Society

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Will assisted dying become a cover for abuse?

Every year, thousands of stories of abuse pour into Compassion in Care, a charity that supports whistleblowers in the care sector. Volunteers manning the charity’s helpline hear of old people dismissed as ‘end of life’, deprived of food and water, abandoned in corners with neglected bedsores, needlessly sedated to make them less time-consuming. And now, says the charity’s founder and director Eileen Chubb, a former care whistleblower herself, they are bracing for ‘a massive increase in abusive cases’. That’s if the assisted suicide bill, which begins its journey through the Lords this week, becomes law. ‘We can foresee whistleblowers contacting us,’ Chubb tells me, ‘saying people died who didn’t want

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Save our sausages!

Who first thought of grinding up all those little unused odds and sods from an animal carcass and stuffing them into a bit of intestine? Many people, apparently. Sausages are one of those products which, while seemingly not intuitive, emerged independently all around the world thousands of years ago. As far as we can tell, sausages have been produced since we began butchering animals. The first record of sausage-making is from around 2,000 bc: an Akkadian cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia mentions intestines filled with forcemeat. Sausages feature in The Odyssey as a simile for Odysseus tossing and turning in bed (‘When a man besides a great fire has filled a

Rachel Johnson

Nick Ferrari’s big fat Provençale wedding

It was the morning after the night before and I was picking glass out of my leg by a pool, blotting the blood trickling down my calf with a navy spotted handkerchief. I was trying to work out how the shards of glass came to be there… and then it came back to me. But first, let’s rewind. I was taking my seat on the British Airways 10 a.m. flight to Nice. ‘Not another one!’ a woman right behind me in steerage complained. ‘Is this some special flight or something?’ I stowed my Globe-Trotter in the overhead locker and made eye contact with her. ‘Piers Morgan is up front,’ she

Melissa Kite

The anarchy of a breakfast buffet

The Portuguese guest wanted an egg, but she didn’t want it to look like an egg. She came down to breakfast with her seven-year-old son and asked me to disguise two eggs by frying them on both sides so the yolks didn’t show. I’ve been getting to grips with the dietary habits of the travelling public all summer, so much so that I’m almost used to a peculiar trend that I can only describe as pretend veganism. My B&B guests seem to be balanced on a capricious meat-vegan knife edge which defies all logic and prediction, with most of them eating either some meat or some dairy, but never both.

Robin Oakley

My favourite memory of Geoff Lewis

To be a great jockey takes character as well as ability and Geoff Lewis, whom we have lost at 89, had that in spades. As the sixth of a Welsh labourer’s 13 children, he put in a 5.30 a.m. milk round before he went to school. When the family moved to London, and before he started on five shillings a week as an apprentice to Ron Smyth in Epsom, he was a diminutive pageboy at the Waldorf hotel, a role that wasn’t aided by his severe stutter. ‘It was sometimes so bad,’ he once said, ‘that if I paged somebody they’d probably left before I could get the name out.’

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill, remembered

When I was told that a newspaper had asked someone to write my obituary, my first instinct was excitement. I’m not easily offended and I’ve always been an attention-seeker. Once, when I was fat, a magazine printed a photograph of Jabba the Hutt and said it was me. I cut it out and pinned it on the wall above my typewriter with other images that inspired and amused me. Another time, when I was doing loads of drugs, I made it on to an online Death List of the ten public figures most likely to turn their toes up in the near future; again, I found this highly entertaining, and

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 13 September 2025

The Chairman’s Cup – the flagship teams’ event of the Swedish Bridge Festival held in Orebro at the end of July – set a new record for the number of teams entering: up 19 to 157 in total. This despite it clashing with the American Summer Nationals, which attracts a lot of the European Pros. It’s now so large that they are considering a different format, as qualifying only the top 32 teams out of nearly 160 is too narrow a window. The final was contested by two Swedish teams – actually a rarity in itself – and featured, as is the norm these days, some hyper-aggressive bidding from both

D.J. Taylor

The myth of the outsider

The job of radio critic for the Tablet offers several perquisites. One of them is access to the BBC previews website, and it was by this means, quite some time before its recent broadcast, that I was able to listen to Adrian Chiles’s Radio 4 documentary Finding Elgar. As a veteran of countless BBC radio documentaries and mindful of their sensitivity to the cultural issues of the day, I knew exactly what I would find, and there it was. Elgar, Chiles insisted, was an ‘outsider’ – lower middle class, a Catholic to boot, and marginalised and patronised by ‘the establishment’ until such time as his musical genius began to declare

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

I doubt there’s a better ravioli in London: The Lavery reviewed

The Lavery in South Kensington is named for Sir John Lavery, official artist of the Great War and designer of the currency of the Irish Free State, who lived here, though he died in Ireland and is buried in Putney. Lavery, of course, would no longer recognise South Kensington as his home, and his white, monumental mid-Victorian house – it’s too cold to be compared to a wedding cake, it’s a power cake – is now a fashionable restaurant and ‘event space’, which I put in quotation marks so you know I didn’t write the words ‘event space’, I just typed them out. In houses like The Lavery, I wonder

Dot Wordsworth

Is Angela Rayner ‘humble’?

Just before the earth opened up, Sir Keir Starmer said of his deputy: ‘Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly.’ We all know what pride comes before. Humble seemed a genteel word to use. Deprived would have sounded harsh; poor too Victorian; working-class too Your Party. Anyway, the humble background had to be thrown off. Hers was not the professed outlook of the writhing Uriah Heep (seen as a ‘red-headed animal’ by David Copperfield). ‘“Be umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at

Douglas Murray

Beware the restless, shifty liars

I have only been to Alexandria once, some years ago, when Hosni Mubarak was still in power, but it struck me as a sad city. Of course the library was not the library. The lighthouse was not the lighthouse. The city was not the city. I looked around for the remnants of the Greeks who had made it their own, but there seemed little left of them. Is there a cause we are financing so considerable it is decent to pass the cheque on to the next generations? Alexandria was on my mind again this week while reading a new biography of the city’s most famous modern poet, Constantine Cavafy

Toby Young Toby Young

How America could save free speech in Britain

The only holiday the Youngs had this summer was a week in Norfolk for the Hunstanton tennis tournament. I’m too hopeless to enter myself, but my friend Nell, who has a house nearby, organised a different competition that I was more suited to. It involved making an ‘elevator pitch’ for a policy that would fix broken Britain. What made it challenging was the panel of judges was chaired by Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary who is also Nell’s dad. The problem I focused on, needless to say, was the free speech crisis. My proposal was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and

Luke McShane

Louisiana surprise

Here we go again! By the end of this year, eight players will have qualified for the 2026 Candidates’ Tournament, whose winner earns the right to challenge Gukesh Dommaraju for the World Championship title. One player, Fabiano Caruana, is qualified already, thanks to strong results in 2024. Fide, the international federation, also holds two major qualifying events: the Grand Swiss, currently underway in Samarkand, and the World Cup, to be held in Goa in November. Altogether, seven out of eight qualifying spots are awarded based on tournament results. The final spot will be awarded to the highest-rated player who doesn’t otherwise qualify. In theory, that would be Magnus Carlsen, but

Luke McShane

No. 867

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Edith Baird, British Chess Magazine, 1894. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 15 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Qxg2+! 2 Kxg2 Rg6+ 3 Kf1 (not 3 Kh1 Nf2#) Bh3+ followed by perpetual check with Rg1+ / Rg2+ Last week’s winner Boris Alperowicz, South Nutfield, Surrey

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Throuple

Comp. 3416 invited you to marry romantasy (the romance-fantasy fusion now dominating fiction sales) with a third genre. Narnia, gritty realism and Holby City were in the mix. Some saw no reason to confine themselves to three, and we had romantasy sci-fi noir, as well as a Scandi noir-Richard Curtis romantasy-com. I’m sorry to leave out Sue Pickard, David Silverman, Basil Ransome-Davies, Nick Syrett, D.A. Prince, Bill Greenwell, Josephine Ruth and others. The voucher winners are below. ‘Don’t try to seduce me, mortal,’ breathed the Fae cowpoke. I had no intention of touching the varmint. He might be tall, sardonically sexy, cruel and cool, wear a black vampire-made Stetson, Elvish

Fieldfare

2720: Black and white

The unclued lights can all follow the same word, which is hidden in the grid and should be shaded. (Two of the phrases take the definite article.) Across 1 Pack slung across river boat (5) 10    Trounce principal predator (10) 11    Cover plate at last with prawn salad (6) 12    Brother caught in evil turning saint (7) 14    French tuck into frog, all I cooked (6) 16    European medic overturned conventional standards (4) 17    Let oneself down, as muscles relax? (6) 22    Weaken worship, delaying verse (8) 25    Sleeps around the whole time (4) 26    Such a war returns beneficial result? Not one (4) 28    Amenable to parking car (4-3)

The Spectator

2717: With my little eye – solution

In Ian Fleming’s DR NO (35D) JAMES BOND (21D) orders a MEDIUM VODKA (20A, 29D) DRY MARTINI (7A, 13A),SHAKEN (12D) and NOT STIRRED (19D) First prize Valerie Fish, Whittlesey, Cambs Runners-up Paul Billington, Blackburn, Lancashire; Mike Carter, Kirkby Overblow, Harrogate

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Why three is the magic number in these Ashes

And so it begins, the Great Debate: no, not who will be deputy leader of the Labour party but the infinitely more important – and certainly more interesting – matter of who will be trudging out at No. 3 to bat for England in the first Ashes Test at Perth, which is now ominously close. Almost as close as the moment the first bars of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ starts plinking round the supermarket. For some, the choice of Ollie Pope or Jacob Bethell is like saying whether you’d rather be buried or cremated. And sure, the days of Jonathan Trott, Ian Bell and the great Nasser Hussain might be

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Do I have to read the romantic novel my neighbour has based on me?

Q. A woman in our village has written a romantic novel in which one of the leading characters is said to be based on me. I understand that the character is glamorous but he is also preposterous. While I know that, technically, such a fictional portrait is a compliment to the person it is modelled on, as long as not libellous, I don’t really like the idea of my neighbour ‘scoring points’ over me while simultaneously mocking me. I therefore don’t want to read the novel as I fear it may undermine me. However, we are a close-knit community and I don’t want to be unsupportive by not reading it,