Can someone check on Guardian sportswriter Jonathan Liew? It would appear he is not taking events in the Middle East terribly well, and one suspects the election of Donald Trump hasn’t helped, either. I’ve noticed it for a while now, this trend of using the back pages – traditionally the fun pages – to foist desperate and
Tedious narcissist blowhard Jake Paul will fight Mike Tyson on Saturday in a meaningless freakshow in Texas that will likely – thanks to the fact it is being internationally streamed by Netflix – be the most watched boxing match in history. Naturally, both men will make millions. That the contest has little to do with
I’ve long liked to think that if I was a really big girl I would transition to compete in the men’s boxing heavyweight championship. Why not, ladies? Tyson Fury earns about £100 million every time he laces up his gloves. Why not get a slice of that pie? After all, for an extremely weird decade
Hand back the Falklands. Why not? FedEx over the Elgin Marbles. What’s the point of any of it anymore? They have put a German in charge of the England football team. It’s over. Can there be a more depressing, or more obvious, sign of national decline than this utterly abject capitulation at the sport we
In the pantheon of all-time tennis hunks, Rafael Nadal sits at the apex. The hunkiest ever to do it. In his prime, which remarkably lasted close to two decades, he seemed to conceal within the archetypal Mediterranean love god physique a kind of tennis supercomputer, capable almost always of finding impossible-seeming angles from which to
Could Rishi Sunak’s emergence as this nation’s greatest gaffe machine since Prince Philip come in time to endear him to the electorate? At this point in his campaign, you’d have to say it’s a tactic he might as well lean into. After all, one of the best things about being British is the manner in
It’s hard to think of anything Rishi Sunak could have done that would cause greater offence to the British sensibility. You do not, not if you’re the British prime minister, sack off the D-Day commemorations in Normandy to return home early under any circumstances – least of all in order to do an ITV interview
Tim Dillon is a comedian who not so long ago worked as a New York tour bus guide and subprime mortgage salesman. He started a podcast from his porch in 2016 and used it to talk about world events, what he and his lowlife friends were up to, and, frequently, to complain about how broke
For an astonishing length of time the attitude of football authorities to the prospect of widespread doping at the sport’s highest levels seemed best summed up in a 2017 tweet by the often spectacularly dim-seeming Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker. ‘Doping is not really an issue in football. Doping doesn’t help players play better. No
Is it more remarkable that Romanian two-time Grand Slam tennis champion Simona Halep took performance enhancing drugs, or that she was caught? I ask only because the sport’s authorities seem to catch vanishingly few dopers, which surely means either they’re very bad at it, or elite players rarely cheat to win enormous sums of money. Certainly, it’s
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In this week’s cover story, The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls writes about Labour’s new paymasters – Keir Starmer’s party now receives more money from private donors than it does from trade unions. What do the new donors want, and what does Starmer want from them? Katy joins Will and Lara alongside the writer and Labour
The plot is thickening. If it turns out NatWest CEO Alison Rose was the source for BBC business editor Simon Jack’s scoop that private bank Coutts, part of the NatWest Group, rejected Nigel Farage as a customer not because of his political views but for a supposed lack of funds, then it’s hard to see
I recently underwent a surgical procedure that according to the surgeon who performed it would cause either no discomfort at all or result in ‘exceptional pain’ for at least two weeks. No way to tell until I was on the operating table, apparently. She said this matter-of-factly, as if discussing bus routes, just as I
If like me you’re convinced a lot of professional sportspeople are doped to the gills, perhaps you’re excited by the launch of the Enhanced Games – a proposed rival to the Olympic Games in which competitors will be encouraged to take as many performance-enhancing drugs as they can get into their bloodstream. After all, if so many are already juicing – and, crucially, not
Has there ever been a more brutally effective piece of social satire than the South Park episode that mocked Harry and Meghan? Since it aired in mid-February, the Duchess of Sussex, previously a seemingly ubiquitous and unstoppable cultural phenomenon, has effectively withdrawn from public life. She’s made just one formal appearance – at an awards show, which
In the mid-90s when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate I did work experience at the now defunct The Face magazine. They put me in what they called the fashion cupboard. Looking back on it now, I recall I spent a hot fortnight in August either hoiking large volumes of clothing around London for various photoshoots
Nish Kumar’s grandiosely titled podcast Pod Save the UK isn’t anything like as annoying as you’d expect. Yes, his speaking voice – a high-pitched nasal gurgle – can grate a little, especially when punctuated, as it is often and loudly, with a laugh that is very obviously insincere. But I listened to the full hour
Just when you thought you couldn’t handle any more depressing news, Gary Lineker has started dropping hints that his days in the Match of the Day presenter’s chair may be drawing to an end. I know. It really puts things into perspective. ‘I’m ancient,’ Lineker said, Aslan-like, on the latest Match of the Day podcast,
It’s perhaps still too early to tell if the Jewish and Muslim communities, here in Britain and indeed throughout the world, were brought closer by the actions of the former Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq. How refreshing it is to see the quaint concept of proof being demanded before a man’s life is ruined Rafiq, you
The high-profile political activist Gary Lineker will not present Match of the Day tonight after he likened the rhetoric of the government to 1930s Germany. Several pundits and commentators are boycotting the show, while the BBC has also been forced to pull from air Football Focus, Final Score and Fighting Talk. Many people are professing themselves baffled that this story about a football presenter
