Laurie Penny is an author and journalist.
Spooky season came early to Manchester this year. Outside the convention centre, a baffled, shattered city reels from the latest round of political violence, but inside, eyeless mannequins of Margaret Thatcher stare out over an empty exhibition hall where what remains of the Conservative party tries to understand what went wrong. There’s something macabre about
I admit that when Donald Trump announced he had found the answer for autism, I was curious. As an autistic person, I was hoping that whatever medieval quackery he came out with would require us to do something fun, like carry a hedgehog at all times or take heroic quantities of cocaine, both of which
You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You’re trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there’s only one left. What will you do to survive? Who
Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point
The problem with having principles is that they’re very expensive. This is proving an enormous headache for Starmer’s government, which is still trying to slash disability benefits in plain sight rather than raise taxes, only to be forced into another embarrassing U-turn by hundreds of its own backbenchers. These rebel MPs kicked up a fuss on
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Owen Matthews says that Venice’s residents never stop complaining (1:11); Bijan Omrani reads his church notebook (7:33); Andrew Hankinson reviews Tiffany Jenkins’s Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life (13:54); as 28 Years Later is released, Laurie Penny explains the politics behind Alex Garland’s film franchise
Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. But it’s eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows where Cillian
There’s been a late entry in the competition for most cretinous misunderstanding of international trade policy. For anyone who’s been distracted by the ongoing meltdown of the global order, this week Britain finally signed a deal with the EU. The deal is sane and sensible enough to be slighty disappointing all round, which has not
