Society

Saturday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The feud tearing apart the Royal Society of Literature

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Royal Society of Literature (founded 1820) might be one of those institutions that chugs on benignly year in year out with nothing to disturb the peace of its members. But on Thursday morning, a letter in the Times Literary Supplement, got up as I understand it by Jeremy Treglown and signed by 14 more distinguished writers (among them Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Fleur Adcock), calls on the leadership of the RSL to refer itself to the Charity Commission. That is, as charitable foundations go, something like demanding that they turn themselves in to the cops.   Everybody is briefing everybody, furious letters

Friday

Alexander Larman

Could Harry become an American citizen?

If I was the producer of Good Morning America, I would feel disappointed by today’s appearance of Prince Harry on my show. The Duke of Sussex came on television for his first major broadcast interview of the year, and it was inevitable that the major topic of interest was not going to be his time in Canada to mark the Invictus Games competitors’ training, or his family life in Montecito, or indeed the forthcoming paperback publication of Spare. Instead, it is his father’s health, which saw Harry drop everything and return to Britain last week for a private meeting with the King estimated to have lasted between 30 and 45

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Shoppers are falling out of love with online shopping

Maybe the Office for National Statistics should stop seasonally adjusting its data. That is the lesson from today’s retail sales figures, which show a strong rebound in sales volumes of 3.4 per cent in January. All areas of spending were up except clothing, which was down by 1.4 per cent. The overall figures might sound promising, but all they really do is to cancel out December’s fall of 3.3 per cent. Look at the figures for the past three months and sales are pretty flat, falling by 0.2 per cent in that time. The high street is in a stupor, just like the economy as a whole. Why did retail appear

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Is Nato ready for war with Russia?

38 min listen

Welcome to a slightly new format for the Edition podcast! Each week we will be talking about the magazine – as per usual – but trying to give a little more insight into the process behind putting The Spectator to bed each week. On the podcast: TheSpectator’s assistant foreign editor Max Jeffery writes our cover story this week, asking if Nato is ready to defend itself against a possible Russian invasion. Max joined Nato troops as they carried out drills on the Estonian border. Max joins us on the podcast along with historian Mark Galeotti, author of Putin’s Wars. (00:55)  Then: Lionel Shriver talks to us about the sad case of Jennifer Crumbley, the mum

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Tan Ikram and the corruption of the justice system

The case of the ‘paraglider girls’ just keeps getting worse, exposing a criminal-justice system that seems to have become riddled with bias and Israelophobia. A mixture of bias, ignorance and cowardice has been exposed at every level of the criminal-justice system On Tuesday, a judge at Westminster Magistrates Court essentially let three women – Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27 – off with a slap on the wrist, after they were charged with terrorism offences.  Last October, they were spotted on a Palestine protest displaying images of paragliders, just seven days after Hamas fighters on paragliders flew into southern Israel before murdering and raping their way

Debbie Hayton

It’s not ‘right wingers’ who turned Parkrun into a trans battleground

The Parkrun saga over times for transgender runners staggers on, but the organisation has only itself to blame. For want of a clear policy on sex and gender, Parkrun seems to have upset everyone. Last week, at least one event director quit as the company erased its run records wholesale in what looked like a knee-jerk reaction to a campaign against Parkrun’s view that competitors could self-declare their gender. It’s not ‘right wing’ to understand the material reality of biological sex This is a fuss that never needed to happen but – like too many other organisations – Parkrun abandoned biological reality when it allowed everyone to choose their sex when

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Do we really need an eco-friendly army?

The triumph of green ideology within our institutions, corporations and public life is staggering. Notions that would have once been confined to meetings in the back of a Brighton bookshop are now the common coin of government, big business and, of course, the cultural elites. All of them now seem to agree that cheap and plentiful energy is bad, that the Industrial Revolution was our original sin, and that eco-austerity is what our ailing nation needs. But the eco-takeover of Britain’s armed forces is particularly odd. In 2021, the Ministry of Defence published its ‘Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach’, laying out its plans to help the government hit net zero by

Eliot Wilson

Britain can no longer defend itself

When the Berlin Wall fell, the British Army had 152,800 soldiers. Tony Blair’s government cut this to 110,000; David Cameron’s reduced it to 87,000. Plans to let that number fall to 82,000 were accelerated by the former defence secretary Ben Wallace. It’s generally accepted that by next year numbers will have dropped to 72,500. That’s a generous estimate: there are credible reports the army could soon number just 67,800. This week the British Army is playing a leading part in Operation Steadfast Defender, the largest Nato exercise in peacetime history. Yet it is smaller than it has been at any point since the 1790s. More importantly, it’s far too small

The Spectator

Letters: no wonder Gen Z-ers don’t want to fight

The many not the few Sir: Your leading article (‘The people problem’, 3 February) fails to get to the heart of this issue. Yes, more needs to be done to reform welfare to encourage people back to work. But nowhere do you mention the need for employers to be more open-minded in their recruitment. There is a large pool of ‘underemployed’ – particularly among the over-fifties – who find it very difficult to get any job at all, many of whom are perfectly familiar with the discipline of regular employment. Polling suggests that more than 60 per cent of nearly all ages, social classes and regions think the country is

Sean Thomas

How to check in to a haunted hotel

The haunted hotel. It’s a definite thing, isn’t it? From Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining to the slightly less classic I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the hotel with an unwanted and probably long-dead guest is a leitmotif in scary cinema. It can also be found in poems, plays, novels; possibly the first novel on the theme is literally called The Haunted Hotel, it’s by Wilkie Collins and it is set in, yes, Venice. But here’s the thing about haunted hotels. They are actually a thing. That is to say, there are places to stay which invoke a definite frisson of doom, dread or deep unease. And I

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The Bishop of Oxford: why I support gay marriage

We all know the Church of England is ‘divided’ over homosexuality. But it’s not a very equal division. Reform is favoured by a clear majority of bishops, the clergy and Anglican worshippers. So how are the conservative evangelicals managing to hold back the tide? Perhaps the problem is a lack of leadership. The archbishops have not dared to reveal what sort of change they want, beyond saying that there should be blessings for gay couples. The other bishops have echoed the evasion. ‘I was seeking to be a focus of unity by not saying what I thought’ Only one senior bishop has articulated a clearer reformist vision. Just over a year

Catriona Olding

How to choose a better death

In 1984 I was a third-year student nurse. The last secondment before my final exam was gynaecology. The wards were housed several miles away from the friends and familiar faces of the Edwardian general hospital where my training had been based. It was an unfriendly place. The staff had little time for outsiders and none for this skinny, ginger, idealistic student nurse. In those days, before accurate scanning equipment was widely available, the diagnosis of ovarian and uterine cancer was difficult and treatments much less effective than they are now. The outlook for many was bleak. Some of the patients on the ward where I worked were a deep ochre

Douglas Murray

I’ll soon be the only commoner I know

It is starting to dawn on me that I will soon be the only commoner I know. I am racking my brains trying to think of anyone I have even met in recent years who has not been ennobled, and at present I am drawing a blank. Each time I am out of the UK I return to find another honours list and another batch of peers. By the time the magazine has gone to press this column’s sub-editor will probably have been called to the Upper House. Should the Upper House really be a chamber filled with failed MPs, council leaders and spads? This is not – I would like

The Spectator

How many countries are led by an octogenarian?

Gerontocracies How many countries are led by an octogenarian? – Out of 187 states assessed in March last year, 10 had heads of government aged over 80. The oldest – who is still in power, is the president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, who celebrated his 91st birthday this week. – The median age of a world leader in March last year was 62, with 18% in their forties, 22% in their fifties, 35% in their sixties and 18% in their seventies. – Countries classified as ‘free’ (as defined by the thinktank Freedom House) tend to have younger leaders, with a median age of 58. Leaders of ‘partly free’ countries have

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Beauty tips every man should know

British men are getting into ‘beauty’. ‘Now it’s men’s turn to hog the bathroom,’ reports the Times, as spending increases 77 per cent year on year. Beauty industry types argue that all men should want to look more groomed, even Anglo-Saxons. What’s wrong with some light fluffing up here, a bit of patching up there? It’s a lucrative business and celebrities are, of course, cashing in. Harry Styles flogs nail varnish; Idris Elba’s skincare line S’Able is ‘powered by modern science’. Even Richard E. Grant has a range of smellies, ‘an exploration of his lifelong love affair with scent’. It’s a long way from Marwood scrubbing essence of petunia into

Toby Young Toby Young

Acton is now posher than Chiswick

In 2017, David Lloyd Clubs took out a long lease on the privately owned sports facility at the end of my road. It used to be called the Park Club, but the new leaseholders, having spent £9 million tarting it up, proposed to call it ‘David Lloyd Chiswick Park’. As a proud resident of Acton, I was outraged and wrote to the CEO, pointing out that the new name would antagonise the locals by implying there was something shameful about their area. ‘The club is on a street called East Acton Lane, it’s about 250 yards from a railway station called Acton Central and 500 yards from a sign saying

Jeremy Hildreth

Why Napoleon (may have) loved St Helena coffee

Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, Saint Helena’s French honorary consul, wants to set the record straight. Contrary to popular belief, he tells me, Napoleon wasn’t exiled to St Helena for life. In a highly idiosyncratic sentencing, drafted by the Russians and ratified by the other powers involved, Napoleon’s banishment was to last ‘until his deadly fame ends’. While Napoleon was living there (from 1815 until his death in 1821, his remains being returned to France in 1840), he was essentially confined to an estate named Longwood House, which sits at a fairly high elevation where the weather is often chilly and misty. There, Napoleon entertained visitors, gardened extensively, and dictated the bestselling book

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

A miracle has happened in Britain’s pharmacies

A small miracle happened in politics recently. Someone had a good idea, and then enacted it really quickly. I popped into my local chemist’s last week and the nice chap behind the counter recommended a few treatments, adding that if I still felt rough in a few days, he could give me some antibiotics. Eh? Wouldn’t I have to contact my GP? Apparently not. I could just come back to the shop. This was handy. Unlike doctors’ surgeries, shops tend to be open at the weekend, when people are actually free to buy things. They’re funny like that, shops. I then remembered reading about a recent proposal to allow pharmacists

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I avoid inviting someone to my hen do?

Q. I did a one-year cookery course in London a couple of years ago and then set myself up in business. Someone I know, who did the course prior to me and is an established dinner-party caterer, has been passing on to me work she can’t do (if she already has a booking on that night, for example). A couple of these people have told me they prefer my style of cooking and won’t be using her again. This puts me in an awkward position and I don’t know how to explain that I am getting repeat business from her introductions. – S.R., Wantage A. Business is business and it