Society

Monday

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

The triumph of Gary Lineker is a disaster for the BBC

The BBC-based sitcom W1A centred on a running joke about how the spinelessness and ineptitude of senior management led them to dig themselves ever-deeper into holes. At one point in the series, the Corporation’s ‘Head of Values’ is wrong-footed by an ex-footballer who wants to be a television pundit. Another episode centres on him closing down an orchestra which turns out to be widely admired by licence-payers. Well, life imitating art and all that then. Today’s ‘resolution’ of the Gary Lineker furore, which began on the basis of the director general Tim Davie’s determination to defend the Corporation’s impartiality, could hardly have done more to cement its reputation as a

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Hugh Grant’s mask slips at the Oscars

The Oscars was always doomed to fail to live up to the drama of last year’s ceremony. In 2022, Will Smith stormed on to the stage to slap host Chris Rock after he took offence to the comic’s routine. But in Los Angeles last night, celebrities were on their best behaviour. Well, mostly. Step forward, Hugh Grant: press regulator campaigner, enemy of the tabloid press and Paddington actor. The English film star was buttonholed on the red carpet by his fellow celeb Ashley Graham. Grant’s monosyllabic answers made it look like he would rather be anywhere else in the world. ‘What was it like to be in Glass Onion? How

Dr Matt Morgan

How to stop the junior doctors’ strike

What if your boss asked you to work fewer hours, for 50 per cent more pay, surrounded by great coffee, great beaches and great weather? A third of UK junior doctors have answered ‘bonza!’ and are already planning their move to Australia. This comes as the NHS struggles along, with shortfalls of 12,000 hospital doctors and 50,000 nurses. NHS medics are, unsurprisingly, not happy: the first day of a 72-hour junior doctor strike has begun in England. While ‘wellbeing hubs’ open in crumbling NHS hospitals, with yoga balls gathering dust and free biscuits going soft, Australia has some solid, cost-effective measures that truly support staff Junior doctors voted last month

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Let’s talk about sex education

Ah, sex education. I remember it like it was yesterday. It would have been 1987. Our entire year assembled in the school theatre. A beige, moustachioed, Open-University-looking chap stood alone on the stage with a slide projector. We’d never seen him before and never saw him again. He had been hired in especially for the occasion, I fancy, in much the same way and for much the same reason Russia uses the Wagner group to supply combat troops.   On one of the early slides was a long list of synonyms for the male organ of generation. ‘Penis,’ he intoned solemnly, indicating the word with his pointer. ‘Willy,’ he said. ‘Dick,’ he said. ‘John

Sunday

Andy Coulson

The BBC should admit its mistake and get Lineker back

While sports fans this morning are discussing why the entire England rugby team backed Gary Lineker by choosing not to turn up at Twickenham, the drama rumbles on. At its heart, this is a communications crisis borne out of that all-too-often-seen disease of people with important jobs taking themselves far too seriously. First we have Gary Lineker: who, clearly unhappy with his lucrative lot in life, feels the need to get involved in politics. I’m interested in the views of all sorts of people outside of Westminster – including on the deeply complex issue of immigration. But Gary, whilst being one of my go-to thinkers on football, doesn’t make that

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Match of the Day without Gary Lineker was oddly soothing

Well, did you enjoy MOTD? Did you miss Gary?  Thanks to, let’s just say ‘circumstances’, we were able to take part in a unique television experiment last night. For the first time in its 60-year history MOTD consisted of all action and no talk. No presenters, no expert comment, no fancy graphic preview packages, no post-match interviews, not even the title sequence and iconic theme tune. Shorn of these adornments the programme was just 20 minutes long.   The BBC appeared to have various options when Gary Linker decided not to play ball with his employers. They could have gone ahead with the programme with an alternative host; they could cancelled

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

The war over the womb 

The womb, that secretive house of early life, is coming under the spotlight. For a long time it was scarcely mentioned in public at all, save in obstetrics, gynaecology, DH Lawrence novels and the Bible. In recent years, however, the uterus has attracted the dubious attentions of the ‘wellness’ industry: Gwyneth Paltrow even recommended ‘cleansing’ it by sitting over a machine pumping out ‘mugwort steam’. And now a new book by the writer and midwife Leah Hazard – Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began – looks at this shape-shifting organ from all angles: medical, emotional, political and futuristic. What emerges from her examination is fascinating, contentious, and

Terry Barnes

Do Fifa really want Saudi Arabia to sponsor the women’s world cup?

In July and August, Australia and New Zealand are hosts of the 2023 Fifa Women’s world cup.   It could not be a better opportunity for the sport. Football in Australia at the professional level lags well behind Australian Rules and rugby league when it comes to profile and broadcast attention. And in New Zealand the round-ball game has a permanently uphill challenge to compete with the unofficial state religion, rugby. The tournament is therefore a huge deal for the two host associations, and the culmination of years of planning and hard work.  But it is still Fifa’s tournament, not Australia and New Zealand’s, and Fifa is a law unto

Yiannis Baboulias

Greece is erupting in anger after its train disaster

‘Message me when you get there.’ This phrase became a rallying cry when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Greece this week, in protests sparked by the country’s deadliest train disaster which killed 57 people earlier this month. Anger against the government was palpable, with protesters shouting ‘murderers’ outside the parliament building in Athens, forcing PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis to postpone his plans to announce the date of the next elections.   To understand why this particular incident threatens to upend the ruling party’s certainties, we must unpack the phrase used by the protestors. It’s hard to understate the emotional resonance of that simple line for Greek

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Lineker’s solidarity strikers could speed up the end of the licence fee

I never expected staff at an entire department of the BBC to put their shoulders to the wheel of the campaign to bring about an early demise for the television licence fee. Yet that is what those working for BBC Sport have done with their rock-solid sympathy strike on behalf of Gary Lineker. Of course, most of them probably don’t realise what they are doing. With many of the big names of BBC Sport being former professional footballers themselves, one should not expect a particularly exalted level of intellectual reasoning. There is no way that a compulsory universal licence fee can support this level of factionalism among its prime beneficiaries

Figen Murray

How I forgave Salman Abedi, my son’s murderer

My son, Martyn Hett, was one of 22 people murdered in the Manchester Arena terrorist attack on 22 May 2017. That day, my whole world came crashing down. I knew instantly that life as it was before had changed completely and forever.  At the time, I was a busy psychotherapist with my own private practice. Family life was also quite hectic with five children, four grandchildren and a house to run. Life was frantic at times, but good – until the day of the attack, when numbness, shock and disbelief took over. Three days after the bombing, I saw the face of Martyn’s murderer for the first time. I was shocked at his young age. Salman Abedi was 22 years

Saturday

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

We’re finding out who really runs the BBC 

The high-profile political activist Gary Lineker will not present Match of the Day tonight after he likened the rhetoric of the government to 1930s Germany. Several pundits and commentators are boycotting the show, while the BBC has also been forced to pull from air Football Focus, Final Score and Fighting Talk.  Many people are professing themselves baffled that this story about a football presenter and Twitter should dominate the news agenda for several days. But the real story here is about what is often referred to as the culture war and who is winning it.   We are finding out who’s really in charge of the BBC. Is it we, the people who pay the licence fee on threat of imprisonment, and who

Annabel Denham

In defence of the supermarket

Supermarkets are once again back in the firing line. Henry Dimbleby, the Leon co-founder turned government food tsar, has blamed the current food shortages on their ‘weird culture’. When food is scarce UK supermarkets won’t raise their prices, he claimed. It leads to growers selling less here and more in Europe, exacerbating shortages. He wasn’t alone in blaming supermarkets. Last month, in an attempt to absolve the government of blame, food and farming minister Mark Spencer demanded the heads of big chains join him for a discussion on ‘what they are doing to get shelves stocked again.’ In the end, only middle-management showed up.  The average supermarket stocks 20,000 items with around

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The BBC shouldn’t have taken Gary Lineker off air

The BBC’s decision to take Gary Lineker off the air is the sort of self-harming stupidity at which the Corporation excels. The Match of the Day presenter tweeted that the Illegal Migration Bill was ‘an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people’ and done ‘in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. As his social media activity makes clear, Lineker’s views are checklist progressive: anti-Tory, pro-Palestinian, anti-Brexit, pro-taking-the-knee. The BBC has previously censured him for a tweet it found to breach social media guidance and editorial standards of impartiality.  Rather than cave to one mob or another, it would profit the Corporation to stand firm in all cases Like other BBC staff

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The ignorance of Gary Lineker

When I was a girl, footballers had a somewhat limited vocabulary. That wasn’t to say that they were seen as inferior to wordy types – on the contrary, like blind piano-tuners, they were seen as accessing a higher level of excellence in one specific realm which we Normals had no chance of achieving. Thus when they spoke of being over the moon/sick as a parrot, we accepted that their brains were in their feet and happily indulged them. Even when humble hometown heroes were succeeded by flashy feet-for-hire mercenaries from Best to Gascoigne, who were worshipped like deities, their fans wouldn’t have given tuppence for their opinions on any burning moral

Anna Arutunyan

Can Ukraine ever win over Crimea and the Donbas?

It’s a topic that few are willing to talk about, but at some point – and especially if it is to get the victory it seeks – Ukraine will have to confront a looming problem: what to do with millions of its own citizens who currently have closer ties to Russia than they do to Ukraine.   President Volodymyr Zelensky has made it quite clear that Ukraine intends to reclaim all of its territory – that includes a large chunk of the Donbas region that pro-Russian separatists, aided by Russian troops, turned into unrecognised pseudo-states in 2014, and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed that March.  If this is a

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The Lineker row isn’t about free speech – it’s a moral coup

So the cancel-culture set believes in free speech now? What a turnaround. People who have spent the past decade turning a blind eye to the unpersoning of gender-critical feminists by the tyrants of Big Tech and the persecution of every poor soul who makes the mistake of holding up a picture of Muhammad have suddenly decided that they like liberty after all. En masse, with noisy tweets and Braveheart-style yelps about the right to dissent, they’ve converted to the cause of freedom of speech. Well, Gary Lineker’s freedom of speech, anyway.  The shamelessness of the British chattering classes never ceases to amaze me. In the past couple of hours, the

Ines Wittke

Why Britain isn’t ready to rejoin the EU – yet

Is Brexit starting to unfold? Some Remain supporters think so. Poor economic performance, supply chain issues, and our inability as a country to fill jobs in sectors that were traditionally performed by cheap EU labour continue to dominate the headlines. But, despite the hopes of some Remainers, this doesn’t mean Britain is ready to rejoin the EU.  It is true that a large percentage of the public seems to have shifted from thinking the country would benefit economically from Brexit, to thinking we are now worse off. According to polling by Public First on attitudes to Brexit, this shift is even present among Leavers: 64 per cent said they thought the

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Can Macron get through the day without insulting the Brits? 

The editorial in today’s Le Figaro heralds the dawn of a 21st century Entente Cordiale and the newspaper carries an interview with Rishi Sunak. Speaking ahead of today’s Anglo-French summit in Paris, Sunak says he wants to ‘open a new chapter with France’.   Le Figaro pins the blame for the deterioration in relations between the two countries since the last summit in 2018 on the British, specifically Boris Johnson and his ‘anti-French populism’. The French believe that is now a thing of the past with Sunak in No. 10. This conveniently overlooks the fact that if Johnson was the bête noire of the French, Emmanuel Macron hasn’t exactly been the most diplomatic

Thursday

William Moore William Moore

Don vs Ron: the fight for the American right

29 min listen

In the cover piece of this week’s magazine, deputy editor Freddy Gray writes about the fight for the American right: it’s Don (Trump) vs Ron (DeSantis). Who will win? On the podcast, Freddy is joined by Amber Athey, Washington editor of The Spectator‘s world edition. (00:37) Political editor Katy Balls writes in this week’s magazine that small boats are a big election issue. Rishi Sunak has promised to stop the illegal crossings, but what will it cost him? Katy is on the podcast with Spectator contributor Patrick O’Flynn. (10:49) And finally, would you let a man with an axe into your house for the sake of art? Cosmo Landesman’s father did, and he