Society

Sunday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Football’s problems run far beyond the Qatar World Cup

Are there any redeeming features of the Qatar World Cup? Perhaps one: the tournament has a sane and logical format. Having 32 teams reduced to 16 after the group stage, followed by a straight knock out is easy to understand and should produce an exciting third round of games and plenty of thrills thereafter. But if you do have the stomach for Qatar 2022 savour this comforting crumb: it could be the last time a major tournament is organised in a way that makes sense from a footballing – rather than a revenue generating – standpoint. For let’s look ahead to USA 2026. There might not be human rights concerns

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Matt Hancock is perfect for ‘I’m A Celebrity…’

How can a man have such good and bad judgement? Matt Hancock’s wife is an absolute babe, but his career – and marriage – came to an abrupt end when he chose to snog his (admittedly gorgeous) aide during the strict social distancing of a pandemic lockdown. What a clown. Now Hancock is jungle-bound. By taking part in I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! he’s following in the footsteps of political titans like Edwina Currie and Lembit Opik. It’s been said politics is show business for ugly people, and though the reality TV choices of politicos can range from the sublime (Michael Portillo, sassy and classy on various train

Saturday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The National Theatre deserves to have its budget cut

The arts cuts have arrived. The biggest loser is English National Opera whose annual award of £12.6 million will be replaced by a grant of £17 million, over three years, to cover the costs of a move from London to a regional centre, probably Manchester. ENO boss Stuart Murphy has complained that it’s unfair to confiscate money from a company that admits under-21s for free. But while it’s kind of him to give unsold seats to youngsters, it probably doesn’t justify an annual award of millions. In theatreland the prestigious Donmar Warehouse has lost every penny of its subsidy. And the National Theatre is to forfeit £850,000 but retains the

Rupert Christiansen

Arts Council England and the war on opera

Instructed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to move money away from London and reassign it to the regions as part of the Levelling Up strategy, Arts Council England has ended up making some very risky decisions. It has thrown funds at small untested groupuscules without a firm audience base and penalising major reputable institutions such as the Royal Opera House for their success and expertise. Given that the sector is struggling from the effects of the pandemic and the energy crisis – not to mention historic under-funding – the result could well be a catastrophic reduction in the quality and quantity of our cultural life, and a

Friday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Don’t condemn the Church of England for its stance on gay marriage

The Bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, has come out in favour of gay marriage – the first senior bishop to do so. He has apologised to gay Christians that the Church has dragged its feet, and that his own views have been slow to change.  He is right to call for change. But I don’t think he needs to apologise that the change has taken, or rather is still taking, a long time to come. I think that the Church has been right to approach the issue super-cautiously. Gradualism is sometimes good. The orthodoxy says otherwise: ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. But in this case, such rhetoric is impatient and

Thursday

Frank Young

Are millennials saving marriage?

Some rare cheer: millennials are divorcing less than their parents. This might be cause for celebration if the long-term prognosis for marriage wasn’t so poor. Last year, divorces spiked by ten per cent: 113,505 couples broke up in 2021, compared to 103,592 divorces in 2020, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Divorce laws allowing couples to avoid pinning the blame on each other and backlogs caused by the pandemic are likely to be to blame for the rise in breakups.  Tucked away inside these numbers, however, is a graph that contains a glimmer of good news: millennials are divorcing a lot less after ten years of marriage

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

A two-year recession has begun, says the Bank of England

Alongside a rather defensive interest rate hike today, the Bank of England unveiled some alarming forecasts for economic growth. The BoE predicts the economy will be in ‘recession for a long period’ – until mid-2024 – with inflation peaking around 11 per cent.  While the Bank is predicting that the recession will be shallower than other contractions, we are looking at the longest recession on record. The Bank thinks recession is already underway (the economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in August –we will get September’s figures next week) and will last for two years. The driving factors for economic contraction, the Bank thinks, will be ‘high energy prices and materially tighter

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Bank of England takes interest rates to a 14-year high

After yesterday’s fourth consecutive 0.75 percentage point interest rate rise from the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England has finally decided to follow suit. This afternoon the BoE announced a rate hike of 0.75 points too, the first rise of this size in 33 years. This takes UK interest rates from 2.25 per cent up to 3 per cent – a 14-year high. A 0.75 per cent increase had been expected by markets – the broad consensus of what the Bank would do after a tumultuous month of interventions, spikes in borrowing costs and inflation returning to double digits. There was general consensus on the Monetary Policy Committee, too, with a vote

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sunak drops ‘legal but harmful’ censorship clause

For some time now, The Spectator has been highlighting the danger posed by the so-called Online Safety Bill which would order social media firms to censor content regarded as ‘legal but harmful’. This was, in effect, a censorship diktat. Rather than have Orwellian figures employed by the government to censor articles, the Online Safety Bill would use the Chinese method of censorship-by-proxy and order digital giants to do this instead. A radical threat to free speech – but one only a handful of politicians spoke out against. One of them was Rishi Sunak. A new version of the Online Safety Bill is soon to be published, and we’re told it will

Toby Young Toby Young

What to do about the Equality Act

Among people of a conservative disposition, it’s long been accepted that the Equality Act needs to be repealed. This legislation, passed in 2010 in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s premiership, was designed to embed Labour’s egalitarian ideology into the fabric of the British state, yet none of Brown’s successors have done anything about it. In July, Rishi Sunak told a group of Conservative party members at a leadership hustings in West Sussex that he would ‘review’ it if he became prime minister, but don’t expect major surgery. The most we can hope for is a bit of light cosmetic work. One thing about the Equality Act not widely understood

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Theme of despair: Drop’N Chicken at Chessington reviewed

Chessington World of Adventures sits in a bowl near the A3. I went in the 1970s when it was a zoo, home to some unhappy orangutans who lived in a cage which made me scream. Being a lonely sort of child, I hugged concrete dinosaurs in the rain. Now it is owned by Merlin Entertainments – a sort of National Trust for people who prefer rollercoasters to country houses – which is owned by a hedge fund that employs teenagers. We are here to feel fear because my son, who is nine, has never really felt it, which is a good thing: and Merlin Entertainments monetises this, offering fear for

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How to balance immigration and jobs

Immigration is now at the top of the political agenda in a way that it hasn’t been since the vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Two factors have propelled it up the list, one very real (the small boats arriving across the Channel) and the other theoretical (economic modelling). The market reaction to Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget made the Office for Budget Responsibility’s next forecast all the more important. In an attempt to increase economic growth, Liz Truss wanted to formalise a more liberal immigration policy. She wanted to show the OBR that her policies would produce decent growth, but her tax cuts would not be enough to do

Tom Slater Tom Slater

JK Rowling, not Daniel Radcliffe, is the heroine of the gender debate

Some people accuse millennials of being ungrateful and entitled. Sadly, many of our celebrities do little to disabuse the public of this notion. Take the young cast of the Harry Potter films. Despite being, let’s face it, an assemblage of rather ropey talents who would be nowhere without the series, they have taken in recent years to denouncing JK Rowling: the woman to whom they owe everything. To those who have been living under a rock, the once feted children’s author has, in recent years, caused intense and sustained outrage. Her crime? Saying some quite measured things about transgenderism. Rowling thinks biological sex exists and that letting male-bodied people into

Melissa Kite

The village bonfire night has taken a sinister turn

The children walked with flaming torches ahead of the float bearing the bonfire queen which was headed for the towering monstrosity of pallets and tree branches on the village green. The builder boyfriend and I stood at the front of the crowds lining the road as the procession came through in the darkness and it struck me, as it always does, how disturbing bonfire night really is, especially when it’s done with this much enthusiasm and attention to detail. A tractor was pulling a livestock trailer upon which were sitting on chairs two figures wearing fancy dress, adorned in heavy make-up, looking like nothing so much as the Queen of

Taki

The golden age of motor sport

There are heroes and then there are unsung ones, and I basically prefer the latter as I have known a few of them in my lifetime. The funny thing is that I grew up learning only about famous heroes, the Ancient Greek type, starting with the semi-God Achilles. Homer didn’t deal with unsung heroes; everyone was larger than life, and there were only winners and losers. The person I’ll tell you about this week would not have been a Homeric hero, but he certainly was one while participating in the most dangerous game in the world. Lance Macklin was an Old Etonian, a second world war navy vet, and a

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The morality of begging for trade with Saudi and Qatar

Cop27? Me neither. Barring a last-minute call to join Boris Johnson’s Sharm El Sheikh entourage, I’ll be minding my carbon footprint at home. But I’m sorry not to be reporting firsthand from a more controversial Middle Eastern gathering of the global elite: the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, or ‘Davos in the Desert’. A ticket to Cop27 is a virtue signal in itself. But attendance at last week’s FII, an annual showcase for progressive sovereign spending within Mohammed bin Salman’s otherwise medieval Saudi state, is a moral conundrum. Just as the UK relies on Qatar for liquefied natural gas supplies while our dignitaries queue to cite the emirate’s human rights

The Spectator

Letters: Where past PMs went wrong

Catalogue of disasters Sir: Matthew Parris, in his article ‘The real cause of all the chaos’ (29 October), asks of our last three prime ministers: ‘What big thing did any of these unfortunate souls do wrong?’ In a spirit of helpfulness: Mrs May: net zero by 2050, derisory defence spending. Mr Johnson: hospital clearances, lockdown, vaccine mandates, derisory defence spending. Ms Truss: tax cuts without public sector spending cuts. As a consequence of these three, Britain is not so far away from having to go cap in hand to the IMF once more, and is again confronted by war in Europe as a result of the failure of conventional deterrence. Tim

Jeremy Clarke

My week alone in a mess of morphine foils

After commuting to Marseille for nine days of radiotherapy, I spent the week alone in the cave, in bed, in a mess of morphine foils and empty coffee cups. Sister Catriona was in the UK overseeing the birth of her first granddaughter. Friends and neighbours kindly kept me supplied with staples. Every day the sun shone. The astounding insolence of the mosquitos and flies in this Indian summer has to be seen to be believed. Maybe I ought to change the sheets. The martins who live up here on the cliff are enjoying the unseasonal airborne feast, circling and swooping just outside my permanently open bedroom windows. Far below, the

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Don’t sneer at Elon Musk

I know a man who plans to burn an effigy of Elon Musk on his bonfire on 5 November. Musk will be on a cardboard rocket and it will be hilarious, apparently,to watch him being engulfed by flames, because he’s ridiculous, he and his weird ideas about Mars. The idea that Musk is laughable is one of the few topics on which the progressive left and the old hawkish left agree. Musk isn’t a serious person, they say, and because he’s not serious, he’s dangerous. He shouldn’t be allowed to own Twitter, let alone space rockets.   There was cautious, grudging approval when Musk donated terminals for his Starlink satellites

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The joy of loathing the Qatar World Cup

It was on 2 December 2010, when the boys of the global footballing community were still quaintly playing FIFA 11 on PlayStation 3, that the venue was announced for the football World Cup of 2022. Among the crowds in the great hall of the Fifa headquarters in Zurich on that Thursday were David Beckham, Bill Clinton, Roman Abramovich, Sebastian Coe and Boris Johnson.  What a moment of disappointment it was for us. Not only had England got just a paltry two votes in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup, losing out to Russia, but we learned that the 2022 one was going to be held in a tiny,