Society

Thursday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A creche for nepo babies: the River Cafe Cafe reviewed

The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification of Hammersmith, which has stalled now that Hammersmith Bridge is closed to traffic and sits dully on the Thames, a bridge of decline. The River Cafe appears, thinly disguised, in a J.K. Rowling Cormoran Strike novel where a literary agent murders her client because he writes Swiftian pastiche, and it is a good place to

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Out of the tomb

Comp. 3392 invited you to write ‘The Curse of King Thut’ (in poetry or prose) in response to the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Thutmose II, the first such since Tutankhamun’s. There were many imaginative curses, from the archaeologist Artemis Spendlove Jr’s tinnitus (Mark Ambrose) to the contents of the tomb turning out quite meh (Frank Upton): No treasure beyond measure No ‘wonderful things’ in the Valley of Kings No chaps in white suit and Panama No mummy or daddy or granama Mark Brown foretold of the influencers descending: ‘The mummy fumes beneath his wraps,/ As tourists pose for selfie snaps’ while Bill Greenwell promised a litany of

Robin Oakley

My highlights from the Cheltenham Festival

When Poniros, trained by Willie Mullins, swept home in this year’s Triumph Hurdle as the first 100-1 Cheltenham Festival winner since Norton’s Coin won the Gold Cup in 1990, one of the very few people who had backed him was my regular racing companion Derek, known in this column as the Form Guru. His successes are normally a reward for rising before the dawn-chorus blackbirds have gulped their first worm and ploughing through the stats for a horse which had possibly shown a glimmer of form on a wet Thursday at Uttoxeter the April before last. But with Poniros there was no form. Not the merest trace. The ex-inmate of

Dot Wordsworth

Why do we diminish ‘compendious’?

My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and boyish avarice. One item promised infinite entertainment in a box: the Compendium of Games. Fundamentally it was a folding board, squared for chess and draughts on one side, marked for backgammon on the other. Its ludic capability depended on two dice and an accompanying booklet of rules. And now I come across a quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the use of the word compendium: ‘Guide to the compendium of games. Comprising rules for playing – backgammon, besique, chess…’ The dictionary estimates the date as about 1899, which is

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 29 March 2025

I am sure that readers of this column need no introduction to Victor Mollo’s most famous creation, The Hideous Hog. Bridge in the Menagerie was first published in 1965 and today, Mollo’s stereotypes are as sharp and apposite as they were 60 years ago. And don’t think (as I did) that hogging is an exclusively male prerogative; I’ve seen women bid their five-card major three times rather than let their partner near the cards. And what about trick hogging? If the worst and most annoying thing is  your partner overtaking your trick with no clear plan as to where to go next, a close second is when they overtake in

Fire

2696: It’s better up north!

The unclued lights are of a kind. Across 12    Sun ruined helter-skelter without cover (9) 13    Lizard found in Wagamama! (5) 15    Screen role I transformed into (9) 16    Rabbit’s discovered in delay at terminus (6) 20    Quietly thatched house and made watertight (7) 21    Oddly, his leg is pulled by Cupid! (6) 22    Location of small storm (6) 26    In with ugly bruiser (4) 27    Recalled child’s little digits (3) 28    Are offstage? (3) 29    Attitude of disheartened gang (4) 32    Melon is a messy thing to eat (8) 34    Woman from New Zealand overwhelmed by wah-wah in England (6) 35    Weavers weaving without a weave (6) 37    Shed

The Spectator

2693: Summer dresses – solution

The unclued lights were odes by Keats and Shelley. The title could sound like ‘Some Addresses’. First prize Peter Wreford, Cambridge Runners-up Angela Tebbutt, West Caister, Norfolk; Anthony Harker, Oxford

Andrey Kurkov

Steve Witkoff is wrong to see peace in Putin’s eyes

Kyiv ‘It doesn’t surprise me that they’re abolishing the Ministry of Education,’ my old friend Dima told me. ‘Judging by what Steve Witkoff said on the Fox channel, neither history nor geography are taught in America.’ Team Trump’s energetic but purposefully misdirected attempts to push the negotiation processes forward have left Ukrainians in shock. Each day reveals new depths in the Oval Office’s inadequacy and we can only shrug when we hear things like ‘Putin is not a bad guy’ or ‘I feel that he wants peace’. President Volodymyr Zelensky said something similar after his election in 2019, when he promised to negotiate a peace deal with Vladimir Putin within

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Has the Assisted Dying Bill been killed off?

The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out to be a form of legislative euthanasia. MPs, looking at the process, began to resemble a patient who, having first of all declared his wish to end it all, then begins to worry that it will not be as simple or painless as he had been led to expect. It is one thing to express a fervent wish to release people from unbearable suffering and quite another to frame safe procedures which involve the state, the judiciary and the medical profession in helping people kill themselves. It was a bad

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spring Statement, Heathrow fire and Prince Harry quits his charity

Home In the Spring Statement, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made further cuts to benefits (such as freezing the Universal Credit health element for new claimants). The Office for Budget Responsibility had said that the cuts announced before would not let her meet her budget rules. She now planned a £9.9 billion surplus by 2030, but would borrow more in the coming financial year. Civil service running costs would be cut by 15 per cent, with about 10,000 of its 547,735 staff to go. She concentrated on a £2.2 billion increase in defence spending and proposed that Britain should become a ‘defence industrial superpower’. The OBR reduced its forecast

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

I’m ready to defend my Tesla from the mob

Occitanie, France In France, burning cars is practically a national sport. Almost 1,000 were set on fire on New Year’s Eve, the annual festival of vehicle incineration. Brand specificity has not traditionally concerned the anarchists, but as Elon Musk has emerged as Donald Trump’s favourite apprentice, Teslas have become the target for left-wing mobs. Tesla owners like me are nervous.  At the Tesla centre in Toulouse a dozen cars, worth €700,000 in total, were destroyed The Tesla centre in Toulouse, where I picked up my own Model Y car in more innocent days, was stormed this month by the previously unheard-of Information Anti- Autoritaire Toulouse et Alentours. A dozen cars,

The Spectator

How many teenagers kill?

That ship has sailed The BBC children’s television programme Blue Peter will no longer be broadcast live. Why did it go by that name? – Blue Peter is the nickname of the international maritime signal flag for the letter ‘P’, consisting of white square inside a blue square. When displayed on its own it means ‘all persons should report on board because the ship is about to sail’. In 1958, a predecessor programme, the Children’s Television Club, was broadcast from the Mersey ferry. Watching was Owen Reed, head of children’s television for the BBC at the time, who wanted to launch a new show for five- to eight-year-olds and was

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The sad demise of Prince Harry’s Sentebale charity

Prince Harry has had an eventful couple of years. There was the controversy-studded publication of his memoir Spare and a plethora of court cases, the highest-profile of which was resolved earlier this year. After all that, the Duke of Sussex might be forgiven for wishing to keep a low profile for the rest of 2025. His relative reticence might be seen by his fleeting, last-minute cameo in With Love Meghan; literally and figuratively, he seemed to be saying that it was her show now, and that he was just a bystander. Yet if he had wished to disappear from the spotlight, the news about his charity, Sentebale, has made such

Nigel Jones

The University of Sussex has learned nothing from the Kathleen Stock debacle

The University of Sussex, one of the leading temples of progressivism in academia, has been fined £585,000 for failing to safeguard free speech following the Kathleen Stock affair. Stock, a philosophy professor, was hounded out of Sussex in 2021 over her belief in biological sex. The Office for Students (OfS)’s investigation into the fallout from that debacle is damning: it criticised the university’s policy statement on trans and non-binary equality, saying its requirement to ‘positively represent trans people’ and an assertion that ‘transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated’ could lead staff and students to ‘self-censor’. The message that the times have changed does not seem to have got through to

Tuesday

David Shipley

How Paddington took over the justice system

Two RAF engineers were spared jail today, after pleading guilty to vandalising a statue of Paddington Bear in the Berkshire town of Newbury. The young, drunk servicemen broke the Peruvian bear in half and then transported his front façade back to RAF Odiham in a taxi. Later jars of marmalade, sandwiches and poems were left at the crime scene by members of the public A few decades ago perhaps the bear’s disappearance would have remained a mystery, his fate known only to those who frequented the station’sbar. Unfortunately for Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, the two guilty men, Newbury’s CCTV captured their entire escapade. They were soon apprehended, with Paddington

Hardeep Singh

The ‘Islamophobia’ working group is unbalanced and opaque

Membership of Angela Rayner’s new ‘Islamophobia’ working group has been announced. The group has been set up ‘to provide government with a working definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia which is reflective of a wide range of perspectives and priorities of British Muslims’. The Labour party, the mayor of London and many Labour-led councils previously adopted the contested all-party-parliamentary group (APPG) definition, but Keir Starmer’s government distanced itself from the definition last year, confirming it wasn’t ‘in line’ with the Equality Act 2010, due to its conflation of race and religion. Islamophobia, the definition claimed, was a ‘type of racism’. It remains to be seen if Rayner’s new group will place a robust emphasis

Damien Phillips

Saudi Arabia could be the only winner in Russia-US peace talks

As the US and Russia meet in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine, the talks potentially mark the end of a battle over who would get to serve as the mediator to help bring the war to an end. The diplomatic tussle to be the Ukraine war’s peace broker has been fractious. So how did Saudi Arabia come out on top? It comes down to the Kingdom’s cordial relations with both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s White House – and, of course, a lot of money. MBS is said to be Trump’s favourite foreign leader Saudi Arabia’s triumph was not a foregone conclusion. Prior to

Alexander Larman

Meghan’s online shop is a new low for team Sussex

Earlier this week, I tried and failed to purchase a couple of items from the As Ever range that the Duchess of Sussex has been touting in her ill-fated Netflix show. I shan’t lie, Spectator readers; my dedication to bringing you the latest hard-hitting investigative news was tempered by the hope that such condiments as the ‘limited edition wildflower honey with honeycomb’ and the ‘shortbread cookies with flower sprinkles’ would end up being perfectly edible. Meghan has used the ShopMy online portal to offer ‘a handpicked and curated collection of the things I love’ Alas! Not only is the collection not yet available for sale – ‘Be the first to

Mike Pitts

Why is Australia reburying ancient human remains?

As I write, hundreds of ancient human remains are secretly being buried in a remote desert 1,000km from Sydney (New South Wales national parks service recommends you take extra supplies, fuel and car parts). No one knows who the people were, how, or when they died. But the reburial has stirred deep emotions, with a dividing line drawn between objective science and subjective belief. This is not just an Australian issue. It is about reconciling global history, and understanding ourselves as a species. The story of these remains begins half a century ago when Jim Bowler, a geologist, was studying a necklace of kidney-bean shaped lakes strung out along a

Yuan Yi Zhu

The landmine ban hands Britain’s enemies an advantage

There are few better symbols of Europe’s military fecklessness during the brief era of relative peace that followed the end of the Cold War than the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which banned the use of anti-personnel landmines by its signatories. The same is true of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which outlawed cluster munitions. This was championed by Gordon Brown, despite the strong opposition of the British armed forces. The return of war to Europe has focused minds It is easy to understand the humanitarian impulses which lay behind both treaties, both of which count the United Kingdom among its signatories. Anti-personnel mines and cluster bomblets can remain unexploded