Society

Thursday

Robin Oakley

How modesty triumphed in the Derby

In the absence on her Platinum Jubilee of Her Majesty, such an avid Derby attender in the past, and following the death just days before of the legendary Lester Piggott, it could have been a low-key, insignificant Derby. Instead, a truly impressive victory for the favourite, Desert Crown, turned it into a different kind of celebration. He had never really been away, but how the crowd welcomed the comeback when Desert Crown won Sir Michael Stoute his sixth Derby, becoming at 76 the oldest to perform the feat. The previous holder of the record was the 75-year-old Matt Dawson with Sir Visto in 1895, but in those days there were

Melissa Kite

Why I don’t do WhatsApp

If I could ban one question ever being asked of me again it would be: ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ I don’t know how many times I’ve answered this in the negative, 57,983 times at least, but the question just never stops being asked. Nobody wants to use even a fraction of a penny of the almost limitless text and call capacity in their perfectly affordable phone packages to send a text any more. What they want is totally free, completely limitless blathering capacity. Consequently, everything has a WhatsApp group attached to it. Every activity I take part in, every hobby, every social group I belong to, now comes with its

Jeremy Clarke

It is time for me to ‘get right with the Lord’

‘But you look so well!’ How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a few it’s outrageous, after all they have heard or read about my health, and they feel cheated of the mushrooms growing out of the side of my head that they’d been hoping for. Either way I’m surprised by the compliment. Yes, the tan and this expensive shaving balm Catriona bought me, and now hair again, make me appear unravaged from the neck up. ‘But you should see the rest of it,’ I laugh gaily, detailing the bulge in my neck where the chemotherapy tube remains in place; the young Brigitte

Taki

The healing power of the Hamptons

Southampton, Long Island These are peripatetic times for the poor little Greek boy, up to the Hamptons for some sun-seeking among Wasp types, and then down to the nation’s capital for the memorial service of that wonderful humorist P.J. O’Rourke. By all means take the following with a grain of salt, but even 800 million years ago, when only micro-organisms slithered around the beaches, belonging to a private club was all-important, especially in the Hamptons. Never have I seen more chest-thumping, bandy-legged, bearded louts trash-talking as they pollute the beaches in this beautiful town. Southampton was once a luminous little village that served as a seaside refuge for New York’s

Wednesday

John Bell

The Brexit Horizon debate is bad news for scientists

The UK and EU are currently locked in a debate about Britain’s participation in the Horizon Europe science funding programme, with the EU blocking the UK from taking part due to concerns about the Northern Ireland protocol. The situation is very disappointing for scientists. Eighteen months ago, when the Brexit deal was signed in good faith, the UK government signed up to participate in the programme. This would have been a good thing. But it has now been turned into political football. As a result, 18 months later, scientists don’t know where they are. We’re apparently not in the programme, it looks like we’re out. But this row is running

Debbie Hayton

Emily Bridges is right about transgender cyclists

Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges doesn’t ‘want special treatment from anyone’. In an ITV interview, Bridges said:  ‘I just want the same opportunities as my fellow female athletes’. As someone who transitioned a few years before Emily, I’d say Bridges is right: transgender people should not need special treatment. We are human beings, just like everyone else. In the UK, at least, trans people have specific and additional protections against discrimination and harassment. But these only become relevant if someone treats us less favourably because we are transgender. That has happened to me very rarely. So who is to blame for this unfortunate situation? Yet in the debate about whether Bridges

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Banning greeting cards won’t keep spice out of our prisons

The last time inspectors visited HMP The Mount in 2018, the place was awash with drugs. The prevalence of the psychoactive substance ‘bird killer’, and the violence associated with it, meant nearly half of all prisoners there reported feeling unsafe. This insidious drug, collectively known as ‘spice’, was smuggled past officers in the form of letters and cards invisibly impregnated with the stuff which prisoners then smoked or licked. Wings and landings filled with zombified inmates in a haze of toxic smoke that felled officers were not an uncommon sight. The addictive qualities of this junk resulted in a spiral of debt, predation and lawlessness that threw rehabilitation out the

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: how not to write a letter of condolence

In Competition No. 3252, you were invited to write a letter of condolence on the mis-fortune of an acquaintance which, intentionally or not, would have the effect of lowering rather than raising the spirits. An example of how not to write a condolence letter, according to New York-based funeral director Amy Cunningham, was Nancy Mitford’s upbeat ending to a letter to her cousin, who had just lost her husband: ‘It’s nice that Decca is coming over for a long visit. Why don’t you come to Versailles with her – I would put her in a hotel and you could stay with me. Think of it.’ It doesn’t seem all that

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Nigeria’s Christians are relentlessly under attack

Dozens of Christian worshippers, including several children, were killed in a gun raid on a church in Nigeria’s Owo town on Sunday. Initial estimates place the death toll at around least 70 parishioners but that number is set to rise, given that the church in question, St Francis Catholic Church, has one of the largest parishes in the southwestern state of Ondo. Nigeria is experiencing an epidemic of terror attacks. Over the last six months, gunmen have killed 48 in the northwestern Zamfara state, massacred over 100 villagers in Plateau state, and raided trains and buses leaving dozens dead and hundreds missing. At least 3,000 Nigerians were killed and 1,500

Jay Elwes

The trouble with Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty, the French economist who shot to fame for writing a colossal work of economics that many people bought but few actually read, recently received some advice. ‘What you write is interesting,’ a friend told him, ‘but couldn’t you make it a little shorter?’ Piketty has answered the call for brevity with a book which by his standards is the equivalent of a Post-it note. It’s certainly ‘brief’ – but is it a ‘history of equality’? Alas, no. What we have instead is an eye-wateringly left-wing manifesto for dismantling economic inequality, both domestically and internationally. ‘Inequality is first of all a social, historical and political construction,’ Piketty writes, and the

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Shame on Cineworld for cancelling The Lady of Heaven

Bradford was chosen last week as the UK’s City of Culture for 2025. This week, Bradford Cineworld – as well as a number of other cinemas around the country – announced that a new movie called The Lady of Heaven was being pulled from schedules following protests by angry Muslims. So is this what we can expect from a City of Culture in 21st-century Britain – the creation of all kinds of culture, except for anything that might offend some adherents to the Islamic faith? The fuss and fury over The Lady of Heaven has been incredibly revealing. This is a British-produced epic historical drama about Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. It

Zoe Strimpel

The feminist case for Love Island

Love Island, which started again last night, flirts with virtue just a little more obviously each year. The show is racially diverse, and overwhelmingly working class, despite featuring the odd medic. Hugo Hammond, who was born with a club foot, became the show’s first disabled contestant last year. The latest series features a deaf contestant, Tasha Ghouri, a ‘dancer’ with a perfect body. If the show looks more representative, don’t be deceived: there’s nothing virtuous about Love Island. But that doesn’t mean we should hold this against its beautiful, young contestants. Despite the name, Love Island isn’t about love. It’s about money, and specifically, about how to monetise your body. This is why the ‘body diversity’ we

Monday

Kara Kennedy

The thrilling misogyny of Love Island

The thought of Love Island starting tonight gives me that same fuzzy feeling I had as a child when I lost a tooth, aware that I’d be waking up a slightly richer woman. I realised after years of turning my nose up at the show that – once you get past the initial guilt – watching trivial nonsense is a bit of a sugar rush. All your friends are watching and, crucially, badmouthing, the young 20-somethings prancing across our screens each night. Love Island is a moral vacuum, one that much of the nation loves being sucked into. Good manners are cast out the villa window and what is frowned upon in

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Queen’s powerful Christian faith

12 min listen

In this week’s Holy Smoke I offer some thoughts on the impressive and distinctive Christian faith of the Queen – impressive because it’s so refreshingly direct compared to that of many of her politics-obsessed bishops, and distinctive because Elizabeth II is one of a dwindling band of Low Church but not Evangelical Anglicans whose favourite Sunday service is old-fashioned Matins. Questions of churchmanship aside, however, there is no doubting the intensity of her convictions, about which she has spoken with increasing candour and confidence in recent years. Will she turn out to be the United Kingdom’s last robustly Christian monarch?

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The monarchy pantomime

Down on the Embankment in London, yesterday, we came upon a peculiar sight: a completely stationary parade. Floppy-hatted drummers, with a vaguely heraldic look, marched on the spot in columns. Behind them there were equestrian forms, mid-leap, with their lower halves made to look like marble statues and their upper bodies made of clockwork, trailing a huge horse’s head drawing behind it a purple crown the size of a gasometer. Behind them, phalanxes of teenagers dressed as swans, and behind them phalanxes of teenagers dressed as some sort of fish, twirled and flapped to the famous patriotic song ‘Who Let The Dogs Out?’. Someone had let the dogs out, an’

Sunday

Peter Hunt

The Queen’s long goodbye

Asked at the start of the Golden Jubilee as to which one of the many events he was most looking forward to, the Queen’s husband answered in typical Philip fashion with two words: ‘the end’. There’ll have been times during the run-up to the Platinum weekend when those around the Queen may well have shared these sentiments as they anticipated what could have gone awry. There were plenty of potential clouds on the jubilee horizon. One by one, they were dispersed. Covid-19’s silver lining revealed itself when Prince Andrew tested positive. He had to recover rather than attempt to kickstart his rehabilitation on his mother’s coat tails. The greatest concern

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The punk paradox of monarchism

It seems incredible that, 45 years ago, a pop group – the Sex Pistols – could release a record on a respectable label (A&M, founded by Herb Alpert, home of the Carpenters) in which they claimed, probably somewhat rashly, that our glorious monarch was not a human being. These days such sentiments are confined to the outer reaches of conspiracy theory nuttiness. I recall the politician William Hamilton, who nowadays would be very unlikely to be elected, forever popping up on prime time television calling the Queen ‘a clockwork doll’, Princess Margaret ‘a floozy’ and Prince Charles ‘a twerp’. Oddly, as society has become less deferential, it appears to have become

Friday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

When will companies end their embarrassing Pride hypocrisy?

June is Pride Month, the annual exercise in rainbow-washing, and if you listen very carefully you may even hear gay rights mentioned. You might be familiar with Pride Month from past years. On 31 May, the bank is offering you a fixed rate with a four per cent APRC; on 1 June, it wants you to know that, on the off chance you’re non-binary, your mortgage-lender thinks that’s valid. The most obvious way for a corporation to signal its commitment to inclusivity is to emblazon its corporate branding with the Pride flag, but this is increasingly fraught with difficulty. Because, you see, the Pride flag is no longer inclusive. It’s

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The witch trial of Amber Heard

For the first few weeks of watching Johnny Depp and Amber Heard attempt to turn each other into twelve cans of cat food, it felt like some silly if savage sideshow. But as the defamation trial dragged on, it became obvious there was something unusually grotesque about this case; as with a boxing match, turning the spotlight on the audience revealed even more ugliness than that which was taking place in the arena. Samuel Butler wrote about his friend Thomas Carlyle: ‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.’ Both Heard and Depp would

Lawrence Bernstein

Never explain, never complain: The power of Her Majesty’s silence

The Queen’s Christmas message in 2002 was unusual. She explained, briefly, her approach to her role. One could even say that she ‘opened up’: ‘Each day is a new beginning, I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God.’ Her Majesty has spoken countless times subsequently. Her collective speeches have included many hundreds of thousands of words. In which, paradoxically, she has said very little. If asked to quote our monarch of seventy years, many of us would