Society

Wednesday

Peter Jones

Boris Johnson is no Pericles

Boris Johnson’s Unleashed imagines him, like Cincinnatus, leaving his plough, saving Rome, and returning to it. But given that Boris is among the international elite, perhaps Alcibiades (c. 451-404 bc) would fit him better. Athenian elites had long had connections with the other power-brokers of the classical Greek world, Sparta and Persia. Born into such a family, the young Alcibiades, at the death of his father in 447 bc, was placed in the care of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, who chose Socrates as his mentor (we are told he tried to seduce Socrates but failed). A charismatic and handsome young man, he led a life of ‘lawless self-indulgence’ but,

Mark Nayler

Meet England’s octogenarian matador

It’s a sunny October morning at a bull-breeding ranch north of Seville, and 82-year-old Frank Evans is preparing to step into the ring. Born in Salford, Evans is one of the few British men ever to become a professional bullfighter, or torero. There is something of the retired rock star about him. He is dressed in the traditional matador’s outfit of black trousers, white shirt and red-and-black waistcoat. Although a little frail, he is toned. His thinning hair is dyed brown but still reaches his shoulders. ‘There are a million people in the local cemetery who’d love to have my eye problem’ Evans and I are here for a tienta

Jawad Iqbal

Labour’s crackdown on hereditary privilege is hard to stomach

Do our new Labour rulers ever pause to think about how something they say or do might look to others? Do they consider, even for a nanosecond, how their behaviour in office or in private stacks up with the public positions they take, or how all this might look to ordinary voters outside the confines of Westminster? The whiff of brazen political hypocrisy – one rule for us and another for everyone else – hangs like a cloud over the new government. It goes some way towards explaining why this summer’s donor scandals, involving free clothes, spectacles and tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, have resonated so strongly with the public.

The Spectator

What does Britain ‘owe’ Caribbean nations in reparations for slavery?

Still afloat Transport Secretary Louise Haigh nearly lost Britain an investment in an expansion of London Gateway docks by calling P&O  a ‘rogue operator’ and imploring us all to boycott its ferries. The company, owned by DP World since 2006, was once considered by the UK government to be the most trustworthy shipping line around. As the Peninsula Steam Navigation Company, it built its reputation on a contract awarded by the Admiralty in 1837 to carry mail to Spain and Portugal. Three years later it was also awarded the contract to carry mail to Egypt, adding the name ‘Oriental’ to its name. By 1914 it was carrying mail to India.

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Did Hitler really ‘have some good ideas’?

One of the many good reasons to want every new generation to study the second world war is that it forces you to confront your own cowardice. Last weekend, my husband and I went to Prague – the first time we’ve been away together since the birth of our son eight years ago. We wandered the city and ended up crying in a church crypt – as you do on a romantic mini-break. The church was the Czech Orthodox cathedral of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius and, as we discovered after we had entered, the scene of the final, bloody showdown of Operation Anthropoid, the mission to assassinate SS Obergruppenführer

Jonathan Maitland

The mystery of Huw Edwards’s missing phone

The best thing about being a playwright? The satisfaction of creativity. The worst? Press-night parties attended by friends, industry people and celebs. Playwright Terry Johnson says he knows writers who find such occasions so hellish they’ve been put off writing plays altogether. The problem is the corrosive, deeply unsettling belief that everyone is lying to you. Everyone knows the rules: on press night, say something nice, even if it was a giant turkey. No negatives. That’s the critic’s job. But writers know this, so never believe any compliment, ever, even if the person paying it is telling the truth. The only time a writer can be sure of something is

The Spectator

Letters: the problem with emojis

Industrial waste Sir: I endorse your concerns about the closure of Grangemouth and Port Talbot and the statement that ‘if high-quality jobs are to return to the North and the Midlands then re-industrialisation is presumably the answer’ (‘Time for a change’, 12 October). However, your leading article fails to observe that Ed Miliband has already committed £22 billion to the re-industrialisation of Liverpool and Teesside in the form of Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) projects. One might wonder where Miliband acquired the daft notion that it is a good idea to spend £22 billion on a technology that has only been proven to work in a coal-fired power station (a

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

No, Israel isn’t deliberately killing children in Gaza

In every war, children perish. It’s the worst thing about conflict, this dragging of innocents into the swirling maelstrom of tensions they don’t even understand. In Iraq, almost 10,000 kids were maimed or killed between 2008 and 2023. In the war in Syria, a child was injured or killed every eight hours for ten infernal years. So unimaginable was the suffering of kids in the Congo wars of recent years that that benighted nation came to be called ‘the epicentre of child suffering’. The echoes of past libels against Jews are deafening now And so it is in the clash between Israel and Hamas. Children in Gaza are dying in

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Does it matter that Thomas Tuchel isn’t English?

Thomas Tuchel has been confirmed as the next manager of the England national football team, to take over from the hapless and seemingly confused Lee Carsley. The 51-year-old German will be given an 18-month contract and will assume his duties in January 2025, in good time to get to work on the qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup (which begin in March).  This is good news for England fans. Isn’t it? Tuchel is one of the top ranked coaches in the world and probably the best qualified man available (assuming Pep Guardiola was the pipe dream most assume it to have been). Tuchel has actually won stuff – like the

Tuesday

John R. MacArthur

The journalist’s journalist: the irrepressible Claud Cockburn

No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career. By late 1931, his eyewitness reporting at the start of the Great Depression convinced him that Marx was right Indeed, it is the journalist son’s signal achievement to have surmounted left-wing cliché and written a fascinating and subtle portrait of a paradoxical career. Claud was a mostly loyal child of the

Fredrik Karrholm

Why Sweden is cracking down on cousin marriages

In Sweden, marrying your first cousin has long been legal, though as in the UK it is widely frowned upon. Yet in response to the growing number of cousin marriages in Sweden after a rise in migration, the government has announced plans to ban the practice next year. A Bill is currently being drafted. In Norway, a ban on cousin marriage was adopted this summer. Denmark may soon follow in the footsteps of its Nordic neighbours. Despite cousin marriage being a well-known issue, for too long any debate on this subject has been shamefully sidelined The reason for the move is the same in all the Nordic countries; within certain large immigrant communities,

Edmund West

Is Kemi Badenoch right about autistic people being advantaged?

Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has been criticised for endorsing ‘Conservatism in crisis’, a pamphlet put out by her campaign team that says autistic people like me get ‘economic advantages and protections’. Is this right? The report says that: ‘Being diagnosed as neuro-diverse was once seen as helpful as it meant you could understand your own brain, and so help you to deal with the world. It was an individual focused change. But now it also offers economic advantages and protections. If you have a neurodiversity diagnosis (e.g. anxiety, autism), then that is usually seen as a disability.’ The document suggests that other ‘perks’ we’re entitled to include getting ‘better

Rakib Ehsan

Is class rather than race a bigger barrier to success in Britain?

Is Britain racist? At times, you’d be forgiven for thinking so. In recent years, our country has experienced considerable turbulence on the subject of race and equality. The spread of the American Black Lives Matter movement on these shores in the summer of 2020 – which led to protests from the Isle of Wight on England’s southern coast to Scotland’s Shetland Islands – contributed towards an acceleration in race-focused thinking. Yet the reality is that Britain is a tolerant place in which race does not usually hold people back. Ethnic minorities in the UK regularly outperform the white-British population in various spheres of life Ethnic minorities in the UK regularly outperform

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Tim Davie and the death of BBC ‘talent’

Has anyone ever come up with a better put-down for Nick Robinson? It is even better that it came from his own boss. Interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning, BBC director-general Tim Davie said ‘we often refer to people like yourself as ‘talent’, but I’ve kind of banned that.’ From now on, he intimated, Robinson and his colleagues would be known as mere ‘presenters’. The heavies will still be clamping down on those who fail to pay the licence fee Davie also went on to speak about ‘bad actors’, although it turned out he wasn’t talking about the cast of EastEnders – he meant propagandists in Russia, whose activities

James Sunderland

Israel’s murder problem

A wave of violence is convulsing Israeli society. It’s not caused by Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, or Iranian attacks. Instead, it’s the daily violence meted out, not by terrorists or enemy governments, but by citizen against fellow citizen. Amidst the chaos of war, Israel is suffering a crime wave. Murder is a crime that happens in every society, but there are alarming trends emerging in Israel. A recent study by the Taub Centre for Social Policy Studies in Israel found that the murder rate amongst Arab-Israelis, who comprise around a fifth of the state’s population, is one of the largest in high-income countries, behind only Mexico and Columbia in the OECD.  Israel is suffering

Monday

Laurie Wastell

Brwa Shorsh and the failure of Britain’s asylum system

Postman Tadeusz Potoczek had completed his deliveries for the day. At around 3 p.m. on 3 February, the 60-year-old was returning from work via the London underground, still wearing his red postman’s coat. As the southbound Victoria line train rumbled towards Oxford Circus, he headed for the far end of the platform, perhaps in the hope of getting a seat. To his left, he noticed a young man sitting on a bench, but he didn’t think much of it – his mind was on other things. Suddenly, the stranger got up and shoved him, hard, onto the tracks. This failure of our asylum system almost led to an innocent postman

Nigel Jones

The fatal allure of Hitler’s favourite mountain

‘The hills are alive,’ warbled Julie Andrews as she strode through a verdant Alpine mountain meadow, ‘with the sound of music. With songs they have sung, for a thousand years.’ But there was always a dark side to the peaks she sang about in The Sound of Music, and they have just claimed another victim. The Untersberg, according to legend, is where emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the ruler of the First Reich, sleeps in a hidden grotto This week Andreas Münzhuber, reportedly a leading German neo-Nazi, tripped on a root and plunged 200 feet to his death climbing on the Untersberg, a mountain massif straddling the German-Austrian border near the town of

Billi Bierling

The discovery of Irvine’s boot on Everest raises more questions than answers

Andrew Comyn ‘Sandy’ Irvine disappeared while attempting to climb Everest in June 1924 with his partner George Mallory. For a century, the 22-year-old British climber’s body lay undiscovered. But last month a startling discovery was made on the mountain: a preserved boot with a red label attached; the lettering inside read: ‘AC Irvine’. Could this discovery finally solve the mystery of whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit? The group of American filmmakers uncovered the boot on the Central Rongbuk Glacier, on the north face of Everest. The expedition was not there to hunt for clues on the ill-fated British 1924 Mount Everest expedition and the climbers instantly knew what

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Braverman’s Cambridge cancellation exposes the campus free speech crisis

Anti-fascism ain’t what it used to be. It used to mean signing up to go to fight Franco’s fascists in Spain, turning out against Oswald Mosley in the East End, or trading punches with National Front thugs. Now it means trying to get right-wing Tory MPs no platformed on elite university campuses – and occasionally punching elderly gender-critical women in the face. It’s by turns despicable and pathetic. The cancellation of Suella Braverman’s event at Cambridge last week – following threats of protest by assorted faux-radical groups, with ‘Cambridge for Palestine’ to the fore – was grimly predictable. Indeed, it follows a pattern that has become all too familiar to

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Labour were right to protect Taylor Swift

Still making headlines, it seems, is one of the more trivial scandals to have dogged the Labour government in its first 100 days in office: to wit, the police protection given to the pop singer Taylor Swift. File firmly under circuses, you might think, rather than bread. For those who need catching up, the American pop star was given a VVIP police escort around London during the UK leg of her Eras tour – a swishy blue-light motorcade of the sort usually reserved for members of the royal family and foreign heads of state, and the reassuring knowledge that should some loon seek to lob a brick at her, or