Society

Sunday

Simon Clarke

Don’t underestimate the Omicron variant

As the Omicron variant makes its way through the population of the UK, the Chief Medical Officer’s warning that we don’t know all that much about the variant, but ‘all the things we do know are bad’ was not what anyone wanted to hear this week. Unfortunately, Chris Whitty is right. The Omicron variant’s assault on the UK has been like a blitzkrieg so far, and it has left a trail of shock and confusion in its wake. It is no wonder that Sage have advised this week that more restrictions may now be needed to prevent a rapid rise in hospitalisations. There is still a lot we don’t know

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

My Twitter conversation with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee

The latest Sage papers have been published, envisaging anything from 200 to 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron depending on how many more restrictions we’ll get — up to and very much including another lockdown. Earlier today I had an unexpected chance to ask questions of Graham Medley, the chair of the Sage modelling committee.  He’s a professor at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) which last weekend published a study on Omicron with very gloomy scenarios and making the case for more restrictions. But JP Morgan had a close look at this study and spotted something big: all the way through, LSHTM assumes that the Omicron variant is just as deadly as Delta. ‘But

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Is Omicron really no less severe? A look at South Africa’s data

It’s an open secret that ministers are nervous about advice from Sage, given its track record in exaggerating the risk posed by Covid. But where else to look? One answer is to the financial markets, who have only one question: is Omicron going to be genuinely more severe? If so then it’s time to sell. If not, it’s time to buy. The problem is that market research is seldom made public and that gloomy news gets the most clicks – which, of course, creates a media bias. The FT, for example, has access to all of these market reports on Omicron (including JP Morgan’s sense-check of Sage) but it will

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Lara Prendergast, Christopher Howse, Lionel Shriver, Peter Hitchens, Joanna Lumley and Caroline Moore

55 min listen

On this week’s very special Christmas episode, we’ll hear from Lara Prendergast on why she’s planning to party hard this Christmas. (00:57) Next, Christopher Howse on those helping to preserve the UK’s medieval churches. (06:31) Then it’s, Lionel Shriver on the Covid heretics she admires most. (16:41) Followed by, Peter Hitchens on Christmas in Russia during the last days of the Soviet Union. (25:23) Penultimately, we have Joanna Lumley on getting the key to the Sistine Chapel. (35:69) And finally, Caroline Moore on how ghost stories became a British Christmas tradition.(41:51) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes Subscribe to The Spectator magazine this Christmas and get the next 12 issues –

Adam Hyman

Pubs and restaurants are being decimated by Covid uncertainty

The run up to Christmas is normally a merry time for the hospitality industry. Our nation’s restaurants, pubs and bars are usually bursting at the seams. Most people are out celebrating with their family, friends and colleagues – with crackers being pulled, pigs in blankets served and a glass or two of mulled wine drunk under the mistletoe. Yet, the exact opposite is happening right now for the hospitality industry in the UK. Instead it’s the nightmare before Christmas. Ever since people in Britain have been told to work from home by the government and told to cut back on socialising by chief medical officer Chris Whitty, pubs and restaurants have

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why do social workers keep failing children like Arthur Labinjo-Hughes?

Why does the number of children dead from abuse — like poor Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson — stay roughly the same year in, year out? More children are taken into care every year in this country. So why doesn’t this reduce the number of desperate, abused children who are dying at the hands of the people who should be caring for them? The cases of both Arthur and Star reveal a disturbingly casual approach My suspicion is that it’s become normal for over-worked, badly-managed social workers simply to focus on the easier cases, and leave the violent addicts and the psychopathic step-parents alone. And if this is true, what

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Billie Eilish is right about our porn-sick society

You could have knocked me down with a snowflake when Billie Eilish slammed pornography on the Howard Stern Show this week. It is a strange paradox of Generation Woke, to whom Eilish is an idol, that while everything from brunch (the actor Alan Cummings said it reminded him of ‘white privilege’) to Brum (the mischievous TV toy car ‘who may reflect the language and attitudes of the 1990s’ as the BBC warned us) is deemed offensive, truly offensive things such as under-privileged women earning a living by being used as sexual meat puppets for the entertainment of men is now being framed as a perfectly wholesome pursuit. (Unless it’s your

Thursday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The attacks on J.K. Rowling only prove her point

It is often said that J.K. Rowling is uncancellable. So rich and bankable is the Harry Potter author — now a modern-day folk devil due to her views on transgenderism — it is almost inconceivable that she could be deprived of her livelihood or pushed entirely out of polite society. But her deranged haters are certainly giving it a good go. The demonisation of Rowling has taken a decidedly Stalinist turn of late. Her crime? Making some mild criticisms of gender ideology and holding to deeply old-fashioned views like believing in biological sex. The cultural elite might not be able to deprive Rowling of her income, but they can try

Ian Maxwell

The truth about my sister, Ghislaine Maxwell

The mainstream media’s pronunciation of my sister’s name has been about as accurate as their coverage of her. No, it’s not ‘Jizlaine’, it’s ‘Giilen’. Firmly a French name, it was my mother, Betty’s riposte to my father’s choice of the name Kevin for my younger brother. My mother is all too often written out of the Maxwell story but in fact she was the major influence on all our lives. That’s partly because of her loving nature but also because my father was so seldom present in our childhood. He was an incessant traveller and his many interests kept him away. Betty was determined to maintain our French identities. We

Melissa Kite

Am I being impersonated by an actor from Colorado or a mining company?

Someone else with my name is wreaking havoc with my attempts to control the Twitter account I don’t want. Obviously, I haven’t been on Twitter other than to stick my toe in briefly, then pull it back out after realising how very cold it is in there. But I can’t work out how to deactivate my account. I’ve tried many times but it is beyond me, so I have had to stay on Twitter but not actually go on Twitter. This position was holding up fine, until I started getting emails telling me someone had logged into my account and if that wasn’t me I should do something about it.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s British travel ban is entirely political

Emmanuel Macron subjected France to a two-hour primetime television interview on Wednesday evening which must have been a pre-Christmas treat for the nation. Just under four million tuned in to see Macron discussing his achievements as president in what was a polished performance; not since Tony Blair has a world leader been such a consummate actor as Macron. He declined to confirm that he will be standing for a second term in April’s presidential election but his people know that he will. There was one fly in the ointment, however, a buzz which has been distracting Macron for months: Covid. France is only just emerging from a ‘fifth wave’ of

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: Durham students’ chilling demands over ‘Rod gate’

The spirit of the Stepford students is back with a vengeance at our top universities, judging by the hysteria which greeted Rod Liddle’s remarks at Durham. Having organised both a walk out and a protest in response to Rod’s after-dinner speech, angry undergraduates have now organised an open letter, which Mr S has just received. As Professor Tim Luckhurst, the college principal who invited Rod, fights for his job amidst a furious backlash, the militant mob smell blood and are now using the incident to demand further concessions from the university. Co-signed by the university’s junior common presidents – the student satraps of each Durham college – it claims that

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why Omicron may not lead to a surge in hospitalisations

There were two takeaways from last night’s press conference: firstly, the hard data showing that the number of recorded cases of Covid had surged by 19,000 – or 28 per cent – in a single day. Second was the assertion that, as a result, the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed. What was lacking was the hard data on hospitalisations and the number of people in hospital. Although you would never have guessed from the tone of the conference, these both fell. The number of people admitted to hospital – a figure which runs a few days in arrears owing to a delay in the four constituent nations of

Harry Mount

How the National Trust’s new leader can restore trust

The National Trust has, thank God, appointed a new chairman. What can he do to restore trust in an organisation that has so catastrophically dumbed down and become so woefully political in recent years? Rene Olivieri is an American-born former publishing executive. He has been interim chairman of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the RSPCA and the Wildlife Trusts and is a board member of the government’s Culture Recovery Fund. His statement on being appointed had a few subtle, encouraging signs that he might stop the dumbing-down, politicising rot. Olivieri said:  ‘As a charity and national institution with a 126-year history, it’s uniquely placed to recognise the debt to the

Bryan Appleyard

Reality check: could our universe be a simulation?

Are we all living in a computer simulation? Is the world we imagine to be real simply virtual reality instead, an elaborate computer program? That sounds ridiculous, but nonetheless it’s what many clever people actually think — or at least, think possible. One of them, the philosopher David Chalmers, has just written a book on the subject, Reality +: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Chalmers is a serious intellect. He won a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad as a child and did his undergraduate studies in Pure Mathematics before turning to philosophy. Part of his argument is that we are already building simulated worlds ourselves —

The Spectator

Did the psychics’ predictions for 2021 come true?

Centenaries 2022 will see the 100th anniversary of: the BBC; Reader’s Digest; Ulysses by James Joyce; insulin treatment for diabetes; canned baby food; Fascist government (Mussolini’s arrival as Italian prime minister); the first female barrister; ski slalom race; Test matches between England and New Zealand; water skiing; football pools; discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb; … but not, interestingly, the 1922 Committee, which wasn’t set up until April 1923. Talking shop How much Christmas shopping did we manage to do before last year’s ‘cancelled’ Christmas? Volume of sales in December 2020 relative to December 2019: Department stores –5.1% Clothing stores –13.7 Household goods stores +10.9% Other non-food stores –0.2% Source: Office for National

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The Covid dissidents who’ve made my Christmas merrier

A few years back, a hackneyed journalistic come-hither led me to a sober reckoning: would I write about someone alive today whom I especially admire? I couldn’t think of anyone I held in high esteem who wasn’t dead. Either I was surrounded by mediocrities, or I was an ungenerous, withholding jerk. I’m pleased to discover that these days I admire a host of folks who aren’t dead. Some are colleagues or acquaintances; others I’ve never met. While they don’t all embrace the same catechism, they’ve one thing in common: they depart from establishment orthodoxy on Covid-19. What they share, then, is an anti-catechism. I’ve been vocal about my dismay over

Jeremy Clarke

Would my scan results be a death sentence?

At the desk I gave my name and showed my Covid vaccination pass and the woman told me to take a seat with the others. I greeted the two elderly couples and the healthy-looking man wearing a three-piece suit and tie and plonked myself down on one of the orange sofas. The tatty oncology department at Marseille now feels like home. The hard-as-nails but sympathetic receptionists. The seatless lavatory bowl. The notice on the wall listing the recognised mainstream religions, designating them with equal disdain as ‘cultes’. Which is a far cry from Torbay hospital, where I was treated for cancer before this. At Torbay hospital the oncology department has

Peter Hitchens

The last Noël in the USSR

It was on Christmas morning in Moscow in 1990 that my daughter, then aged seven, realised that Santa Claus was not to be trusted. She had made the usual elaborate suggestions to him in a letter to Lapland (perhaps hoping that, being posted from a frozen region, it would get through more readily). But when she came to rip open her gifts, the parcels did not contain the things she had hoped for. Instead, they were full of pale, oddly coloured and sometimes faintly dangerous Soviet products, breathing the last enchantments of the 1930s. Mrs Hitchens had queued fiercely to buy these delights in the colossal ‘Children’s World’ department store

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: Lockdown, protests, parties and Matt Hancock’s kiss

January The United Kingdom found itself in possession of a trade agreement with the EU. Coronavirus restrictions were tightened. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was administered with authorisation for the first time; retired doctors could not vaccinate before undergoing ‘diversity’ training. To prevent vaccines being exported from the EU to Northern Ireland, the EU prepared to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, but soon changed its mind. The Capitol in Washington, DC was overrun by weird people, one with horns, supporting President Donald Trump, despite his electoral defeat. Joe Biden was inaugurated as President a week later. February The government promised to legalise the drinking of coffee by two people