Society

Saturday

Travis Aaroe

Henry VIII turned England upside down

Henry VIII, who was born on this day in 1491, is the only English monarch other than William the Conqueror who can claim to have destroyed a society and replaced it with a new one. Catholic apologists like Chesterton are right to see in the Henry VIII saga a sort of secular apocalypse; it was, in Chesterton’s words, the ‘dissolution of the whole of the old civilisation’. The new England that grew up in its place – by Henry’s unwitting patronage – was alien, denatured, dislocating, and altogether more worthwhile than the one that had gone before it.  The story of Henry VIII’s is the story of an eccentric clique

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Tom Skinner and the triumph of Essex Man

As a teenager, my first husband was an Essex Man. It ended badly – all my fault – but I still retain a fondness for the breed, who I associate with self-made can-do stoicism and optimism; the opposite of, say, Islington Man. An Essex Man is being spoken of as the one to give the ghastly ‘Sir’ Sadiq Khan a run for his money In recent decades, the county has become known as a glitzy, new-money Cheshire-on-Colne, due to the popular television show The Only Way Is Essex, a ‘scripted reality’ show in which a mutating cast of likely lads and luscious-lipped ladies make out and break up at bars

Laurie Wastell

Demographics is the new dividing line on the right

It’s an ominous time for a state-of-the-nation conference. Each week, the shores we defended against Hitler, Napoleon and the Spanish Armada are breached by hundreds of foreign men, while asylum seekers make up ‘a significant proportion’ of those currently being investigated for the grooming of British children. Earlier this month, there were days of violent anti-immigration riots in Ballymena. The five Gaza independents elected last year marked the grim rise of electoral sectarianism in the UK, a trend that is only set to accelerate. Academics and government insiders, despairing at the state of Britain, fret about looming civil war along ethnic lines. ‘Now and England’, a one-day conference hosted by the Roger

Octavius Black

The dark side of LinkedIn

I’d always assumed that LinkedIn is Instagram for people with lanyards. A place for earnest self-congratulation, polite emoji applause, and lightly airbrushed career updates: ‘Humbled to be speaking at Davos’; ‘Thrilled to have joined Deloitte’; ‘Grateful to my incredible team for smashing Q4 targets.’ That sort of thing. Sanitised, self-serving and safely anodyne with an easy trade: a like for a like, a ‘repost’ for a ‘funny’. Instead of an apology, I received a torrent of replies ranging from ‘you had it coming’ to ‘stop making a fuss’ So when I posted something mildly provocative, I expected at worst a few furrowed brows and an awkward silence in the comments.

Friday

Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan, Tim Shipman, Francis Pike, Hermione Eyre and George Young

42 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Peter Frankopan argues that Israel’s attack on Iran has been planned for years (2:00); just how bad are things for Kemi Badenoch, asks Tim Shipman (13:34); Francis Pike says there are plenty of reasons to believe in ghosts (21:49); Hermione Eyre, wife of Alex Burghart MP, reviews Sarah Vine’s book How Not To Be a Political Wife: A Memoir, which deals with Vine’s marriage to ex-husband Michael Gove (28:46); and, George Young reports on the French sculptors building the new Statue of Liberty (34:45).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Jawad Iqbal

Iran’s supreme leader looks more deluded than defiant

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has made his first public comments since the ceasefire with Israel took hold. Khamenei, who has ultimate authority over all major decisions in the country, has not been seen or heard from in more than a week. His pre-recorded speech, aired on state television, is meant to put an end to rising speculation about his fate after he went into hiding at the start of the conflict. In the televised address, the Iranian leader hailed his country’s ‘victory’ over Israel and vowed never to surrender to the United States. The Iranian leader was eager to tell anyone who would listen that the US bombing of

Arabella Byrne

Is your private school dumbing down?

Bankruptcy, as Ernest Hemingway famously said, comes ‘gradually, then suddenly’. For Britain’s private schools floundering in the wake of the VAT rise on fees imposed in January this year, the gradual decline is well underway. Not only have an estimated 11,000 pupils left private schools so far in an unprecedented – and poorly forecast by Labour – mid-academic year exodus and smaller private schools have closed, but now Chinese whispers have begun about the lowering of academic standards.   Pleading anonymity, several mothers muttered that pupils that would ‘never normally be through the door’ were found in their children’s classes According to unnamed sources in the Telegraph, headteachers are quoted as saying

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

‘Trans rights’ has never been a civil rights issue

Indisputably a nutjob, Chase Strangio is the soul of nominative determinism. The lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union is a ‘trans man’ – meaning a woman, of course; one of the trans movement’s lesser impositions is forcing consumers of pliant media to keep translating wishful thinking into real life, much as the unhip once had to keep remembering that ‘super-bad’ means ‘super-good’. Strangio is a rare example of sexual disguise that is reasonably persuasive. The 42-year-old woman passes for a certain kind of man: weedy, slight and very short, with narrow shoulders, Marx Brothers eyebrows, just-credible facial hair, a tight fade over the ears bursting into a cocky skywards

The Spectator

Letters: Israel’s attack on Iran was no surprise  

Moral support Sir: All of Tim Shipman’s reasons for the PM’s reluctance to support Israel sound outwardly plausible, though, from my experience, the spook excuse, ‘The CIA wants us to keep the embassy open’, is plainly specious. Mossad is clearly all over Iran and they’re not relying on an embassy (‘Starmer’s war zone’, 21 June). There is concern over what might follow a regime change, but no one is asking what happens if we don’t support Israel and the US. Instead there is some cobbled-together ‘de-escalation’ which leaves a diminished but still viable theocratic terror regime in place, but one now consumed by a desire for existential revenge. Add to

Peter Jones

The abortion debate is as old as time

Now that parliament has decided to decriminalise abortion, it is interesting to see what the ancients made of the matter. The question for them was, as for us – when did the foetus become ‘human’? The answer was when it developed a psukhê (‘soul’). Some Greek philosophers argued that the foetus was fully ‘ensouled’ from the moment of conception, and abortion was therefore wrong. Others asserted it was only ensouled at birth. The ‘gradualists’ thought the foetus took between 36 and 50 days to became human (active kicking was a good sign). Aristotle (d. 322 BC) argued that the embryo became human when it had developed four ‘capacities’ in the

Angus Colwell

Is your restaurant halal?

Dos Mas Tacos opened recently next to Spitalfields Market, one of London’s trendiest and busiest areas. Two beef birria tacos cost £11.50; two mushroom vegano are £10.50; a ‘can-o-water’ is £2.50. But look a little closer at their menu, and something jumps out: no pork and no alcohol. You’d expect a carnitas option at a taqueria, and you’d want a Corona with it. You can’t get either at Dos Mas Tacos. Huh, and hmm. I came across the place on TikTok, via a video of the two founders, Rupert and Charlie Avery, outside their shop. They’re well-heeled lads, twins with posh accents. They used to work in the superyacht industry.

Arabella Byrne

Millennials don’t want brown furniture

For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death it was passed on to my mother, who kept it grudgingly in her cottage even though you couldn’t get to the kitchen without banging your hip against its bow front. At some stage it was passed on to my sister, who paid a considerable sum to store it because she had no room for it in her terraced house. Some years later, I was informed that I must house this precious mahogany albatross myself. After some handwringing and sadness, lack of space forced me to pass it on to someone

Grayson Perry

Why do my outfits make people so angry?

I have always cycled everywhere in London, not because I want to save the planet but because I want to get to my destination on time. I ride a big heavy Dutch woman’s bike: practical, less nickable and I can wear pretty much anything while riding it. On this occasion I was wearing frilly pink nursery-print dungarees, pink patent bootees, a sweet little jacket with puffy pale-blue bows down the front, a pink cloche hat and a pink-and-blue shiny PVC backpack. I was just locking my bike to the railings on Charing Cross Road when an angry man approached. ‘Are you a paedophile?’ he roared. ‘Why are you dressed like

Douglas Murray

The dangers of toxic femininity

The American critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has just published a new translation of The Odyssey. In his superb introduction, Mendelsohn also does something that many modern translators and critics avoid, which is to point to the oddness and different-ness of Homer’s world. For that and many other reasons, reading Mendelsohn’s fresh and clear translation was a counterweight to one of the great imperatives of our time: ‘Let us look at this long-ago thing only in order to see if it can shed any light on the glorious us and now.’ Everything is about ‘understanding’, ‘listening’, ‘speaking for’ and ‘alleviating’ the suffering of others Yet a timeless work remains timeless

Francis Pike

In defence of exorcism

British politics and ghosts are subjects that rarely meet. Sometimes an MP or parliamentary aide might report a sighting of one of various spirits that inhabit the Palace of Westminster. It is said, for instance, that the ghost of the assassin John Bellingham haunts the Commons lobby at the spot where he gunned down Spencer Perceval. And last year the diary secretary to speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle excited the tabloids with her claim that once, in one of parliament’s side rooms, she felt a phantom dog nuzzling against her leg. When I bought a pied-à-terre in Kensington, I got the dowser to give it a psycho-spiritual once-over In general, though,

Toby Young Toby Young

The secret to ‘womankeeping’

God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: ‘mankeeping’. According to Ferrara, ‘patriarchal masculinity’ stops men from developing ‘emotionally intimate bonds’ with each other, so they inevitably unburden themselves to their wives and girlfriends, expecting them to listen attentively as they drone on about their ‘issues’. They can’t open up to their male buddies about this stuff because they don’t want to appear vulnerable and unmanly. So they unload on their female partners instead. Yet

Christopher Fletcher

The hidden value of notes

‘You asshole,’ was my friend’s cheery greeting when we met in Ludlow. I’d mucked up the time. Reconciled, we walked to his place and on the door was a note he’d left me, scrawled on a card with an image of him mimicking Philip Larkin proudly sitting on a border stone: ‘Just a note that you are an asshole. Call.’ Stuart, a collector of manuscripts, showed me a recent acquisition, a note by Sir Edward Elgar, graced with a self-portrait featuring, my friend is sure, an immodestly large penis. I think it’s his coat tail. We debated the iconography while listening to ‘Nimrod’. Notes are often discarded – who hasn’t

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The rise and rise of the ‘tantric sector’

For the past 25 years I have commuted to London from Otford, a delightful village outside Sevenoaks. I do this in adherence to Sutherland’s Law – not the excellent 1970s BBC series featuring Iain Cuthbertson, but a rule of my own devising which states that you should always travel from the smallest airport or railway station possible.  Recently, much of the station car-park was closed so a colossal pedestrian footbridge could be constructed 50 yards away; this replaced a pedestrian level crossing at the same spot, which lay along a footpath connecting one part of Otford to another. In 25 years, I have seen pedestrians using it on three occasions.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Where should I seat Hollywood stars at dinner?

Q. My husband and I have recently made very good friends with some neighbours in France. They know I am having a 60th birthday party in London and have assumed they will be invited too. My problem is one of these new friends is a world-famous Hollywood actor and his wife is famous in her own right. I am worried about where I will seat them. I wouldn’t want to give the impression to a roomful of my oldest friends (none of whom is famous) that I think the ‘stars’ are more important than they are, but neither do I want to offend the stars, who I fear will expect