Society

Thursday

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,

Robert Hardman

The comeback of George III

We no longer correct ourselves as we sing the first line of the national anthem. ‘Prince of Wales’ no longer means ‘Charles’. As we mark the third anniversary of his accession this week, it is possible to attempt useful comparisons between the reigns of Charles III and Elizabeth II. Set aside age and medical matters and the principal differences are pace and expectation. It was nearly a year before the UK heard a speech from the new monarch in 1952; in 2022, it took a day. Court mourning went from 16 weeks to one. Three years in, the late Queen was still on her first prime minister. The King is

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Angela Rayner resigns, Poland downs Russian drones and Israel bombs Qatar

Home The government shuddered when Angela Rayner resigned as housing secretary, deputy prime minister and deputy leader of the Labour party after being found to have breached the ministerial code by Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent adviser on ministerial standards. He said she had followed advice from a legal firm when not paying enough stamp duty on her new flat in Hove, but ignored a recommendation to seek expert tax advice. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, called her ‘the living embodiment of social mobility’. He then threw himself into a great big cabinet shuffle, in which Yvette Cooper became Foreign Secretary and was replaced as Home Secretary by Shabana

Nadine Dorries

Why I gave up on the Tories

The days between my leaving the Tories and joining Reform were an odd uneven time. It was the hardest decision I have ever made – I’d been a Conservative party member for 30 years, after all. Before the announcement, only three people knew what I was planning to do. In Westminster almost everything leaks so we kept the information tight. Once I had made up my mind, Nigel Farage and I held several clandestine meetings in a secluded room in a Mayfair members’ club to decide how to break the news. I initially rather fancied defecting on the eve of the Conservative party conference, for maximum impact. But in the

Peter Jones

Angela Rayner and the ancient question of ‘good judgment’

Angela Rayner has returned to the back benches because, as housing secretary, she failed to follow the rules relating to stamp duty on a flat she had bought. Athenians were extremely proud of their citizen-led Assembly and did not take kindly to sub-standard officials. Plato constructed a dialogue (c. 430 bc) between Socrates and the controversial sophist Protagoras, who claimed that anyone taught by him would be a success in public and private life. Socrates challenged this claim. He pointed out that, when the democratic assembly of male citizens met to discuss technical matters (e.g. ship-building), they listened to those who actually had experience of building ships and shouted down

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Reform’s success is far from set in stone

The current ‘Britain is on a knife edge’ mood is understandable. Our discontents are great and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is even more incompetent and divided than we critics expected. But do not forget how the British system works. We are not like France, paralysed because its executive president can, constitutionally, hold out until 2027, even though his governments last only for months. The tired phrase ‘overwhelming majority’ has meaning. Labour can overwhelm all parliamentary opposition. It may find it harder to overwhelm internal opposition, but an early general election remains most unlikely, since MPs do not demand an election if they think they will lose their seats. Labour can

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Badenoch has learned from her PMQs mistakes

Kemi Badenoch learned from her mistakes at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, and devoted all six of her questions to trying to get Peter Mandelson fired as British Ambassador to Washington. Badenoch devoted all six of her questions to trying to get Peter Mandelson fired as British Ambassador Last week, she tacked on random observations about Angela Rayner to questions about the economy – though today she did still try to claim credit for the former deputy prime minister’s departure. The annoyance in the Tory party at this missed open goal had been palpable, and so Badenoch got straight to it in her first question. Pointing out that a Nato

Patrick West

Why Reform’s critics say they’re fascist

To smear your opponents as fascists or Nazis has always been the perennial temptation of those who seek to terminate an argument – or have no argument of their own. It’s the last resort of the callow, the ignorant and the desperate. And it’s an argument that just won’t go away. They’re doing this – and McDonnell is joining in – because it’s the last thing they’ve got left Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell deployed it in all tawdry gruesomeness yesterday. Speaking at a fringe event at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference, the MP said: ‘Reform are a protest fascist organisation. We’ve seen it in the Thirties. What they

Rakib Ehsan

The judiciary is still in thrall to DEI

Reports of the death of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) have been grossly exaggerated. DEI still threatens to undermine equality of opportunity in Britain, as well as suggesting we are not focusing enough on genuine barriers to social mobility. The UK Supreme Court and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’s recently published fourth annual update to its Judicial Diversity and Inclusion Strategy is a case in point. As well as orchestrating a peculiar scheme which entails junior legal professionals from ‘under-represented groups’ mentoring a judge (with a strong focus on ‘diversity and inclusion’), it sets out objectives such as supporting an ‘inclusive and respectful’ culture. Part of this includes the replacement of

Matthew Lynn

Brits are fed up with overpriced coffee

We don’t lead the world in Artificial Intelligence. We can’t keep up with the Chinese in making electric vehicles, and as for building high speed trains it is best not to ask. Still, there was one sector of the global economy where the British were world beaters. When it came to making ridiculously expensive milky caffeine-based drinks our entrepreneurs could match anyone. But hold on. There are now signs that Britain has turned its back on overpriced coffee – and the chains are running into trouble. The real problem is that the chains are charging way too much for a product that is not actually very good Pret a Manger is

Limor Simhony Philpott

Starmer must hold his nerve on Palestine Action

Keir Starmer is hardly famous for his grit. But the proscription of Palestine Action is one issue on which the Prime Minister must hold his nerve. Nearly 900 supporters of Palestine Action – a banned terrorist group – were arrested last weekend alone Nearly 900 supporters of Palestine Action – a banned terrorist group – were arrested last weekend alone. The organisation’s supporters – and critics of the proscription – claim that the sheer number of arrests means the current approach isn’t working. It simply isn’t sustainable, they say, to apprehend hundreds of ordinary people for showing support for Palestine Action. They’re wrong: Palestine Action is a dangerous organisation that

Tuesday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

With Raymond Blanc

40 min listen

In a bumper episode, the legend that is Raymond Blanc joins Olivia Potts and Lara Prendergast. The self-taught chef heads up the double Michelin-starred Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, has trained chefs from Heston Blumenthal to Marco Pierre White, and received an honorary OBE in 2008. His new book Simply Raymond Kitchen Garden is out now. The chef tells Liv and Lara about his earliest memories of food – from eating worms to easter eggs, how his love of food is connected to the garden and why he owes his existence to General de Gaulle. He explains how he ended up becoming ‘exiled’ to Great Britain, how he fell in

Harvey Proctor

Why must the next Labour deputy leader be a woman?

Harriet Harman has declared that the next deputy leader of the Labour party “definitely needs to be a woman.” I greatly respect Baroness Harman, but such a view is absurd and discriminatory. Equality must be rooted in mandate and merit, not gender diktat. Why should men not receive equal protection for their health? For nearly three decades, Britain has had a Minister for Women. Successive governments of all political shades have maintained the role. Yet in all that time, no Minister for Men has ever been appointed. The result is a glaring hole in policymaking, where male-specific issues are consistently ignored. The figures are stark. Every week, 84 men in

Rupert Hawksley

The strike to save the future of horse racing

Horse racing is a notoriously factional sport. The interests of owners and trainers, for example, are quite different from those of racecourses and administrators. Even for those not in the saddle, the chafing can be painful. But on Wednesday, this dysfunctional family will unite to go on strike for the first time in the sport’s history. Scheduled meetings at Carlisle, Kempton, Lingfield and Uttoxeter will not go ahead: no horses, no jockeys, no bookmakers, no punters. Racing is shutting its doors. Walk into any high street bookmaker and watch the desperate and the vulnerable feeding coins into the flashing maws of these machines; it has nothing in common with betting on

Alexander Larman

Is this the end of the Murdoch drama?

So at last, the vexed question of who is going to succeed the now 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch has been settled. A deal has been announced that reveals that Murdoch’s eldest son Lachlan, the chairman of News Corp and CEO of Fox Corporation, will now be taking control of the family business. His siblings – sisters Prudence and Elisabeth and younger brother James – will each surrender their shares and any influence in the company to him, in exchange for a pay-out estimated at just over a billion dollars each. This concludes a torrid saga that was widely believed to be the major inspiration behind Jesse Armstrong’s acclaimed show Succession – and has

Julie Bindel

Why wasn’t Pride in Surrey cancelled?

This weekend, I bought a ticket to attend the controversial Pride in Surrey (PiS) event, held in Guildford. My interest in the event was heightened because I am currently recording a podcast about PiS’s co-founder Stephen Ireland, who in June was sentenced to 24 years in prison for raping an ‘extremely vulnerable’ 12-year-old boy. He was jailed alongside his former partner David Sutton, who was sentenced to four-and-a-half years for making indecent photographs of children.  Ireland co-founded PiS in 2018 and used it as a cloak to earn respectability in the community. This predatory child abuser enjoyed free reign for years until his arrest in April 2024 for several offences.

Rob Crossan

Disabled people don’t need BBC do-gooders sticking up for them

Jamie Borthwick is an uncommonly fine young actor who, frankly, is far too good for the increasingly strained and schlocky scripts that are churned out to him and the other residents of Albert Square. If you haven’t heard of him, then all you need to know is that he’s been a major character in EastEnders for the last two decades, playing Jay Brown, until very recently the manager of a (much in demand) funeral home in Walford. But no longer: Borthwick has been axed from the show after he used a slur once commonly used against disabled people, but in this occasion aimed at the people of Blackpool in general.

Monday

David Cohen

Four years on the run: New Zealand’s fugitive dad shot dead by police

A fugitive father who vanished into the rugged bushlands of the Waikato region of New Zealand with his three children has been shot and killed by police. Tom Phillips’s death marks the end of a case that has gripped the country for nearly four years. Phillips first disappeared from his small Marokopa community with his homeschooled kids, Jayda, now aged twelve, Maverick, ten, and Ember, nine, in September 2021, but was nabbed by police shortly afterwards and charged with their abduction, apparently stemming from a custody dispute. A member of Phillips’ family later said the episode had to do with the father needing to ‘clear his head’. Before the case

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Who cares if there’s a blunder in Ian McEwan’s latest book?

Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know isn’t even out yet, and already someone has spotted a goof. In response to an early review in a Sunday paper – which reports that McEwan’s novel is set in a world where a Russian hydrogen bomb has missed its target in the United States, exploded in the Atlantic and “flooded three continents” – the science fiction writer Charles Stross pointed out drily on social media that “if you can flood three continents with a single H-bomb in the Atlantic, that bomb is rather more powerful than all the nuclear weapons we, as a species, ever manufactured, multiplied by some factor with

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

For the good of France, Macron must go

This evening Emmanuel Macron will almost certainly be searching for his fifth prime minister since January last year. Francois Bayrou’s decision to call a vote of confidence in his government looks like a calamitous misjudgement, one that will plunge France into another period of grave instability. Comparisons are being drawn with the tumult of the Fourth Republic when, between 1946 and 1958, France went through more than twenty governments. The French are fed up with their political class Bayrou’s coalition government has limped along this year, achieving little other than creating more disenchantment and contempt among the long-suffering electorate. The French are fed up with their political class. Above all, they’re