Society

Sunday

Fergus Butler-Gallie

The sad decline of the Scottish Kirk

My memory is that October is cold in Sutherland in the Highlands of Scotland. Come to think of it, my memory is that June can be cold too. Nature might well abhor a vacuum, but whether anything can convincingly fill the one left by the Kirk’s role in Scottish life remains to be seen As a child, I was taken there a few times in half-terms by my Grandmother, to go and look at faded headstones with my surname on them. I suppose she thought it important to show me my windswept origins. Pictures show a little boy and a formidable woman in closely wrapped raincoats standing by grey stone

David Shipley

Head of the prison officers’ union: we should halve the prison population

The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) and its national chair Mark Fairhurst have a reputation for always wanting prisons to be more secure and more punitive. So it was a surprise when Fairhurst told me he opposes the government’s new prison building programme, and went on to describe his ideal justice system in terms which the most soft-hearted prison reform charities would struggle to disagree with. ‘All we’re going to do…is spend £4.7 billion building 14,000 new prison spaces. And if you build new prisons you’ll always fill them’ I met with Fairhurst a few days after the POA’s annual conference in Eastbourne, a busy time for him because ‘everybody wants

Terry Barnes

Erin Patterson’s mushroom murder case is Australia’s Trial of the Century

Since its general election a month ago, Australia’s politics have endured their biggest upheaval in fifty years. Its Labor government was re-elected by a massive majority, when just months ago it was in danger of being tossed out, and the conservative opposition parties are in existential turmoil and even briefly severed their coalition. Erin Patterson is a a frumpy, middle-aged woman, with a mien unfortunately drawn by nature as a mask of permanent misery Yet Australia’s epicentre of interest this past month hasn’t been the nation’s capital, Canberra. Instead, it’s been Morwell, a dying industrial town in the Gippsland region of the state of Victoria. There, Australia’s Trial of the

Saturday

James Heale James Heale

Why Zia Yusuf changed his mind about quitting Reform

Well, that was quick. Within 48 hours of his resignation as party chairman, Zia Yusuf has returned to the Reform fold. In a joint Sunday Times interview with Nigel Farage, Yusuf has admitted to making a ‘mistake’. He will now take up a new revised role within the party, focusing on policy formation and leading on the party’s DOGE mission in local government. A new chairman will be named on Tuesday, amid a backroom shake-up focused on sharing the load on Reform’s leadership. ‘Welcome back Zia,’ wrote Richard Tice on one internal Reform WhatsApp group. ‘Hope you enjoyed your holiday!’ What led Yusuf to change his mind? The obvious precedent here is

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Hamas doesn’t hold a monopoly on Palestinian terror

Israeli forces operating inside Gaza have retrieved the body of Thai agricultural worker Nattapong Pinta, bringing to a close one of the many grim and unresolved chapters from the October 7th atrocities. In a joint operation by the Shin Bet and the IDF, based on intelligence gleaned from captured militants, the body was recovered in Rafah. Pinta had been abducted alive from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led assault, only to be murdered in captivity by a lesser-known but no less brutal Palestinian terror group: Kataeb al-Mujahideen. Among the cascade of horrors unleashed that day, one of the most harrowing sights remains etched in my memory Among the cascade of

David Spencer

Why won’t the Met Police deal with Palestine protestors blocking parliament?

Does the Metropolitan Police have more respect for the rights of aggressive protestors than it does for Parliament itself? That’s the unavoidable question after the Met handled the latest demonstrations outside the Palace of Westminster with the usual kid gloves. If the police were not aware of the protestors’ plans, how could such a failure of open-source intelligence occur? For several hours last Wednesday, many hundreds of Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporters gathered on the perimeter of the Palace of Westminster, effectively surrounding the Parliamentary Estate. As has become the norm at such events, the police appeared to be unwilling to enforce free and unobstructed access to Parliament so long as

Thomas Fink

How Britain can borrow America’s top scientists

From the time of Newton, Britain led the world in science. That began to change in 1940, when, with the Battle of Britain raging, Winston Churchill sent the scientist Henry Tizard on a secret mission to America. His objective was to secure financial and industrial help in the fight against Hitler. His currency was British military technology, in particular the cavity magnetron, a device that made it possible to locate the enemy with radar. This wowed the Americans and achieved his objective. According to one historian, it was ‘the most valuable cargo ever brought to [America’s] shores.’  The last ten foreign scientists we brought to the London Institute for Mathematical

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What happened to Piers Morgan?

There was great fanfare when Piers Morgan re-entered the world of television three years ago to front a new prime-time show on Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV. Morgan framed the move as a fightback against cancel culture, a return to free speech, and a declaration of independence from the constraints of legacy media. Piers Morgan asks for the truth but refuses to hear it. pic.twitter.com/2LtEgoMJ5h — Natasha Hausdorff (@HausdorffMedia) June 3, 2025 ‘I’m delighted to now be returning to live television,’ he announced in the show’s trailer, promising to ‘cancel the cancel culture’ and to bring ‘lively, vigorous debate’ and even, in his words, the increasingly taboo three-letter word: fun. What began

Alex Klaushofer

Tesco’s ‘VAR’-style self-checkout cameras are the final straw

Tesco has followed Sainsbury’s lead by installing cameras above self-checkouts to identify when shoppers fail to scan an item properly, using the footage to provide a live-action replay of their misdeed. Predictably, it’s not gone down well: a video posted on Instagram involving a can of tuna got more than 3.5 million views. When will the supermarkets learn to stop treating their shoppers like criminals? Tesco’s track record with customer data is not encouraging Much of the reaction to Tesco’s VAR (Video Assistant Referee) cameras has focused on Britons’ humorous responses: ‘VAR Decision – Tuna Disallowed,’ joked one person. ‘Clearly off side,’ riffed another. But the growing surveillance in our supermarkets is no laughing matter.

Friday

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Max Jeffery, Tanya Gold, Madeline Grant, Matthew Parris and Calvin Po

29 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery tracks down the Cambridge bike bandit (1:10); Tanya Gold says that selling bathwater is an easy way to exploit a sad male fetish (5:38); Madeline Grant examines the decline of period dramas (10:16); a visit to Lyon has Matthew Parris pondering what history doesn’t tell us (15:49); and, Calvin Po visits the new V&A East Storehouse (23:08).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Alexander Larman

Why did it take so long to give David Beckham his knighthood?

Arise, Sir Goldenballs. Next week, David Beckham will finally become Sir David in the King’s birthday honours, which in turn will mean that his wife will become Lady Victoria Beckham. Once, when she was best known for being the pop songstress Posh Spice – and he was most famous for being an unusually petulant Manchester United footballer – this would have seemed like a ridiculous state of affairs; the monarchy pandering to celebrity at its most naked and obvious. It may be a sign of how Britain, rather than the Beckhams, has changed over the intervening decades that the only observation that many might have about the award is why

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Reform’s burqa ban isn’t ‘Islamophobic’

MPs from Nigel Farage’s Reform party are calling for a burqa ban in Britain. Sarah Pochin, who won the Runcorn by-election last month, asked Sir Keir Starmer in the House of Commons this week if he would consider outlawing the garment. Her demand attracted the ire of Reform chairman Zia Yusuf, who has since stepped down from the job after saying the idea was ‘dumb’. Labour MPs, who shouted ‘shame’ at Pochin, also didn’t like the idea. But those who suggest that it is ‘Islamophobic’ to restrict the burqa are under a misapprehension. The number of Muslim-majority states outlawing the face veil is increasing After all, at least ten Muslim-majority countries

Thursday

William Moore William Moore

Nigel wants YOU, secularism vs spirituality & how novel is experimental fiction?

52 min listen

How Reform plans to win Just a year ago, Nigel Farage ended his self-imposed exile from politics and returned to lead Reform. Since then, Reform have won more MPs than the Green Party, two new mayoralties, a parliamentary by-election, and numerous councils. Now the party leads in every poll and, as our deputy political editor James Heale reveals in our cover article, is already planning for government. The party’s chair, tech entrepreneur Zia Yusuf, describes the movement as a ‘start-up’; and like a start-up, Reform is scaling up at speed. Among the 676 councillors elected last month, a number are considered more than ready to stand as MPs. James also

Natasha Hausdorff

Why can’t Piers Morgan handle the truth about Israel?

As Israel continues to wage a defensive war against the terrorists who invaded and slaughtered hundreds of Jews on October 7, the Jewish State is under attack as never before in the West. I found this out for myself when I was invited on to Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss the situation in Gaza. Piers Morgan asks for the truth but refuses to hear it. pic.twitter.com/2LtEgoMJ5h — Natasha Hausdorff (@HausdorffMedia) June 3, 2025 What my appearance and censorship on the ironically named “Uncensored” show demonstrated was a refusal, perhaps even a fear, to hear the reality, the facts and the law when it comes to the war against Hamas. This is in

Stephen Pollard

The health nutters are winning

The woman two tables from me at a branch of Pret in the City was talking about her chemotherapy. Her male companion asked her how her treatment was going, and she replied that it was gruelling. She was on a short break and was dreading the next round. I have leukaemia, and know the pattern of these conversations. What usually follows is sympathy, or empathy if someone has been through it themselves or knows someone who has. But there was no sympathy or empathy offered. Instead, the man launched into a diatribe. A diatribe of all the most idiotic and dangerous health conspiracies rolled into one. To paraphrase, he told

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Could the Winter Fuel Payment fiasco bring down Rachel Reeves?

When the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she was withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from most pensioners on the same day, last July, when she awarded fat pay rises to many public sector workers she perhaps imagined herself as striking a blow for inter-generational fairness. Working people would get more money – at least if they worked in the public sector – and wealthy retirees a little less. Yet it is fast becoming the an issue which could prove her undoing. The tragedy of the Winter Fuel Payment fiasco is that it leaves the far bigger problem untouched We now learn that the government’s partial U-turn will involve pensioners effectively

Alexander Larman

Meghan Markle has a strange definition of privacy

There are some sights that nobody should ever be forced to see, lest they be forced into a lifetime of therapy-intensive PTSD. To this list should be added a video of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex twerking. For some unfathomable reason, Meghan and Harry decided to mark their daughter Lilibet’s fourth birthday by posting a video on Instagram that featured the heavily pregnant expectant mother gyrating wildly in a hospital room to a song called ‘Baby Mama’, in apparent recreation of a (checks notes) TikTok trend.  I assumed at first that it was an AI-created spoof, and that litigation from this never knowingly under-lawyered couple would be coming soon. But no.

The Spectator

Letters: Pride has taken a nasty turn

Lionel is right Sir: Gareth Roberts’s piece (‘End of the rainbow’, 31 May) gave me pause to reflect. It’s not that Pride has become irrelevant; after all, same-gender relationships are still criminalised in 64 countries – and in eight of those the death penalty is applicable. Rather, since the pandemic, it seems to have taken a rather nasty and unpleasant turn, with those dissenting from whatever ludicrous party line happens to be in vogue routinely heckled and vilified. Placards emblazoned with slogans such as ‘If you see a Terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] then smash them in the face’ are often to be spotted on Pride marches. Those producing such placards

Philip Hensher

Spare us from ‘experimental’ novels

Some sorts of books and dramas have very strict rules. We like a lot of things to be absolutely predictable. In romantic comedies, a girl chooses between a charmer who turns out to be a rotter and another man she hates at first but then falls for. In the BBC’s long-running Casualty, if a worried patient turns up with his put-upon wife who coughs twice, it’s the wife who’s got an undiagnosed fatal disease. Bertie Wooster falls for a girl that Jeeves doesn’t care for and the valet goes to some lengths to detach his employer. We like these things because they’re safe and a little bit cosy and we

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The truth about Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater

In the 2004 film Mean Girls Ms Norbury (Tina Fey) cries to her High School students: ‘Girls! You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores!’ Do we? I ask because Sydney Sweeney, an American actress, is selling her bathwater to men with unfathomable desires. No woman would buy it. We have an infinite supply. Selling bathwater is hard. It’s the logistics. How do you distribute it? By fishing trawler? By pipe? Sweeney, who has marketing skills – and this is all marketing, she designed a Ford Mustang, which can’t be drunk, last year – has partnered, as they say, with a soap company, which will incorporate drips (dribbles?)