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The Spectator presents The Year in Review

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Friday

Penworthy

Four bets for Royal Ascot next week

Royal Ascot gets me more excited than the weekend racing fare so I am going to put up four horses who could well go off shorter when they line up for their respective targets next week. First up in RASHABAR in the Group 1 St James’s Palace Stakes on Tuesday (4.20 p.m.). Brian Meehan’s three-year-old colt caused an upset at this meeting a year ago when landing the Coventry Stakes at odds of no less than 80-1. Admittedly, next week he has to take on arguably the best horse in training in the form of Field of Gold but this race might just cut up to less than eight runners

Kate Ferguson

Save the miniskirt!

What is it about men and miniskirts? A few months ago, I read with horror – but sadly not surprise – about a school that was considering banning girls from wearing skirts. Apparently, residents in Whitstable, Kent, were so alarmed at the ‘inappropriate skirt lengths’ spotted around town they had complained to the local school. Headteacher Alex Holmes (you guessed it – a man) immediately dashed off a letter informing parents that all pupils could be forced to wear trousers as part of a new ‘gender neutral uniform’ in response. The miniskirt is a symbol of women’s liberation – not sexual servitude I’m sorry, what? Are we talking about a

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The deadly curse of influencers

What’s the most hazardous occupation? Deep sea fisherman? Uranium miner? Tail-end Charlie in a Lancaster bomber (not a career currently available)? I challenge anyone to find a speedier way to meet one’s end than becoming an influencer. The sad death of 28-year-old University of Salford student Maria Eftimova, who tumbled off Tryfan, a 1,000ft mountain in Snowdonia during a hike organised on Facebook, is one of those all-too-regular headlines: an influencer who meets their end in their twenties, leaving tens of thousands of followers distraught. Policymakers fret over children falling under bad influences online – we have had an entire Online Safety Act to try to address the problem. But

Wednesday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

NHS the only winner in Reeves’s spending review

Rachel Reeves has just taken her seat after delivering the first spending review since the pandemic. The plans outlined today set departmental budgets for the next three years and infrastructure spending for the next four. Total departmental spending will rise by 2.3 per cent – but, predictably, the spoils will not be shared evenly. The NHS and defence will take most of them. In real terms, the health service is set to receive a 3 per cent annual rise, leaving combined spending on the other departments with not even a 0.2 per cent increase. Britain continues its transformation into a health service with a country, and maybe a few guns,

G.V. Chappell

When did we become so boring?

Recently, I found myself trying to explain to a much younger colleague who Oliver Reed was. We’d got on to the subject of the hell-raising actor because I was bemoaning the fact – perhaps rashly – that today’s world is completely anodyne. Fear of offending others means it’s better to keep your thoughts to yourself; after all, who needs the police investigating them for a non-crime hate incident? Brave is the person who brings their whole self to work, as many of us are encouraged to do. The government’s Employment Rights Bill, which some are calling the ‘banter ban’, may mean we’re even more reluctant to speak our minds. This

Julie Bindel

Rules for my dinner party guests

I love having friends over for dinner, and like to think I’m rather good at hosting. And while I always strive for a relaxed atmosphere and dislike formality, there are a few hard rules that my guests should adhere to if they want a repeat invitation. Let’s start at the beginning. When checking on any foods you don’t eat, I am asking if you are vegetarian or coeliac, or if you have an actual allergy; what I don’t want is a list of your preferences. One person I invited replied telling me all about how, although she quite likes fresh tomatoes, she can’t eat them cooked, adding that she’d rather

Michael Henderson

The pretentiousness of the pop critics

Pop music criticism, said Frank Zappa, was the work of people who can’t write, about people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read. Half a century later and he’s still right. Although pop is essentially a juvenile art form – its clearest strength and most obvious weakness – that doesn’t stop reviewers pumping up performers as though Johann Sebastian Bach had decided to form an all-star band with Beethoven and Brahms. The Three Bs! Sign ’em up! The current pop reviewers for the Times and the Telegraph, Will Hodgkinson and Neil McCormick, clearly think they bear witness to giants. Like Pinky and Perky, these mature teenagers can trill ‘we

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Farewell to Frederick Forsyth, the master of the thriller

If Frederick Forsyth had not existed, you would have had to invent him. Yet no novelist could have come up with as convivial, swashbuckling and lively a character as the thriller writer, who has died at the age of 86. Many of his millions of admirers thought him almost immortal, and over the course of a half-century career – which began in earnest with the publication of The Day of the Jackal in 1971 and seldom slackened thereafter – Forsyth produced a series of bestsellers that sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages. After briefly serving as an RAF pilot, he went to work at Reuters and

Robin Ashenden

Children’s TV was better in the 1970s

One advantage to being born in the 1970s was the sheer abundance of good kids’ TV on offer. This was the golden age between clunky black and white offerings like Muffin the Mule, and the creeping vapidity of later shows like Teletubbies or The Care Bears. It gave us Camberwick Green, The Magic Roundabout, Captain Pugwash, Mister Benn (and the Mister Men), The Clangers, Playaway, Hector’s House, Fingerbobs, Tiswas, The Muppet Show, Ivor the Engine, and Basil Brush – not forgetting the holy trinity of Mary, Mungo and Midge. Did we hit the jackpot, or what? As my daughter, aged 11, prepares to leave her own childhood, I’ve been rewatching

Sean Thomas

How a Luxembourg village divided Europe

I am in the most EU-ish bedroom in the EU. That is to say, I am lying in a refurbished room in the handsome 14th-century Chateau de Schengen, in the little village of Schengen, Luxembourg. From my casements, opened wide onto the sunny Saarland afternoon, I can see the exact stretch of the river Moselle where, on a boat floating between Germany, France and Luxembourg, the Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985. This was the agreement that sealed Free Movement as Europe’s defining ideal – one whose consequences are still unfolding. I’ve been in Luxembourg for a week, on assignment, and this week has given me an insight into why