Society

Sunday

The Spectator

Can you beat The Spectator’s quizzers?

This week, the Spectator Club hosted a quiz night for subscribers – with the ‘Charles Moore’s red corduroys’ team the eventual winners.* The night was such a success we thought other readers would enjoy doing the quiz as well. There are four rounds of questions below. We’d like to think the questions are fun to work out, and pass the ‘even if you don’t get them, you’ll kick yourself when you hear the answer’ test. If you can beat the winning team’s score we’ll enter you into a draw for a bottle of Pol Roger champagne. Enter your answers here by Friday 6 June. Round one 1. Which type of pasta

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Is God an Englishman?

32 min listen

Bijan Omrani joins Damian Thompson to talk about his new book God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England. They discuss the spiritual and cultural debt the country owes to Christianity. The central question of Bijan’s book is ‘does it matter that Christianity is dying in England?’. The faith has historically played a disproportionate role in many areas of English life that we take for granted now – for example, by shaping both charity and the welfare state. Yet this is influence is often ignored as congregations shrink and the UK slides into secularism. But are there unexpected grounds for hope? The publication of God is an Englishman has coincided with a modest but surprising

Jimmy Nicholls

No, Zoomers: life wasn’t better before the internet

Almost half of 16 to 21-year-olds wish they had grown up without the internet. A similar portion are even calling for a social media curfew, with a quarter wanting phones banned in schools, according to research from the British Standards Institution. Really? The truth is that Zoomers – those born between 1997 and 2012 – don’t know how lucky they are to have come of age during an era in which they had access to the web. The truth is that Zoomers don’t know how lucky they are While my own generation of Millennials were early guinea pigs for Facebook, Twitter and – for the connoisseurs out there – MSN Messenger,

Saturday

Lucy Dunn

Should cannabis be decriminalised?

21 min listen

London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has called for possession of small amounts of cannabis to be decriminalised following a report by the London Drugs Commission. The report has made 42 recommendations, which include removing natural cannabis from the Misuse of Drugs Act. Former cabinet minister, now Labour peer, Charlie Falconer and Tory MP Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst join Lucy Dunn to discuss whether now is the time to decriminalise cannabis. For Lord Falconer, who chaired the Commission, the present law doesn’t work and he explains the principles behind the review; Neil, however, believes that the proposals send the wrong message that cannabis is harmless. He argues that a balance needs to

Billi Bierling

What’s wrong with using Xenon to climb Everest?

Reaching the top of the world and returning to London within a week without so much as stopping for a coffee in Kathmandu sounds like the stuff dreams are made of. But on 21 May 2025, four former members of the British special forces turned this dream into reality when they stood on the summit of Mount Everest four days and 11 hours after leaving the UK. Their secret was to inhale Xenon two weeks prior to the climb, a gas well known to anaesthetists, but so far unheard of in mountaineering. When I climbed Everest in 2009, I remember thinking that the World Anti-Doping Agency would have a field

Friday

David Shipley

Why do police accept criminal drug use?

Another day, another sign of the British state’s acceptance of criminality. This time it’s the news that almost half of people caught in possession of Class A drugs avoid criminal sanction, with the police either issuing a ‘community resolution’, which does not create a criminal record, or avoid any action at all ‘in the public interest’. This represents a dramatic change since 2016, when only 7.5 per cent of those caught in possession of hard drugs avoided prosecution. Why has this happened? And what does it mean for the drugs trade in Britain? In some cases, those avoiding prosecution will be asked to participate in ‘diversion schemes’, described by the College of

Arabella Byrne

Arabella Byrne, Sean Thomas, Mathew Lyons, Bryan Appleyard & Chas Newkey-Burden

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Arabella Byrne on the social minefield of private swimming pools (1:13); Sean Thomas says that not knowing where you are is one of the joys of travel (5:34); reviewing Helen Carr’s Sceptred Isle: A New History of the 14th Century, Mathew Lyons looks at the reality of a vivid century (11:34); reviewing Tim Gregory’s Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World, Bryan Appleyard analyses the three parties debating global warming (16:07); and, Chas Newkey-Burden looks back to the 1980s nuclear drama that paralysed his childhood, Threads (20:42).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Stephen Pollard

The growing militancy of the BMA

To understand what’s really going on with the latest British Medical Association strike threat – it is currently balloting 50,000 doctors over a putative six-month strike in support of a 29 per cent pay claim for ‘resident’ (formerly called junior) doctors – it’s instructive to look at what happened to Liverpool City Council in the 1980s. The local Labour party had effectively been taken over by Militant entryists, who then exerted de facto control of the council. One of their aims was financial: they argued that cuts to the Rate Support Grant meant that £30 million had been ‘stolen’ from Liverpool by the government. But they also had a broader

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The case for looking back in anger

Last week marked the anniversary of the Manchester Arena bombing – the deadliest terrorist attack on British soil since the 7/7 London bombings. Twenty-two people were murdered, most of them children and teenagers, at a pop concert targeted with deliberate cruelty. Among them was Saffie-Rose Roussos, just eight years old – the youngest known victim of terrorism in UK history. It was the first time a jihadist attack in Britain had deliberately targeted a music venue, the first of its scale in Northern England, and the deadliest ever on a civilian crowd in that region. Our love, we’re told, must be stronger than their hate. But I believe, deeply, that this is

Thursday

David Shipley

Robert Jenrick is right to confront tube fare evaders

Robert Jenrick tweeted a 60 second video this morning, showing him confronting suspected fare dodgers at Stratford London Underground station. He watches people reportedly forcing their way through the barriers while TfL staff seemingly do nothing to stop them. Jenrick then follows the suspected freeloaders down escalators, challenging them on why they haven’t paid. They’re not apologetic of course and none seem to show the slightest shame. One seems to threaten the shadow justice secretary, with Jenrick responding ‘you’re carrying a knife, did you say?’. In his narration, Jenrick says 4 per cent of travellers on the London Underground haven’t paid for their fare – I checked with TfL and the

William Moore William Moore

End of the rainbow, rising illiteracy & swimming pool etiquette

50 min listen

End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall What ‘started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men’, argues Gareth Roberts, became ‘a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality’ but ‘anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional’. Yet now Reform-led councils are taking down Pride flags, Pride events are being cancelled due to lack of funds, and corporate sponsors are ‘withdrawing their cold tootsies from the rainbow sock’. Has Pride suffered from conflation with ‘genderism’? Gareth joined the podcast to discuss, alongside diversity consultant Simon Fanshawe, one of the six original co-founders of Stonewall. (0:59) Next: people are forgetting how to read Philip Womack ‘can hear

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Don’t cancel Andrew Lawrence for his Liverpool joke

Andrew Lawrence has some claim to being Britain’s most-cancelled comedian. For more than a decade now, the 37-year-old stand-up has been losing himself work, friends and representation due to his wilfully offensive style of comedy / commentary. In a 2014 Facebook post, he took aim at BBC panel shows on which ‘aging, balding, fat men, ethnic comedians and women-posing-as-comedians, sit congratulating themselves on how enlightened they are about the fact that Ukip are ridiculous and pathetic’.  It is facile, censorious and philistine for comedy clubs to treat jokes as if they are straightforwardly sincere statements and no-platform comedians because they are offensive After England’s Euros penalties defeat in 2021 he

Madeleine Teahan

Carrie Johnson and the reality of having four children

While I am delighted to hear that Poppy Eliza Josephine Johnson, the fourth child of Boris and Carrie Johnson, arrived safely on Saturday, I’d be lying if I said that a small part of me didn’t die on seeing Carrie Johnson’s latest Instagram photos of the last days of her pregnancy. The cinematic shots of little tots kissing her belly, in her immaculate home, were not even the most implausible part of the shoot. Instead, it was the photo of her sitting alone, devoid of any children climbing up her legs or chewing her luscious hair. One elderly gent witnessed me trying to cross the car park with three kids

James Hanson

Phone theft is out of control in London

It just happened to be my birthday. A Friday lunchtime at the start of November. Broad daylight. I had left Oval tube station and was about to turn onto my road. But as I strolled along the pavement, airpods in, replying to happy birthday messages on WhatsApp, the inevitable happened. Snatch. My phone was lifted straight out of my hand by a teenager on a bike. I suppose it served me right for listening to The Rest is Politics at the time. The police, of course, were completely uninterested when my phone was stolen. My case was closed within 48 hours, despite the theft occurring on a road plastered with

Jawad Iqbal

We expect too much of Emma Raducanu

No one seriously expected Emma Raducanu to beat Iga Swiatek in her second round match at the French Open. Swiatek, a four-time champion in Paris, is nicknamed the ‘Queen of Clay’, having won 37 of her 39 matches at Roland Garros. Even so, few will have anticipated the scale of the drubbing that took place. Raducanu admitted ‘I have to improve’ after being completely outplayed during the 6-1, 6-2 defeat. One match commentator even went as far as to describe Raducanu as ‘Iga’s personal ball machine’. That is cruel and unfair. Raducanu was simply outclassed by a far better opponent and given a brutal lesson in tennis at the highest

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

We still need Jane Austen’s icy wisdom

I managed to sit through most of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius the other night. I endured luvvies and minor academics and even Cherie Blair, all wide-eyed at the brilliance of their heroine. She was inevitably presented as edgy and funny and brave and ground-breaking and mould-breaking and ball-breaking and oozing girl power. One of Austen’s prime targets is clumsy groupthink, which makes her pretty relevant to the age of social media Equally predictably, no one mentioned the key to her writing’s power, to her authorial authority: her moral intensity. It’s the truth about her that’s universally unacknowledged. It is hard to talk about – we don’t like moralists nowadays,

Philip Womack

We’re losing the ability to read

A recent American study, called ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’, analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at two Midwestern universities. You may be surprised to discover that the title is not ironic. That they don’t read very well is an understatement along the lines of Spike Milligan’s ‘I told you I was ill’. The study’s subjects were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. A doddle, you’d think, for anyone reading Eng lit at a university. Well, you’d be wrong. Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens’s prose.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Will Labour’s rail replacement service leave travellers stranded?

By spooky coincidence, on Saturday night I watched an old episode of Slow Horses in which a passenger died mysteriously on a replacement bus between High Wycombe and Oxford Parkway – and on Sunday I woke to reports that the first service of the new era of rail renationalisation, the 5.36 from Woking to Waterloo, had also featured a replacement bus. Nobody died, but it wasn’t a good omen. Nor was it quite the ‘turning point for the future of our railways’ that Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander declared. South Western Railway’s return to state hands this week was in fact the fifth major passenger franchise to go that way –

The Spectator

Will renationalising the railways lead to a better service?

Domestics policy Brigitte Macron, wife of Emmanuel Macron, was seen to push him in the face as the doors to their plane opened on arrival for a visit to Vietnam. The French President claimed they were just joking. It will kindle memories of awkward moments between Donald Trump and his wife Melania, as well as the incident in June 2019 when police were called to the south London home of Boris Johnson’s then-girlfriend Carrie Symonds after reports of a heated argument, apparently about wine being spilled on a sofa. – It is increasingly hard for politicians to keep their domestic disputes private. Harold Macmillan and his wife, Dorothy, got  through

The Spectator

Letters: Britain sold its fishing industry down the river

Hard reset Sir: Once again we must debate Brexit (‘Starmer vs the workers’, 24 May). The ‘reset’ agreement does give more control over UK domestic policy to the EU, if the points outlined in it are followed through. I assume they will be, as that’s what Labour’s front bench wants. (The prospect of us rushing through EU passport control, as Michael Gove and others suggest, is still unlikely, though – the document states only that there will be the ‘potential use of e-gates where appropriate’.) Britain must pay for many of the extra ‘benefits’. Apparently the boost to the UK amounts to £9 billion by 2040, but I’m unable to