Society

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Tom Tugendhat’s speech was a masterclass in oratory

An ounce of emotion, it has been said, is worth a ton of fact. Tom Tugendhat’s remarkable speech to the Commons today was delivered with a current of emotion – pathos, as scholars of oratory call it – that was all the more electric for its restraint. His jaw clenched and trembled; his voice, now and again, seemed on the verge of faltering. As he said in his opening words: ‘Like many veterans, this last week has been one that has seen me struggle through anger, and grief, and rage. The feeling of abandonment of not just a country but the sacrifice that my friends made. I’ve been to funerals

Douglas Murray

Why did the BBC bury this detail about a homophobic attack?

In the last decade or so, a sinister group of individuals from a range of organisations have spent their energies trying to rein in the free press. Specifically they try to stop the reporting of stories that might portray any follower of Islam in a negative light. So, for instance, when someone goes full ‘Allahu Akbar’ during an attack, the press is likely to report the fact and conclude that the attacker might have been inspired by a certain religion. At which point the army of anti-media mujahideen get to work to complain to Ofcom, Ipso and whatever other regulators they can find. In time, their work has an effect.

Joanna Williams

Harry and Meghan’s glib Afghan statement

Finally, some news to cheer us all up on this grim, relentless August. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been rendered ‘speechless’ by the news from Afghanistan and Haiti. No doubt, there’ll be no more Oprah interviews or birthday messages. And there’ll be no more lectures from Harry on the importance of imagining how it feels to be a raindrop or from Meghan on the importance of people asking her if she is okay. At least, that’s what we should assume, right? Surely being left ‘speechless’ is a sign that you are about to shut up? Unless, of course, you are Harry and Meghan. In their world, being ‘speechless’

Tuesday

Angus Colwell

The hitch with Hitchens

It hasn’t taken 20 years to work out that Christopher Hitchens was a dud, but this week’s collapse of Kabul obliges us to reexamine the Hitchens back catalog — because Hitchens had an outsized influence on debates about the supersised errors of post-9/11 foreign policy. The briefest of looks exposes the deficits of the neoconservative mind. An even clearer picture emerges of the hubris that led American policymakers, and the West in general, to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the spread of liberal enlightenment, rather than subjecting them to the tests of Realpolitik. Never trust a man whose favorite sport is politics. For Hitchens and the neocons who adopted

Andrew Tettenborn

Will Knowland, Eton and the problem with the teaching misconduct panel

When Eton master Will Knowland was sacked last year over anti-feminist views contained in a YouTube video which he refused to take down, alumni and others rightly called out Eton’s small-mindedness and intellectual conformism. If the best-endowed schools in the land can’t stomach unorthodox opinion, what hope for UK education generally? They were, of course, entirely right. But there is a further, more serious, side to the story. This week’s widely-welcomed victory by Knowland is not the end of the matter. Eton, as it was required to do when dismissing a teacher for gross misconduct, had reported the circumstances to the professional body for teachers, the Teaching Regulation Agency. The TRA was

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why incels aren’t terrorists

Sometimes, a nutter is just a nutter, even when he’s a homicidal nutter. In the case of Jake Davison, the Plymouth killer who murdered five people, then himself, the indications are that he was a sad, bitter, angry man with a grudge against society in general and women in particular. He didn’t have a girlfriend, and, like every other sad case nowadays, from cannibals to neo-Nazis, he found company and a label online. At any other time, we’d be content to call him an evil creep, a sadistic coward or possibly a homicidal loon, and confine ourselves to the valid question of how his shotgun licence was renewed. There are

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

My roots burnt with Greece

On 11 March this year my father passed away from prostate cancer after several weeks in a hospital in central Athens. As we sat around his bed, I remember thinking that I was watching 3,000 years of Greek history slowly perish before my eyes. My father was an only child, and I am British. His line of Greeks is at an end. Now fires have ravaged Greece and the olive trees that stood in my ancestral village for centuries have burnt to the ground. This year has seen the almost literal burning away of my roots: because if I am British, I am also a Greek — of sorts. This

Debbie Hayton

Scotland’s transgender guidance is a safeguarding nightmare

On Thursday, teachers planning residential trips were told that it may be just fine for teenagers of the opposite sex to share a room.  In 25 years of teaching, I have seen many daft ideas trickle down from government, but the Scottish government’s latest guidance, ‘Supporting Transgender Pupils In Schools’, takes the biscuit. Of course it promotes affirmation of transgender identities. This is Scotland, after all, where Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP seems to be in thrall to transgender ideology. The party previously enacted legislation that talked about people ‘becoming female’. But while that law took liberties with the rights of women, this latest guidance impacts the safeguarding of children. Astonishingly, the reference

George Chesterton

How I fell out of love with football

The new Premier League season has begun and I don’t know what to think. I tried to watch all of England’s Euro 2020 matches, but I never made it to the end of any of them. When the final against Italy kicked off, I retired to a quiet room feeling angst and confusion. Why was I so out of step with everyone else? Gareth Southgate’s players seem like lovely boys. And while they probably represent the better aspects of our evolving culture, it seems likely we may soon discover that they remain fallible. But if the response of the public to England’s triumphs and tragedy was one thing, the reaction

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: H1 2021

When the pandemic struck, we at The Spectator adopted the brace position. Like many publications, we furloughed staff and prepared for the worst. When subscription growth picked up, we became the first company in Britain to return the furlough money to the taxpayer and say we’d instead trade our way through the storm. Our last reported sales in 2019 were 83,000 (a record high) and we set a pretty big goal: to hit 100,000. I’m delighted to report that sales of The Spectator averaged 105,850 copies in the first half of this year, up 27 per cent on the first half of last year. Digital-only sales are popular but when new

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why the government was right to drop vaccine passports

12 Sept 2021: Health Secretary Sajid Javid has announced that the government is shelving its plans to introduce mandatory domestic vaccine passports (details here). Below is Lionel Shriver’s column from August 2021, in which she argues vaccine passports were always a bad tool for tackling Covid-19. Despite having mocked app-happy Albion in my last column, I finally downloaded the NHS app. (Lest I seem a raging hypocrite, the institutional app is quite distinct from the Track-and-Trace Covid one, possession of which marks you as insane.) I found the app’s elaborate security features for registration bitterly comical. I had to photograph my passport, then record a video of myself speaking four prescribed numbers

The Spectator

Who cut more coal: Thatcher or Wilson?

Woolly thinking There were protests in Whitehall to save Geronimo, an alpaca due to be put down after testing positive for tuberculosis. How many alpacas are there in Britain? — The British Alpaca Society claims to have 1,500 members who between them own 45,000 alpacas. — The society’s annual show can attract as many as 600 animals for display. — The wool from the animal, a native of South America, was introduced to Britain in 1836 by Sir Titus Salt, the industrialist and founder of Saltaire, the model villagein West Yorkshire. Cool reception Some of the less-reported findings from the IPCC report on global warming: — ‘In recent decades the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why filling Father Christmas’s sack will cost more this year

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey looks increasingly uncomfortable as inflation notches upwards from ‘nothing to worry about’ towards the Bank’s latest prediction of a decade-high 4 per cent peak later this year and a possible ‘Oops, we’re back to the 1970s’ if spiralling wage and price pressures confound the forecasters. I wrote last week about the UK’s lack of lorry drivers, but that’s just one of many bottlenecks that need unblocking, as Bailey says, to bring ‘a wave of supply back on to the market’ and quell the blip. More significant globally, and much more difficult to resolve, is the logjam of shipping. The composite World Container Index published

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Liberté, égalité, vacciné: France’s Covid passport revolt is just beginning

Montpellier Three weeks ago, 100,000 demonstrators turned out on the streets of France to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s hastily passed law to require vaccination passports to get on a train, eat at a restaurant or visit a shopping centre. A week later, the number had more than doubled. Last Saturday, it doubled again. One police union estimated that close to 500,000 had turned out, although as usual the Interior Ministry claimed a much lower number. Enormous demonstrations were staged not just in Paris but in more than 150 cities and towns across France, as well as in the overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Réunion. All this in the middle of

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The National Trust has lost the language of architecture

Press officers, breathe easy. This is not another column attacking the National Trust. Actually, I tell a lie. It is. But my complaint isn’t bullying or slavery or LGBTQ+ery or even chocolate Easter eggery. It is more single and specific: the National Trust does not speak architecture. Or if it does, it’s keeping shtum. Since the great May reopening, I’ve dragged my husband around half a dozen National Trust properties, landscapes and gardens (he hardly ever protests, always pays for tea). We’ve done Stourhead, Oxburgh, Ickworth, Lacock, Cobham Woods and Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor. In the gap between lockdowns last year, we did Sissinghurst and Knole. I cannot fault the car

Taki

The Olympics have become a celebration of human frailty

Coronis Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger ethos of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human appears to have triumphed over the need to excel, or so the Games sponsors tell us. Not that I watched any of it. Not a single second, so help me you-know-who. I liked Sebastian Coe’s remark in last week’s Speccie about taking advice from Djokovic, who quit the mixed, thus leaving his partner in the lurch. I’ve always liked and admired Coe and always mistrusted the Serb, but then I’m a small-timer where sport is concerned. One thing I’ve never done is quit, however, and I did

Matthew Lynn

How the ‘Nixon shock’ reshaped our economy

The dotcom bubble. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The oil price spiral of the 1970s. The launch of the single currency. It would be fun, in a nerdish kind of a way, to debate which was the most seismic economic event of postwar history. But in fact the answer would be this: the ‘Nixon shock’, a fateful day when the final link between gold and the money you carry around in your pocket, or on your bank card, was finally severed. And it happened 50 years ago this week. A half-century on — enough time for some historical perspective — how’s it going? Well, since then we have

Dot Wordsworth

The dramatic evolution of ‘actor’

‘That chap in Line of Duty. That’s what I’d call a bad actor,’ said my husband with vague certainty. He was responding to a remark on the wireless about Iran being a bad actor. Language, as usual, is in a state of transition. Actor is now employed to mean some person, or moral entity, acting in a good or bad way. But if you ask anyone what an actor is, the answer would be a person taking part in a drama, on stage or the equivalent. This goes to show the difference between the main meaning of a word now and the meaning of words from which it originates. Actor

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why cocktails are superior to wine

I often argue that, in theory at least, well-made cocktails are indisputably better than wines costing 20 times more. My argument runs as follows. In making a cocktail, you can mix, in any combination you wish, any of the liquids known to humanity. In making a wine, you are stuck with using grape juice harvested by grumpy Frenchmen from scrubland east of the Gironde. Mathematically, the odds that the best drink you can generate derives only from a few bunches of such grapes is so small as to be infinitesimal. Besides, almost no one drinks grape juice, and nobody has ever seriously tried to sell non-alcoholic wine. If it really

Bruce Anderson

The wine that made me change my mind about Valpolicella

There was a marvellous general of yesteryear called George Burns. He had a good war and a splendid peace. He also held senior posts for longer than would be permitted in these diminished times. Colonel of the Coldstream for 32 years, he was Lord-Lieutenant of Hertfordshire for a quarter of a century. Many stories are told about him. Connoisseurs of equestrianism say that he was much the worst rider ever to appear at the Queen’s Birthday Parade, always looking like a magnificently attired and bemedalled sack of potatoes. He also had a set diet: a game bird at every meal. Once, he collapsed, was rushed to hospital and opened up.