Society

Saturday

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Is Gary Neville actually a Tory?

If you judge a man on what he does and not just what he says, then it seems obvious multimillionaire Labour activist Gary Neville is in reality a Tory. ‘I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist,’ the former Manchester United defender turned Sky Sports commentator and plutocrat businessman told the world on Instagram this week. ‘I believe in entrepreneurialism. I believe in companies making profit. I believe in lower taxes. And I also believe that distribution of profit should be spread amongst us.’ It goes without saying, these are sentiments with which Margaret Thatcher herself would have nodded in ecstatic assent – particularly when uttered from the lips of a

Peter Hunt

Harry and Meghan’s balcony ban is a mistake

Once again, a moment that should be a unifying and celebratory for the Windsors has attracted division and discord. It has been reported today that Harry and Meghan will not appear on the Buckingham Palace balcony for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. All of this controversy for a fleeting appearance on what someone described on social media as ‘an outdoor patio on the second floor of an old building’. It’s the world’s most famous outdoor patio, utilised first by Queen Victoria in 1851 to mark the opening of the Great Exhibition. Since then, the Buckingham Palace balcony has been a focal point and climax of significant national celebrations and commemorations.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

‘Please don’t do a hit job’: An interview with Devi Sridhar

Of all the scientists who became household names during the pandemic, few divide opinion as much as Devi Sridhar. The Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh turned adviser to the Scottish government and Guardian columnist is, according to your point of view, either a voice of reason who could have prevented the bungling at Westminster and steered Britain through the pandemic with a death toll as low as that of New Zealand, or a hectoring advocate of an impossible ‘Zero Covid’ strategy. She complains of having received hate mail – a baleful occupation hazard for many in public life, but perhaps all the more shocking if

Charlie Baker

The rise of the Old Rectory left

There’s a revolution stirring in the gentle British countryside, as a political faction starts to make their voice heard. The Old Rectory left are shrugging off their chains. In Thursday’s local elections, places where the Lib Dems were trailing the Tories saw an eight point swing to Ed Davey’s party. Meanwhile, the Conservatives lost control of Oxfordshire after ceding four councillors to the Lib Dems and another to the Greens. But who are these new rural agitators? I’m sure you know the most brazen of the tribe: retired lawyers harassing their children by dropping James O’Brien clips into the family WhatsApp chat. Militant FBPE-ers based between Putney and Salcombe. Angry,

Thursday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The fight is on to censor Elon Musk’s Twitter

If Elon Musk truly intends to make Twitter a free-speech platform, he’s clearly got a fight on his hands. That was made abundantly clear by the collective meltdown among media and political elites that greeted the billionaire’s shock takeover of the platform last month. The vested interests in keeping Twitter a sanitised, censorious place are apparently considerable. And not only will Musk have the great and good, his own employees, our own Nadine Dorries and Joe Biden’s new ‘disinformation tsar’ to contend with, but potentially Twitter’s advertisers, too. CNN reports that giant American brands, including Coca-Cola and Disney, are coming under pressure to boycott Twitter if Elon Musk makes good

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Catholic Church’s muddle over Roe vs Wade

12 min listen

So Roe vs. Wade is as good as dead. Americans are about to lose their constitutional right to an abortion. Five out of the nine Supreme Court justices have drafted an opinion in their forthcoming ruling on a Mississippi abortion case which strikes down the 1973 Roe ruling as ‘egregiously wrong from the start’. As we all know it’s been leaked – but it’s expected to be issued pretty much unchanged in the next few weeks because, even if they wanted to, the justices can’t change their votes without appearing to succumb to political pressure. The unprecedented leaking of that draft opinion has been greeted by jubilation from religious conservatives

Owen Matthews

The new White Russians: the fate of émigrés fleeing Putin

It’s spring in Tbilisi. The fruit trees are in full blossom, the nights are warm. The Purpur restaurant near the Gudiashvili Gardens and Vinzavod No. 1 on Rustaveli Avenue – favourites of visiting Moscow hipsters and creatives for years – buzz with Russian conversation. ‘Everyone I know is here now,’ says Katya, 43, a museum curator visiting from Moscow. ‘It’s like Kvartira 44 [a Moscow café popular with the intelligentsia] on an outing.’ But instead of excitement, the mood among the thousands of Russians who have fled their country for the Georgian capital since the beginning of the war is one of anxiety and barely suppressed desperation. ‘People are putting

Matt Hancock

It takes courage to be vulnerable

It has been wonderful to welcome seven refugees – and their four dogs – to my home in Suffolk. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Ukrainian food and picking up the basics of the language. It’s humbling living with three generations from one family who have escaped war with little more than the clothes on their backs. It brings perspective. They video-call family and friends left behind who live under the threat of bombardment, and it’s striking just how close to home this conflict is. The teenagers staying with me study by remote learning at their college in Kyiv while the shells fall. The Suffolk community has been so helpful. Within

Douglas Murray

What America gets right about the abortion debate

There are two things non-Americans can almost never understand about America and should probably never speak about. The first is guns. If you have a British accent and arrive in America, or talk about America, you should be very careful before opining on the Second Amendment. It isn’t a precise analogy, but you might compare it to an American arriving in Britain and suddenly talking about the rights and wrongs of hereditary monarchy. There are lots of reasons why countries end up with the institutions they have. And though Her Majesty the Queen is clearly responsible for fewer fatalities each year than America’s right to bear arms, the Second Amendment

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

The romance and rebellion of an Iranian picnic

Iranians adore a picnic. During the country’s most ancient festival, Nowruz, the Persian new year, they brandish baskets of food as they swarm into parks and gardens to celebrate Sizdah-bedar, the 13th and final day of the Nowruz celebrations and the coming of spring. In Britain, it’s only just getting warm enough to enjoy a khoresht stew or doogh, a yoghurt drink that tastes a little like Indian lassi. But venture out to Hyde Park and you’ll see groups of young and old Iranians sitting in the pale springtime sun. The Persian picnic is generally a family affair. Pretty much every Iranian has fond memories of Nowruz meals; eating fragrant

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

How did we fall for the junk science of forensics?

I grew up in the golden age of forensic science, at a time when expert witnesses were becoming celebs, each with their special little area of crimebusting know-how. The papers were full of excited talk about hair microscopy, ballistics and fibre analysis. Crime scene investigators were hot as pop stars. My brother and I had a nanny with a passion for gore. She wasn’t interested in me as a rule, but I could always hold her attention with a nice chat about blood spatter patterns. We discussed what you could tell from the trajectory of arterial spray or the shape of a drip. Over in America, Herbert MacDonell was the

Robert Hardman

The monarchy’s real race problem

The monarchy has a race problem. And it has much more to do with Theresa May and Boris Johnson than the hazy accusations of the Sussexes. Two royal tours on the trot have now been upstaged by accusations of ‘colonialism’. First, the Cambridges took the Queen’s Jubilee message to three of her Caribbean realms. Then the Wessexes visited three more. On both tours, local politicians took the opportunity to lecture their royal guests on historic evils done in the name of the Crown. This was swiftly followed back home by a virtuous pile-on on Twitter and elsewhere. LBC’s James O’Brien berated the ‘absurd’ Wessexes for giving their hosts framed photographs.

The Spectator

Who’s heard of Lorraine Kelly?

The right to buy The Prime Minister floated the idea of granting housing association tenants a blanket right to buy. How many social homes have been sold over the years? – Since 1980, 2.19m homes have been sold in England. The most sold in any one year was 167,123 in 1982/83 and the fewest was 8,474 in 2008/09. In 2020/21, 17,262 were sold. Although receipts from sales are supposed to fund replacement dwellings, this has not happened. Since 2010, when the Conservatives returned to power, 235,460 social homes have been sold. But the overall number of social homes has grown only by 94,000, from 3.972m to 4.066m. Abortion rates The

The Spectator

Letters: an artist’s work shouldn’t be judged by how he leads his life

Wrong is right Sir: Having spent most of my working life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), I never pass up an opportunity to catch up on what is happening in Africa. Michela Wrong’s article (‘Hotel Rwanda’, 23 April) illustrates well the incompetence of Priti Patel in sending asylum seekers to President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda against, apparently, the advice of her own civil servants. I had to read that bit twice because I have always admired Patel for her forthright and sensible executive decisions. But what is the motive here? Michela Wrong itemises Kagame’s history of killings going back to 1994 and the atrocities committed by Rwandan troops in the Democratic Republic

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

No, BP’s profit hasn’t boosted Starmer’s windfall-tax call

BP’s ‘underlying’ first-quarter profit of $6.2 billion, compared with $2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021, was a direct reflection of the surge in global energy prices. Coming 48 hours before polling day, it also looked like a gift-wrapped on-time delivery for Sir Keir Starmer and his claim that a windfall tax on ‘excess’ profits of North Sea oil and gas extractors would knock £600 off the energy bills of ‘those who need it most’. Perhaps anticipating the BP announcement, Rishi Sunak last week seemed to trim his opposition to a windfall tax, telling Mumsnet ‘of course that’s something I would look at’ if energy companies fail to invest

Katy Balls Katy Balls

‘Whitehall was horrified by Brexit’: an interview with Australia’s departing high commissioner

When Britain voted for Brexit, Tony Abbott, the former prime minister of Australia, had an idea. How about striking a new free trade deal between Australia and the UK to celebrate escaping the statism and bureaucracy of Brussels? The deal needed to be only one page long, he argued, because the two countries were already so similar. ‘If a car is fit to be sold in Britain, it’s fit to be sold in Australia,’ he said. ‘If a doctor is fit to practise in Australia, he or she is fit to practise in the UK.’ In the end, things proved more complicated. An agreement was eventually signed last December, but

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: If Alan Bennett had been a spy

In Competition No. 3247, you were asked to submit the reflections of a well-known writer on a career path they might have taken. Most famous writers have had day jobs – Kurt Vonnegut sold Saabs, Harper Lee worked as an airline ticket agent, and Joseph Heller was a blacksmith’s apprentice. But what about those missed vocations? Take a bow, Robert Frost, map-maker; Emily Dickinson, undertaker; Raymond Chandler, shrink. The winners earn £25. I think I could have been a model censor of obscenity Admonishing the naughty and not ever granting lenity To crudity or nudity or any kind of rudery, Far bossier than Bowdler in my monumental prudery. How drastically I’d prune the books

James Heale James Heale

Eton mess: inside the battle to run Britain’s top public school

Speak to Tory ministers of a certain background and the question of succession soon arises. But the position they’re talking about is in Windsor, not Westminster – and it has nothing to do with skipping a generation of the monarchy. Pretty soon there will be a new Provost of Eton and, thanks to a quirk of history, it’s a Crown appointment. With so many Old Etonians in this government, including the Business Secretary, Brexit Opportunities Minister and the Prime Minister himself, there’s no shortage of opinions. The incumbent, Lord Waldegrave, is expected to leave his post shortly, after 13 years – and at a time when a battle is being

Bryan Matthews

The strange return of the Philippines’ brutal Marcos dynasty

For Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr, the frontrunner for Monday’s Philippine presidential election, a reframing of the country’s past has been crucial to securing his future. Last week, he reminded a television audience what a ‘political genius’ his late father, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr, was. Bongbong’s revisionist history has infuriated many Filipinos but, it seems, resonated with many more. Polls show that he has a 30-point lead over his closest rival, the current vice-president Leni Robredo, though she has drawn massive crowds and expects a late surge of support. Thirty-six years ago, after the ‘people power’ revolution ended, Marcos Sr’s dictatorship and sent the family fleeing to Hawaii, it seemed

Jeremy Clarke

How a May Day car-boot sale gave me back my optimism

So that’s it. Is a third world war possible? It’s already begun, opined a retired US general in the newspaper. Oh good. I shouted down the stairs to Catriona: ‘World War Three’s started.’ Catriona said she’d better get the washing in, then go down to the village shop to get fresh coriander. May Day in France is also Fête du Muguet – the festival of the lily of the valley. Lovers give each other bunches to signify love, affection and workers’ rights. She returned with coriander and a lily of the valley for me. The latter was wilting a bit. ‘It’ll probably only last two or three days,’ she said.