Society

Monday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

In praise of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

If there’s one quality that defines Elon Musk other than his entrepreneurship, it’s his ability to drive his detractors mad. From this perspective, his attempt to buy Twitter is his greatest success yet. With Twitter poised to accept a buyout today, we can expect more entertainment on this front. We can also expect a significant improvement to the social network. Musk’s motivations are twofold. Firstly, he is a passionate believer in free speech, a quality he views as sorely lacking on the platform. A commitment to enabling unfettered conversation would make it a far more interesting place to be. Secondly, and relatedly, he thinks he can run it better than

Matthew Lynn

A football regulator is bad news for the beautiful game

It will stop shady oligarchs and brutal autocracies buying up clubs simply to whitewash their reputations. It will ensure financial stability and fair play between the teams. And it will protect local fans, many of whom have been standing on windswept terraces for years, from seeing their teams turned into mere units of anonymous global corporations. In the wake of the Super League fiasco, and the sanctioning of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, it is not hard to understand why the government has today announced the creation of an Independent Football Regulator with sweeping power to oversee the national game. But hold on. Like all regulators, while it is no doubt well

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The case that sums up the police’s warped priorities

If you want a snapshot of how warped the police’s priorities are these days, look to the case of Kevin Mills. Mills, a 63-year-old electrician, has just had a ‘non-crime hate incident’ scrubbed from his record following a bizarre battle with Kent Police. It all stems from a testy exchange in 2019 between himself and a woman he was doing some work for.  Mills showed up to the woman’s house in Maidstone in Kent to install a bathroom mirror. When he realised he’d need £50 more for materials, the two got into a row and she insisted on keeping some materials he’d already bought for the job. Mills walked out,

Sunday

Debbie Hayton

Why we need an inquiry into gender treatment for children

Sajid Javid is right to worry about the way the NHS has treated children who identify as transgender. The Health Secretary is reported to be preparing an urgent inquiry into the issue, and planning an overhaul of how the health service treats young people with gender dysphoria. He is the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, so it is his job to be concerned. But for too long ministers have shied away from what future generations may consider to be a scandal of epic proportions. In England, children presenting with gender dysphoria are referred to a single NHS provider – the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) operated by

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Privilege vs poverty in the French election

In a few hours France will know who has won the presidential election. Macron, predict the polls – though Marine Le Pen’s National Rally remain convinced that the ‘voice of the street’ will sweep them to power. The truth, however, is that there will be no winner from this election. Macron told Le Pen during Wednesday’s live television debate that her wish to ban the headscarf would precipitate a ‘civil war’, but France is already at war with itself. Macron vs Le Pen is how it has manifested itself this month but the battle lines were first drawn a decade or more ago as the effects of globalisation began to bite

Michael Mosbacher

Will Stroud’s ‘racist’ blackboy clock fall?

Britain’s statue wars are rumbling on. Stroud District Council wants to take down an historic Jacquemart or jack – a mechanised figure which strikes the time with a hammer on a bell – clock located on Castle Street in the centre of the Gloucestershire town. Whilst jack clocks are fairly common in France and Germany, there are only 20 in the UK, most showing knights or similar striking the bell. Stroud’s jack, however, is a thick-lipped black boy in a leaf skirt and hence offends today’s mores. In the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and Bristol’s Edward Colston statue being toppled by a mob and thrown into

Saturday

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Trump, Piers Morgan and the power of self-publicity

If ‘real recognise real’ – by far my favourite piece of modern American vernacular – then Donald Trump’s latest tiff with Piers Morgan seems final. ‘I don’t think you’re real’, the former President spits angrily in the excitingly edited promo for their upcoming interview, shortly before seeming to storm off set – a choice of words suggestive of a fundamental re-evaluation. Did Trump until this surreal moment of tabloid TV consider Morgan – a person with whom he has spent many hours over more than a decade – a man of great honour and integrity? Did he feel he had been tricked into doing the interview on a false premise?

Stephen L. Miller

The sad demise of Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart made one of the biggest career follies in the history of infotainment when he walked away from the Daily Show in 2015, removing himself from the Donald Trump presidency. It’s a mistake from which he’s never recovered. Ratings for the Daily Show tanked as a then-unknown replacement host (Trevor Noah) took over, while just about every late-night comic adopted Stewart’s model of faking the news (Late Night with Seth Meyers, the Colbert Report, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and a dozen others). Journalists admired Stewart because he was the class clown who could say things about Republicans they all wanted to but couldn’t. News websites created

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Earth Day – and the untold story of environmental progress

It’s Earth Day today, the anniversary of the 1970 event that kick-started the modern environmentalist movement. in her recent column, my colleague Mary Wakefield wrote how a ‘dark green’ orthodoxy of negativity is being taught in schools with kids being given an unduly gloomy view of the world. But that’s perhaps inevitable when the “act or die” message of the original Earth Day is perpetuated even after the arguments behind it have collapsed – without anyone really explaining, or tracking, the new facts.  The premise of the first Earth Day was plausible at the time: that the world’s resources would be drained in proportion to population growth so health improvements that cut infant mortality would lead

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Making a sick joke about Grenfell doesn’t merit a jail sentence

So in Britain in 2022, you can get a jail sentence for making an offensive joke. Yesterday a man was handed a 10-week prison sentence – suspended – for engaging in an act of crude humour. This should give rise to some serious national self-reflection. A free, civilised country does not hand out jail time for jokes. What has happened to us? The man in question is Paul Bussetti from Croydon. He’s the guy who shared a video of something horrible that happened at a bonfire party in November 2018. Someone put a cardboard model of Grenfell Tower on top of the fire. The model had the faces of residents

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Narcissist vs fantasist: France’s gruesome choice

Something strange is happening in advanced western democracies. In America and France, voters keep finding themselves choosing between candidates for whom they have very little affection. In America, we saw Clinton vs Trump, followed by Biden vs Trump. And in France this week, we have Macron vs Le Pen again. As many French voters now say, this is a choice between la peste (plague) et le choléra. Emmanuel Macron is disliked: arrogant and narcissistic to the point where he has compared himself to Jupiter, king of the gods. He has spent five years insulting and patronising voters and delivering mediocre results. His management of the epidemic was repressive and absurdist.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why Elon Musk should forget Twitter and stick to Tesla

I spent Easter agonising over whether to throw the considerable weight of this column behind Elon Musk’s maverick $43 billion bid for Twitter. One thing I didn’t do, however, was consult the multitude of opinions on the matter available via Twitter itself, because I’m afraid I regard it as a satanic cacophony of misinformation and vanity. If that puts me in the position of the late-15th-century scholar who said ‘Printing presses? Pah! The only news I trust is handwritten by monks’, so be it. But when I read Musk’s claim that ‘civilisational risk’ would be decreased by his sole ownership of the ubiquitous microblogging site, I laughed out loud. Not

Peter Jones

Ukraine, the Roman army and why morale matters

Commentators talk much about the morale of the Ukrainian troops and the edge that this has given them over the Russians, even in a technology-dominated conflict. Ancient warfare was a matter of hand-to-hand fighting, where morale is absolutely crucial – ‘defeat in battle always starts with the eyes’, said Tacitus – and the imperial Roman army offers a masterclass in how to generate it. That army was, uniquely, professional. The soldiers’ physical fitness, kit, mastery of weapons and technical training in battle tactics were second to none. Their loyalty to the group was reinforced by the closely knit units of eight in which they lived, ate and slept, training and

Charlie Metcalfe

Thumbs up: why hitchhiking is the best way to travel

When I first saw Vitaly I thought he was drunk. I was standing outside a petrol station near Fulda, in central Germany, when he pulled up in a battered Saab. Mud covered the entire left side of his car and the rear bumper hung like a drooping bottom lip. His hair was greasy. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. Only later did I discover that he had just fled besieged Kyiv. He was now driving to Bern in Switzerland, where he hoped to find work. I was heading to Morzine for a family skiing holiday. Vitaly offered me a lift. My decision to hitchhike the 428-mile journey

The Spectator

Letters: The hard truth about soft power

Soft ground Sir: We have heard much over the years from the overseas aid lobby about the value of soft power. Now the chips are down, we see how empty those claims were. Aidan Hartley (‘Russia’s special relationship’, 16 April) outlined how African nations have lined up to support Russia rather than Ukraine or the West, exposing how wasted the UK’s investment in soft power has been. The same applies to aid given to Pakistan and India. The absurdity of an overseas aid target of 0.7 per cent (of GDP) must be abandoned and replaced by an 0.5 per cent spending ceiling, at or below which the UK’s aid objectives

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris packs his bags, XR blocks bridges and Netflix viewers switch off

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that it did not occur to him that the gathering in the Cabinet Room on his birthday (for which he had been issued a fixed-penalty notice) could amount to a breach of the rules on coronavirus. ‘That was my mistake and I apologise for it unreservedly,’ he said. He packed his bags for a visit to India to coincide with a Commons debate on whether he had misled parliament. Priti Patel issued a ministerial direction (the second in the Home Office in 30 years) to implement a scheme whereby people deemed to have entered Britain unlawfully since 1 January

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Let’s parler Franglais

In Competition No. 3245, you were asked to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. This challenge invited you to engage in the parlour game popularised by the late Miles Kington, whose much-loved ‘Let’s Parler Franglais’ columns in Punch were described by Michael Bywater as a ‘macaronic jeu d’esprit’. Chapeau! to Richard Spencer, and £25 each to those printed below. Laurent a visité la local morgue, à le recherche du les remains de Camille, qu’il a tué only le jour before. Ou-est-il? Dans le section, ‘Submergé’? Ici les stiffs étaient dans un parlous état: visages bursting comme les saucissons anglais; cheekbones visible vers

Cheesecracker

2552: ????

Eight unclued entries comprise four pairs whose thematic ordering is provided by 3, 31, 37 and 41.   Across 1 Deft, dry in denial (5) 6 Bitter unit – British back in charge (7) 11 Criminal or liar with cult having three cells (10) 13 Distress furniture suitable for oils? (9) 15 Talks, say, regularly, inanely (4) 16 Extremities such as frogs’ legs do (7) 17 Thought mostly about minor inertia (7) 18 American-English custom (3) 19 To wit, PI hires corrupt eastern minister (10) 21 Put out cats, finally having enough (5) 23 Rigorous, way-to-the-right painter (5) 27 Acknowledge heron, moving head (5) 28 Heed unknown once-prominent primate (5)

The Spectator

2549: Obscurity – solution

PALE FIRE is a novel by Vladimir NABOKOV (18). Synonyms of words in the novel’s title are 7, 15A, and 28, 36. Surnames of characters are KINBOTE (27), the components of which are defined by 21 and 37, and SHADE (1A), which is defined by 30 and also indicates how to treat the concealed title. First prize Frances Wood, Burnham Market, Norfolk Runners-up Robin Simpson, Shincliffe, Durham; Hilda Ball, Belfast

Luke McShane

No. 699

Black to play. Sukandar-Niemann, Reykjavik Open 2022. In this preposterous position, Black found a quick forced mate. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 25 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Rg1! leaves Black no good response to 2 Rg8+ Rxg8 3 Nf7# Last week’s winner Luís Asúa, Madrid