Joanna Rossiter | The Spectator columnists & writers

Michael Gove has announced that members of the public will be able to offer rooms and accommodation to named refugees through a government portal – Homes for Ukraine – which was launched on Monday. Gove said that he was confident there would be no shortage of people coming forward, although he gave a somewhat roundabout answer as to whether he himself would be hosting a refugee. The British public, however, appear to be very open to becoming hosts, with one in three saying they would offer a room, according to a poll conducted by The Observer. When Gove launched the scheme in the House of Commons yesterday, Lisa Nandy was quick to criticise the government’s policy of asking volunteers to name Ukrainians who they wished to host.

The trouble with boycotting Russian food

As the war in Ukraine worsens, the horrific scenes filling our screens have prompted a visceral reaction from the British public: 78 per cent now support Russian sanctions – up from 61 per cent in late February. Economic sanctions have undoubtedly hit the Kremlin’s spending power – and that’s to be encouraged. But what should we make of the broader cultural boycott of Russia that is rapidly gaining pace? So far, Britain's boycotts have had a peculiarly culinary bent. While Putin continues his onslaught, British shoppers have been encouraged to shun vodka and caviar. Lockdown revived an intense interest in cooking amongst the house-bound middle classes. And, seemingly emboldened by their banana bread and sourdough starter kits, many seem set on using food to take on Putin.

What a picture of bin Laden reveals about free speech in schools

A foreboding air of déjà vu surrounds the suspension of a teacher from a Bedfordshire school this week. A pupil at All Saints Academy complained that an image of Osama bin Laden had been labelled as the prophet Muhammad in a religious studies class and the teacher responsible has now been suspended until an investigation is completed. The school said in a statement that ‘All Saints Academy recognises the deep hurt and distress that has been caused to the Muslim community’ and called the images that were used ‘totally inappropriate’ and ‘offensive’. Was the image of bin Laden shown in jest, to start a discussion or did the teacher simply make a mistake? The details of the case aren’t yet clear. But regardless of how the image came to be shown or the motivation for sharing it, the incident has exposed the government’s inaction on safeguarding free speech in the classroom.

Putin won’t be fazed by Britain’s show of military support to Ukraine

Can the British army afford to take on Russia? That’s the burning question that has been left after Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced this week – to surprisingly little fanfare – that the UK is sending 30 elite troops and 2,000 anti tank weapons to the Ukraine. Wallace clearly intended to send a message to Moscow on where Britain’s allegiance lies, but such political posturing can only be beneficial if it’s backed up by sustained support in the long term – something the British army is in no place to do. As Britain seeks to reduce the size of its army to just 72,500 regular soldiers, Russia has amassed over 106,000 troops on the Ukraine border. With the British army heading for its smallest size since 1714, how much use is the small British deployment in helping Ukraine to hold off Putin? While Britain is one of the few Nato countries to meet its pledge to spend at least two per cent of GDP on defence, things are far from rosy.

The windswept Devon island adored by Agatha Christie

Burgh Island certainly knows how to make an entrance. As you descend the hill at dusk into Bigbury-on-Sea the white hotel drinks up all the light. Like a flashy piece of costume jewellery, it’s the only thing you notice on the skyline. But, then again, it's used to making good first impressions. Despite its diminutive size, the island appears in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun before any of the novel’s characters, upstaging even Hercule Poirot. The reader is never in any doubt that the book's murder will hinge entirely on ‘the little windswept gull-haunted promontory – cut off from land at each high tide’ and the ‘comfortable and most exclusive hotel’ on its most northerly shore. Burgh Island and its causeway Christie isn’t known for her sense of place: her settings are usually seen as blank canvases for the crimes, dashed off in a few sentences before the plot can get underway.

The tragi-comedy of Peppa Pig World

There is something uniquely soul-destroying about British theme parks. The effusive, American cheer of Disney Land somehow fails to translate in Blighty where no amount of sugary pastel scenery, singing flowers and glockenspiel music can distract from the bad weather. Indeed, if Peppa Pig World really does embody 'the power of UK creativity', as Boris suggested in his CBI speech, we really are in more trouble than I thought. Maybe the PM got lucky with the weather during his visit to Peppa Pig World last weekend. But, for the rest of us, it's hard not see an hour-long queue in the drizzle for Peppa's Big Balloon Ride as anything other than a particularly cruel form of parental purgatory. Yet, for modern parents like Boris and Carrie, it's almost a rite of passage.

Sabina Nessa and the truth about stranger danger

The brutal murder of primary school teacher Sabina Nessa in Kidbrooke, South London this month has prompted more anger about female safety on British streets. It’s reminiscent of the aftermath of the horrible case of Sarah Everard, another instance of a killer targeting a female victim – seemingly out of the blue – in a public space assumed to be safe. Such incidents understandably heighten fears among women of predatory attacks by men, and lead to calls for greater protection – more police patrols or rape alarms, for instance. Campaigners have praised men for crossing over to the other side of the road rather than walking behind women in order to help them feel safe: ‘it’s small actions like that that make a huge difference,’ said one.

What Jeff Bezos should have learnt from Neil Armstrong

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos joined the billionaire space race today in his suitably phallic looking New Shepard rocket. Bezos successfully travelled to just beyond the Karman Line: the official boundary between the earth’s atmosphere and the rest of the universe. So what sage words did the billionaire have for the rest of us as he looked out of the window at a sight that only 556 other humans have had the privilege to witness? A philosophical thought perhaps? A rumination on our planet’s beauty or fragility? Or maybe an assertion of mankind’s technical prowess? Alas, we were given none of this. According to the entrepreneur, as he descended on a rocket-powered air cloud, it was the ‘Best. Day. Ever.’ Now, Bezos could be forgiven for being rendered slightly speechless at the experience.

The sumptuous Suffolk estate that transports you to Tuscany

Ah Italia! Land of gelato, Vespas and frescoes – I’ve pined for the place so many times over the last year that it’s difficult to know which I love more: Italy itself or the idea of Italy. The joy of travel is always sparked in part by imagination: the anticipation of a place before you arrive; the memory of it once you leave. And it's not without reason that we love to recreate the places we admire back home. The Chinese have even gone so far as to enshrine their nostalgia for England through Shanghai’s mock English suburb Thames Town. It’s a riot of British stereotypes – from phone boxes to village greens. We too love to indulge in our own make believe versions of the countries that have captured our hearts.

The shallowness of the Oxford dons’ Rhodes protest

Rhodes must fall. At least, that’s the conclusion of 150 Oxford dons who have joined a boycott of Oriel college over its decision to keep its Cecil Rhodes statue in place. The protest may have made national headlines but who does it really serve? Certainly not the students at Oriel who will feel the brunt of the impact: the rebel dons say they will refuse to give tutorials to Oriel undergraduate students and will not assist the college with its outreach work, including interviewing undergraduates. In short, their chosen form of protest costs them nothing and punishes students who largely support the removal of the statue anyway. As with so many other modern social justice campaigns, the Oxford dons have conveniently settled on a form of rebellion that grabs headlines but requires no personal sacrifice.

Batley Grammar and the dilemma for trainee teachers

Should a teacher show a picture of the prophet Mohammed in the classroom? In the wake of the ugly scenes recently at Batley Grammar school when one teacher did just that, there are few questions more relevant to the work of a teacher right now. But when one trainee student at Manchester Metropolitan university contacted his course leader to ask whether they would support someone who did show such an image in class, the response was not the one he expected. The university’s reaction was telling: it did not initially respond to the trainee’s email request for advice. Instead it contacted him a month later saying he must attend a disconcertingly named ‘fitness to practise cause for concern meeting’. Don’t go into teaching if you care about free speech.

The art of storing and unveiling

‘Put beauty first and what you get will be used forever,’ said Roger Scruton in his BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters. The philosopher’s neat elision of beauty and utility is perfectly embodied by Étienne Maurice Falconet’s nymph, who is to be the star of a forthcoming lecture by Waddesdon Manor curator Juliet Carey. This small marble figure would be far less remarkable were it not for the elegance of the 19th-century wooden box in which she is housed. Exquisite, flesh-like pillows of chamois fill the space around the nymph’s form: the box and the sculpture seem at one, as though locked in a dance. The nymph has been stored this way since the 19th century when Edmond de Rothschild commissioned a set of boxes for his collection from Chenue.

Beijing is quietly challenging Brussels

The new agreement between China and the US on climate change, announced this week, contained the usual worthy overtures. Both nations reasserted their commitment to fighting the ‘climate crisis’ by ‘co-operating with each other and with other countries.’ But can the West really take the Chinese Communist party at its word? Judging by Beijing's activity in the Western Balkans, the answer is a resounding no. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chinese state-owned energy companies have built four coal power plants since 2010, with a further four planned – made possible by the Chinese Development Bank. China’s belt and road charm offensive is no secret in the West. What Europe’s political elites haven’t yet grasped is how Beijing's growing influence in the region is being used to counter EU expansion.

Why aren’t the teaching unions speaking out about Batley?

‘Sadly, his life here in Batley is over. Even if he gets his job back, how can he possibly return to Batley Grammar School? It will be far too risky. And how will he be able to walk around the town with his kids, doing normal things knowing that he could be killed?’ These were the harrowing words of the father of Batley Grammar’s suspended RE teacher yesterday. It’s hard to believe that a professional working in a liberal democracy like Britain, whose only ‘crime’ was to use a drawing to start a class discussion, is now facing a lifetime of police protection, unable to return to work and living in fear for his family’s life. More shocking still has been the lack of support from the teaching unions in response to this teacher’s treatment.

Should we vaccinate kids against Covid?

Children could start getting Covid vaccines over the summer as part of the government's herd immunity strategy. As Katy Balls reported last month, the current thinking in government is that vaccinating the majority of the population is the best way to stop the virus in its tracks. But where does this leave parents like me who have concerns about giving their children the jab? NHS England’s chief executive Simon Stevens has already mooted the idea of combining the flu and Covid vaccinations into one dose. And streamlining the two vaccinations makes perfect sense for adults. But it could put parents in a difficult position. Flu can pose a much greater risk to children than Covid – it causes more child deaths in the U.

Is making misogyny a hate crime really a victory for women?

Misogyny will now be recorded as a hate crime by police. But is this really the victory for women’s rights that campaigners are claiming it to be? It’s absolutely right, of course, that the law is bolstered so that incidents against women are taken seriously by the police. But the wording of the policy is disappointingly woolly, relying heavily on what the victim perceives as the motivation for the crime. Speaking in the House of Lords, Home Office minister Baroness Williams said that from the Autumn: ‘We will ask police forces to record and identify any crimes of violence against the person… where the victim perceives it to have been motivated by a hostility based on their sex.’ In the aftermath of the Sarah Everard case, Boris Johnson has talked about how women who bring serious complaints about violence to the police must be ‘properly heard’.

Why the British love Henry Hoover

What's so endearing about Henry? It's been the question on everybody's lips since he spectacularly photobombed the unveiling of the new Downing Street press room. The friendly faced vacuum cleaner still manages to compete with the likes of Dyson forty years after he was first created. Made in Chard, Somerset, with his bowler hat shaped ‘cap’ and smiley face, Henry is arguably one of the last remaining bastions of British eccentricity. Henry is that rare thing in British culture - a domestic appliance that transcends class. As Grayson Perry pointed out in his excellent series All in the Best Possible Taste, the British have a propensity to imbue ordinary household objects with all sorts of thinly veiled social codes.

The royal family is in a perilous position

Whatever you think of the Sussex saga, it’s clear that Buckingham Palace are waking up to more uncomfortable reading this morning. The coverage of the allegations made by the Sussexes is not going to die down anytime soon and the public is now poised to see how the Palace reacts. While the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did everything in their power to twist the knife during their two-hour tell-all with Oprah, the royal family’s well-intentioned actions last week may have worsened their predicament. It's easy for the press to pooh-pooh Meghan Markle’s Little Mermaid metaphors but there can be no denying that the Sussexes have inflicted serious reputational damage to the rest of their family. The royal family now finds itself in an impossible situation.

Kazuo Ishiguro is right about cancel culture

When the Kuwaiti authorities banned nearly 1,000 books from the Kuwait International Literature festival including Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the move was rightly met with outrage from the Western literary community. The press was full of talk about the perils of artistic censorship. That was twelve years ago, but this grand-standing was on display again last year during the Abu Dhabi literature festival. Stephen Fry and Noam Chomsky signed a letter to the United Arab Emirates government, castigating them for ‘promoting a platform for freedom of expression, while keeping behind bars Emirati citizens and residents who shared their own views and opinions.’ What would have struck us as dystopian a decade ago now seems not that far removed from the cultural climate we find ourselves in today.

What Angela Merkel can learn from the Queen about vaccine scepticism

You have to feel for Germany. After a fraught vaccine procurement process, not only is the government struggling to persuade its citizens to take the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, but Angela Merkel has now stated that she will not be given the jab on account of her age. ‘I do not belong to the recommended age group for AstraZeneca,’ the German chancellor told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. It could well be the final nail in the coffin for an EMA-approved, safe vaccine that has cost her country millions. Merkel’s view may be aligned with government policy – she is 66 and therefore, under the German rules which state that over 65s should not be given the vaccine, she does not qualify for a dose. But the intransigence of her position is also astonishingly naïve.

Does Nicola Sturgeon really want to fly the EU flag?

The news that Nicola Sturgeon has asked for the EU flag to be flown every day from the Scottish Parliament building won’t come as a surprise to those familiar with her much-documented Europhilia. Indeed, when Britain was edging ahead in the vaccine race, she threatened to publish confidential information about the UK’s vaccine supply in order to offer support to Brussels, potentially undermining our vaccine deals. The fact that she was prepared to do this in order to cosy up to the EU tells you everything you need to know about the SNP’s particular brand of nationalism. What’s most bizarre about Sturgeon’s focus on the EU is that she lives and breathes Scottish independence. Why, if it matters so much to her, would she want to take Scotland straight into a centrist bloc whose expressed aim is an ‘ever closer union’? It doesn’t appear to make much sense, but then again, neither does flying the EU flag in a country that is no longer part of the EU.

Bezos vs Musk: who will win the new space race?

While the West gets itself into a lather on a weekly basis about the evils of past colonialism is anyone paying attention to the new empire builders in our midst? Although their ideas for space travel often read like the pages of an Arthur C Clark novel, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have done little to disguise the colonising instincts of their space projects. Both have outlined competing intentions to mine the moon and put humans on Mars. And, with Bezos stepping down from Amazon to devote more time to his space venture Blue Origin, we could be witnessing the beginnings of a galactic power struggle - executed not by States but by corporations. Bezos and Musk are far from the only billionaires to follow this route. The co-founder of Google Sergey Brin has been spending much of his time on Planetary Ventures - a Google-funded space exploration project which in 2006 took over a Silicon Valley airfield from NASA for the purpose of space research.

What’s holding up Scotland’s vaccine rollout?

If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say that Nicola Sturgeon has had a ‘good pandemic’, I’d be living in my very own Scottish castle by now. Imposing restrictions one step ahead of Boris Johnson seems to have become Sturgeon’s go-to formula. But if the First Minister has been praised for her initial response to Covid-19, Sturgeon is running out of excuses to explain why Scotland’s vaccine programme lags behind that of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Having just managed to catch up on the over 80s briefly at the weekend, Scotland has now fallen significantly behind in its vaccination of the over 70s. And with England soon to call over 65s for appointments, Sturgeon is finding herself in increasingly hot water.

Why vaccine nationalism won’t end in 2021

After the EU’s behaviour last week, no one can be under any illusion about how nationalistic the pandemic has now become. Even before the EU attempted to halt vaccine supplies destined for Britain, the scrabble to secure enough doses had become reminiscent of the cold war. It wasn’t for nothing that the Russians named their vaccine ‘Sputnik’ – a reference to the satellite they launched in 1957 during the space race. Nor was it by chance that the Scottish government appeared to find it so difficult to say the word ‘Oxford’ when talking about the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. But these sorts of political tiffs are just the beginning. Now that vaccinations are underway across the West, focus is beginning to shift onto future supply.

The EU is blaming everyone but itself for its vaccine debacle

Something has gone badly wrong with the EU's rollout of the Covid vaccine. Yet in its response to this debacle, Brussels seems determined to double down, engaging in behaviour of the pettiest kind as it blames everyone but itself for what has happened. 'The companies must deliver', Ursula von der Leyen, the EU commission's president said this week, as she announced the launch of a 'vaccine export transparency mechanism'. In reality, this plan to oblige companies to notify the commission when vaccines leave the EU (into Britain, for example) is an attempt to pile pressure on the pharmaceutical firms who have given us the only way out of the situation we find ourselves in. To coin a favourite phrase from Brexit, von der Leyen's statement rather seems like having her cake and eating it.

Europe’s slow vaccine approval is testing Germany’s patience

The Bundestag can’t be an easy place to be a politician right now. At the start of the pandemic, Germany seemed to be steering a steadier course than other countries, who looked on in awe at the speed with which it launched its testing regime. But as Britain, Canada and the USA begin vaccinations, Germany has been left tapping its feet. It is still waiting for the European Medicines Agency to approve the Pfizer vaccine, which it is set to do on 21 December – a state of affairs that is rapidly turning into a national and international embarrassment. The German public have grown increasingly irritated at the delays. ‘It’s just beyond belief,’ the Bild newspaper wrote in an editorial. ‘The world is celebrating the BioNTech vaccine developed in Germany.

The Isles of Scilly: a staycation that feels like you’re abroad

First-time visitors to the Isles of Scilly are hard to find. Once you discover this spell-bindingly beautiful archipelago twenty eight miles off the Cornish coast you quickly become part of its fiercely loyal legion of fans. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to resist the urge for a return visit. It came as no surprise, then, to learn that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge decided to holiday on the island of Tresco in the heart of the Scillies twice in close succession this year. Returning in October just two months after their first visit, it’s clear the royal couple have cottoned on to something good: turquoise waters, white sand that glitters in your fingers, sub-tropical flora and a rugged otherworldly feel that only seems fitting for the last scrap of British soil in the Atlantic before you reach America.

Did Brexit boost Britain’s vaccine deal?

The government’s successful deal to secure 40 million shots of Pfizer's vaccine is a political coup in more ways than one. Not only have ministers successfully backed what looks like the winning vaccine from a pool of 150, it has also pipped the EU to the post. The EU has only just signed on the dotted line with Pfizer to secure 200 million shots of the vaccine, with the coordinator of the European parliament's committee on public health Peter Liese saying that pharmaceuticals 'need to respect EU law and that’s why it took a while’. Yet free from the shackles of having to balance the interests of 28 member states, Britain has shown itself to be nimble-footed compared to the behemoth of EU bureaucracy; it signed its own deal for thirty million doses back in July.

Patrick Vallance was right to hedge his vaccine bets

Patrick Vallance has rightly come under fire over the use of statistics during the government’s now infamous lockdown press conference, but we ought to give him some credit for the UK’s preparedness for a Covid vaccine. It was Vallance’s forward thinking that established the taskforce responsible for securing 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine (enough to cover 20 million people) back in May 2020. This taskforce also made the call to spread the UK’s vaccine investment across six suppliers. People will quibble about the number of doses ordered, but thanks to Vallance, the UK is in a position to benefit from whichever vaccine reaches the market first. After months of negative headlines, Boris Johnson's government also deserves some praise.

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