Society

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

How Rebekah Vardy went from underdog to ‘Cry-Bully’

It was Depp vs Heard and Best Of Breed at Crufts rolled into one: yes, the Wagatha Christie gravy-train came to a screeching halt yesterday having taken three years and £3 million in lawyers’ fees to reach the terminus. And with it, Rebekah Vardy’s reputation as a Cool Girl hit the buffers. I was vaguely on Team Vardy to start with; childhood abuse, broken home, homeless at 15, teenage bride, three times married, mother of five, eventually finding fame, fortune and Fendi by marrying Jamie Vardy. Coleen, on the other hand, seemed the boring good girl who had been with Wayne since they were schoolmates – before he had money,

Lucy Dunn

The grim reality facing junior doctors

The NHS is facing the biggest crisis in its history. GP surgeries are breaking under pressure, waiting lists could top nine million by March 2024, and there’s a huge shortfall of staff. Many medics are opting to simply throw in the towel. Having recently qualified as a doctor, I can’t say I’m surprised. For junior doctors, stress, burnout and bullying are quick to take a toll: seven per cent of medics leave within the first three years. This bucks the expected trend: that people are at their most vitalised nearer the start of their careers. For medicine, the evidence suggests otherwise. Clinical placements reveal harsh realities early on, acclimatising trainees to

Nigel Jones

Is the death penalty making a comeback?

It’s been a busy week for hangmen. In Japan, Tomohiro Kato, a 39-year-old man, was hanged at a Tokyo prison for killing seven people and injuring ten others in a 2008 murderous rampage in which he drove a truck into a crowd before stabbing several other random victims. Kato admitted his guilt and blamed his crime on his alienation from society and insults he had received on social media. It was the second execution in Japan ordered by the government of prime minister Fumio Kishida, who took office in 2021, after the death penalty had been held in abeyance for several years. However, it’s unlikely to be the last. Tetsuya

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the eurozone in crisis?

Is the eurozone heading for another 2010-style sovereign debt crisis? Today comes the news that inflation in the eurozone hit 8.9 per cent in the year to July. Although it is a record high, it is not as quite as towering as inflation in Britain – at 9.4 per cent. However, what it does do is expose the vulnerability of the eurozone – and how Italian public debt threatens to undermine it. This week, the yield on Italian ten-year government bonds rose to 3.5 per cent as investors began to wonder again if the country can honour its debts. Granted, it’s not quite as high at the rates of over

Alexander Larman

Rebekah Vardy’s spectacular own goal

Jamie Vardy is one of English football’s most prolific strikers. But thanks to his wife, his surname will be forever associated with one of the all-time great legal own goals. Rebekah Vardy has spectacularly lost her high-profile libel battle against Coleen Rooney in the so-called ‘Wagatha Christie’ case.  It’s hard to overstate how damning today’s judgment is of Vardy: Mrs Justice Steyn said that Vardy’s evidence, which she had treated ‘with very considerable caution’, ‘was manifestly inconsistent with the contemporaneous documentary evidence’ and was ‘evasive’ or ‘implausible’. She also decided that Rooney’s Instagram post – which sparked the bust-up between the two WAGs in the first place – was ‘substantially true’. A drama has been

Debbie Hayton

On the front line at Drag Queen Story Hour

Henleaze, a suburb in the north of Bristol, is an unlikely place for a protest. This is a well-to-do area where the houses sit behind neatly-clipped hedges and cost over half-a-million pounds. But across the road from the local Waitrose yesterday morning, Henleaze’s library was surrounded by at least a dozen police officers and two angry groups of demonstrators. A gaggle of toddlers and their mums had also gathered. Drag Queen Story Hour was about to begin. Those protesting against the appearance of Sab Samuel, a drag queen who goes by the stage name Aida H Dee, were clear what they thought. ‘It’s wrong. This is aimed at toddlers and these kids don’t

Thursday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Why the Tavistock clinic had to be shut down

There are many reasons why what is sometimes crudely called ‘the trans issue’ is important. One is the political failure that left the legitimate views of many women (and men) ignored by decision-making individuals and bodies, who instead prioritised the views of interest groups and campaigners. Another is the multiple failures of governance that have seen numerous public bodies fail to deal properly and responsibly with questions of real public interest, because of their enthusiasm to follow the subjective agenda of interest groups rather than amass and act on objective evidence. Simply put, organisations that are supposed to make decisions on the basis of facts have sometimes chosen to proceed

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Scotland’s drug deaths scandal is a problem no one seems able to solve

Scotland has a high amount of drugs deaths. But it’s not just that. It’s that Scotland suffers drugs deaths at levels unknown anywhere else in the UK or Europe – nearly four times worse than any other country for which records exist. This scandalous figure has been updated today, showing that – although it fell one per cent this year – it has trebled since the SNP came to power. It speaks to a wider collapse of public policy. And one that requires urgent attention. The new figures published show drug-related deaths have fallen to 1,330 – just nine fewer than the year before and the second-highest ever recorded. As a share of the

The Spectator

Germany’s energy crisis is a warning to Britain

During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy. A decade on and it is Berlin doing the begging. Europe has reluctantly agreed a 15 per cent cut in gas use this winter in the hope that German factories can stay open and German citizens can keep from freezing. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom threatened to reduce the gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline yet again so that Germany would receive only a fifth of the amount it did before the Ukrainian invasion. While Berlin has said it plans to wean itself off Russian gas over

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The parallel universe you can explore on two wheels

Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own genuine, and literally parallel, universe that we can escape into at any moment. It’s the National Cycle Network that threads its way quietly and meanderingly over, under and alongside our gridlocked main roads and our daily lives. Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with supposedly ‘broken Britain’ all over again. You’ll be reminded that it’s a country of dog-walkers, rivers, farms and front gardens. And you don’t have to wear Lycra to do this. You just need ordinary clothes, plus KitKats, Thermos and sandwiches, and off you trundle

Dot Wordsworth

The etymological ingredients of ‘flageons’

‘Don’t you know the answer?’ asked my husband with mock surprise, throwing over to me from his armchair a copy of the Daily Telegraph. The question, from a reader on the Letters page, was what Mrs Beeton meant by flageons of veal. I had no idea and nor did the Oxford English Dictionary in 20 volumes. The recipe was for a sort of giant hamburger or hot meatloaf made from minced veal, suet, eggs and breadcrumbs. That gave no clues about its name. It could hardly have connections with flagons or flagellation. A day later another reader found in her edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management from 1915

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

How to save Royal Mail

The government’s ‘cost-of-living tsar’, Just Eat co-founder David Buttress, was appointed last month as a Canutian gesture against the inflation tide. He says his role is to encourage retailers and utilities to offer discount deals that might relieve short-term pain for consumers. But wouldn’t it be good if he also had powers to shame companies or sectors for profiteering by whacking their prices up far ahead of inflation? Any firm for which energy or scarce raw materials are major cost elements has possible reason for scorching price rises; many others do not. Buttress could start by looking into hire-car rates, which have doubled (and more) across Europe since 2019 –

Prue Leith

Why Liz Truss shouldn’t be PM

Two and a half years ago I joined the Tory party to vote for Boris, then unjoined as soon as I could. I’ve never been a Tory voter but I believed in Boris and never thought of him as a cliquey, old-school Conservative. Now I’d like to rejoin to keep Liz Truss out. She seems to want to be PM just for the sake of being PM – we’ve had enough of that. But I’m hoist on my own petard. The party has wised up to tactical joining and you need to be a member for six months to vote. One of the many reasons we have a chronic staffing

The Spectator

Letters: Let’s get fracking

Get fracking Sir: All credit to The Spectator for grabbing the cancelled Tory leadership debate slot (‘The final three’, 23 July) and for quizzing the contenders on the massive cost of net zero. Rishi Sunak’s response was particularly disappointing. Here is a man who has financial acumen and who has spent his entire cabinet career in the Treasury. Yet he would have us believe that the offshore wind industry, whose biggest costs are incurred in erecting huge structures of steel, iron, plastic/resin and concrete, has somehow contrived to cut those costs by nearly three-quarters over a decade. Unfortunately strike prices around £40/MWh which have been obtained for some recent offshore

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sunak vs Truss, London dodges a blackout and 94st walrus capsizes boats

Home In a television debate between the two contenders for the leadership of the Conservative party (and hence the prime ministership), Rishi Sunak said it would be irresponsible to put the country in even more debt by cutting taxes and Liz Truss said that the tax rises he approved would put Britain into a recession. Mr Sunak was criticised for interrupting. A later proposal he made to cut VAT when the price cap on energy bills rose above £3,000 only brought accusations of a U-turn. He agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Neil on Channel 4, but Ms Truss didn’t. Opinion polls put Ms Truss well ahead among Conservative voters;

Andrew Tettenborn

Allison Bailey and the trouble with Stonewall

When a pressure group moves from promoting the rights of a minority to trying to micromanage the behaviour of the majority, we should be worried. When large numbers of organisations in both the public and private sectors dance to the tune of that body, we should be more so. Stonewall is a case in point, if the evidence given at an employment tribunal case decided yesterday involving commendably pugnacious lesbian activist Allison Bailey is anything to go by. Founded in 1989 as a gay equality campaign group, in recent years Stonewall has diversified into aggressively promoting trans activism. As an organisation, it has also become pretty rawly commercial. A good

Toby Young Toby Young

My Icelandic holiday with Kevin and Perry

I’m currently on holiday in Iceland. I say ‘holiday’, but I’m with my three teenage sons so it’s more like being a supply teacher on a school trip. The scenery looks like a series of illustrations in a geography textbook – volcano, tectonic plate, glacier – but so far the boys aren’t impressed. ‘Every day is the same,’ said 17-year-old Ludo. ‘We wake up, drive somewhere, go on a walk, take pictures of a waterfall or a lava field, then walk back again.’ This produced murmurs of agreement. I told them they’d enjoy the sightseeing more if they looked up from their phones occasionally, but I don’t think this cut

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What Keir Starmer’s got wrong

I see that Cricket Scotland is an appalling institution riven with racism. It has just been subjected to ‘the most devastating verdict to be delivered on any sporting institution in the UK’, having treated a whole bunch of players of Asian heritage to prejudice, discrimination and racial abuse. As a consequence there will be inquiries into the governing bodies of all the other sports Scottish people play with great enthusiasm but a marked shortage of talent. I daresay they will find similar nastiness within these McKu Klux Klanneries, a vicious and festering spite borne of inferiority complexes and facilitated by the fact that the governance of the entire country is

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Trussonomics doesn’t add up

I’ve been lucky enough in my working life so far to hold a string of jobs that have allowed me – if not actively encouraged me – to be critical of government. Coming up through Westminster thinktanks in my twenties, I had great fun putting out press releases that tore apart bad public policy. When I had the opportunity to speak to MPs, they’d remind me of the ‘political realities’ that tied their hands and prevented change. In other words, check your policy privilege. Thinktank wonks, commentators and journalists can make all the punchy points they want; they don’t face re-election. But there was one politician who over the years

The Spectator

Which country has hosted Eurovision the most?

The longest heatwave How did the recent heatwave compare with that of 1976? That year, the temperature peaked at 35.9˚C at Cheltenham on 3 July. This did not even break the UK temperature record at the time – 36.7˚C recorded in Northamptonshire on 9 August 1911. No recording from 1976 currently features on the list of Britain’s ten hottest recorded days. By contrast, in 2022 temperatures peaked at 40.3˚C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire. – However, the 1976 heatwave was far more prolonged. Temperatures surpassed 90˚F (32.2˚C) somewhere in England on 15 consecutive days – a record which has never even nearly been surpassed. In 2022, temperatures exceeded 90˚F on just three