Society

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Harry and Meghan want to destroy the House of Windsor 

When I coined the phrase ‘The Grabdication’ in The Spectator two years ago, I had no concept of exactly how grasping the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would turn out to be. Having found Frogmore Cottage insufficiently close to California even after £2million of public money (since paid back) was spent on renovations, I still imagined that Meghan would eventually settle for a few tiaras and some voice-over work. I had no idea that what this grim pair were actually seeking was the destruction of the House of Windsor, ostensibly on the grounds of racism, but actually because this was the one chance two mediocre people would get to feel mighty.   It’s unnerving that she calls

Robert Tombs

England vs France is far more than a football match

When England play France tonight, more will be involved than just a game of football.  We all know why. Even those with an enviable indifference to history will have vague notions about Agincourt, Joan of Arc, Waterloo, Napoleon and General de Gaulle. When I first went to France decades ago I was surprised to be asked fairly regularly why we had fired on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir – an event which, despite my history degree, had largely passed me by.  From the Norman Conquest to the Tudors, England was in a formative and often abusive relationship with France. Our language was changed by the influx of French, but on the other hand

Friday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The two books that made me a Conservative

From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often dazzle the reader with a display of erudition or passion, rather than tell the more mundane truth. The mundane truth is that our dispositions and the courses of our lives tend to be fixed before our ages run to two digits: a time when we were unlikely to be tackling Proust, understanding Nietzsche or appreciating C.P. Cavafy. The child being father to the man, we should be looking at fairy tales, picture books and First Readers if we seek the truly formative influence of literature. Foreign and war correspondents or

Jacqueline Wilson

It’s hard to beat Christmas in the countryside

Christmas in the countryside – what could be better? All right, at the time of writing we’ve had such storms that the swans are swimming across the flooded fields and we squelch through thick mud when we take the dogs out, but we hope the sun will come out tomorrow. I don’t just write about little orphan Annies – I’m starting to sound like one, too. But rain or shine, Christmas will be lovely, with a Christmas tree in the village square, shops serving free mulled wine and mince pies, a barber-shop choir singing in the real barber’s shop, and the nursery school children reverently laying Baby Jesus in his

Hannah Moore

The mystery of Jesus’s siblings

Since I gave birth four years ago and then, too soon afterwards, two years later, I have deliberately become a sponge for other women’s experiences of childbirth and raising babies. I found the whole process almost unbearably difficult, and I was baffled that other women didn’t seem to be walking around sharing their birth stories with strangers in the way I was. Matthew and Luke needed to set Jesus apart from his immediate family to emphasise the virgin birth During Christmas 2020, amid the fog of sleep deprivation, lockdown blues and postnatal depression, I began imagining Mary giving birth in a stable with only Joseph for a midwife. I also

Patrick Kidd

The trials and tribulations of a churchwarden

Missing: one king, answers to Balthazar. Wandered off last Epiphany with a French peasant girl who had a basket under each arm and an eye for wise men bearing gold and smellies. Could have returned to Babylon, more likely made for Lewisham. We will miss him at our church crib this year. While paintings of Jesus’s birth have been found in early Christian catacombs, the first live Nativity scene is said to have been created 800 years ago next Christmas by St Francis of Assisi as a visual aid for preaching. The idea spread, with statues replacing the living oxen, asses and shepherds. During the French Revolution, when churches were

Martin Rees

Space won’t offer an escape from Earth’s problems

Because I have the title Astronomer Royal, I’m often asked: ‘Did you do horoscopes for the Queen?’ Sadly, the answer’s ‘no’. I’m just an astronomer, not an astrologer. Scientists are poor forecasters – almost as poor as economists. But I fear I’ve become typecast as a doomster because I predict a bumpy ride through the next few decades.  We’re deep in the ‘anthropocene’. Humans are so numerous and so demanding of energy and resources that our collective footprint is changing the world’s climate, and despoiling the natural environment. Politicians like to focus on immediate threats, but they won’t prioritise measures needed to deal with long-term global issues – especially when

The Spectator

A Spectator Christmas poll: What gives you hope?

Volodymyr Zelensky   I am inspired by the Ukrainian people – a courageous, creative and strong people who united in one moment against the brutal and unjust Russian aggression. All Ukrainians today are warriors – those on the front line, volunteers, journalists, IT specialists, doctors, teachers, absolutely everyone. These are strong and courageous people who are fighting for their homeland, their country and their lives. And nothing can break them. Not bombs, not rocket strikes, not the lack of electricity, water and heat in their homes, nor other types of Russian terror. This nation delights and inspires me and gives me confidence in the victory of Ukraine. Richard Dawkins        Science gives

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘Loss is a thing that we become’: Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’ On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with

Andrew Watts

There’s nothing romantic about mistletoe

The line of trees beside the road into Tenbury Wells are bare of leaves at the beginning of December. But on their spindly branches are huge clumps of mistletoe, weighing them down like muffs on the skinny arms of dowagers. Most of the country’s mistletoe grows in a small area of England – Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, the counties around the Malvern Hills – but no one is quite sure why; it may be the number of orchards (mistletoe grows well on apple trees) or the climate of cold winters and warm summers. Pliny the Elder writes that the druids of Gaul held nothing more sacred than mistletoe Or it may

Dot Wordsworth

The worst words of 2022

‘Homer, the poet?’ asked my husband, puzzled, as he often is. He was responding to my scornful observation that the Cambridge Dictionary had chosen homer as its word of the year for 2022. The reason was merely that it had figured as the answer to a Wordle puzzle and many people did not know what it meant, so looked it up. The homer in question was presumed to be a home run in baseball. The poet would not qualify, being a proper name. He does however find a place in the Oxford English Dictionary under nod, since Homer nods became a proverb, taking its cue from the Ars Poetica of

Rory Sutherland and Slavoj Žižek

‘Universities shouldn’t be safe spaces’: Rory Sutherland and Slavoj Žižek on cancel culture, futurism and Hollywood Marxism 

Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural theorist. Rory Sutherland is The Spectator’s Wiki Man. We arranged for them to have a chat. They spoke for more than four hours about identity politics, Elon Musk, Hollywood, free speech and more. Introductions & ‘luxury beliefs’ Rory Sutherland: I’m recording this on a Meta Portal moving camera, which no one seems to have bought, because I assume nobody wants Mark Zuckerberg spying on them in their living room. I don’t mind though: no one wants to spy on an overweight 57-year-old advertising executive. Slavoj Žižek: I know what you mean. Perhaps we should do this interview naked from the waist down! By

Juliet Nicolson

My memories of Raymond Briggs

I really loved Raymond Briggs. I first met him in 1976, before his mega-fame had arrived. I was working in the publicity department of Raymond’s publishers, Hamish Hamilton, and every so often he would trundle a wheelie suitcase into the office containing the painted boards of artwork for his latest cartoon story. His visits were a joy because he was so funny, but also tricky because unlike every other author under our promotional care, Raymond considered the less media attention he received to be the better. He referred to us as ‘blooming publicity women’ and we had to beg him to agree to talk to eager interviewers, and to submit

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 17 December 2022

This is (unbelievably) my last column of 2022 and I thought I’d give you my team’s highs and lows for the year. Highs would be winning England’s Premier League, closely followed by coming second in the World Bridge Tour’s final in Copenhagen; and you don’t get much lower than being beaten in the first round of the Gold Cup when you are the holders and seeded number one. Or being 36 up with eight to play and losing by one IMP. Here’s how it’s done: West led the ◆King, covered in dummy and ruffed by East, who cashed a top Club and switched to a Heart. I needed to dispose

Robin Oakley

Farewell to the greatest ever jockey

In racing’s record books 2022 will be remembered especially for Alpinista’s Arc de Triomphe and Baaeed’s all-round brilliance. But it was the year, too, in which we lost the sport’s most popular owner, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, and the greatest ever jockey, Lester Piggott. His figures still astound. Lester won 30 British Classics including an unrivalled nine Derbies. His 116 winners at Royal Ascot included 11 in the Gold Cup and in all he won 4,493 Flat races. Nobody but Lester could have beaten Rheingold in the Derby as he did on Roberto. But what I will always remember was his victory in the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Mile. Five years

Aidan Hartley

In praise of missionaries

Kenya Tonj is a war-battered settlement on a river that eventually feeds into the White Nile, in South Sudan. When they are not feuding over livestock, Dinkas from remote cattle camps, dressed in garish jalabiyas, saunter down the dusty main street. For months at a time, tropical deluges turn the surrounding mud hamlets into islands, clogged with papyrus, buzzing with insects and isolated from the world. Last year, Dr Ben Roberts, an eye doctor from Alabama who works as a medical missionary in Africa, arrived in Tonj to perform cataract operations on hundreds of local people, restoring sight to those who live in darkness. News of Dr Roberts’s miracles reached

Melissa Kite

Confessions of a conspiracy theorist

‘You’re one of them anti-vaxxers,’ said the brusque northerner who was seated opposite me at a friend’s supper party. ‘Why do you think I got Covid and was really ill even though I’m up to date on my jabs?’ And he fixed me with a murderous stare. I said: ‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’ Next to me, the builder boyfriend was wearing his glassy-eyed look of panic. We can feel a dinner-party vaccination lynching coming a mile off. But this was peculiarly alarming. The last time I saw this fellow he had been fuming with me for not having the jab. Barely a year later,

Jeremy Clarke

The naked truth about cannabis farming

Then dear old Dolly drove down from Essex to pay her respects. It was a brave effort because she hasn’t been anywhere for years and only once before to France, in the 1970s to pick grapes. She arrived at midday and immediately piled into the wine. The day was pleasantly warm enough to sit outside on the terrace. I started her off on a Louis Latour Domaine de Valmoissine pinot noir and asked her what she thought of it. ‘It’s a nightingale by still water, Jel,’ she said, knocking it back in one. Dolly is exactly the sort of person advertisers are targeting when they add a click button peremptorily

Taki

Why going to church beats going to a nightclub

Gstaad It’s nice to be back in good old Helvetia again, but as the holiest of holy days approaches I cannot help but think of my friend Jeremy Clarke and his struggles. Philosophers, starting with the Greeks, have dealt with life’s problems yet not one of them has been able to pin down Man’s ultimate defeat: death. The one who did manage it was no philosopher. He was a simple carpenter, and his take on death has given more comfort and hope to us mortals than all the eggheads put together. Nowadays we have doubters who see us believers as Dark Ages ignoramuses. You know the kind I’m talking about