The Spectator columnists & writers

Prima donna: is Giorgia Meloni the most dangerous woman in Europe?

In this week’s episode:Is Giorgia Meloni the most dangerous woman in Europe?Spectator contributor, Nicholas Farrell is joined by Chiara Albanese, a political correspondent at Bloomberg, to discuss the road ahead for Italy’s next likely leader. (01.10)Also this week: Are we entering a new age of digital censorship?Lord Sumption unpicks the Online Safety Bill in this week’s magazine. He’s joined by Baroness Nicky Morgan, a firm supporter of the bill. (17.53)And finally: why has holiday hand luggage become such a hassle this summer?Spectator contributor and marketing guru, Rory Sutherland joins us to get to the bottom of this. (31.56)Hosted by Lara Prendergast and Gus CarterProduced by Natasha Feroze.

Boris 2029!

OK, it might sound a little fanciful, but hear me out. I think there could just be a way for Boris to scrape back in to power. Some Johnson loyalists in Westminster think that whoever replaces him will implode, that there could be another leadership race before the 2024 election and that Boris could run and win. That seems like wishful thinking. Instead, I'd suggest he plays the long game. It's a little convoluted and involves quite a few what-ifs – but if anyone can do it, it’s the great greased piglet himself. Step one: take over the Evening Standard. The ailing London paper has been in trouble for some time. It recorded a £14 million loss last year even after the majority of commuters returned post-Covid. The job of editor is vacant after Emily Sheffield, sister-in-law to David Cameron, stepped down last year.

The rise of the neo-Luddites

Yesterday, a pair of Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to a John Constable painting in the National Gallery, covering The Hay Wain with a printout of an alternative vision of England. The cart crossing the River Stour in Suffolk is perhaps Constable’s most famous painting. But instead of a bucolic, biscuit tin Albion, Just Stop Oil’s version shows the Stour tarmacked over, a belching power plant in the distance and a commercial jet overhead. The message is clear: our modern world is sick. I have some sympathy with these student activists, or at least I envy their certainty. Their view of the world is simple: bad things like fossil fuels, industrialisation, and consumerism can be stopped merely by taking a stand.

In defence of ‘Stop Brexit Man’ Steve Bray

It is a great and ancient right of all freeborn Englishmen, stretching back far beyond the reaches of our recorded history. From Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution, it has been woven into each of the defining constitutional moments of the British story, a principle bled and died for on the battlefields of Europe. It is, of course, the right to make a tit of yourself. Whitehall’s Stop Brexit Man has been the most vociferous pursuer of that right in recent years. Steve Bray, with his Brussels blue top hat and shouty megaphone demeanour, loves to make a tit of himself. He marches around Westminster barking inanities at any unsuspecting Tory MP, usually something demented about Russia and Brexit. He likes to pump out the sugary pop tune Bye, Bye, Baby but instead shouts ‘Boris’ over the word ‘baby’ (he’s a clever one our Steve).

Are the Abraham Accords working?

Two years ago, UAE citizens were barred from entering Israel. No longer. The inaugural Emirates flight touched down in Tel Aviv last week, a Boeing 777 carrying 335 passengers. For much of the 20th century, the only thing that the Middle East could agree on was the destruction of the Jewish state. But attitudes are changing. The purported reason is the so-called Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 after Donald Trump decided to solve the seemingly intractable problem of the Middle East. If Don the Dealmaker couldn’t do it, who could? Seven decades of antagonism had failed, the White House argued, and the Palestinian cause seemed as troubled as ever, so why not try a different approach? The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain formally recognised Israel in September that year, signing a document that declared a new era of ‘peace, security and prosperity in the Middle East’.

Zelensky’s peculiar Glastonbury appearance

Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t quite make it onto the Glastonbury line-up posters. Perhaps Michael Eavis, the owner of ever-so Worthy Farm, had last-minute difficulties with the Ukrainian President’s booking agent. No matter. An eight-foot-high image of President Zelensky’s face graced the Pyramid Stage on Friday, right before ageing indie rockers The Libertines belted out their two-decades-old bangers. ‘Time for Heroes’, but not before festival-goers had enjoyed a brief set by Europe’s very own hero. You’d be forgiven for thinking the shtick’s getting a bit tired – but at least Pete Doherty can just about hold a tune. ‘Glastonbury is the greatest concentration of freedom these days,’ Zelensky told the festival. And what greater expression of freedom is there than tucking into over-priced Vietnamese street food while some besieged leader begs your government for more weapons? Perhaps Stoke Newington’s exiles in Somerset could pop over to the Kyiv tent, nestled somewhere between Water Aid and Greenpeace, and sponsor an NLAW? They barely managed the syllabically-strained rendition of ‘Oh, Volodymyr Zelensky’ (à la ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’).

Is Britain heading into a wage-price spiral?

Are wages about to spiral out of control? Boris Johnson certainly thinks there’s a risk. Last week he warned that the economy was ‘steering into the wind’ and that the UK could be entering a 1970s-style malaise. With inflation shooting up to 9 per cent – and expected to go higher still – rail workers are embarking on the first of three days of industrial action today, demanding a minimum pay rise of 7 per cent. Network Rail has offered just 2 per cent, with the potential for an extra 1 per cent on top if they can meet productivity targets later this year. Barristers too have voted for a walkout, and teachers and doctors are threatening to join the strikes. Speak to people in Westminster and there is a prevailing sense that there is only one way to stop runaway inflation: keeping wages down.

What’s the alternative to the Rwanda plan?

Last night, a Boeing 767 that was supposed to fly 130 asylum seekers to Rwanda returned to Spain without a single passenger on board. Throughout the day, the number of people planned for that flight had been whittled down by multiple legal challenges. Then, minutes before take-off, the European Court of Human Rights made an injunction stopping an Iraqi man known as KN from being taken to Central Africa because, it said, he faced ‘a real risk of irreversible harm’. The question some are asking is why the Home Secretary didn’t wait. There is supposed to be a broader challenge at the High Court next month which would, perhaps, have dealt with Strasbourg’s concerns – namely, that there was no legal mechanism for asylum seekers to return to the UK.

Why is Apple getting into lending?

It’s the highest form of flattery, but is Apple really trying to copy Klarna? That’s the allegation made by the Swedish firm, which has led the way with so-called ‘buy now, pay later’ credit. Last week Apple announced that it too would be offering deferred payments via Apple Pay, as well as the option to split repayments over several instalments. It’s something that Klarna has been flogging for over a decade. And it’s already pretty popular: nearly a quarter of British shoppers have used Klarna’s services. Now its founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski has accused Apple of nicking his concept. In reality, Klarna isn’t the only, or even the first, company to offer short-term interest-free loans. But it is one of the largest.

Spectator Out Loud

Katy Balls, John Connolly and Gus Carter

17 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Katy Balls, John Connolly and Gus Carter

17 min listen

On this week's episode: Katy Balls reads her article on the cadets gunning for the Tory leadership. (00:52)John Connolly reads his investigation into the new warehouse ghettos where Britain is sending migrants. (06:36) Gus Carter reads his piece on why he's not getting invited to any dinner parties. (12:05)Presented by Angus Colwell.Produced by Angus Colwell and Sam Holmes.

Dinner parties are dying

I don’t get invited to that many dinner parties. I hope it’s not a problem with me, although I can’t rule it out. Instead, I have a feeling that the era of nibbles, laying the table and stressing about the starters is over. When I asked my friends how many invites they get, there was a reasonably consistent answer: roughly one every few months. I’m not talking here about spag bol with pals. A dinner party is a sit-down affair, with multiple courses and, ideally, a few people you don’t know for company. In their twenties, my parents were apparently having a dinner party every week. My mum has three smartly bound journals, all with the title ‘Guest & Menu Book’. Inside each is an assortment of table plans and wine notes, entries on roast lamb and claret, as well as occasional thoughts about the conversation: ‘This is the last time I cook for people who claim to be struggling on £100,000.

The Edition

How the rebels plan to finish off Boris

45 min listen

The Edition

How the rebels plan to finish off Boris

45 min listen

The dreary truth about partygate

I’m starting to get a bit annoyed about partygate. Well no, that’s a lie. I’m angry in theory. On paper I’m fuming. In real life? Meh. This whole saga has trundled on for so long now I’ve just stopped caring. I’m probably annoyed about something else. Train timetables or maybe the fact that broccoli is £1.60 in M&S. Given how miserable the rest of us were during lockdown, those making the rules should really have done the polite thing and followed them. But then when you read the details of ‘partygate’, you can’t help but think that they weren't really enjoying themselves. A Colin the Caterpillar cake in between meetings? ‘Wine time Fridays’? Who wants to be cooped up in the office with their colleagues on a Friday evening? Didn’t they have any other friends they could sneak off and see at the end of the week? It’s what the rest of us did.

Sadiq Khan shows why London doesn’t need a mayor

Sadiq Khan doesn’t seem to know what his job is. The Mayor of London announced on Thursday morning that he was setting up a review to examine whether cannabis should be legalised. Just a few hours later, the Home Secretary Priti Patel reminded him that ‘the mayor has no powers to legalise drugs’. Duh. Labour didn’t seem that happy either. Yvette Cooper also gave Khan a ticking off, saying that the national party already had a policy and, no, they wouldn’t be pushing for legalisation. So please be quiet Sadiq. But we all know what the mayor was really up to. Sadiq Khan wants attention. He wants to be a national politician by using a local politician’s platform. Yes, London is a global city, but the powers that the mayor actually has are limited to things like getting a few more houses built (which he’s failed to do) and keeping tube fares down (again, fail).

Don’t make war in Ukraine about Putin’s mental health

There was a time when supposedly serious commentators on world affairs used to at least feign historical knowledge. They might quote Bismarck or Castlereagh. Now, international relations punditry, like almost everything else, has succumbed to the language of pop psychology. Vladimir Putin is ‘gaslighting’ the Russian people, we are told, motivated by his ‘hypermasculinity’. His invasion of Ukraine is, according to one commentator on Radio 4 this morning, ‘unforgivable abuse’. I thought abuse meant kicking a dog or being cruel to a partner. Now it means starting a war. It’s almost as though we’re unable to think of Putin as anything other than a nasty contestant on reality TV. Take Vanity Fair’s explanation of ‘the psychology behind Putin’s war’.

Are you man enough to eat raw offal?

The dominant wolf gets the liver, at least according to the American podcaster Joe Rogan. In one episode, a bodybuilder called ‘CarnivoreMD’ (real name Paul Saladino) tells him: ‘If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male… or alpha female.’ Offal has taken a markedly macho turn in recent years. No longer resigned to memories of the postwar school canteen, organs have become the preferred food of a certain type of gym bro. The word offal implies wastage – from the Middle Dutch for offcuts – but it can also be a delicacy. Recently saved from a government ban on cruel foods, foie gras is only the most obvious example. For the most part, though, the West has become squeamish about what was once called ‘variety meat’.

The cult of the daffodil

Spring is the season of supermarket daffodils. At a pound a bunch, you can deck out your home like Elton John and still have change from a fiver. From January until April, daffodils burst from village greens and quiet churchyards. The wild daffodil found across Britain is the Narcissus pseudonarcissus, known also as the ‘Lent lily’. Native to northern Europe, the hardy bulbs followed the British empire around the world and can now be found in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the Falklands. There are thought to be 27,000 different cultivars of daffodil bred from 36 different species. Most are yellow but there are white varieties and a few with splashes of pink. Generally the flowers are a trumpet-like corona encircled by petals.

How much trouble is Boris Johnson in?

Just how bad is it for Boris Johnson? In some ways it's difficult to tell, this is a prime minister who seems almost unable to exist without a crisis. But last night's new Covid rules — mixed up with the unending stories about Downing Street parties in the depths of lockdown — seem to have ushered in a different level of Westminster discontent. It's more the timing than anything else. On Tuesday morning, the Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said 'We don’t think that Plan B is required'. On Wednesday evening the PM implemented Plan B. What happened? During those intervening 36 hours, the data on Omicron only seemed to have improved. Further evidence emerged that while more transmissible, the effects of infection seem to be milder than previous strains.

It’s Harry, not Meghan, who’s the real problem

Who or what drove Harry and Meghan to leave the royal bosom for the land of slebs on the other side of the Atlantic? That’s one of the central questions of a new two-part documentary, The Princes and the Press, that aired on the BBC last night. The obvious suspect is the dreaded British media — barging, intrusive, xenophobic — riddled with prejudice, we’re told, against a mixed-race American in the monarchy. But the jostling between royal households seems equally responsible. After the early days of Hazza and Megz, a clear jealousy from some of William and Kate’s people began to seep into the media. The younger brother and his American wife were suddenly the darlings of the British press. ‘Work-shy William’ and ‘waity Katie’ were left looking like yesterday’s royals.

Terror threat level raised to ‘severe’

The Home Secretary Priti Patel has just announced that the terror threat level has been raised to 'severe' meaning that another attack is now considered 'highly likely'. The move comes after yesterday's explosion in Liverpool was declared to be a 'terrorist incident'. Speaking after a Cobra meeting, Patel confirmed that the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre had raised the threat level following the Liverpool attack. 📺 WATCH: Shocking moment David Perry’s taxi explodes, but he escapesMore here 👉 https://t.co/PEsyfKDH6p pic.twitter.com/3UnebFgz1Y— The Spectator (@spectator) November 15, 2021 The Home Secretary said that the decision had been taken because two terror attacks had been confirmed in the last month, the former being the murder of MP Sir David Amess.

Liverpool terror attack: what we know so far

Are banking apps luring young people into debt?

Last month, my bicycle got a flat tyre. ‘Both of those tyres are gonna need replacing and you’ve knackered your sprockets,’ huffed the bike man. The bill came to £230. It’s the kind of irritating expense that means I run out of beer money a week before payday. I’ve always assumed I’m a reasonably normal spender. Work pays me, the money gradually disappears over the month, with hopefully a bit left over for my Isa. I’m vaguely aware that something exists called a ‘credit card’, but my parents always made clear to me that if you don’t have the money for something, don’t buy it. Where I differ from older spenders is that like many under-thirties I use a Monzo card. It makes it easier to split bills with friends and to keep track of spending.

The Edition

Superbad: Joe Biden’s plummeting presidency

41 min listen

The Edition

Superbad: Joe Biden’s plummeting presidency

41 min listen

MPs vote to overhaul their own watchdog

MPs have voted in favour of overhauling their own watchdog after its decision to ban a senior Tory backbencher from the House of Commons. The committee on standards found that former minister Owen Paterson had breached lobbying rules and recommended he be suspended from the House for 30 days. However, the government backed an amendment to the vote on his suspension — normally treated as a formality — that will now see a new committee set up to fix 'potential defects' in the way the current disciplinary system works. Detractors of the cross-party body have accused the standards commissioner, Kathryn Stone, of anti-Tory bias. Paterson himself has said that the protracted two-year investigation contributed to his wife's suicide in June last year, making the debate particularly sensitive But that doesn’t mean the result was uncontroversial.

How Raab plans to fix the law

How do you solve a problem like Britain’s creaking criminal justice system? To the newly appointed Secretary of State, the answer involves ripping up the Human Rights Act, rolling out more electronic tags for convicts and pumping cash into preventative projects. At a Spectator event this morning, held at Tory Party Conference, Dominic Raab explained that rewriting the UK’s human rights laws was central to his reforming mission. He told editor Fraser Nelson: The Prime Minister was very clear when he appointed me deputy PM and Justice Secretary that he wanted this done… Overhauling the Human Rights Act is not just a good way of dealing with the foreign nationals that we can’t deport but also of ironing out our constitution.

Richard Tice is a rebel without a cause

The vaccines make you magnetic, didn’t you know? And Covid is a form of biological warfare, released by the Chinese to weaken the West. New 5G technology is melting people’s brains and the Bank of England is owned by the Rothschilds. I am listening to three delegates from Reform UK’s first party conference, held in parallel to the Tories' much larger jamboree just down the road. They are outside chaining cigarettes and they’re fired up. At last, they feel they can talk about this stuff without being shut down. I nod along. I’m not a scientist, I explain, and I don’t really know how central banks work. But why, I ask, aren’t these things being discussed on the Reform conference stage? ‘They’ll just be labelled conspiracy theorists by the fake news media,’ explains one man who travelled from Preston for the event, lighting his third cigarette.

Spectator Out Loud

Lara Prendergast, Cindy Yu and Gus Carter

17 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Lara Prendergast, Cindy Yu and Gus Carter

17 min listen

On this week's episode, Lara Prendergast asks if it's so wrong to talk about whether the Covid vaccine affects periods. (01:05) Cindy Yu says China's 'zero Covid' strategy can't last. (06:50) And finally, Gus Carter spends an hour in a sensory deprivation tank. (13:05)

My strange night in a sensory deprivation tank

Hidden below St George’s Wharf in Vauxhall, down the road from a now defunct gay sauna, is Floatworks, a wellness centre that offers ‘floatation therapy’. Sensory deprivation tanks can be found in most British cities — in bohemian towns like Bristol and Brighton, but also in Birmingham and Belfast. The concept is simple enough: people are locked in an unlit pod and lie there with nothing but their thoughts. Some people report hallucinations, others a deep sense of calm. Wally Funk, the 82-year-old who was blasted into low earth orbit last month aboard Jeff Bezos’s private rocket, endured ten hours of sensory deprivation when she trained as an astronaut. Ten hours seemed a dangerously long time, so instead I booked a measly 60-minutesession and cycled over after work.

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