Society

Wednesday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Did the Ukrainians bomb the Nord Stream pipeline?

There’s an uncomfortable fact about covert operations in the information-saturated modern world. Like personal WhatsApp messages, they always leak – the only questions are how long it takes, who leaks, and what the consequences will be. With reports coming from both Washington and Berlin that Ukrainians may have been behind the spectacular bombings of the Nord Stream gas pipeline back in September, it looks as if the current lag is just months. If, as some suggest, the operation was bankrolled by a Ukrainian oligarch, he could presumably afford to hire the best At the time, the mysterious attacks were variously blamed on Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, London and who knows who

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Michael Caine: no, Zulu doesn’t incite far-right extremism

Michael Caine is 90 this week, and he offers to accept questions by email, which he will then answer by email, as if we are communicating between galaxies. Normally this would bother me – gah, actors – but it is Michael Caine, so I can’t mind. Maurice Micklewhite’s invention Michael Caine – he named himself after The Caine Mutiny – is as luminous a piece of 20th-century British culture as Eleanor Rigby. There are some people you want to be happy. They deserve it.  He replies quickly: this is a functional man. What did I expect? He has been nominated for an Academy Award six times in four separate decades,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why ‘safe routes’ to asylum can’t work

I have never met Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, but I have not the least doubt that his heart is in the right place. And that’s the problem. In the current and coming furore about small boat crossings and what to do about them, too many who comment are concerned to show that their heart is in the right place. Too few appear ready to contemplate the natural rather than the hoped-for consequences of stopping the government’s plan to deport those who come here without permission to a third country like Rwanda. If you oppose the plans to send away those who land, you are advocating a continuation

Jawad Iqbal

It’s time to end the City of Culture charade

It is something of a mystery why being named UK City of Culture is seen in some quarters as a great civic accolade, a glorious first step on the road to social, economic and cultural regeneration. The experience of Coventry (the winner for 2021) reveals the many downsides to winning this dubious cultural prize. It is a cautionary tale of financial incompetence, threats of legal action over unpaid debts and buck-passing over who is to blame. The UK City of Culture award has from its inception been little more than a joke at the public’s expense This fiasco has come to light with the collapse into administration of the Coventry

The Spectator

How often does spring bring a cold snap?

Out of service  Conservative MPs criticise the proposed appointment of Sue Gray as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. It is not unknown, however, for civil servants to switch to political careers, including two prime ministers of recent times.  – Edward Heath began his career in the Ministry of Civil Aviation, having come joint top in the civil service entrance exams in his year.  – Jim Callaghan did not intend a career as a civil servant, but on joining the Royal Navy during the second world war he was found to have tuberculosis, and for a while was seconded to work at the Admiralty in Whitehall, where his duties included writing

Paul Wood

Meet the architect behind ‘Putin’s palace’

Lanfranco Cirillo, architect and interior decorator to the Russian elite, is shaking his head in horror. ‘Absolutely not. No.’ He is answering my question about whether he put a gold toilet and even a gold toilet brush into a villa he built that the Russian opposition says belongs to President Vladimir Putin – and which they call ‘Putin’s palace’. At one time, protestors used to taunt Putin by waving gold-painted toilet brushes. Cirillo says the whole thing is a calumny. ‘I don’t like gold, first of all, I like marble. And I’m Italian. For an Italian to make a toilet in gold is really anti-historical, anti-cultural. No, no gold toilet,

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Despotic social controls cost lives

Look, I realise you don’t want to read this column. I’m unenthusiastic about writing it. For most of us, any mention of Covid triggers a deep aversion and desperation to flee. Even recalling the uncanny tranquillity of the first you-know-what – the blue skies, the blazing sunshine, the serene silence in once-bustling London – makes me wince. Between the slow drip-feed of the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files and Rishi Sunak’s dubious Protocol breakthrough, most UK news consumers would have greeted last week’s headlines with a double-whammy of ‘Oh, no, not that again!’ – since the only subject that rivals Covid’s revulsion quotient for Brits is Northern Ireland. Waves of variants came

The Spectator

Letters: Putin isn’t winning

Friends like these… Sir: I much admire Peter Frankopan as a historian but his article ‘Is Putin winning?’ (4 March) is misleading and plain wrong. He argues that the vote at the UN on Ukraine on 23 February demonstrated that Russia’s strategy is winning new friends in Africa, Central and South America, and Asia; friends who are refusing to vote with the US and the West, and are supporting Russia. An inspection of the actual figures at the UN vote shows this claim to be foolish: 24 African states condemned Putin’s Russia. Only two, Eritrea and Mali, supported Putin. In South and Central America, 16 states condemned Putin. Only Nicaragua

Douglas Murray

Jonathan Coad and British TV’s most catastrophic interview

‘Coad. Coad.’ I wracked my brain. Distant bells began to tinkle as I turned the name over. As though performing a solo game of charades, I said to myself ‘Sounds like?’ And I landed on it. Jonathan Coad used to be known only to a small band of aficionados. Happily today he is almost a household name. This is because of his participation in what must be regarded, by some stretch, as the most catastrophic interview ever conducted on British television. And I have not forgotten about Michael Howard, Prince Andrew or Cathy Newman. This week Mr Coad was on GB News being questioned about Matt Hancock, WhatsApp, Isabel Oakeshott

Kevin Toolis

A schism in Ulster is inevitable

The fate of the Stormont Assembly, and a Brexit resolution of a kind, now rests on the uncharismatic shoulders of DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson and his judgment call on the Windsor Framework. If Donaldson declares the abstruse new EU trading arrangements on the enhanced flow of chilled meats to Ulster a victory, then Stormont will re-start and the usual divisive politics of Northern Ireland begin again. If he goes for the treachery button, then the long campaign in the wilderness against the perfidious and varied enemies of Ulster will go on – much to the consternation of Downing Street. As closed as the Kremlin, it is never easy to forecast the

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 March 2023

The Camrose Trophy is the championship between the five home countries, held over two weekends, with the host country fielding a second team to ‘make up the numbers’. My team qualified to represent England for one of those weekends – Andrew Black’s strong squad played the other – and between us we won! And yes – before you ask, I did play! One of England’s brightest ever stars (and one of the nicest) was Tony Priday who died, aged 92, a few years ago. He played in the Camrose almost continuously from 1956 to 1986 and came out of retirement to play one more in the mid-1990s – which ofc

Robin Oakley

Why I fear for Cheltenham Festival

The London Times of 10 March 1922 drily recorded: ‘It is very seldom that Irish racing and hunting people make a determined attack on an English meeting without paying at least their expenses. One gathers that they did more than that yesterday.’ The Times was chronicling Connemara Black’s triumph in the Foxhunters’ Challenge Cup – a victory greeted as Ireland’s first at Cheltenham. Things have moved on since then and at last year’s Cheltenham Festival Irish-trained horses won 18 of the 28 races, not quite as spectacular as their feat of winning 23 in 2021 but still a phenomenon that had England’s racing fraternity scratching around feverishly for excuses. When

Melissa Kite

The case against a cashless society

‘We don’t take cash,’ said the boy behind the counter in Pret after I tried to hand him a £5 note and two pound coins. ‘My’ ham and cheese baguette and bottle of Coke sat in a brown paper bag on the counter and a woman standing beside me grimaced as she waited to be served in the otherwise empty shop. I say ‘my’ in inverted commas because I have since looked into the legal rights concerned and what I might have said to handle this in an effective way. As it was, I got it wrong. Not one of these people in this queue had any cash on them.

Jeremy Clarke

My life in a lunatic asylum

I can see why rock stars and other impetuous celebrity types accidentally top themselves with drug cocktails. When you are spaced out on medicaments it’s easy to forget what you have or haven’t taken. A month ago I was prescribed a dose of corticosteroids to see off a chest infection: 60mg a day for four days. Apparently, it’s a big dose. Nurse Catriona says it’s the largest she’s seen. (She was a practice nurse for donkey’s years.) For some folk corticosteroids have a similar effect on the mind as coke. Which means, in my case, I become chatty, overconfident and overassertive, occasionally tipping over into aggressiveness and paranoia. In his

Taki

My recipe for longevity

Gstaad The man in the white suit is not exactly a matinee idol around these parts. The mauvaises langues have it that the rich fear him more than the poor because they have more to lose. I’m not so sure, although it does make sense. This was not the case in the past: Spartan kings were in the first line of battle, unflinchingly eager to show their troops how to die. Samurais worshipped a heroic death, shunned opulence, but were employed by very rich patrons who answered to all their needs. It was a symptom of the times. Teutonic knights, those of the Round Table, and officers during the Napoleonic

Tuesday

Winston Marshall

Simon Fanshawe: what Stonewall gets wrong and the case for diversity and inclusion

59 min listen

Winston speaks with Perrier Award-winning comedian, writer, author and co-founder of gay rights charity Stonewall, Simon Fanshawe. They discuss the history of Stonewall, Fanshawe’s recent book ‘The Power of Difference’, his new company Diversity by Design, and how it aims to promote diversity in the workplace. Together they debate the case for and against diversity and Stonewall’s ‘strategic pivot’ towards trans rights.

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Chris Rock’s criticism of Meghan Markle is spot on

The story of Harry and Meghan has often been portrayed as a clash of values between Britain and America. Between British stiff-upper-lip and Californian emotional incontinence. Between stoicism and the new woke victim politics. But I’m pleased to see that our American cousins – having been lumbered with the transatlantic royal couple since 2020 – are now as fed up with the self-pitying Sussexes as we are. This has been made abundantly clear by Chris Rock’s new Netflix stand-up special, Selective Outrage. In it, alongside settling scores with Will Smith for *that* slap at the Oscars, Rock takes merciless aim at Meghan, ridiculing her claims of royal mistreatment.  ‘They’re so

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Radio 2 has misjudged its audience

BBC Radio 2 is one of the many modern cultural enterprises which seems to have as its primary aim alienating the people who love it. The shabbily executed departure of Ken Bruce from his long-established and still wildly popular mid-morning show feels like a final door being slammed shut. Bruce is to be replaced by Vernon Kay, a live wire television presenter. Like the breakfast show’s Zoe Ball, Kay is one of those people who is very excited about something the rest of us have not been let in on. They both retain a prepubescent bounce that is frankly odd in those around the age of 50. Is this tartrazine

Richard Ekins

Will Rishi Sunak’s Channel migrant crackdown work?

The government’s inability to control our maritime border is a public scandal. Bold action is needed to make crossing the Channel pointless and put the people smugglers out of business. This will be impossible without major legal reform. So it is good news that the government is about to introduce new legislation to Parliament.  The government’s Rwanda plan was well-intentioned. However, it not supported by a legislative mandate and was, predictably, challenged in the courts. In June last year, an attempt to implement the plan was blocked by a last-minute intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. The legal challenge in our courts continues and even if the government in the end prevails,

John Keiger John Keiger

Macron’s France is a tinderbox

On 22 March 1968 the slow burn that would eventually flare into France’s ‘May ‘68’ began. The radical student movement known as ‘22 March’, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Dany le Rouge) at its heart, was unaware its actions on this day would lead to riots and the eventual paralysis of the French state after workers joined them. History does not repeat itself, it echoes. Even then, echoes from the past do not necessarily produce the same effects, no matter how many revolutions France has known. Nevertheless, 55 years later on this 7 March, France will be paralysed by widespread rolling strikes and demonstrations against President Macron’s proposed legislation to extend the retirement age from