Society

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith

A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries of popular fiction of the second half of the last century. He joins Jameses Michener and Clavell, Hammond Innes and Harold Robbins in the great 1970s dad bookshelf in the sky. Kids of today will say: ‘Wilbur who?’ But I owe that man a debt of gratitude. He was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novelists I really got stuck into; along, of course, with Stephen King. Like Stephen King, he was grown-up in just the right way to appeal to children — really, a hop and a skip from Willard

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Liverpool terror attack: what we know so far

Britain has been subjected to another terror attack, just as the nation fell silent for yesterday’s annual Remembrance Sunday memorial. An explosion occurred in a taxi outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Sunday morning, killing the passenger and leaving the driver in hospital. Police have now confirmed that the incident is being treated as a terror attack.  Reports suggest that the driver, David Perry, noticed that his passenger had a device and locked himself in the car alongside the bomber. The as-yet-unnamed passenger was declared dead at the scene. Boris Johnson has hailed Mr Perry’s ‘incredible presence of mind and bravery’. He was discharged from hospital last night after receiving treatment for cuts and burns as

Sunday

Andrew Richards

David Railton and the final journey of the Unknown Warrior

The sound of footsteps on cobbled streets in the dead of night was a familiar sound in Margate during the autumn of 1920. The Reverend David Railton MC, the newly installed vicar of the town, frequently walked the streets unable to sleep, his mind ravaged by the memory of what he had witnessed during the war where he served as a chaplain on the western front. Just a few days after one of these night-time strolls, on the anniversary of Armistice Day, Railton was at Westminster Abbey to see his flag, a Union Jack he had carried throughout the war, hung above the grave of the ‘Unknown Warrior’. A year

Saturday

Samantha Smith

Why is Durham offering training for student sex workers?

As a first year university student from a disadvantaged background, I know all too well the constant struggle students can face to make ends meet. Before starting my studies at Durham, I worked three jobs to keep food in my mouth and clothes on my back while in full-time education. Living in group homes and emergency accommodation, I saw those around me searching desperately for any way to earn a living, even if it meant endangering their health and their lives. So it was both surprising and disturbing to find when I arrived at Durham that the university’s student union was encouraging young people down an incredibly dangerous path by

Madeleine Kearns

The grim reality of gender reassignment

Lisa Littman, a doctor and researcher, recently surveyed ‘detransitioners’ — people who thought they were transgender then changed their minds. The majority, 55 per cent, ‘felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.’ Sadly, it seems, their identity issues were more complicated than simply being trans. Many of these individuals are now living with the consequences of medical treatments that failed to help their gender issues and may have caused permanent physical and psychological damage. There is no objective diagnosis for transgenderism, and the evidence supporting hormonal and surgical ‘reassignment’ as an effective remedy for gender dysphoria (the feeling of

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Meghan has been found out

‘Speaking her truth’ has been one of Meghan Markle’s USPs – and what an absolute disaster it’s been, leading inevitably to the low point she has now reached this week, after she apologised to the Court of Appeal for ‘forgetting’ information about the Finding Freedom biography. For there are not different truths for different people; there is one true version of events. The Windsor’s motto ‘Never complain, never explain’ was thought to have been introduced by the Queen Mother in 1936. A few years before she said, when it was suggested that the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret should be evacuated to a safer place like many British children of the

Thursday

Taki

I’ve been back one week and the good old US of A has never seemed more depressing

New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamist gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No siree, people over here are shot every day and night but not for playing music at a wedding. Give New York credit where it’s due. The city is a bloody horror if you’re living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, with the rest of Gotham experiencing a level of street crime not seen in a decade. Robberies and felonious assaults are up 15 per cent in a year and gun arrests by a whopping 20 per cent.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Yorkshire cricket: the long view

The new chairman of Yorkshire County Cricket Club played a blinder in his first innings, consistently hitting the boundary and finding a settlement to defuse the troubling allegations made by the county’s former player Azeem Rafiq. It’s a pity he wasn’t moved up the order earlier, as Yorkshire’s performance in the storm over allegations of racism has been truly dreadful. Cricket really needs to move beyond this as pretty soon a significant minority of the England team will be of Asian origin. Yorkshire was always a players’ county, seeing itself as a plain-speaking republic. But speaking as you find has its drawbacks, as does ‘banter’. Complaints about other counties are

The Spectator

The power of remembering

On the advice of doctors, Queen Elizabeth II will not attend this year’s Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall. Her absence will be poignant. The Queen was 19 on VE Day in 1945. She served in uniform in the war, in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She represents the very youngest generation who fought in the second world war. That generation will not be with us much longer. The Queen does still hope to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph on Sunday. But we have to face up to the reality that one day there will be no one left who knew the world at war; there will be no

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Court of Chaos: Boris’s style of government isn’t working for him — or his country

Without Boris Johnson there would be no Conservative majority. The millions who turned to him at the last election were not voting for the Tories, but for something (and someone) very different: they wanted Brexit and they trusted him to deliver it. Without Johnson, the Tories would struggle to keep his electoral coalition together, so when the Prime Minister asks his MPs to vote for something they dislike, though they denounce his madness, they do it. But now, for the first time, these MPs are beginning to waver. They’ve seen a pattern in the PM’s behaviour, they’re beginning to understand how each debacle will end, and they’re becoming wary. This

The Spectator

Is there any evidence climate change is making hurricanes worse?

Horror shows Eight people were killed when fans of rapper Travis Scott rushed the stage at a concert in Houston, Texas. Some previous deadly concerts: — 11 were killed at a Who gig in Cincinnati on 3 December 1979, after a crush sparked off by concert-goers outside the entry doors mistakenly thinking the band had started playing when they were only tuning up. — Nine were killed at a concert by Pearl Jam at Roskilde, Denmark on 30 June 2000. — 11 people were killed during a festival in Rabat, Morocco on 23 May 2009. Stevie Wonder and Kylie Minogue were on the bill, although not on stage at the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I learn to cope with my husband’s mess?

Q. My husband has fallen in love with ‘the country’ and retired to Exmoor while I maintain a presence in our Notting Hill residence for work. The problem is he has left his London study, carved from half our ground-floor sitting room, in its traditional disordered condition as if he has only popped out to buy milk — drifts of detritus, newspapers and plastic bags on every surface. I would like to Marie Kondo the study but I don’t dare tidy it as he will accuse me of throwing away even more things he has in fact lost himself. It is also a terrible waste to have half our available

The Spectator

Letters: climate protestors would do better to boycott China

Heat Sir: May I place some of Nigel Lawson’s comments in a sensible historical context (‘Stupid fuels’, 6 November)? First, he notes that the difference between the average annual temperature in Finland and in Singapore is at present 22°C. However, he is wrong to suggest that we should therefore not be concerned about a predicted rise in the average global temperature of a few degrees. The average global temperature during ice ages was only about 6°C colder than today, but that difference was enough to make the planet unrecognisable: much of the northern hemisphere’s land was covered in glaciers several thousand feet thick, and the sea level was 100 metres

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tory sleaze, NHS jabs and Elon Musk’s shares

Home NHS staff in England will have to be fully vaccinated against Covid by the spring. Britain had ordered 250,000 courses of a Pfizer antiviral pill available from early 2022 shown to cut the risk of hospitalisation or death from Covid by 89 per cent. Britain approved another antiviral pill, developed by Merck, and ordered 480,000 courses. In the seven days up to the beginning of this week, 1,185 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 141,743. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 1,097.) Numbers remaining in hospital stayed at about 9,000. Rolls-Royce gained the backing of private investors

Dot Wordsworth

Has Boris Johnson really ‘trashed’ parliament’s reputation?

‘When they posted the closing-night notice for his first Broadway play, Comes a Day, he went into a drunken rage, threw his fist through a glass window and played the last act bleeding into a rubber glove before being forced into a hospital where he required 22 stitches.’ So said the New York Times in a profile of George C. Scott in 1970, 12 years after the event. Scott’s infatuation with alcohol saw him through five marriages. My husband admires his screen performances, naturally. In another profile of the actor, in 1971, the Times in London said of the incident: ‘Backstage at Comes a Day he got drunk and trashed

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Sentenced to chicken: NoMad reviewed

NoMad is a new hotel in what used to be Bow Street Magistrates’ Court: a preening piece of mid-Victorian classicism opposite the Royal Opera House that is clearly too fine for the half-hearted criminal classes these days. I was judged in this court once for the very boring crime of cannabis possession (I think I did it), as was Giles Coren for something else (he says: ‘I never done nuffink’), General Pinochet, Dr Crippen (VeryMad) and Oscar Wilde. It heard its last case in 2006: the breaching of an Asbo by a man called Jason. Now it sells cocktails. NoMad has a restaurant named, as if in homage to a

Toby Young Toby Young

Racism, cricket and the problem with ancient allegations

Last week, the former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan revealed that he’d been accused by another cricketer — Azeem Rafiq — of having said something racist to him and two other Asian players 12 years ago. According to Rafiq, when Vaughan was playing for Yorkshire in 2009 he said to the three as they walked out on to the field together to face Nottinghamshire that there were ‘too many of you lot, we need to do something about it’. Vaughan categorically denies saying this and it’s difficult to evaluate the veracity of the accusation because Rafiq hasn’t made it against him publicly. Rather, he named Vaughan behind closed doors while

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Bankers, not Greta, will save the planet

I have observed before how useful really big numbers can be in response to crises: when US treasury secretary Hank Paulson unveiled his $700 billion Wall Street bailout package in 2008, an aide famously let slip that the number had been pulled out of the air because it sounded reassuringly huge. Now we’re told that more than 450 banks and investment firms representing $130 trillion of assets (that’s 40 per cent of global savings, give or take a few soaring bitcoins) have joined the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero led by Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg, who tell us that ramping up clean energy fast enough to avoid the

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The dangerous pleasure of hating men

I have Netflix, and in particular the series Maid, to thank for the startling discovery of how easy it is to slide into a form of man-hating — not a righteous feminist rage, but a sort of dopey, palliative, unthinking misandry. Maid was released last month, and it’s already one of the stand-out Netflix successes of 2021. (It was announced last week that it’s set to take over Queen’s Gambit as the most-watched Netflix miniseries.) The show is catnip for women, and after several late nights, letting one episode tip into another, I can see why. It’s based on the real-life memoir of a woman in the US who fled

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Kamala Harris and the problem with racist trees

I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I have always held trees in the deepest suspicion: it is their long-abiding silences which worry me. As we know from Black Lives Matter, ‘Silence is violence’ — and trees, for literally aeons, have been conspicuously silent on the matter of white privilege and racism. To follow this logic, then, trees are inherently violent. Nasty, leafy bastards. This certainly seems to be what Ms Harris thinks. During a visit to Nasa, instead of asking those space boys how to reverse park a shuttle, she instead became obsessed with keeping an eye