Society

Tuesday

Katie Glass

Period talk needs to stop. Period

When the supermodel Brooks Nader’s period started at Wimbledon, naturally she turned to social media. ‘Tries to be chic. Starts period at Wimbledon,’ Nader wrote, alongside a snap on TikTok showing blood stains on the back of her skirt. ‘A canon event for all us girlies!’, someone bleated in response. The American model was praised for being ‘real’ and ‘NORMALISING’ periods. May I be the first to say: Nader should have kept this to herself. ‘Tries to be chic. Starts period at Wimbledon,’ Brooks Nader wrote This is just the latest example of a disturbing tendency among women to overshare about their menstrual cycles. Nader flaunting her uterine shedding in

Monday

Mike Pitts

Was Easter Island less isolated than we previously thought?

It’s hard to exaggerate how isolated Easter Island was before its discovery by Polynesian sailors eight or nine centuries ago. This tiny island, which you can walk round in a day, is thousands of miles in any direction from inhabitable land. Yet a new study claims that long before the first European ship arrived in 1722, it was reached more than once, and that people sailed back out to other Pacific islands. It seems history’s greatest explorers were even more extraordinary than we first realised. It seems history’s greatest explorers were even more extraordinary than we first realised The first inhabitants of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it’s known

Sam Leith Sam Leith

There’s one thing readers enjoy more than a story like The Salt Path

Only last week, I was having lunch when The Salt Path came up in conversation. ‘That’s the one about the woman with the terminally ill husband who went off round Cornwall, wasn’t it?’ said one friend. I responded, perhaps a little heartlessly: ‘Yeah, and then the husband weirdly failed to die and she got a couple of sequels out of it.’ There’s nothing we Brits love more than a story about an underdog battling adversity and the inextinguishable resilience of the human spirit The twinge of self-reproach I felt then has evaporated. The Observer yesterday carried a report into the background of that book’s author, Raynor Winn, and her husband

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

In defence of Wimbledon’s AI line judge

Does anything work in Broken Britain? You’d be forgiven for wondering when even during our most prestigious sporting tournaments the transport is chaos, the digital  ticketing system has crashed leaving gaps in the crowd, and even the supposedly cutting-edge line-call technology appears to go on the blink. Wimbledon has seen three major ‘Electronic Line Calling’ (ELC) controversies in just the first week, raising questions about the line calling system’s reliability and ongoing viability. The occasional misfires are highlighted and endlessly discussed while the correct calls, often excruciatingly tight and hugely significant, are rarely appreciated. The AI-powered ELC, known as Hawk-Eye Live, was criticised by both Emma Raducanu and Jack Draper

Terry Barnes

Australia’s ‘mushroom murders’ fascination is poisonous

After an eight-week trial followed avidly around Australia and the world, and a week’s jury deliberation, Australia’s answer to Lucrezia Borgia today has been found guilty of murdering three of her dinner party guests and attempting to murder the fourth. The jury of five women and seven men decided, beyond reasonable doubt, that the presence of fatal death cap mushrooms in the beef wellington that Erin Patterson, 56, cooked for her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, her sister-in-law Heather Wilkinson, and Heather’s husband Ian, was no tragic accident. The jury was satisfied that, coolly and deliberately, Patterson’s toxic beef wellington killed three of them and almost killed Ian Wilkinson too.

Patrick West

The decline of the fact checkers is something to celebrate

For some years now, one of the greatest worries among a certain coterie has been that of ‘misinformation’. This is the idea that the masses, left to their own devices – figuratively and literally – are unable to discern what is true and what is false. This is what has prompted the establishment of such gatekeeping bodies as BBC Verify, institutions that presume to protect the general public from the vast tides of online nonsense. Logically had ostensibly noble intentions upon its creation in 2016 The news that Britain’s biggest fact-checking company, Logically, has gone into administration, will be a blow to those who think we need such bodies. Former

Sunday

Noor Qurashi

Britain’s high streets have become unhappy, dangerous places

Supermarket staff in London are now serving customers from inside glass and metal cages. The unveiling of such desperate security measures, including at a Sainsbury’s store in Battersea, should shock us. Yet in Britain, we’ve become so accustomed to shoplifting and crime on our streets that its introduction generates barely a murmur. Our supermarkets and shops have morphed from places where customers can be trusted, to environments where they are watched like hawks and treated with suspicion Sainsbury’s says the crackdown has been implemented to ‘protect’ staff serving vape bars, tobacco and alcohol to customers. It’s hard to blame the supermarket for its logic. But that doesn’t mean we should

Arabella Byrne

Do men really want more paternity leave?

How do you solve a problem like modern fatherhood? According to Jonathan Reynolds, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, paternity leave is how. As he launched his new review looking into maternity, paternity, shared parental leave and financial support offered to new parents this week, Reynolds stated that he wanted it to become as ‘culturally accepted’ for fathers to spend time at home after a baby is born as mothers. Must modern paternal love be predicated on a father singing ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’ at Monkey Music?   Reynolds, a father of four, must know that paternity leave take-up in this country is notoriously poor: only 59 per cent of

Francis Pike

How Britain came to dominate Formula 1

This weekend, Formula One returns to where it all started 75 years ago: Silverstone. But although the first F1 Grand Prix took place in the UK, the sport was initially dominated by Italian cars and Latin drivers, rather than Brits. Dottore Giuseppe Farina, a lawyer turned racing driver, won that first F1 race in front of King George VI. Driving an Alfa Romeo 158, Farina went on the win the championship. For the next seven years, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Maserati swept all before them. Did British dominance of F1 come only from European teams’ exit from the sport? It was in this era that the legend of Enzo Ferrari

Saturday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Wimbledon has had enough of tennis

Wimbledon is the highlight of the year for tennis fans. But for local residents it’s a fortnight of traffic chaos and misery. As a born-and-bred Wimbledonian, I think I have earned the right to ask this: hasn’t the tennis all got a bit much? If you have lived in Wimbledon for any stretch of time, you will quickly learn that there is one thing, and one thing only, non-SW19ers will associate you with: the tennis. There’s a good reason why. After Christmas and Easter, the Wimbledon championships are treated much like the town ’s third annual holy feast. At least two weeks in advance, the first of the ubiquitous tennis

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why is Bob Vylan free but Lucy Connolly in prison?

So now we know. Now we know that Bob Vylan’s sick chant at Glastonbury was not a colourfully worded call for the ‘dismantling’ of a military force, as the band’s leftish apologists claimed. No, it appears that this punk act really does want the soldiers of the Jewish nation to die. A new clip shows the lead singer saying ‘Death to every single IDF soldier out there’. There it is, as clear as it is vile: they want the hundreds of thousands of men and women who serve in the Israeli Defence Forces to perish, to be wiped out without mercy. There it is, as clear as it is vile:

Chas Newkey-Burden

How I made Facebook nice again

Social media can still be a force for good, as I found out last weekend when we woke up with an unexpected visitor in our garden: a beautiful white, crested chicken. In the old days, reuniting lost animals with their owners could be a tricky task, involving phone calls to the RSPCA and local authorities, checking lampposts for ‘lost pet’ posters and keeping an eye on the animal. This time, I logged onto our village’s Facebook group and found a ‘missing’ post from the chicken’s worried owners. I messaged them and they came round to collect her, bouncing off home full of relief and joy. The whole thing was sorted

Friday

Tom Harwood

Why is TfL’s boss attacking me for cleaning up his filthy trains?

If at first you don’t succeed; deny, deflect, attack. This is apparently the mantra of Sadiq Khan and his Transport for London (TfL) Commissioner, Andy Lord. This week both men hit out at volunteers like me and my friends at the Looking for Growth (LfG) movement, who in recent weeks have taken it upon ourselves to make the state of certain Tube lines ever so slightly less terrible. Anyone who has travelled on the Bakerloo or Central line in London over the last six months will have seen the state of the rolling stock. The clear deterioration of standards, and surging sea of graffiti tags. Astonishing. Sadiq Khan says @lfg_uk

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Steve Coogan’s accidental Partridge moment

Mr Steerpike is a fan of Accidental Partridge moments, and this one was back of the net. Lefty actor Steve Coogan popped up on BBC Breakfast this morning to talk up his appearance at this weekend’s Co-op congress in Rochdale. Amid swipes at the government and big business, the comedian was becoming visibly exasperated by presenters Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty who kept interrupting with inane and repetitive questions about how cooperatives work.  So it was unfortunate that with his attempt to define the concept, things took a sharp turn to the right. Giving the example of tenant collectives, Coogan said: ‘When you act as individuals, you have no power. If you’ve got cockroaches and

Charlotte Henry

Women’s football needs Euro 2025 to be a success

On 1 August 2022, bleary-eyed England women football players danced around central London with the word ‘Home’ emblazoned across their t-shirts. They were celebrating being crowned European champions, becoming the first senior English team to win a major tournament since 1966. They had brought football home. Now the game is back: on Wednesday, Euro 2025 kicked off in Switzerland. The tournament comes at a pivotal moment. Both in-person and TV viewership of women’s domestic football dropped in the UK last season. A recent report from the Women’s Sports Trust found that in-person Women’s Super League (WSL) match attendances were down 10 per cent season-on-season, with average TV viewership down 35

Stephen Pollard

Corbyn and Sultana’s party launch gets off to the worst possible start

There could be no more deliciously appropriate start to the new party supposedly co-led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, than the news that the ex-Labour leader is said to be ‘furious and bewildered’ that it was launched without him even knowing that he is a member of the party, let alone that he is its leader. Although I’m not sure it is really news that Jeremy Corbyn – who has yet to comment on the new party – is either furious or bewildered, since he has spent his entire career being both. Although I’m not sure it is really news that Jeremy Corbyn – who has yet to comment

John Power

Ipso owes Suella Braverman an apology

When Suella Braverman wrote in April 2023 that ‘the perpetrators [of group-based child sexual exploitation] are groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani,’ the then-Home Secretary was roundly condemned. ‘Hacked Off’, a lobby group which seeks to tighten regulation of the press, said her article in the Mail on Sunday was part of a ‘toxic libel’. Guardian columnist Owen Jones went on to describe her ‘claims’ as ‘designed to foment racist division and hate’. Lewis Goodall of LBC confronted her live on air, saying that she was chastised ‘entirely rightly’ for her ‘false claim’. Last week, Suella Braverman wrote to Ipso to demand a retraction of that ruling. She is right to do so One entity

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

We should be outraged by Lily Allen’s ‘four or five’ abortions

If we want to understand why thousands of women a year in England and Wales have an abortion – 251,377 in 2022, so probably way more now – we could do worse than consider the musings of the singer Lily Allen on the subject. In a podcast chat with her friend Miquita, this took a musical turn. She began singing to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’: ‘Abortions I’ve had a few… but then again… I can’t remember exactly how many’. Giggling, she continued: ‘I can’t remember. I think maybe like, I want to say four or five.’   Miqiuta – a woman of whom I’d never heard – observed that,

Miriam Cates

Why the baby bust matters

Birth rates are tumbling across the world. This isn’t just a tragedy for the growing number of women who have fewer children than they want; below-replacement fertility rates mean that each generation will be smaller than the one before. This could lead to a permanent spiral of decline where the old always outnumber the young. But can anything be done about it? A report published last month by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) acknowledges the problem, but its analysis is rather confused. The authors complain that economic barriers prevent women from having ‘reproductive agency’ while simultaneously arguing that governments trying to reduce these barriers are, in some cases, ‘coercive’. After decades

John Connolly John Connolly

John Connolly, Gavin Mortimer, Dorian Lynskey, Steve Morris and Lloyd Evans

26 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: John Connolly argues that Labour should look to Andy Burnham for inspiration (1:51); Gavin Mortimer asks if Britain is ready for France’s most controversial novel – Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (4:55); Dorian Lynskey looks at the race to build the first nuclear weapons, as he reviews Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds (11:23); Steve Morris provides his notes on postcards (16:44); and, Lloyd Evans reflects on British and Irish history as he travels around Dublin (20:44).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.