Society

Kate Hoey

Britain’s smoking ban will inflict havoc on Ireland

As Westminster and Dublin compete with performative new tobacco bans, smokers on the island of Ireland will be forced to dodge between jurisdictions and shifting laws just to buy a pack of cigarettes. Starting in February 2028, adults under the age of 21 in the Republic of Ireland will be barred from buying tobacco at home but will still be able to nip across the border to stock up in Northern Ireland. But once the UK’s generational smoking ban begins, the farcical cross-border relay will reverse, with 22-year-olds banned from buying tobacco in Belfast still free to do so in Dublin. As the years go by, the legal absurdity only

Alexander Larman

King Charles is the definition of ‘rebellious hope’

While the world continues to laugh (and, on occasion, groan) at the antics of the Duchess of Sussex, there remains a more serious ongoing issue at the heart of the royal family: the King’s health. As his treatment for cancer stretches on into its second year, with no clear end point in sight, he hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace yesterday for those who work with cancer patients and their families. This is, regrettably but obviously, a subject that he knows a great deal about, but it was still salutary to see how personal and emotive his words on the subject have been. In a booklet that was handed out

Stephen Pollard

Ignore everything the Tories and Reform say about the local elections

Never let it be said that The Spectator doesn’t provide invaluable time saving services. I’m here to help save hours of your life tomorrow, when the results of today’s local elections – 1,641 seats across 14 county councils, five regional and one city mayoralties as well as the Runcorn and Helsby by-election – will emerge. Here’s my election hack: ignore everything said by all of the parties contesting the elections. Literally everything, because all of it is meaningless. It’s clear that you can fit almost any claim to any result – and the parties will do just that More specifically, after four decades of watching and analysing elections, it’s clear that

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Has Keir Starmer watched Groomed: A National Scandal yet?

I look forward to Keir Starmer hosting a special summit on the Channel 4 documentary, Groomed. And to hearing him gush about it every time a reporter puts a mic anywhere near his mouth. And to seeing his proposals for showing it to teens in schools across the land in order that we might prise open their innocent eyes to the dangers of so-called grooming gangs. These girls were sacrificed at the altar of preserving the ideology of multiculturalism After all, he did all that for Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a made-up crime against a fictional working-class girl. So surely he’ll do it for a documentary that lays out

Today

Robert Taylor

I think I’m in love with Ronnie O’Sullivan

I’m in love with snooker legend Ronnie O’Sullivan – purely in the sporting sense, of course.  I want him to win more than he does himself. He’s in yet another World Championship semi-final, this time at the ludicrous age of 49, but claims not to care whether he triumphs or not. I’ll be sobbing into my beer if he doesn’t. It’s his genius, unpredictability, hilarity and longevity that fascinate Why my obsession? After all, he’s everything I’m not. And I don’t mean just his talent, of which he’s got bucketloads. When he comments on politics, I always disagree. He hints he voted Remain (I didn’t) and campaigns for socialists (I

Chas Newkey-Burden

Is anyone actually enjoying this heatwave?

It’s going to be a scorcher in Britain today, with temperatures forecast to hit 29c. Naturally, lots of people will be throwing open their doors to bask in the warmth and sunshine, loving every moment of this summery spell. Lots of people, but not all people. Some of us don’t enjoy hot weather, so we won’t be celebrating this early onslaught of sizzling conditions. This isn’t a hot take: the truth is that I hate a lot about summer, so I’m not wild about this week’s heat. Some of us don’t enjoy hot weather, so we won’t be celebrating this early onslaught of sizzling conditions For most of the summer,

The Spectator

Letters: the cruelty of the Supreme Court trans ruling 

Cruel intentions Sir: Rod Liddle (‘Let’s strike a blow for honesty’, 26 April) seems to have fallen into the same trap as most writers who support the Supreme Court’s ruling on the trans issue – which is to refuse to differentiate between those who have undergone a full gender reassignment, so that they effectively no longer have the same bodies they were born into, and those who simply put on a dress and call themselves a woman. While it can clearly be argued that a man in a dress might pose a risk to women in single-sex spaces, it can hardly be suggested that a trans woman who has undergone

Paul Wood

The secrets of ‘God’s influencer’

Assisi In a medieval church built of white stone, pilgrims and tourists shuffle past the body of a 15-year-old boy in a tomb with a glass side. The boy is handsome, with dark curly hair, and wears a blue tracksuit top, jeans and Nike trainers. Everyone peers through the glass and some realise, with a start, that the perfectly preserved face and hands are eerily lifelike silicone. The real remains, decomposing for almost 20 years, are inside the effigy. This is Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager known as ‘God’s influencer’, who is about to become the first millennial saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The tomb is held up from

Laurie Graham

AI killed the Easter Bunny

On the grounds of advancing age, I had decided to ignore all the chatter about artificial intelligence and devote my remaining time to things I could properly understand. Then I discovered that one of my own copyrighted properties, the fruit of a year’s work, had been scraped into the AI maw without so much as a by-your-leave, and it became personal. I wrote to my MP who responded with template blandishments. This government… committed to blah blah… exciting prospects… safeguarding… potential opt-out system… a close watch, yadda yadda… Feeling impotent and no further forward, I returned to my knitting. It took the murder of the Easter Bunny to rouse me

Peter Jones

How to capture a lion

An 1,800-year-old cemetery on the outskirts of the Roman legionary fortress town of York has been found to contain a skeleton whose pelvis was bitten by a lion. Since most of those buried there were decapitated young men, the victim was surely a gladiator. That lion must have been a major entertainment coup for the soldiers. During the reign of the emperor Augustus, 400 tigers, 250 lions and 600 leopards were slaughtered in the gladiatorial arena, together with bears, wolves, elephants, boars and other wild animals. This was one important way to win the favour of the plebs and was a very big business, employing thousands of men across the

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why the trans debacle matters

I first stuck my neck out on ‘trans’ nearly a decade ago, when a societal obsession with pretending to change sex was already going great guns. I’d been disturbed by this unhinged cultural preoccupation ever since documentaries about little boys in dresses started to glut our television schedules in 2012. I’m not proud of having kept my own counsel in print for three years thereafter, but this radical fad emerged inexplicably in tandem with the stern message that a single discouraging word would end your career. I delayed writing about the topic because I was cowardly and, regarding my self-interest, smart. This entire fiasco is based on lies, and a

Mark Mason

The art of a great pub quiz

‘What’s the capital of Albania?’ The correct answer is, of course: ‘Who cares?’ If you’re at a quiz and this is one of the questions, find another quiz. Either you know it’s Tirana or you don’t, and in neither case is there any satisfaction. A really good quiz question is one you can work out. For instance: ‘Which major UK retailer has the same name as Odysseus’s dog in Greek mythology?’ Even if you don’t know your Classics, you can take a mental trip up and down the high street until you arrive at Argos. Or, in the case of one team I encountered, FatFace. A good quizmaster should also

Toby Young Toby Young

Bridget Phillipson’s perfect storm for schools

In its manifesto, Labour pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers and the Education Secretary reiterated this a few days after the election. ‘From day one, we are delivering the change this country demands and putting education back at the forefront of national life,’ said Bridget Phillipson. ‘We will work urgently to recruit thousands of brilliant new teachers and reset the relationship between government and the education workforce.’ If that really is her intention, she’s got a funny way of going about it. Last week, I got an email from Ian Hunter, CEO of the multi-academy trust I co-founded, alerting me to a funding shortfall in the next academic year. He’d

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The gobsmacking brilliance of baked Alaska

I have never seen a baked Alaska in the wild. Have you? I knew what they looked like, of course, all meringue cheekbones and technicolor interior, but I haven’t actually come across one. For whatever reason, they seem to be an endangered species – so I took to making them myself. The pudding was invented in the 18th century by Sir Benjamin Thompson (also known as Count von Rumford), a physicist who invented the double boiler, the modern kitchen range and thermal underwear too. Thompson realised that the tiny bubbles created when you aerate egg whites to make meringue provided so much insulation that you could torch the meringue and

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Texas is the perfect holiday destination

Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity to extend your stay, so most of your time is spent in airports and meetings. The taxi from the airport may be the cultural highlight of the whole trip. Nothing has a worse effort-to-reward ratio than staying in a hotel for a single night. And, worst of all, while you are awake at 3 a.m. watching

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I tell young people to pipe down at dinner parties?

Q. I find that when I go to mixed-age dinner parties the young all seem to be shouting. How can one tell them to pipe down without puncturing their ‘self esteem’? – N.H., London SW7 A. Young people’s voices have indeed become louder. The habit of wearing headphones and watching Netflix with subtitles so they can double-screen has compromised their ability to hear real-life voices and in response they shout. If, apart from the shouting, you still enjoy socialising with the young, you could equip yourself with noise sensitivity loop earbuds and use these in some capacity. Q. I am an artist and have started employing a neighbour who comes

Bruce Anderson

My new-found love for Marsala

Western Sicily is one of the most wonderful places on Earth. From the Greek temples in the south to the Arab-Norman architecture and frescos around Palermo, there are endless treasures and glories. There are also records of fascinating characters, especially the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Stupor Mundi. Historians still argue whether he was a prototype of a Renaissance ruler, with a distinct flavour of the Enlightenment, or merely among the most remarkable men of the high Middle Ages. He was a polymath, but one of his most distinguished qualities ultimately limited his inheritance. He found it impossible to stop fighting, not least against a succession of popes. In that particular

Dot Wordsworth

The gender frenzy has wrecked language

‘I regard this as a single-sex space,’ said my husband as I perched in his study, on the arm of a chair which was piled with books, trying to find out if he’d eat monkfish if provided with it. I doubt the Supreme Court will come to his aid, but gender frenzy has left some puzzling wreckage in the language. The Times recently reported that a drunken architect took a meat cleaver and pursued a teenager, ‘who locked themself into the bathroom’. The writer did not want to specify the teenager’s sex, but did want to keep him or her singular. Another author in the Guardian wrote about ‘how an

Catriona Olding

My high-speed bus chase

My youngest daughter and her husband moved to New York last October. Three days after they arrived, she tripped on a step and broke her ankle. ‘So annoying, I was wearing such a good outfit, Mumma.’ They didn’t know anyone. In a boot and on crutches she tackled umpteen flights of stairs in search of permanent accommodation, avoided crazy people in the street and faced up to taciturn bank and phone-shop employees. The unfriendliness of the city upset her more than the pain and inconvenience of the break. I couldn’t afford to visit then – so when a friend, American Cathy, who’s got a second home near me in Provence,

Melissa Kite

The Airbnb guest from hell 

‘Is there a secret passageway behind that door?’ said the weirdly difficult Kiwi as she eyed a door marked ‘private’ leading off the central staircase. ‘Yes, sort of,’ I said. Behind that door is the rear part of the house, unrenovated. So if you open it, the secret is you fall into a gap in one of the smashed floorboards, trip over a box of books or ten, fall against a stack of mattresses and tumble down a rickety staircase that lands you in the boiler and machinery room, where you will find the unfathomable clutter that is the builder boyfriend’s tool collection, the vast water tanks, groaningly driven by

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 3 May 2025

A few years ago, Sally Brock – women’s world champion many times over – told me she’d like some coaching in declarer-play from Artur Malinowski. Artur, she said, just seems to make more contracts than other people. And it’s true: he has extraordinary table presence. He relies on ‘reading’ his opponents as much as he does on playing the odds. I was reminded of this during a recent TGRs Super League match: West led the ♥️8. The obvious line is to cash the ♥️KQ, play the ♦️A, ruff a diamond, draw the last trump, play a spade to the ♠️A and cash the ♦️K. If the ♦️Q falls, you claim.

Luke McShane

Freestyle

Magnus Carlsen’s run of nine straight wins at the Grenke Freestyle Open was, even by his own standards, extraordinary. The world no. 1 is a zealous advocate for freestyle chess, in which the pieces on the first rank are placed in one of 960 possible configurations at the start of the game. The format has been tested in a series of elite events, but the Grenke Open – held in Karlsruhe over the Easter weekend – was one of very few freestyle events open to players of all levels. Based on the standard of Carlsen’s opposition (which included seven grandmasters), he would have expected to score 7/9 in normal chess

Luke McShane

No. 848

White to play. Dardha-Sorensen, Grenke Freestyle Open, 2025. The knight forks rook and bishop, and Re6-e3 runs into another fork with Nd4-c2+. Which move enabled Dardha to decide the game in his favour? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 5 May. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1…Bf3 with the idea 2 gxf3 Rh6 mate. White tried 2 Be6 but resigned after 2…Rxg2+ Last week’s winner Phil Hair, Cambusbarron, Stirling