Society

Monday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Gary Lineker is an excellent presenter

Gary Lineker is off then, much to the BBC’s relief. It is moot as to whether it was his resoundingly stupid views on Israel and Gaza that did the trick, or his criticism of the direction in which Match of the Day seems to be heading (and about which I think he is right). Lineker brings an easy lightness of touch to a sport which is full of pomposity Lineker may have the depth of geopolitical knowledge of a plastic tea tray, but he has been a superlative presenter, bringing an easy lightness of touch to a sport which is full of too much pomposity, hubris and faux expertise to

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Let Gary Lineker host Eurovision

So, the foreigners still hate us then. That was the first lesson to take away from the Eurovision Song Contest as our benighted entry, ‘What The Hell Just Happened’ by Remember Monday received not a single vote from the public, after being nestled in the top half via the jury vote. Mind you, it was an object lesson into how not to write a song: a reasonably interesting chorus spavined by a dull verse and inappropriate changes in time signature, which robbed it of all momentum. A lazily written song. So maybe the public was right – although throughout the voting there was the usual evidence of national enmities and

Robin Ashenden

Why are today’s MPs so incredibly drab?

Current MPs in Britain seem, at times, a drab and depressing bunch. ‘The quality of parliamentarian,’ Ann Widdecombe said on a recent podcast, ‘is the lowest I can ever remember.’ It was not just the reluctance most sensible people feel about exposing themselves to such overwhelming and intrusive media focus, she explained, that was putting better candidates off. It was also down to the identity-driven shortlists all three main parties have embraced in the past few decades. It’s all too easy for ministers to forget what a strong economy, a robust education system, or a love of free speech are actually for ‘They began to select on identity rather than

Jimmy Nicholls

Don’t mourn the death of cash

‘Cash is king,’ grinned the bartender as he handed me two pints of dry cider at a music festival I attended several summers ago. Since I’d paid in cold, hard cash, he’d agreed to a discount suspiciously in line with VAT. With nearby food vendors struggling to connect their payment terminals to the internet and fellow festival-goers queuing for cash, I gladly handed over the tenner and glugged down the goods. Such a bargain is not uncommon. I’ve seen the odd hospitality worker offer a cash discount so they can pocket the takings themselves. After a removal quote once went awry, a surly van man demanded extra cash to shift

Robert Taylor

Cricket has become irrelevant

Apparently, the cricket season has begun. More than that, it’s in full swing and is already six weeks old. But to the casual sports fan, there’s little sign of this. It’s hardly on terrestrial TV. I last saw children playing it in a backyard about a decade ago. I’ve no idea who England are up against this summer. The newspapers relegate it to the inside pages. Many people who once cared no longer do. Newcomers to our shores would have no clue we’re a cricketing nation. What on earth happened? Newcomers to our shores would have no clue we’re a cricketing nation. What on earth happened? Growing up in the

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

How to fight back against Lily Phillips

Why is the pornification of our culture so difficult to oppose? Partly because it takes subtly different forms. There used to be prostitutes and pornographers. Now, there are online influencers like Lily Phillips, subject of the documentary I Slept With 100 Men in One Day. These influencers sometimes talk like feminist activists, too. The idea that sex belongs in committed relationships is rubbished There are also TV shows that are not quite porn, but are not quite not. A few years ago, I attacked the Channel 4 reality show Open House, which features first-time swingers. It doesn’t just document their adventures; it arranges them. I hoped that my attack would finish it

Saturday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why I changed my mind about multiculturalism

When Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain complains about an opponent believing ‘free speech means protecting the right to offend Muslims’, you feel an instinctive response gathering in your throat. You’re damn right it does. It means the right to burn the Qur’an, mock the Hadith and doodle cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed performing in a rainbow-flag hijab on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a liberal society, people should be free to blaspheme against any and all religions, even pretendy ones like Anglicanism. Mass immigration plus non-integration have allowed enclaves of reaction to sprout up in Britain. In these parallel states, some migrants and subsequent generations live as paper citizens but do not subscribe

Michael Gove

Michael Gove, Max Jeffery, Paul Wood, Susannah Jowitt and Leyla Sanai

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove interviews Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood (1:17; Max Jeffery shadows the police as they search for the parents of three abandoned babies (14:41); Paul Wood asks if this is really the end of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (20:57); Susannah Jowitt reports that death has come to the Chelsea Flower Show (28:55); and, Leyla Sanai reviews Graham Swift’s new anthology of short stories, Twelve Post-War Tales (34:23). Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Alex Klaushofer

Sainsbury’s self-checkout surveillance has gone too far

Sainsbury’s is stepping up surveillance on its self-checkout tills. It’s hard not to laugh out loud. Not only will shoppers in some stores be recorded close-up by a VAR-style camera as they pack their groceries, but should anything appear amiss they may be shown a replay bearing the message: ‘Looks like that last item didn’t scan. Please check you scanned it correctly before continuing’. It doesn’t get much more Big Brother than that. Britain is rapidly becoming a surveillance society. Banks of cameras are part of the furniture on our streets, and in our supermarkets and shops. Some stores even use facial recognition. As I wrote in The Spectator a year ago, this obsession with

Sean Thomas

David Lammy and the trouble with foreign taxis

After decades on the road, I’ve collected a few rules that have served me well. Rule one: always go inside a cathedral. However dull, tiny or ugly it may seem, it will always tell you something. Even if that something is ‘avoid this town.’ Rule two: pack condiments wherever you go. I recommend Tabasco, soy, sriracha, and salt and pepper grinders – they can save the blandest meal. Lord Byron did this, so you’re in good company. Rule three: expect to be ripped off by the first taxi in any new country, and when it happens, grin and bear it. Nothing quite beats the terror of climbing into a cab

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Gary Lineker is a joke

After a lifetime of being irritated by too many public figures to name, a few years back I discovered a way to bypass this minor but persistent feature of modern life. Whenever their asinine blatherings are splashed over the media, don’t read them as if they were the thoughts and utterances of reasonable – or even real people. Simply think of them as great comic creations of the type we see on screen in a ‘mockumentary’. Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap, David Brent from The Office or Alan Partridge. Instantly, your irritation will melt away and you can enjoy a good old snigger instead. The imbecility of the man is almost

Friday

Andrew Tettenborn

A 10mph speed limit is preposterous

The increase of 20mph speed limits in Britain has been sending drivers around the bend. But if an organisation called the Road Safety Foundation (RSF) has its way, things could be about to get even slower – and more frustrating – for motorists. The RSF says that road speeds in cities should be cut to 10mph to prevent deaths and reduce serious injuries. Talk of a 10mph speed limit is preposterous. Does the RSF want to take us back to 1903, when the Motor Car Act of that year first raised the speed limit to what was then a blistering 20mph? Nearly all of human progress involves trade-offs between advantages and risks

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The anti-Israel Eurovision mob are Hamas’s little helpers

Imagine booing a survivor of a fascist attack. People actually did that this week. Pro-Palestine activists heckled and insulted a young woman who survived Hamas’s anti-Semitic butchery of 7 October 2023 by playing dead under a pile of bodies. Take a minute to consider the depravity of this, the sheer inhumanity of tormenting a woman who experienced such terror. It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest The woman is Yuval Raphael. She’s the 24-year-old singer who’s representing Israel at Eurovision. The last big music event she attended was the Nova festival in the desert of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. What she witnessed there almost defies belief.

Robin Aitken

Why the BBC wants to go German

The BBC’s Director General Tim Davie made a speech this week which suggests he’s leaning toward a radical fix for the Corporation’s financial woes. The question is whether even this government will buy an idea that, to put it politely, seems unlikely to be popular. Davie’s problem is that the writing is on the wall for the licence fee. Last year the Corporation’s annual report noted that half a million households had stopped paying in the previous 12 months. All of which makes for grim reading for an organisation which has seen its real-term income fall by over 30 per cent in the last decade. Finding a replacement to the

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What does Gary Lineker know about Zionism?

When I was a schoolboy, on the rare occasions I was required to line up against the wall to be picked for a football team, I would be picked last. It was fair enough: my abilities matched my interest level – zero. Not much has changed in the intervening decades, and thanks to my lack of any real knowledge or ability in the game, I would be most unlikely to comment on the World Cup or the Euros. But when it comes to coverage of Israel and the Middle East, I’ve spent enough time on the ground amassing knowledge, sources, and experience that this publication entrusts me to explain it

Patrick West

The trouble with BBC Verify

Can the BBC ever be objective and unbiased? It’s a question many of us ask ourselves, sometimes in hope, often in exasperation. It’s also a question that the Corporation forever asks itself, but instead in the spirit of aspiration and ambition. So it’s ostensibly good news that it has announced plans to expand its Verify fact-checking unit. On the face of it, this initiative should result in more accountably and scrutiny in its news output. Verify was born out of insincerity and dishonesty BBC director-general Tim Davie has unveiled a scheme, on behalf of ‘the world’s most trusted news provider’, to ‘build Verify across more services globally’. Davie also wants

Julie Bindel

Why lesbians want out of the LGBT movement

LGBT+ is an ‘inclusive’ way to represent all the different identities in the longer acronym, says the BBC. What nonsense: the reality is that while lesbians and gay men often get lumped together we actually have little in common. It’s time for lesbians to break free of the LGBT+ label. As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less included As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded in recent years to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less and less included. The umbrella term takes in all manner of sexual and gender identities, most of which

Thursday

Charlie Peters

Doubted then vindicated, Andrew Norfolk was peerless

Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior has endured countless painful conversations with me. Across many years, we have reflected on cases of brutal sexual exploitation and explored cover-ups, bullying and brutal political scheming at the expense of children battling abuse. But the first time I heard her cry was when she phoned to share the devastating news that Andrew Norfolk had died. At the height of the crisis, Jayne passed Norfolk boxes full of key documents exposing the scandal of mass exploitation in Rotherham. When police and the council leadership of the South Yorkshire town were seeking to punish anyone who spoke out, Andrew was the lone voice that heard her and

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Who judges the judges?

I started out as a reporter covering the criminal and civil courts in Ohio. I got to read every piece of paper filed with the clerk’s office, a bottomless source of stories. These were the days when people still trusted reporters and talked to us. I hung out with the prosecutors and cops, and wandered in and out of the judges’ chambers. It horrifies English lawyers when I suggest there is merit in electing judges rather than allowing them to be appointed by the diversity-obsessed Judicial Appointments Commission After the closing gavel, judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and we reporters would assemble in chief judge Kessler’s chambers for a whiskey. He kept a

Douglas Murray

Should you be arrested for reading The Spectator?

Regular readers will know that I have an obsession with home burglaries. Specifically those occasions when a burglar goes into a British home, helps himself to the contents of the household and finds that the last people on his case are the British police. Scanning some recent burglary statistics, I was struck again by the almost miraculous failures of force after force. Take Kent Police. In a recent breakdown of crime statistics, the force managed a career high. In one of the areas where they are meant to have oversight, there were 123 home burglaries. Of those 123 burglaries, they managed a great, round zero in their detection rate of