Society

Saturday

Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell, Gus Carter, Ruaridh Nicoll, Tanya Gold, and Books of the Year I

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Christopher Caldwell asks what a Trump victory could mean for Ukraine (1:07); Gus Carter argues that leaving the ECHR won’t fix Britain’s immigration system (8:29); Ruaridh Nicoll reads his letter from Havana (18:04); Tanya Gold provides her notes on toffee apples (23:51); and a selection of our books of the year from Jonathan Sumption, Hadley Freeman, Mark Mason, Christopher Howse, Sam Leith and Frances Wilson (27:08).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Alexander Larman

History has been cruel to Wallis Simpson

If there is one thing that Paul French’s forthcoming book Her Lotus Year should put right about Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, it is that her so-called ‘lotus year’ in China in the 1920s was not the sexual bacchanal that it has been painted as by the prurient and the envious. Instead it was a formative – if exotic – experience that helped shape her into the woman she became. Yet rumours of Wallis’s outré behaviour have been common currency for the past century. Even French’s finely researched publication is unlikely to dispel our fascination with the so-called ‘China dossier’, an apocryphal account of all the wrongdoings that the

Friday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has the perfect riposte to the anti-Israel bores

Finally, a celeb has stood up to the Israel bashers. It took the famously dour frontman of Radiohead to do it. At a solo gig in Melbourne, Thom Yorke was heckled by an audience member smugly demanding to know why he hasn’t spoken out about Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Yorke wasn’t having it. He even called the caterwauling gig ruiner a ‘coward’. It’s the best thing he’s done since OK Computer. Shaky footage filmed by his fellow concert-goers captured the man yelling at Yorke. From deep in the audience he barked something about the ‘Israeli genocide of Gaza’ and said half of those killed ‘were children’. He challenged Yorke to

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The Women’s Equality party deserves its fate

Of all the grotesque modern types who cast a silly-yet-sinister shadow over the dog-days of Western civilisation – the Queers for Palestine, the Jew-baiting anti-racists, the humanity-hating eco-nuts – the Transmaid has a special step of shame very near the top. The Transmaid is a handmaid, like in Margaret Atwood’s novel, with two vital differences. Transmaids get everywhere, but they are often to be found in showbusiness and politics Transmaids often curry favour, not with regular men – indeed, they may often think of themselves as feminists who hate the patriarchy – but with men who say they are women. This means they do not really practise feminism at all,

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Team Trump, astrologers versus pollsters & debating history

43 min listen

This week: Team Trump – who’s in, and who’s out? To understand Trumpworld you need to appreciate it’s a family affair, writes Freddy Gray in the magazine this week. For instance, it was 18-year-old Barron Trump who persuaded his father to do a series of long ‘bro-casts’ with online male influencers such as Joe Rogan. In 2016, Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was the reigning prince; this year, he has been largely out of the picture. Which family figures are helping Trump run things this time around, and which groups hold the most influence? Freddy joins the podcast alongside economics editor Kate Andrews. What are the most important personnel decisions facing

Alex Fleming-Brown

Scroll model: confessions of a clickbait writer

Working on a ‘trending’ news desk is the journalistic equivalent of being a battery-farmed hen. When I was still at university, I wrote pieces for one of the most-visited clickbait news sites in the UK, which boasts 300 million followers worldwide. My brief was to pump out a 400-word article in 45 minutes, every 45 minutes, for nine hours straight. My fee for these 12 articles was £125 in total (£13 per hour or, more saliently to a student, a pint for 250 words). All of you will have come across clickbait online. Some of you might even admit to having clicked on it. Who doesn’t want to know which

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Toffee apples: a dangerous food for frightening nights

Bonfire night is more about burning Catholics than haute cuisine and it shows. I’ve always felt for Catholic friends at this time of year, but I am a Jew, and I am told I am oversensitive. It’s also three decades since I made £150 doing ‘Penny for the Guy’ on Hampstead High Street. The last time I went to a bonfire night party it was hosted by a Catholic, and this confused me, until I remembered: she is an English Catholic. If Christmas is for the goose, and Easter for the hot cross bun, bonfire night has the toffee apple. Because this is a desolate festival, it has neither toffee

Toby Young Toby Young

Will Keir Starmer get me banned from football games?

Last Saturday, I made the 400-mile round trip to Burnley with my 16-year-old son Charlie to see Queens Park Rangers play the Clarets. Quite a long way to go, given that Burnley was one of three teams relegated from the Premier League last season and are expected to go straight back up, while QPR are struggling to remain in the second tier. Nevertheless, we managed to hold them to a goalless draw, which the visiting fans celebrated as if we’d just won the FA Cup. ‘Worth the trip,’ declared Charlie as we embarked on the four-hour train ride home. The cabinet of killjoys can’t stand the fact that the beautiful

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The glaring mismatch in English football

Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself to a half-time pie and a mug of Bovril if you said Howard Wilkinson, who took the First Division championship with Leeds United in 1992, the final season before the formation of the Premier League. Since then nothing: now the top four teams in the country are managed by a Spaniard (Guardiola at Man City), a Dutchman (Arne Slot at Liverpool) and two more Spaniards (Mikel Arteta and Unai Emery at Arsenal and Villa). The only three English managers in the top flight are Eddie Howe at Newcastle (currently 12th),

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop my boss sending me rambling voice notes?

Q. I am a concierge for a high-net-worth individual. She likes to communicate with me mainly via WhatsApp voice messages and it’s not unusual to receive ten of these a day. The messages are often lengthy and I find it tedious having to listen carefully right to the end in case I miss some vital instruction. For example, she might be talking about the dinner she went to the night before but embedded within her ramblings could be: ‘By the way, could you get the plumber back urgently to the London flat – water is leaking from the basin in my bathroom.’ How can I tactfully ask her to waste

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

You’re spoiling us: The Ambassadors Clubhouse reviewed

The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting. There was an avant-garde café under the Heddon Street Kitchen called The Cave of the Golden Calf. Ziggy Stardust was photographed for his album cover outside No. 23; from Heddon Street you could hear the Beatles play their final concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969. This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated

Catriona Olding

Martin has worn down my defences

Provence My older, adopted sister came to stay. She suffers from peripheral neuropathy secondary to diabetes and is registered disabled. It’s a worry watching her negotiate the cliff path and the 12 stone steps to the front door with her stick, but she adores it here. Since reversing her insulin-dependent diabetes with an extreme fasting keto diet, her mobility has improved and she no longer uses a mobility scooter. My sister got cross when I doubted the veracity of both his ID and love for her Obesity and diabetes killed her twin brother five years ago this week. He was 62. First he partially lost his eyesight, then sensation in

Dot Wordsworth

Does ‘tummy’ turn your stomach?

‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising language has already made poo the normal way of talking about excrement. Now it’s tummy. Last week the manager of Arsenal admitted that choosing a team sometimes gives him a ‘bit of tummy ache’. There is even an outfit called the Happy Tummy Co, which bakes bread that is said to be easily digestible. It is not as though stomach was particularly indelicate. Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury was happy to claim ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, though she

Luke McShane

End of The World

In 2016, the naming of a polar research ship was put to a public vote, and ‘Boaty McBoatface’ was the overwhelming winner. Should humanity’s fate ever be staked on a game of chess against alien invaders, I hope we don’t get a vote. If the internet has taught me anything, we would end up playing the Bongcloud Opening ‘for the lols’ and be vaporised. Even ignoring the saboteurs, the wisdom of crowds does not reliably select good chess moves. The recent game between former world champion Viswanathan Anand and ‘The World’ was a case in point.     In the first diagram above, you can see why the world voted for 14…Qd8xd5,

Melissa Kite

Hands off my empty plastic bottles!

‘Where are my empty plastic bottles?’ I ran around the house screaming, after discovering my stash had disappeared. The government in Ireland has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers. It has introduced a scheme whereby you can feed all your empty bottles and cans into a machine in the supermarket that crushes them down and spits out a voucher – by which I mean about 20 small plastic water bottles, for example, makes you two or three euros, which is enough for a coffee, a sandwich or some money off your shopping bill. The government has done something with the recycling laws that

Robin Oakley

My fears for the National Hunt Chase

World politics is dire but so long as Mick Herron is writing spy novels, David Mitchell is raising laughs and Bukayo Saka is scoring goals there is joy available and I have lived to see the start of another proper jumps season at the Cheltenham Showcase meeting. Saturday’s racing did, however, provide a sharp reminder of how the Irish dominated last season’s Cheltenham Festival, winning 18 of the 27 races, including 12 of the 14 Grade One contests. Irish trainers Ian Patrick Donoghue, John McConnell, Gordon Elliott and Henry de Bromhead won four out of the seven races, and you have to wonder how hard some home-based handlers are trying

Luke McShane

No. 825

White to play. Abdusattorov-Maghoodloo, European Club Cup, October 2024. Black’s preceding move Qg6xg3 backfired spectacularly. Which move allowed White to turn the tables? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 4 November. 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 Qd5! threatens Qa2#. If 1…Bxd5 2 Re1# or 1…Bb1 2 Qd4# or 1…Kd1 2 Qd1#. Last week’s winner Mark Powney, Rowledge, Surrey

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: It is what it is 

In Comp. 3373 you were invited to mull on a line that Sigmund Freud almost certainly did not say, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, substituting another object if it seemed apt. In the event there was plenty about cigars as substitutes and not so much about their substitutes as substitutes. A word in praise of Frank McDonald’s lovely poem about the transformations wrought by imagination and Gail White’s ‘Cat is simply cat’. Also deserving of a mention: Alex Steelsmith, Janine Beacham (‘Cigars are just cigars, no deep complex… Good Lord, stop thinking everything is sex!’) and George Simmers, whose poem ends: Then he, being an utter bastard, Quoted Kipling

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 2 November 2024

The World Bridge Games are taking place in Buenos Aires and I’m glued to my screen, kibitzing and checking the results at every opportunity. The superstars are out in force, and it’s riveting to compare the way they approach the same hands – and a great way to learn. That said, you’ll see certain bids which you probably shouldn’t try to emulate: their instincts and imaginations are on an altogether higher plane than most of ours. Indeed, I saw a number of bids which, if anyone I teach had made, I’d have ‘corrected’ at once! Representing the USA in the Seniors Teams, for instance, Zia Mahmood (South), picked up ♠️J