Society

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The narcissism of Meghan Markle

I’ve read some batty celebrity profiles in my time. But that piece about Meghan Markle in the Cut takes the biscuit. It is almost unbelievably preposterous. It shines a glorious if unwitting light on the narcissism and outright daftness of the right-on celeb set of which Ms Markle is now kween. Where to begin? How about with the basic set-up. We’re heading for a catastrophic energy crisis, with people forced to choose between heating and eating. And yet here’s Meghan in her multimillion-dollar luxury pad in California telling us how hard her life is. The Cut’s reporter – Allison P Davis – gushes over Harry and Meghan’s sprawling mansion. It

Monday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

The culture wars are coming to France

The infection of France by le wokisme continues apace. Last year, president Emmanuel Macron vowed to stand against intersectionality only to see his parliamentary majority swept away in the recent National Assembly elections in part by the leftist coalition of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Now a new woketarian front is opening against the mores of traditional France as transgenderism asserts itself with a campaign by Le Planning Familial, the non-profit association influenced by the movement created originally in the United States, active in France for 62 years and that has recently transitioned itself. The movement, which is subsidised by the government, has moved from offering advice on contraception and abortion to a

Steerpike Steerpike

Meghan’s Mandela moment

It seems that the last two years of interviews, podcasts and media briefings actually count as Meghan keeping shtum. Towards the end of a 6,500-word interview with the Cut, which covers the duchess’s views on the monarchy, the British press and racism, she says that she ‘never had to sign anything that restricts her from talking,’ adding ‘I can talk about my whole experience and make a choice not to’. At this point, Mr S doesn’t know whether this is an attempt at satire or if Meghan genuinely believes her ‘truth’.  The interview, titled ‘Meghan of Montecito’, comes less than a week after her Archetypes podcast with Serena Williams (in which listeners might have hoped

Sunday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

What Philip Larkin can teach us about depression

A couple of years ago I taught The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin to some A-level students. In the last class they summed up their feelings about his poetry. ‘It’s bare depressing, innit’, said someone (this wasn’t Eton), and someone else agreed: ‘I guess it’s good poetry but I can’t lie, it’s way too gloomy for me.’ Then one young man piped up: ‘But that’s how life is for a lot of people – you know, really bleak.’ Yes, I quietly thought, and you might discover that acquaintance with bleakness awaits you, too. But hang on, aren’t today’s teenagers meant to be depressed and anxious? One of the girls who had dismissed him

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The four-day working week is a sham

The challenger bank sector has been such a graveyard in recent years that I don’t hold out much hope that Durham-based Atom Bank will ever quite displace the likes of Lloyds and Barclays. Nevertheless, I wish it well. It is just that its claim to have increased productivity by changing to a four-day week does not fill me with confidence. Not only does the bank intend to make four-day working a permanent fixture, it wants other businesses to copy its example. ‘We firmly believe the four day week is the future of working life,’ says ‘chief people officer’ Anne-Marie Lister. ‘We hope that Atom’s experiences will encourage other businesses to

Luke Coppen

What is Pope Francis up to?

If you think your diary looks busy over the next few days, spare a thought for Pope Francis. The 85-year-old, who was confined to a wheelchair for several months this year, is preparing for a big weekend. He will be spending it in the company of the world’s cardinals – the red-clad figures who are supposed to be his closest advisers but seldom meet en masse in Rome these days. Now the pope has finally decided to gather them together – in the Eternal City’s unforgiving August heat. The pope will be adding to the cardinals’ number today. Tomorrow, he will be dashing off to L’Aquila, the Italian city that

Thursday

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The politics of butter

Butter was not a major part of my childhood. In fact, I don’t remember it ever being in our fridge. My parents were subject to the saturated fat scaremongering of the 1980s, and consequently believed that butter was the enemy. Instead, we had spread: margarine, rebranded as a cholesterol-busting alternative to heart-clogging butter. But spread wasn’t so bad. It lubricated my sandwiches and melted on my toast. Spread was everyday. Butter was for high days and holidays. Otherwise, we were all certain to die young. Butter has always been a bellwether of the British psyche. We want luxury, but only every so often, and only so much – and we

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The lockdown files: Rishi Sunak on what we weren’t told

When Britain was being locked down, the country was assured that all risks had been properly and robustly considered. Yes, schools would close and education would suffer. Normal healthcare would take a hit and people would die as a result. But the government repeatedly said the experts had looked at all this. After all, it wasn’t as if they would lock us down without seriously weighing up the consequences, was it? Those consequences are still making themselves known: exams madness, the NHS waiting list surge, thousands of unexplained ‘excess deaths’, judicial backlogs and economic chaos. Was all that expected, factored in, and thought by leaders to be a price worth

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How to run a school

Taking a short break from persecuting Roman Catholic faith schools for ideological reasons, Ofsted has stuck the boot into the Abbey School in Kent. This school, in Faversham, has been given the lowest possible ranking of ‘inadequate’. The report bemoans the fact that pupils are expected to do as they are told, be polite and behave themselves, and describes the atmosphere within the school as ‘oppressive’. By a winning coincidence, Ofsted’s report was published in the very week that the Abbey School reported by far its best ever A-level results. What, Ofsted sees as ‘oppression’, then, is more commonly known as ‘running a school properly’. In 2017, before the fascists

Aidan Hartley

When will the West start to deal with Africa on its own terms?

Kenya Suddenly all the great powers are courting Africa. Like emissaries to the 14th-century Malian monarch Mansa Musa in his adobe Timbuktu palaces, foreign officials from West and East compete for attention in multi-country tours across the poorest continent. Recent visitors include the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken leading caravans of Washington officials, Moscow’s Sergei Lavrov and Emmanuel Macron of France. Invitations arrive for trade summits; speeches plead forgiveness for past wrongs, pay tribute to Africa’s new influence and offer the return of artefacts looted by imperialists; while Beijing – well, the Chinese came to stay a long time ago. For Africa’s leaders, now repeatedly dry-cleaning their red carpets

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

I’d be the perfect communist shill

Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and read Chinese. Some question my English accent, almost suspiciously posh given that I didn’t speak a word of the language until the age of ten. Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. My podcast, Chinese Whispers, often explains the Chinese government’s way of looking at things. I studied at Oxford and now work at the heart of the British establishment. Am I not ideally placed to advance Beijing’s agenda? When I started my career, this was all a joke. Now it’s less of one. The atmosphere in Britain towards China

Aidan Hartley

Waiting for the rain that never comes – and for the elections to be over

Kenya After two years of no rain, all colour has drained from the landscape on the farm so that by the time we boarded the bush plane to leave in the bright sun it was as if we were all snow blind. From the air the highlands were waterless and dead until we descended over Kenya’s north shore and the world went green. My late mother’s garden at the beach house swirls with bougainvillea, gardenia, frangipani and allamanda. Green ingots of baobab leaves hang wetly down over green grass and wild flowers which spill down to the high tide mark. We walk among clouds of butterflies with lilac-breasted rollers and

Melissa Kite

I can trace all our problems back to Frankie Dettori

‘If you think about it, Frankie Dettori is to blame,’ said the builder boyfriend, because when things are really bad he deploys satire. One thing leads to another with horses, the joke goes, so we may as well trace our problems back as follows. If Dettori had not ridden a horse called Marienbard to victory in the 2002 Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe by bringing something magical out of a horse as slow as an elephant so that the Godolphin bay suddenly, like something out of a movie, exploded from the absolute back of the field to come from nowhere, overtaking horse after horse after horse in the final seconds

Jeremy Clarke

The intense heat is gone and so are the grandsons

Finally rain. None for months, then a violent tropical storm lasting two days. It marked the end of high summer as clearly and distinctly as a clarion of trumpets. Afterwards the nights were cooler and the sun less fierce and it was easier to maintain one’s temper. We could begin to look forward again instead of merely enduring. The week before the storm burst the village had been stretched to its collective mental limit. You could see it on the exhausted faces of the waiters and in the traffic negotiating normally unfrequented side streets. You could hear it in the buzz of the packed outdoor restaurants on the village square,

Taki

It’s back to the 1970s

Gstaad As the great Yogi Berra explained: ‘It’s déjà vu all over again.’ The great one also contributed the following wisdom that: ‘You can observe a lot by just watching.’ Yogi came to mind as high inflation and a recession loom, and merry old England’s trade unions are reverting to type and blackmailing the government. And where is Margaret Thatcher now that she’s needed? Gone with the wind, that’s where. I started writing this column when James Callaghan was in No. 10 and Britain was on the brink. The Brits back then were over-taxed and the smart money had gone abroad. Paper money issued by the Treasury translated into higher

Dot Wordsworth

Why everyone is ‘struggling’

‘Quicksand!’ yelled my husband, flailing his arms wildly. Since he was sitting in his armchair, his dramatic representation of a scene from a western failed to convince, though it endangered the tumbler of whisky on the occasional table next to him. He’d been set off (not that it takes much) by my mentioning the ubiquity of struggling. Instead of the hard-working families that we were forever being told about, it is now struggling families, torn between having another pie for tea or turning on the heating in these sweltering days. Everyone is struggling. ‘Mateo Kovacic is struggling with knee problems,’ the Telegraph told me. Others are ‘struggling to care for

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I find out whether old friends fancy each other?

Q. How can I find out, without making things awkward, whether one of my close male friends fancies one of my close female friends? They have known each other for years but until recently were both in long-term relationships. Now she has developed a major crush on him. Is there a way I could help to move things forward? It is too risky to tell him directly, because if he’s not interested, it could spoil the whole dynamic of our group. – Name and address withheld A. Wait till you are alone with the male friend and scrolling on your phones. Randomly mention the female’s name, e.g: ‘Oh wow, X

Toby Young Toby Young

Confessions of a lawn obsessive

For the past few days I’ve been frantically watering my lawn in anticipation of the London hosepipe ban. True, there are other things in the garden that need watering – the roses, the magnolias, the rhododendrons, as well as the tomato plants, the rosemary bushes and the olive tree. But I can probably manage to get round them with my watering can once the ban kicks in and in any case it’s the lawn that’s my pride and joy. Gazing at the stripes after it’s just been mown is one of life’s great pleasures as I settle into late middle age. When Caroline and I first looked round our house

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

It’s time to clear out the Bank of England’s board

Liz Truss says she intends to review the Bank of England’s mandate, which has been fixed as a 2 per cent inflation target since Gordon Brown gave the Bank its independence in 1997. We’re told Governor Andrew Bailey, keen to keep his job, thinks a review is ‘probably the right thing’. But is it? A return to the long-term inflationary average of 2 per cent is highly desirable as soon as global price spikes subside – but if the odds-on next PM thinks the Bank incapable of achieving it, setting more dynamic inflation-and-growth objectives would surely be an overreach. Instead, maybe she should take her axe to the organisation, starting

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: gems from Swig to satisfy the most demanding of thirsts

Order today. There are some typically quirky gems from Swig on offer this week and it’s great to have Robin Davis and the gang back in these pages. Their offer in January was a rip-roarer and, as before, there is plenty here to satisfy even the most demanding of thirsts. The 2020 Bourgogne Chardonnay Les Truffières, Domaine de Mauperthuis (1) is a Chablis in all but name and price, produced in Auxerre on south-facing Kimmeridgian soils that could easily pass for those of Montée de Tonnerre. Matured for 12 months in stainless steel, it’s crisp, clean and pure, taking its time to unfold gently in the glass and reveal its