Society

Thursday

Rachel Johnson

My night at the Spectator summer party

The first rule of the summer party is do not hold your summer party on the same night as The Spectator. It’s social fight club. You can only lose. This is a rule, however, that our Prime Minister, among others on ‘the left’, ignored to offer competing attractions. Zarah Sultana MP went to the most extreme lengths. She chose the same evening (3 July) to launch a new political party with Jeremy Corbyn, by posting something on X at 8.11 p.m. before her party even had a name, or indeed, Jeremy Corbyn. It was Jezbollah minus Magic Grandpa. Total success, as my father says whenever something goes badly wrong. The

Melissa Kite

Our B&B has found its niche

A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, which was occupied by a couple from West Virginia on a romantic road trip. The door rattled again as I stood there. I realised the big old key was turning and returning in the lock and the handle was rattling but the door was not opening. I ran back into our bedroom and shook the builder boyfriend awake. ‘The people in room 4 are stuck in their room!’ He stirred and when I wouldn’t stop shaking him he got

Aidan Hartley

Are my cattle ready to compete?

Kenya My cattle sensei Mark revealed that my Boran bulls aren’t gaining enough masculine growth after weaning because they’re only just surviving on the droughted, brittle pastures of my farm at 6,000ft in Laikipia. They’re also starved half the time, since the perennial threat of armed cattle rustlers mean they must overnight in a stone and thornbush zeriba – and this year we’ve had one bitch of a lioness constantly harassing the livestock, even jumping into the stockade at night to kill or injure animals. I’ve put all my bulls on to a protein and bran supplement, but sadly I have selected only three very young beasts to enter the

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 July 2025

The city of Poznan in Poland became heaven on earth last month, swarming as it was with hundreds of fellow bridge addicts and most of the world’s top players. It was the 11th European Transnational Championships, and I went to play in the Mixed Teams with a wonderful group: Sebastian Atisen, Andrew McIntosh, Sara Moran, Paula Leslie and Gunn and Fredrik Helness (wife and son of the legendary Tor). We named our team Contract Killers, which we thought was great until we suddenly realised it might sound like we butchered our contracts rather than nailed them. In any case, we did well to get to the round of 32 before

Luke McShane

UzChess Cup

The team of young talents from Uzbekistan, who sensationally won gold at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, continue to develop apace. The strongest, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, is in the world top 10, and Javokhir Sindarov is at no. 25. They tied for first at the strong UzChess Cup, held in Tashkent in June, competing against elite players like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Arjun Erigaisi and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. The latter also tied for first and won the playoff, though he was on the losing side of the most spectacular game of the event (perhaps the most beautiful of the year so far). R. Praggnanandhaa-Richard RapportUzChess Masters 2025 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3

Luke McShane

No. 858

White to play. Abdusattorov-Rapport, UzChess Masters 2025. The a-pawn seems bound to promote before the h-pawn. Which move allowed Abdusattorov to win the game anyway? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 July. 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 Kxd7! Then 1…Kh5+ 2 Be6#. Against 1…f3 or 1…Nf3, also 2 Be6# Or 1..Kf5 2 Bf3# Last week’s winner Paul Carter, Lancaster

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Between the lines

For Competition 3407 you were invited to write about a historical event euphemistic-ally. This challenge was a little vague; Private Eye code was the inspiration but from the tone of the entries it could have been 1066 and All That. The standard was very high, with too many runners-up to name names, and the £25 vouchers go to the following. Life grew rather complex in 1789 when France experienced a regime malfunction. The financially embarrassed commoners, who kept popping their clogs due to nutrition deficiency, took against royals and aristocrats who did not rate highly on political awareness. Paying an unscheduled visit to the Bastille, the monarchy-resistant mob significantly devalued

Gila

2711: Homework

Unclued lights give two lines of a poem, their author and a relevant location. Across 1    Magnificent place featured in dispatch papers (8) 15    Wrongdoer relinquishes first secret (5) 16    Cut some garlic (5) 17    Stomachs filled with endlessly bad, bad feelings (6) 18    Young lad bored by love before long (4) 21    Housing activity on course to increase (7,2) 22    To become stronger, senator takes time away from work (7) 26    Blue uniform accepted by a cleaner, possibly (9) 30    Advance payments – one way to eke out a living (7) 32    Misguided negotiator dismissing one ordinary form of crowd control (4,5) 34    Left in charge, do a runner

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The unspoken truth about 7/7

Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something called 7/7, apparently. I read a long report on the BBC’s website about this tragedy but remained entirely unclear as to who killed the people on those trains and bus. The report said ‘bombs were detonated’ on the Tube, as if the bombs – anxious to fulfil their purpose in life – had blown themselves up, without the aid of any external agency. Nowhere in the report did it mention who brought the bombs down from Yorkshire and then set them off. Nowhere in the entire article were the words

The Spectator

2708: On the shelf – solution

Bertrand RUSSELL, whose surname is hidden in the final column, said, ‘There’s a BIBLE on that shelf there. But I keep it next to VOLTAIRE – POISON and ANTIDOTE.’ The other four unclued lights are two synonyms each of ‘poison’ (VENOM, TOXIN) and ‘antidote’ (MITHRIDATE, SERUM). First prize  Rhiannon Hales, Ilfracombe, Devon Runners-up  Paul Harrison, Wilpshire, Blackburn, Lancs; Matthew Wright, Topsham, Devon

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rachel Reeves cries, Rishi Sunak joins Goldman Sachs and a six-month bin strike

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had given a theme to the week by sitting weeping behind Sir Keir Starmer during Prime Minister’s Questions. She later said: ‘It was a personal issue.’ Sir Keir said: ‘She will be Chancellor for a very long time to come.’ No. 10 said she and the Prime Minister were ‘in lockstep’. The government found itself short of the £5 billion it had meant to save in the welfare bill, thwarted by its own MPs. The Office for Budget Responsibility said that, with rising debt, ‘The UK’s fiscal position is increasingly vulnerable’. Asked whether she would rule out tax rises in the autumn, the

Jacob Rees-Mogg

My P.G. Wodehouse summer

Normally I model myself on one of the more retiring of the Desert Fathers, as much as a man living in England with six children can, so I rarely venture out. But this summer I could have given Galahad Threepwood a run for his money in the socialising stakes. Not that a Desert Father would have objected to my visit to Wimbledon to the papal nunciature, where the nuncio was celebrating the papacy of Leo XIV. It is reassuring to have a Pope who believes in the papal office and, with luck, the traditional liturgies will no longer be persecuted. The hatred for the Latin Mass is a peculiarity of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Peerless: the purge of the hereditaries

The House of Lords is very old, but not quite continuous. In 1649, shortly after the execution of King Charles I, the Cromwellian House of Commons passed an act which said: The Commons of England assembled in parliament, finding by too long experience, that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the People of England… have thought fit to Ordain and Enact… That from henceforth the House of Lords in parliament, shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away. This measure was nullified, however, by the Restoration in 1660. The parliaments of King Charles II, and all parliaments since, have included the House of Lords. The

Sophia Falkner

Good Lords: the House is losing some of the best

Keir Starmer has not been the luckiest general. But, in one respect, he has bested Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington will shortly be purged from parliament, two centuries after Waterloo. Like his ancestor, Charles Wellesley has led a life of public service. For that, he will shortly receive the sack as part of the greatest purge of active lawmakers since Oliver Cromwell. All this so Starmer can make way for the likes of Tom Watson, Sue Gray and Richard Hermer. Among the hereditary peers are Olympians and entrepreneurs, artists and academics Among the hereditary peers are Olympians and entrepreneurs, artists and academics. Some are genuine blue bloods, others political animals.

Peter Jones

Orcas, dolphins and the ancient question of animal sentience

Killer whales have been seen offering titbits to divers – but as a gift or a lure? Plutarch (c. AD 100) had strong views on animal sentience.  Unlike most ancients, Plutarch did not think that animals were there to be exploited for humanity’s benefit, whatever that entailed for the animals themselves. He believed they were worthy of respect rather than exploitation because they demonstrated, admittedly in a ‘weak’ and ‘muddy’ form, a capacity to think, reason and remember. For example, without those capacities, an animal would not be able to discriminate between what it should avoid and what pursue. A mother partridge would not be able to teach its fledglings

John Whittingdale

Norman Tebbit transformed the country for the better

My first job in government was working for Norman Tebbit as his special adviser in the Department of Trade and Industry. I received the call 41 years ago, in the summer of 1984, and it was agreed that I would join him immediately after the Conservative party conference concluded that year in Brighton. He was already a hero of the Margaret Thatcher government. But few saw as close up as I did just how much courage – and compassion – Norman, who died this week aged 94, had. On the final day of that conference, in the early hours, an IRA bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel. Republican terrorists had

Wednesday

Andrew Gilligan

Miqdaad Versi and the troubling war on ‘Islamophobia’

Readers of progressive newspapers have occasionally been invited to admire a man called Miqdaad Versi. He was the subject of a respectful 2018 profile in the Guardian for his ‘personal mission to confront…the Islamophobia of the British press’ one complaint at a time. Versi’s ‘spreadsheet of shame’ showed ‘how flagrantly British papers get their news about Muslims wrong’. Alas, a large number of this piece’s claims about the corrections supposedly forced on shameful British newspapers by Versi were themselves wrong and had to be corrected at the bottom of the online version. That is, as it happens, a truer reflection than the Guardian intended of the organisation which Versi set

Patrick West

Most people hate their jobs. Get over it

Most people hate their jobs. This is a sad, unfortunate fact of life. But it happens to be an eternal truth. Throughout the course of human history the overwhelmingly bulk of mankind has toiled to live, rather than having the good fortune to follow their dreams. Even when this is the case, when people elect to pursue an artistic, literary, journalistic or thespian vocation, their lives still consist for the most part of drudgery, penury, rejection and disappointment. Jared Harris says that people in his profession need to take parts they don’t love if they ‘have bills to pay’ So we should welcome the intervention by the actor Jared Harris,

Lara Brown

Museums like the V&A shouldn’t be allowed to return ‘looted’ treasures

Henry Cole, the first director of what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), could never have imagined that in his place would follow a man who seems determined to rail against the safeguards that have helped keep the museum’s collection intact. But this, sadly, appears to be the task Tristram Hunt is committed to. Hunt knew the law before he took the job Hunt, director of the V&A since 2017, has declared the 1983 National Heritage Act which prevents him from returning artefacts to their country of origin, to be ‘outdated and infantilising’. In fact, it is a key reason why collections, including the V&A’s, have been maintained. Britain is

Tuesday

James Tidmarsh

Remembering Jonathan Miller

The long-time Spectator contributor Jonathan Miller has died. James Tidmarsh remembers him here: Jonathan Miller liked to say that Emmanuel Macron was the gift that never stops giving. ‘The Spectator can’t get enough of him,’ he told me. ‘Macron serves up fresh spin, scandals and missteps, an endless supply of stories for any journalist willing to look behind the official line.’ When we first crossed paths on X, we’d swap messages about ministers, café gossip, and the small absurdities that make French politics so irresistible. Jonathan was usually in his village in the Languedoc sunshine. He loved it there and seemed content when describing the rhythm of village life. Jonathan Miller