Society

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What foreign policy would look like under a PM Truss

When Tom Tugendhat announced he was backing Liz Truss for prime minister, his former supporters were dismayed. He was the candidate for the ‘One Nation’ caucus of moderate MPs, who defined themselves against the Tory right. ‘Anyone but Truss’ was their mantra – and they lined up behind Rishi Sunak. Yet here was their former poster boy supporting their nemesis. What could Truss and Tugendhat possibly have in common? The answer can be summed up in a word: China. For better or worse, Truss is an instinctive politician. On foreign affairs, she was held back by Boris Johnson, who was more cautious on China. If she becomes prime minister, which

Fiona Unwin

How Rishi Sunak won over the Tories of West Suffolk

‘I’ve cancelled my exercise class for this! I hope he’s worth it,’ said Selina in the hotel lobby. Rishi Sunak was coming to West Suffolk to meet members of our Conservative Association. Would he be worth a listen? Clearly our members thought so. More than 90 of us rocked up at one day’s notice to meet Rishi (or Sushi, as one of our older members kept calling him). Rishi wanted to pitch for our votes. His strategy is to introduce himself to as many members as possible. Last weekend, he met 2,000 activists in constituencies where 10,000 Tory members are based. He needs every single one of our votes if

Nicholas Coleridge

Why must my mobile provider harass me all through my holiday?

We have been on a family holiday to Tangier, Morocco, and of course my mobile phone came too. Not that I was intending to use it much – minimum impulse roaming; I would mostly wait until we had wifi for the purposes of Instagram and the rest of it. And I don’t tend to use the telephone bit at all. We had been at the villa two days when the barrage began – text after text, email after email, all from O2. I can’t pretend I am someone who can tell one service provider from another, but I know I am ‘with’ O2, and suddenly they were all over me.

Rachel Johnson

They do things differently in the Cotswolds

The Season has ended and – apart from The Spectator’s summer bash of course – the two bang-up parties of July were discos in the Cotswolds. They do things differently there. At Jemima Goldsmith’s I danced so hard in high heels with a selection of her handsome young swains that I suspect the double hip replacement will be sooner rather than later. At Carrie and Boris’s Daylesford wedding do in a magical flower-filled field we all busted out our best moves. I was taught the slut-drop by Liz Hurley years ago in Nick Coleridge’s party barn in Worcestershire. She demonstrated how to collapse to the floor like a broken deckchair

Dot Wordsworth

What do ‘catcalls’ have to do with cats?

‘A law against catcalls?’ asked my husband sceptically. ‘What next, criminalising booing and hissing?’ He often gets the wrong end of the stick, but in this case I hardly blame him, for the press retailed widely Liz Truss’s resolve to make a law against catcalls and wolf-whistles. But to an older generation like my husband’s, catcalling is something to do with the theatre. In Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot assures us that Gus the Theatre Cat acted with Irving and Tree – Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), who Shaw said revealed on stage ‘glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness’, and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917), noted for histrionic versatility. But then Eliot

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I tell my neighbours I’m too busy to stop for a chat?

Q. My parents are abroad for two months and as my flatmates in London are all, like me, working from home, I’ve moved to their country cottage to get some peace. This is an idyllic and very community-based village but one unforeseen problem has arisen. The house is at the end of a cul-de-sac lane and every time I nip out to do anything – post a letter, buy a pint of milk – I run into neighbours, each one requiring at least a five-minute chat. Short errands are taking an hour to complete. Without seeming to be unfriendly, how can I, on weekdays, give the message I am busy

Neil Clark

What we can all learn from Jim Corbett’s tiger tales

‘The word “Terror” is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.’ Thus begins the third chapter of The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (1947), part of the Man-Eater series by the great Anglo-Indian hunter and naturalist Jim Corbett. I was reminded of Corbett and his wonderful books when reading last week that human-assaulting tigers are once again on the prowl in Nepal, with 104 attacks and 62 people killed in the past three years. Conservation efforts have seen tiger numbers rise three-fold since 2010, but with that good news comes the

Toby Young Toby Young

Iceland’s scenery takes your breath away – but so do the prices

I’m writing this on the plane back from Iceland, a fact that fills me with relief. Not because I didn’t enjoy my trip to the land of fire and ice – far from it – but because there was a serious risk I might be stuck there indefinitely with Caroline and my three sons. In the 24 hours before our departure, nearly 4,000 earthquakes were detected in the southwestern region known as the Reykjanes peninsula, which is where the international airport is located. Such unusual seismic activity is often a sign that a volcano is about to erupt and that, in turn, can create an ash cloud that necessitates the

The Spectator

When did ‘best before’ dates begin?

An idea past its sell-by date Waitrose has announced the removal of ‘best before’ dates from many food products. – The idea of printing dates began with Marks & Spencer in the 1950s, but only for use in the stockroom. They first appeared in the company’s shops in 1970 and were named ‘sell-by’ dates from 1973, launched with an advertising campaign saying: ‘The sell-by date means that St Michael foods are fresh.’ There was also a TV advert which featured Twiggy. – The concept was quickly adopted by other supermarkets after evidence that shoppers liked the reassurance of a date. It was expanded in the 1980s, with ‘best before’ dates

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Hosepipe bans, England’s women win the Euros and a strike over dragons

Home BP reported quarterly profits of £6.9 billion, its biggest for 14 years, after oil and gas prices rose steeply. Typical domestic energy bills were forecast by the consultancy Cornwall Insight to go above £3,600 a year in the coming winter. Under the family scheme for visas, 31,300 Ukrainians had arrived in the United Kingdom, and 72,700 under the sponsorship scheme. British Airways suspended new ticket sales for short-haul flights from Heathrow until at least 15 August, to meet the airport’s limit on the number of passengers departing each day of 100,000. On 1 August, 696 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats; in July the total was 3,683, and

Wednesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Kansas’s abortion vote could prove decisive for the US midterms

In 2020, 56.2 per cent of Kansas voters cast their ballot for Donald Trump – 15 percentage points in his favour. Yesterday, many of these same voters returned to the polling stations. This time, more than 58 per cent of voters cast their ballot in favour of retaining the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. This overwhelming victory for abortion rights in a comfortably red state is providing insight into how the abortion debate will play out State-side in the latter half of the year. It’s not simply the result, but the margin by which Kansans voted in favour of abortion rights that is notable. This suggests the average

Lucy Dunn

What’s the truth about the NHS’s ‘Black Wednesday’?

If there was ever a bad time to end up in hospital, today – Black Wednesday – is it. The first Wednesday of August is changeover day in NHS hospitals. A fresh-faced cohort of junior doctors arrive on the wards ready to get their hands dirty. It’s also the day that just about every trainee doctor moves jobs. The result can be chaotic, as teams of medics scatter and new ones arrive. Doctors who had become used to working alongside one another not only need to adjust to new teammates, but also navigate unfamiliar wards, or even relocate to entirely different hospitals altogether. It’s no wonder that patient care can take a

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Has Sadiq Khan’s junk food ad ban really stopped London getting fatter?

London Mayor Sadiq Khan made a bold claim this week: ‘As a result of our junk food advertising ban on Transport for London, nearly 100,000 cases of obesity have been prevented since 2019.’ Hailing the ‘incredible result’, Khan said ‘it’s expected to save the NHS over £200 million’. Is it true though? To ascertain whether the ban worked, researchers from Sheffield university and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine produced a graph. They found that there were some 4.8 per cent fewer obese people than expected and 1.8 per cent fewer overweight people. What they didn’t do was actually count the obesity rate in London’s population. Instead, their estimates

Robert Tombs

These polemics against Brexit both fall into the same trap

It is good for historians to take the plunge into political writing, using their knowledge where they can to illuminate our present predicament. I declare an interest: I have tried it myself, on the other side of the debate. One has to be open with the reader as to one’s intentions and willing to expose one’s own opinions to the test of evidence. Otherwise, the result is something like these intriguingly confused and confusing books, which are really polemics against Brexit while purporting to be something else. Though very different in style and assumptions, their prejudices lead to the same intellectual dead end. Bernard Porter is a distinguished historian of

Patrick West

Mock the Week deserved to be cancelled

After seventeen years and more than 200 episodes, the cackling and sniggering is finally over for the panel show Mock the Week. As the BBC announced yesterday: ‘The next series of Mock the Week will be the last, we are really proud of the show but after 21 series we have taken the difficult decision in order to create room for new shows.’ What could be behind this decision? Its veteran presenter, Dara Ó Briain, sought to apportion some logic to the matter. ‘The storylines were getting crazier and crazier – global pandemics, divorce from Europe, novelty short-term prime ministers,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t go on. We just couldn’t be

Tuesday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

In defence of Beyonce

People complaining about supposedly offensive pop lyrics is hardly anything new. It’s as old as the form itself; never-ending proof that everyone is offended by something and that every era has its own set of taboos. But the speed with which music stars appear to be acquiescing to other people’s hurt feelings today is surely something new. Take Beyonce. She’s one of the biggest stars in the world. A genuine living legend. And yet because a handful of disabled charities and irked right-on tweeters have complained about one word in one of the songs on her new album Renaissance, her ‘team’ has almost immediately promised to scrub and re-record the

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Oliver Cromwell was a liberal pioneer ahead of his time

Was Oliver Cromwell a religious fanatic who loved banning stuff, or a pioneer of liberal values? Sunday’s Observer reported that a group of historians have dredged up some documents that suggest that he was seriously committed to religious freedom.  Despite his reputation for brutally suppressing Irish Catholics, it emerges that Cromwell was open to them practicing their faith, so long as they no longer posed a political threat by supporting royalists. Another document confirms his enthusiasm for readmitting Jews to England and his willingness to offer them religious freedom. The article quotes one of these historians, John Morrill, emeritus professor of British and Irish history at Cambridge University: ‘Cromwell’s commitment

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Does Stonewall have no shame?

Watching people brazening it out can be tremendous fun. The higher the stakes, the more extreme the disparity between reality and what we now call ‘cope’, the greater the cheer. We remember the brass neck of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister dubbed ‘Comical Ali’, still denying the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime as American tanks rolled into Baghdad. Or the final balcony address given by Nicolae Ceaușescu on his pet TV station as his regime was toppling. We associate this kind of thing with despotic regimes, but in the democratic world we get the occasional glimpse of it: a public figure refusing to acknowledge openly the import of

Monday