pig. Daylesford is a sort of Las Vegas-themed hotel, invoking something half–imagined from something half-real. Caesar’s Palace; the Paris; the Luxor; the Venetian; Le Petit Trianon; Moreton-in-Marsh! It is not uncharming – many of us have a parallel life in which we live in Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land, on a pile of Lady Bamford’s dragon gold – but it

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Harry Kane is many things – but he’s not a leader

What’s not to love about David de Gea? Manchester United’s goalkeeper might appear to have it all: a humongous salary, a lovely family, a sensationally beautiful wife, Edurne Garcia, who is a star in her own right in Spain, and a pleasing ability to behave like a complete berk. He is a mix of utter brilliance and complete rubbish. On Sunday, de Gea went the wrong way every time before Solly March shot over the top  Last week he made a series of terrible errors, backed up by a woeful Harry Maguire, to gift Sevilla a Europa League tie that United should have won quite easily. Then at the weekend

Toby Young Toby Young

My blue tick humiliation

I was one of the first people to take up Elon Musk’s offer to purchase a blue tick, the Twitter equivalent of VIP status. Not because I didn’t have a complimentary one – I did, believe it or not – but because if you sign up to Twitter Blue it means you can post videos on the site that are longer than a couple of minutes. Poor Elon Musk then had to do a reverse ferret, announcing he’d be restoring the merit badges to a select few I had noticed that my friend Konstantin Kisin had put up a speech he’d made at the Oxford Union and it was getting

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Inside America’s Satanist movement

The largest gathering of Satanists in history is taking place in Boston this weekend. It’s not open to the public. Or, to be more precise, no longer open to the public. That’s because all the tickets have been sold. They’ve downgraded the supernatural in favour of aggressive secularism, with an emphasis on trans issues The second annual SatanCon is being organised by The Satanic Temple or ‘TST’, the world’s biggest Satanic sect, at the Marriott Hotel in Copley Square. That’s the same Marriott chain founded by a devout Mormon family who, back in the 1960s, only agreed to serve alcohol to guests after securing permission from the president of the

Wednesday

Iain Mansfield

The UK’s biggest teaching union has exposed its true colours

The National Education Union’s (NEU) mask slipped last month when four of the organisation’s senior figures published a new book, Lessons in Organising: What Trade Unionists Can Learn from the War on Teachers. It was endorsed by the NEU’s general secretary, Kevin Courtney, who called it ‘an excellent review of the attack on teachers and their unions, by authors well placed to point to ways to improve the fight back and resistance’.  The book confirms that the union’s priorities lie far from their members’ pay and workload, which they describe as ‘narrow issues’. Instead, the NEU’s leadership appears to be dedicated to fighting the ‘multiple oppressions of capitalism’ and transforming the union into a body that aims to

Steven Barrett

The EU has no right to lecture the UK over its Rwanda migrant plan

The EU deigns to warn the Tories: don’t try and bypass the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) when it comes to deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Senior EU officials, including European commissioner for home affairs Ylva Johansson and European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič, are among those to voice concern about the UK’s attitude toward the ECHR. But the sheer brass neck of the EU on this is hard to take. The EU is said to be worried that the UK intends to ignore injunctions from the ECHR. But the EU itself continues to drag its feet over its own accession to the European Convention on Human Rights which established the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I’ve missed you, Diane Abbott

I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life and I only properly realised this when she came back, gloriously, to fill it again. Hitherto I had been going about my business, writing columns, cooking for my family and so on, and perhaps to other people I seemed to be getting along normally enough – but in truth I was hollow inside, devoid of a sense of purpose. How uplifting it was to see her back in the headlines. It is less her stupidity that I find attractive, more her perpetual sense of confusion. She makes a series of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Biden, bullying and Barry Humphries

Home ‘China is carrying out the biggest military build-up in peacetime history,’ warned James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, in his Mansion House speech, but said ‘no significant global problem’ could be ‘solved without China’. The government borrowed £139.2 billion last year, £13 billion less than expected, bringing public debt to 99.6 per cent of GDP. In an opinion poll by YouGov for the BBC’s Panorama, 58 per cent of the 4,592 people asked thought that the United Kingdom should continue to have a monarchy and 16 per cent did not know. The Prince of Wales (Prince William) was paid a ‘very large sum’ by the owners of the Sun to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Dame Edna’s elusive origins

On 25 October last year, Thérèse Coffey became Defra Secretary. On 2 November, Sir James Dyson wrote to her. The famed inventor, who is the biggest owner and active farmer of agricultural land in Britain, outlined the problems of producing food sustainably and profitably, inviting her to visit one of his farms and meet him. No reply. A week later, Sir James’s office contacted Ms Coffey’s office and were assured her reply would be sought. None came. On 8 February this year, his office tried again. Two days later, her special adviser told the Dyson team that the original letter had been lost. Sir James re-sent it. On 24 February,

Sarah Vine

Don’t cancel Diane Abbott

Browsing my local Oxfam, my eye was drawn to a faded hardcover with the title The Merry Wives of Westminster. As some readers may know, my Twitter handle is @WestminsterWAG, so I bought it for the princely sum of £2.99. It wasn’t until I got home and started reading it that I realised who the author was: Marie Belloc, sister of Hilaire, a successful novelist in her own right. Married to the Times journalist Frederick Lowndes, she died in 1947; this little book was published in 1946. She writes with clarity and confidence on the SW1 of her day, but what’s fascinating are the parallels with modern life: the money

Cosmo Landesman

I’m grey – and proud

In the wake of new research by New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, scientists think a treatment for stopping our hair going grey – and even reversing it – may soon be possible. Their optimism is based on early positive experiments with mice, which is great news if you’re a mouse, but what if you’re a man over 60 and totally grey like me? Yes, women go grey too – but it’s different for them. The ones I know don’t make a big existential drama out of it the way men like me do. Women simply dye their hair or just let it go grey. Men panic and turn

Eva Vlaardingerbroek

Dutch farmers vs greens: why it matters

Amsterdam It’s not often that regional ballots in the Netherlands capture the attention of the international media. But last month that is exactly what happened. On 15 March, the so-called ‘provincial elections’ were held. Although technically these are regional, they also indirectly determine the composition of the Dutch senate – and, if the ruling parties lose their majority there, the chances of being able to pass legislation become very slim. It’s part of a larger conflict between the authoritarian green agenda and the silent majority paying for it all This time, however, the stakes were higher than ever – because, as incredible as it may sound, the Dutch government has

Dot Wordsworth

Why is ‘NPC’ an insult?

An 11-year-old boy is doing well after being stabbed at a Dollar Tree store in Mill Creek, Washington State. Dollar Tree is like a pound store and attracts poor folk. According to court documents the insult ‘NPC’ had been shouted at a man who has now been charged. My husband didn’t even say ‘What?’ when I told him, so for information I resorted to Veronica, who not so long ago counted as a young person. I was little the wiser to learn that NPC stood for non-playable character (or non-player character). The reference is to computer games, in which NPCs are, as it were, extras not controlled by the players.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: should I ask guests to pay to charge their Tesla?

Q. My wife’s daughter and son-in-law and their family live about 40 miles away. Whenever they come to stay, he asks if he can use an electric socket to charge his new Tesla. Although he thanks me profusely for making a socket available, he does not offer to pay for the electricity. Were he to do so, I would decline the offer, but I do feel that it is discourteous of him to take it for granted that it is a gift. How can I get him to raise his game? – Name and address withheld A. There is a protocol to deal with this emerging dilemma. Electric car drivers must make