Society

Thursday

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Big bash

In Comp. 3387, for the centenary of the publication of The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway, you were invited to submit a passage in which one goes to the other’s party. It was especially hard to whittle this one down. Deserving a mention: Mrs D.’s West Egg dream by Brian Murdoch (‘“Sod the temporal perspective and narrative shifts,” she thought, “I need a nap”’) and Basil Ransome-Davies’s rendering of stream of consciousness (‘newspaper vendors at Piccadilly Circus, pigeons marooned in roof space, university architects, pistachio ice cream in a Viennese café… What made her wonder if Mr Carraway was Mr Gatsby’s petit ami like that mad young French poet?’); also

Douglas Murray

Is Britain ready for blasphemy laws?

In its infinite wisdom, the Labour government appears to be reconsidering the introduction of a blasphemy law in the UK. It has picked up this idea despite it being so idiotic that it was even rejected by the last Conservative government. That well-known theologian Angela Rayner has decided to set up a council to look into the question of ‘Islamophobia’. As mentioned, there was a push to do this during the Conservative era, when a committee including some of the worst people then in public life – Dominic Grieve, Naz Shah, Anna Soubry – looked into the same thing. Their scholarship foundered, as it always will, on how you protect

The Spectator

How has Brexit affected ferry travel?

Meeting expectations Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had a telephone call prior to US and Russian officials meeting in Saudi Arabia. It was the first time the US and Russian leaders had spoken in three years. How often did US and Soviet leaders meet during the Cold War? — After Harry S. Truman met Josef Stalin in Potsdam in July/August 1945, shortly after the end of the second world war in Europe, Stalin did not meet a US president again. Nikita Khrushchev met Dwight Eisenhower three times, at Geneva (1955), Washington (1959) and Paris (1960). John F. Kennedy also met Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. — After the Cuban missile

Charles Moore Charles Moore

My Valentine’s Day car crash

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, is not a MAGA groupie, but a believer in the Nato alliance. He knows about working with allies. Yet he says that the Americans should go right ahead with Russia, the murderous aggressor, without bringing Ukraine, ally and victim, or the Nato member states, into the talks. This is President Trump’s will, he says. Compare with the Middle East. Would Rubio – or Trump – say that Hamas, the murderous aggressor, was the key player, and should therefore have bilateral talks with the US whereas Israel, ally and victim, should just sit and wait to be told later what is happening? Trump helped

Doc

2691: Very large fellow

The title wrote three unclued lights (one of two words) with the letter-count (3,8,6,4), whose members are the other unclued lights (two pairs, another of two words and a singleton). Solvers must highlight the singleton’s missing moniker hidden in the completed grid. Across 11    Half the beans initially seem superfluous accompanying hot paste with chillis (7) 12    Seashore grass blowing back and forth (6) 14    Just a moment for A. Lloyd Webber’s collaborator (5) 16    Less convincing Debussy composition (2,3) 19    Poor actor’s part as expressed on picnic menu (3,4) 23    Leading academic’s endless nonsense on fish (7) 24    Raw sea-mist outside of hangar (4) 25    Figure runs home not

The Spectator

2688: 4 + 4 = 8 – solution

The unclued four-letter solutions are paired, one inside the other, to yield the four unclued 8-letter words: 37 ÷ 19 = 3, 15 ÷ 6 = 23, 21 ÷ 8 = 40 and 31D ÷ 38 = 44. First prize R.A. Towle, Ilkeston, Derbyshire Runners-up R.B. Briercliffe, Onchan, Isle of Man; Roger Cairns, Chalfont Heights, Bucks

The Spectator

Who lost Ukraine?

In the America of the 1950s, one question dominated foreign policy: ‘Who lost China?’ The Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the defeat of America’s ally, the Kuomintang regime, provoked agonised debate about the principles that should guide statecraft – the balance between containment and pushback, the relative importance of winning hearts and minds or prevailing by strength of arms. The question that we might ask today is: ‘Who lost Ukraine?’ Of course, the war between Kyiv and Moscow is not over. Ukraine’s army continues to fight with a tenacious courage that is inspiring. Volodymyr Zelensky’s diplomatic efforts to maximise support for resistance are unflagging. But all the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: US and Russia talk, Chiltern Firehouse burns and Duchess of Sussex rebrands

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that, to guarantee the security of Ukraine, he was ‘ready and willing’ to put ‘our own troops on the ground if necessary. I do not say that lightly’. Parliament would be allowed a vote on such a deployment, the government said. Earlier, Sir Keir took an unannounced telephone call from President Donald Trump of America about their forthcoming meeting. Afterwards, Mr Trump said: ‘We have a lot of good things going on. But he asked to come and see me and I just accepted his asking.’ The Chiltern Firehouse hotel in Marylebone burnt down. The Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill,

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The secrets of the perfect potato rösti

You may be forgiven, if you are a regular reader of this column, for thinking that my primary motivation in cooking is showing off. I’m always banging on about lovely dishes you can serve to unsuspecting guests that will guarantee plaudits and amazement. But while there is more than a kernel of truth in this, I think that it’s actually simpler than that: what I crave from cooking is satisfaction. And I don’t mean satiation of hunger (although that too: I am greedy), but the sense of achievement that cooking – almost – invariably brings. True, this achievement can often be found in presenting a beautiful cake to an assembled

Wednesday

Konstantin Kisin

The tide is turning

Konstantin Kisin delivered these remarks – which also appear on his Substack – at the ARC conference in London Ladies and gentlemen, it is great to be back at ARC. If we haven’t met, my name is Konstantin. I was born in Soviet Russia and moved here when I was a teenager. I love this country and I say so publicly, which is how you know I still haven’t integrated into British culture.  Last time we were here, I opened my speech with this quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. ‘The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialisation.

Matthew Lynn

Is X still worth £38 billion? Elon Musk thinks so

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, his many critics gleefully predicted a catastrophe. We were told that everyone would quit the site for its rivals, such as Bluesky and Mastodon. The rebranding to X made Musk the object of ridicule. Musk was warned that he was unlikely to see a return on the $44 billion (£38.1billion) he had splashed out on the site. But hold on: today brings news that Musk is attempting to raise extra cash for his site at the same valuation as what he bought it for. Musk’s critics will no doubt say he is deluded. But his business acumen speaks for itself: this is a

Leah Pennisi-Glaser

The confusing sex lives of Gen Z

What do Hollywood bonkbusters Bridget Jones: Mad About a Boy, Baby Girl, and Lonely Planet have in common? The middle-aged blonde ice maidens at the centre of each film are all women who refuse to age gracefully. Their faces show a toxic desire to cling onto youth.  The movies also all feature large age-gap relationships with the woman as the older party. Thanks to the gender reversal, pop culture is lauding the storylines as inspiration and liberating. But what message are young people – especially guys – supposed to take away? The bald fact is there’s a reason why it’s a social taboo to have sex with people young enough

Tuesday

Richard Ekins

The Lady Chief Justice has no right to condemn Starmer

The Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr, has told reporters that she is “deeply troubled” by a recent exchange between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition during Prime Minister’s Questions – and that she has written to the Lord Chancellor to complain. This is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily ill-advised, intervention in the political process, which the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition should firmly rebuff. There is no evidence that occasional ministerial criticism of judgments imperils judicial independence The parliamentary exchange to which Baroness Carr took exception concerned a recent decision of the Upper Tribunal allowing a Palestinian family in Gaza, who had a relative living in

Steerpike Steerpike

Meghan relaunches lifestyle brand after trademark trouble

11 months ago, the Duchess of Sussex promised big things with the launch of her new lifestyle brand. Last March eagle-eyed social media users quickly spotted a new Instagram account called ‘American Riviera Orchard’ with the biography reading: ‘By Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex.’ Yet fast forward to the beginning of 2025 and, er, nothing much had happened with it. Instead it appeared like Meghan had turned her back on the project completely to focus on her new Netflix lifestyle show, ‘With Love, Meghan’. Well, it turns out that is half right… The Queen of Privacy has, it transpires, binned off American Riviera Orchard – and relaunched her brand until

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The doomed union of Stormzy and Jeremy Corbyn

It’s been a lovely month so far for us free-thinkers, with the wokescreen tumbling down big-time. First the predicted winner of the Best ‘Actress’ Oscar – a biological man – was revealed to have been a bit of a social media ‘scamp’ in the past, with a soft spot for Hitler. And now the popular modern singer ‘Stormzy’ (real name, the rather beautiful Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr) has blotted his copybook – gloriously so. I don’t think much of his songs (‘Gals say I’m rude, they wanna see me nude/My name stiff chocolate, I got nothing left to prove… Gettin’ freaky in the sheets, we’re takin’ body shots/Then I

Monday

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Who shot the world’s first openly gay imam?

Muhsin Hendricks, the world’s ‘first openly gay imam’, was shot dead in Bethelsdorp, South Africa, on Saturday. While the police are still probing the murder, Imam Hendricks had repeatedly cited death threats – including in the 2022 documentary The Radical – owing to radical Muslims finding his preaching, and officiating of same-sex marriages, as an affront to Islam. According to reports, he had recently performed the ceremony of a lesbian couple, and was on his way to officiating the wedding of a Muslim woman with a non-Muslim man, which too is deemed against Islamic teachings. In addition to sanctioning unorthodox marriages, Hendricks’s Al-Ghurbaah Foundation provided support to those marginalised on

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Why do Australian doctors want to kill Israeli patients?

Imagine the uproar if a white Christian doctor refused to treat a Muslim Arab patient – or worse, boasted of killing them under their care. The public would be outraged, not only at the cruelty but at the sheer incongruity of such malice from a profession defined by care and a faith defined by compassion. Yet when two Australian nurses – Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh – publicly declared their willingness to kill Israeli patients, the horror was accompanied by something more chilling than shock: recognition. Their depravity felt like an affirmation of the darkest fears about imported hatreds and their place within our institutions. The video that

Andrew Tettenborn

Should burning the Quran be against the law?

There are worrying signs in Britain that a blasphemy law – abolished in 2008 – might be sneaking in through the back door. Last week, a Turkish man allegedly set fire to the Quran as part of a protest against the Turkish government outside its consulate in Rutland Gate, London. He was then attacked by an outraged zealot with a knife, arrested and charged with a similar offence. He has pleaded not guilty and remains to be tried. Earlier this month, a Manchester man filmed publicly burning pages from the Quran in protest at Islamist excesses was also very swiftly arrested and locked up. Two days later, the man pleaded

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Kemi Badenoch is more interested in liberalism than conservatism

Kemi Badenoch made a speech today which mentioned the terms ‘liberal’ or ‘liberalism’ seven times before the word ‘conservative’ got a look in. The liberalism she was extolling in her address at the ARC conference in London was not of the leftist kind, but the ‘classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, the rule of law, and equality under it’. And there is not much to cavil over in that little list. Although when one person’s desired ‘freedom of religion’ impinges on other people’s basic freedom of expression then clearly there are priorities to be ranked. Since the Brexit vote, the

Danny Shaw

Why people kill

Why did he do it? Over the last few weeks, many of us have asked that question following a series of horrifying acts of violence that have been difficult to comprehend. Why was 15-year-old Harvey Willgoose fatally stabbed at a school in Sheffield? Why did Axel Rudakubana slaughter three girls at a children’s dance class in Southport last summer? And why did the father and stepmother of ten-year-old Sara Sharif abuse, torture and murder her?  Violent deaths are so shocking and alarming it’s natural that we search for explanations. But in the early stages, as details are pieced together and information about suspects isn’t known or publicly available, those answers often