Society

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Meghan and Harry’s interview: Seven bombshell claims

The Royal Family is waking up to a series of allegations set to rock the monarchy following Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s tell-all interview with Oprah. The two-hour show aired in the United States overnight – and will appear on ITV this evening. But with the main lines set to dominate the news agenda all day, Mr S has rounded up the biggest bombshells so far from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. 1. Meghan claims Archie was subjected to racist comments The most shocking moment in the interview was Meghan Markle’s claim that a member of the royal family made racist comments about Archie’s skin colour. The Duchess of Sussex alleged that an unnamed royal in

Sunday

Thomas Fink

How Boris’s research agency can thrive

What is the recipe for outstanding innovation? According to Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, we should learn it from America. When he announced last week the launch of Britain’s new Advanced Research and Inventions Agency (ARIA), he reiterated that the £800m organisation would be based upon DARPA, America’s high-risk, high-reward defence research agency. This is no surprise. Since the 1950s, DARPA has racked up an extraordinary series of breakthroughs, including the internet, GPS, drones and stealth technology. Yet when it comes to recapturing what Kwarteng calls ‘the spirit of Britain’s long and proud history of inventing’, he should look at Britain’s history

Mark Piggott

Brexit and gender are off limits for aspiring authors

When a small US publisher accepted my first book for young adults, ‘Crosstrack’, it wasn’t long before things went pear shaped. The novel follows two teenage athletes, one a middle class American, the other a young Syrian refugee. Apart from cycling ability, they have another thing in common: both are trans.  I’d anticipated a backlash at having the temerity to describe someone outside my own experience, and expected it to involve the Middle Eastern migrant (a la Jeanine Cummings). Yet when my publisher passed the book to a new editor for a final edit, she took exception to some of the views expressed by the other main character, and in

Saturday

Jethro Elsden

The big state won’t save our post-Covid world

The big state is back. The Budget puts Britain on a path to having the highest tax levels since the 1950s, and a state that controls as much of our GDP as it did in the days when it still owned carmakers, phone lines and travel agents. Despite Rishi Sunak’s best efforts to contain spending, the figures are likely to go higher still, as the bills for the NHS, social care, and disrupted education continue to rise. But it’s not just about the numbers. Even before the pandemic, the political winds were blowing towards larger government, with Boris Johnson embracing a more muscular, state-led industrial strategy. But the pandemic has

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The weekly cost of lockdown

Lockdown has always been a matter of trade-offs. The impact of suppressing the economy to also suppress a deadly virus has had consequences on every aspect of life, from non-Covid health treatment, to rising unemployment, to the impact on children’s education. But these costs can be calculated in something much closer to real time. New data from the OECD, analysed by The Spectator and unveiled in this week’s magazine, shows the weekly difference between a country’s economic activity now and how it compares with the year before.  First, let’s look at change in lockdown stringency — as measured by Oxford University’s Blatavnik School of Government. When the second wave struck, Britain ended up

Colin Brazier

What does the trans debate mean for widowers like me?

I once asked a hospice nurse to describe her job and was surprised when she likened it to midwifery. ‘There are two days,’ she said, ‘which aren’t the full 24 hours. The day you are born, and the day you die.’ Uncertainty, fear and waiting. Having been at my late-wife’s deathbed – and at her side as she gave birth to our children – I can see the analogy. But why, when it comes to the language of inclusivity, is death excluded? Or, as the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, asserted recently ‘there is currently biological essentialism and transphobia present within elements of mainstream birth narratives and discourse’.  Why stop

Charles Harris

What activists get wrong about Britain’s history

Over the last year, the Black Lives Matter movement has created an infectious blend of conflated antipathy to slavery, Empire and England. Across our institutions, there has been a rush to appease self-righteous activists by removing statues and pictures, rewriting our history, altering street names and allowing them to silence anyone who dares question their orthodoxy. What is motivating this supplication? The reasons ostensibly given are England’s part in the Atlantic slave trade and the British Empire, dismissed as racist and without any redeeming features. This shift in how the empire is viewed today shows just how historically illiterate we have become as a nation. One ‘academic’ even recently dismissed

Friday

Kristina Murkett

Meghan’s critics and defenders are both wrong

When it comes to Harry and Meghan, is it time for everyone to take a collective deep breath? With the build-up to the ‘tell-all’ Oprah interview and the recent disclosure of bullying allegations, it feels like hysteria around the couple is at fever pitch. In the war of the Waleses, is there room for a middle ground? The more vicious Meghan Markle’s critics are, the more her supporters portray her as an almost Christ-like figure. Her detractors then become irritated by the virtue-signalling, her defenders cite racism and sexism, and the vicious circle continues. Every action just seems to entrench each side’s position until there is no room for manoeuvre.

Mary Dejevsky

Why NHS workers shouldn’t get a pay rise

The Government in the person of Rishi Sunak won a surprisingly positive public response to what was essentially a tax-raising Budget this week. Within 24 hours though, the same government had spectacularly lost the PR contest by recommending a 1 per cent pay rise for NHS staff across the board. The outcry was universal: mean, measly, an insult, a slap in the face, not a way to treat ‘our heroes’ – or, more personally, those who saved the Prime Minister’s life. The rise – and it is currently just a recommendation to the NHS pay review body – is indeed a mistake. In fact, it is a double mistake, but

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Covid-19 and the problem with Britain’s weight

How strong is the link between obesity and the danger of dying from Covid? Yesterday, the World Obesity Federation published a report containing a widely-quoted statistic that 2.2 million out of 2.5 million Covid deaths globally have occurred in countries where more than half the population is overweight. The figure is stark, although also highly unsatisfactory. Obesity tends to be more prevalent in wealthy countries – which also happen to have more aged populations, another strong risk factor in Covid deaths. Yet the report also collates a substantial body of evidence linking obesity more directly with Covid deaths. Among the findings reported around the world is a British study finding

Douglas Murray

Will Alan Rusbridger apologise for the Guardian’s Republican cell?

Subscribers will know that I wrote in my column for the magazine this week about the revelations by former journalist Roy Greenslade that he was an active supporter of the IRA throughout the Troubles. But there are a number of people who we should still hear from on this, and have not. One is Greenslade’s long-term editor and defender at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, now the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. As I mentioned in my column, in 2000 The Spectator ran a piece by Stephen Glover identifying a Republican cell within the Guardian. Rusbridger responded furiously to this, denouncing the piece, The Spectator, the magazine’s then-editor Boris Johnson, and

Thursday

John Sturgis

Parents should stop complaining about World Book Day

Every year, at the same time, they come – great flocks of them. Squawking, squabbling, screeching. Never mind the first cuckoo call or the sighting of the earliest swallow, there is no more reliable metric in modern Britain for the arrival of spring than parents moaning about their children having to dress up for World Book Day. What started in the mid-nineties as a fairly innocuous celebration of all things children’s lit, has somehow in the quarter century since evolved into an annual festival of epic parental whining: ‘it’s too commercial’; ‘too demanding’; ‘too expensive’; ‘too tacky’; ‘too much’. These are all, I concede, to a degree, reasonable criticisms. Personal

Julian W Tang

Why we shouldn’t worry about Covid super strains

Should we worry about new Covid variants? Much has been made in recent weeks about the potential for new Covid strains to arise, and the danger of a new super variant bypassing all our vaccines and bodies’ existing defences to cause another global pandemic even worse than this one. But while I would say that this is not impossible and could happen, it would be very unusual if this took place. We know from previous epidemics what happens when a population encounters a new virus. When Europeans first discovered South America, the viral infections they imported – measles, chickenpox, smallpox, influenza – killed more of the indigenous people than any

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Meghan, Harry and the trouble with Oprah’s ‘truth’

Obviously, I can’t wait for the Meghan and Harry audience with Oprah Winfrey. Alas, it’s going to be broadcast at about one o’clock in the morning our time (I’m still thinking popcorn at the office around a flat screen). But meanwhile there are tasters from the programme to keep us happy. What got me going from the most recent excerpt wasn’t Meghan’s observations about ‘The Firm’, interesting as that was, but the question put to her by Oprah:  ‘How do you feel about the palace hearing you speak your truth today?’ Eh? ‘Your truth’? I think what she means is ‘putting forward your point of view’ or ‘offering your take

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The case for keeping business taxes low

Why should business pay tax at all? That’s a provocative but forlorn question to ask in Budget week. Business pays corporation tax on profits because that’s what voters expect, partly because many are conditioned to believe profit is a sin and partly because all would prefer to pay less tax themselves. Investors pay tax on capital gains because — as the American bank robber Willie Sutton said of his crimes — that’s where the money is. And companies pay more tax as business rates on premises because that’s the easiest way to collect contributions towards public services from which they benefit — but it’s also an easy levy to relieve

Dot Wordsworth

The word ‘like’ is in crisis

‘Blame Kingsley Amis,’ said my husband, with the carelessness of one defying a man out of earshot. The blame, such as it was, lay in the title of the novel Take a Girl Like You (1960). The ambiguity in the title, he maintained, was between like meaning ‘such as’ and like meaning ‘resembling’. There is something in what he says. Like has been in crisis for a generation on several fronts. The most hated is probably like as an oral filler, along with you know or sort of. A second annoying usage is stranger: like introducing a made-up quotation serving as an adjective. An example would be to replace ‘He

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Rishi’s nightmare: will inflation crush the recovery?

At first, it seems to make no sense. Britain is in the middle of the worst economic crash in recorded history, with a Chancellor who is famously keen on low taxes, spending control and sound money. But Rishi Sunak this week presented a Budget that seems inspired, in parts, by Labour’s last manifesto. Debt surging to £2.8 trillion. Public spending up by a quarter in a year. And taxes: soon going up. Corporation tax, freezes to the personal tax threshold. The explanation most Tories comfort themselves with is that Sunak wants to explain to a high-spending Prime Minister that today’s cash splurge is tomorrow’s tax rise. But in truth, Sunak

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The real reasons children are going hungry

‘We’re idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.’ I listened to The Food Programme on Radio 4 this week, because the channel finder on my car radio wasn’t working and so I was stuck with it. It was, as it almost always is, four left-wing ratbags moaning to one another. As I’ve mentioned before, this is the template for almost the entirety of the station’s output: miserable women carping endlessly about everything. It is almost impossible to know what particular programme you’re listening to. You have to keep your ears tuned for key phrases which might give you an indication. If it’s a woman teacher moaning about

Melinda Hughes

Did I give Russ Abbot Covid?

For the past few weeks there’s been a 7 p.m. curfew in Barbados as part of what the government calls a ‘national pause’ (lockdown, essentially). I’m actually grateful because it’s been manic lately. The excitement started with the visit of Captain Sir Tom Moore in December. I was commissioned by a golfing group called the ‘Sandy Lane Swingers’ to write and perform a song, ‘Marching on to Victory’, at a charity lunch. It’s a jaunty tune, composed by my co-writer Jeremy Limb, with a singalong at the end. Captain Tom joined in, waving his napkin in the air. As an encore I sang a verse of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’

Elisa Segrave

A quick fix: how Boris and Carrie can bring Dilyn the dog to heel

A lot of nonsense is being written about Dilyn, the adorable Jack Russell owned by Boris and Carrie, a lookalike for my dog, Perry, now nearly 16. Is Dilyn the currently subdued Boris’s alter ego, one journalist wondered. We read that Dilyn allegedly humped Dominic Cummings’s leg, and at Chequers ‘mounted’ a stool made from the hide of an elephant shot by Teddy Roosevelt. He also peed on an aide’s handbag after she arrived at Downing Street for a meeting. Of course it is not the first time Boris has had a poorly trained dog in his life. When he was editor of The Spectator, a dandie dinmont called Laszlo