Max Jeffery is The Spectator’s online commissioning editor. He tweets at @MaxJeffery_.
Israel No telling in Jerusalem this morning that Israel resumed war and poured hell on Gaza last night. In the Muslim Quarter of the Old City shopkeepers receive pallets of soft drinks, and spilled coke runs red-brown down the Via Dolorosa. A couple of streets away the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is very quiet.
Howard Hodgson ends lunch in a rage against unearned fame. ‘Marilyn Monroe: drunken actress,’ he says, ‘fat drunken actress. Gets killed. Ohhh! Marilyn!’ He does a mocking voice for that last bit, like someone wailing about her death. ‘John F. Kennedy: one of the worst presidents the United States ever had. Bay of Pigs. Fucked everything up. Robert Kennedy was vastly
It’s a typical morning at the Boxing Academy in east London. In the reception, men with handheld metal detectors pat down students, confiscating their belongings and mobile phones for the day. A child has emptied out his pockets and is holding a mucky plastic dental retainer. ‘Can he have this?’ one man with a metal
Relive with me and enjoy again the downfall of Armand Douglas Hammer. If you remember, Hammer’s Hollywood career had been going as smoothly as anything: there was his 2010 breakthrough playing the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, his turn as Leonardo DiCaprio’s no. 2 in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, the 2018 Golden Globe for
Dan Pena has a picture of Adolf Hitler on his wall, but not any old picture. You know, not a simple portrait with Bavarian hills in the background, or a snap of the Führer doting on Helga Goebbels, Joseph’s daughter. No, Pena has a Hitler collage – Nazis marching through Nuremberg, a swastika blotting out
Departing Gatwick train station, with nine minutes till Crawley, I tried to get in the head of a Chagossian. In 2002, Tony Blair gave everyone from the Chagos Islands British citizenship, permitting 10,000 Chagossians to live wherever they liked in the UK. About 3,500 have chosen Crawley. And what a weird thing to do. They
It’s a Wednesday evening, and I’m getting psyched up to go catch a paedophile with the boys. Playlist on, rocking down the A12 and chatting to my new mate, Nick, in his van. There’s a man not far from here who thinks he’s going to meet an underage girl tonight. He doesn’t know that we’ll
Joe/Jeff Marsh wants to make it clear that he did not, like people keep saying, start the riots in Southport. He wasn’t at the riots. He doesn’t like riots. He’s a white nationalist, fine, but he’s also a busy, self-employed builder from Swansea. And Swansea is nowhere near Southport. All he did was share a
Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. ‘Before Peter had kids, we’d go on these holidays around the world. Small group of us. Gay, tech, venture capital, founder-types,’ says D’Souza, an Australian businessman. ‘It’s quite a close-knit
Figures out today show a country with levels of surveyed crime still at historic lows (just a quarter of the 1995 peak) but with two big exceptions. Personal theft rose by 40 per cent compared with the year before, and shoplifting is at its highest level since records began in 2003. What’s going on? ‘These
Worldwide, computers are saying no. GPs can’t access appointments and medical records, banking apps have been knocked offline, flights are grounded, laptops won’t work. Technology across Europe and America has been toppled by what appears to be a glitch in a software update for some popular anti-virus software from a company called CrowdStrike. ‘Biggest IT
Future House is a weird private members’ club. There’s a mattress on the floor for napping, a bathtub designed to hold ice and bottled beers, a robot dog imported from China and a purple neon sign that reads: ‘Just F***ing Build Something.’ Around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place is rammed. ‘I missed the
Nigel Farage says that Britain is ready for a ‘revolt’, and he’s not the only candidate in this election committed to an uprising. The biggest threat to Keir Starmer is coming not from the Tories or the Lib Dems… but from left-wing insurgents. In Bristol Central, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary, could lose to the
‘London has become a jungle, right? Anyone with anything nice risks having it taken.’ Bobby, the manager of one of Hatton Garden’s watch shops, does business in a windowless room as far from the street as possible, watched over by a thickset guard and a couple security cameras. ‘I’m a paranoid person,’ he says, and
It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453
Is that Monty Panesar? The old England spin bowler is stood in a crowd in Parliament Square, with a vacant, million-mile smile. George Galloway is standing in front, talking to the press. Galloway is meant to be revealing the 200 candidates that his new ‘Workers Party’ is putting up at the next election (Panesar is one of
‘Won’t you take me to… Funkytown!’ At around 10 p.m., in a bar under a railway arch in south London, members of a group called Youth Demand are doing the conga to 1970s disco music. They are celebrating a week of good protesting. ‘I’m sooo ketty!’ shouts a girl on the dance floor. (‘I’ve taken
Rob Stephenson is trying to produce a sonic representation of joy. He’s DJing on stage at the World Happiness Summit in London, pumping out a kick drum at 124bpm. The sound represents the subliminal satisfaction you get from a walk round the park, Rob says. He adds bongos and the dinging noise of a triangle
Greed is good again. It’s early Saturday morning in a glum and airless back room of a Holiday Inn in London. ‘Raise your hand if you’d like to make some money this morning!’ says Chloë Bisson, ‘#1 Bestselling Author, Multi-Award Winning Entrepreneur, International Speaker’. People go ‘yep’ and ‘uh-huh’ and ‘too right’ and put their
It’s mid-afternoon in the Royal Oak pub in Blackpool and Liv has arrived to sell a bag full of stuff she’s stolen from the supermarket. She’s got fabric conditioner, soap, Creme Eggs and a large bar of Dairy Milk. She pulls in a few pounds and then leaves to score some crack. ‘Everyone struggles,’ says
