Society

Jonathan Sacerdoti

We need to talk about Islam

I did not come to Islam through theology. I came to it through fear, threat and hatred directed at me and the world I live in. I think the first time I became aware of something called Islam was in 1989, when Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’ for writing his novel, The Satanic Verses. Images of furious men immolating books spread around the world and seared themselves into my childhood mind, fixing fear and confusion to something I did not yet know how to name. My father, a bookseller, insisted on continuing to sell the book, but decided, soberly, that it would have to be kept

Nicola Burkinshaw

No, Lady Macbeth isn't a trans man

William Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is many things: ruthless, ambitious, manipulative, flawed. But there’s one thing she isn’t: a man. Or so I thought. For almost a decade, I have been working as a private tutor helping students studying English and history. I love my job: there’s few things better in life than reading great literature and discussing it with keen youngsters. Often, tutoring is about filling in gaps in their knowledge; sometimes it’s about correcting misinterpretations. Most recently this meant I had to unpick the suggestion that Lady Macbeth was, in fact, a bloke. The problem appears to have come from the line in Macbeth: ‘Unsex me here’ Predictably, the

Ross King

Are we failing to learn the lesson from Ancient Rome's riches-to-rags tale?

Today’s tech billionaires, property tycoons and hedge-fund titans have nothing on the ancient Romans. Julius Caesar, who plundered Gaul for both gold and slaves – at one point selling 53,000 captives from a single tribe – had a fortune valued at $5.4 trillion (£4.1 trillion). His wealth was on a scale that makes today’s billionaires look modest. Caesar’s riches were so great that he was worth more than Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Larry Ellison combined. His fortune was inherited by his great-nephew, Octavian, who, as Augustus, added to the family pot: by seizing Egypt he became, arguably, the richest man of all time. Even the sternest Roman

Yardena Schwartz

How the first Palestinian leader became a Nazi war criminal

If the founding leader of the Palestinian national movement had been wanted for Nazi war crimes, you might assume this would figure in every modern debate about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet one of the darkest, most inconvenient facts of twentieth-century history has remained strangely peripheral: the intimate alliance between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Nazi regime. The founding father of the Palestinian cause was an unapologetic Nazi collaborator who abetted an actual genocide Many have seen the image of Husseini meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1941. Yet few know what they discussed and what Husseini went on to do for the Third Reich.

Today

Katherine Pangonis

Brigitte Bardot's rejection of fame was her most radical act

In 1956, Brigitte Bardot was invited to the Royal Command Film Performance in London, where she would be presented to Queen Elizabeth II. She was thrilled – not only to meet our queen, but the other one too: Marilyn Monroe would also be present. Bardot later recalled the evening with a mixture of awe and amusement. Monroe, she insisted, was the real star: radiant, charming, fragile. This brief encounter between the two most famous blondes in cinema history captured, in miniature, a fork in the road between two kinds of fame. Six years later, Monroe would be dead. She was found nude in her Los Angeles home, killed by a drug overdose, aged just 36. Even

Saturday

Jim Lawley

England's Ashes Test triumph is long overdue

England have just won the fourth Test match against Australia by four wickets. In a bizarre, low-scoring game at Melbourne that was completed inside two days they recorded their first Test win in Australia in 15 years. The pitch was freakish; this was the first Test match on Australian soil without an individual half-century for nearly a hundred years. England recorded their first cricket Test win in Australia in 15 years Set to score 175 in conditions which, to put it mildly, made batting extremely difficult, openers Zak Crawley (37 runs off 48 deliveries) and Ben Duckett (an even more quick-fire 34 off just 26) set the tone with aggressive ‘Bazball-style’

Rory Hanrahan

Why pubs shouldn't ban Labour MPs

In Britain’s public houses, a rebellion is brewing. Landlords, hit hard by the Labour government’s fiscal measures – higher employer National Insurance, slashed business rates relief, and policies that threaten closures – have started discussing boycotts. The plan: bar Labour MPs from the premises as a protest against the erosion of the hospitality sector. As a pub manager approached to join this effort, I’ve considered it carefully. Yet I must reject it. Such a ban, however appealing in frustration, is anti-conservative and undermines the pub’s role as a neutral space. The plan: bar Labour MPs from the premises as a protest against the erosion of the hospitality sector The facts

Robin Ashenden

How Badenoch bounced back

One of the origin stories about Kemi Badenoch’s career as politician is that, while waiting to be interviewed as candidate for Saffron Walden, she sat alone, listening through headphones to Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – that pounding, sinew-stiffening theme to Rocky III. Given the ups and downs of her year as leader – not unlike a Rocky film in itself – it now seems a prescient choice of song. Kemi, in the past month, has finally come out punching. It was Badenoch’s tour de force response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget of Broken Promises, that seemed to change her fortunes Perhaps the wait was unavoidable – few newly-elected party leaders

Piotr Wilczek

Britain doesn't need to become great again – it already is

After three-and-a-half years as Poland’s ambassador in London, I’ve come home with two strong impressions. The first: the United Kingdom remains one of the most astonishing places in the world. The second: the British are suddenly, and oddly, intent on convincing themselves it isn’t. Everywhere I went — dinner parties in Hampstead, conversations with taxi drivers — the refrain was the same: ‘This country is finished’ Everywhere I went — dinner parties in Hampstead, opinion columns in the Guardian, even conversations with taxi drivers — the refrain was the same: ‘This country is finished.’ The trains are late, the NHS is on its knees, the education system is in meltdown, the

Michael Gove

From Porn Britannia to Political Chaos: The Spectator’s Year in Review

31 min listen

The Spectator’s senior editorial team – Michael Gove, Freddy Gray, Lara Prendergast and William Moore – sit down to reflect on 2025. From Trump’s inauguration to the calamitous year for Labour, a new Pope and a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the year has not been short of things to write about. The team take us through their favourite political and cultural topics highlighted in the magazine this year, from the Assisted Dying debate, the ongoing feud over Your Party and Reform’s plan for power, to Scuzz Nation, Broke Britain – and Porn Britannia. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.  

Friday

Joshua Young

Did Band Aid make a difference?

Is this the year that ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ – the charity song written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in 1984 to provide relief for the victims of famine in Ethiopia – finally died? The song has been condemned for its broad-brushstrokes lyrics about Africa, and it feels increasingly like the work of a naïve and distant past. But the truth is that it has always been better music than critics would like us to think. The question that matters most though is the hard one: did Band Aid improve the world? Urging the public to ‘feed the world’, Band Aid created the modern association between fame and

Mark Solomons

Save our Boxing Day football

Football’s race to destroy the sport’s finest traditions has surpassed itself, yet again. For the annual Boxing Day feast of top-flight football – something which has been part of the game’s calendar since 1913 – has been all but wiped out. This year there is only one Premier League match: Manchester United vs. Newcastle United. Once again, football fans are paying the price We shouldn’t be surprised by the death of Boxing Day football. The last few years have seen TV bosses, club owners and the Premier League itself try and suck the joy out of the game for supporters, particularly those of us who actually go to matches. Interminable

Druin Burch

Christmas and the luxury of fallow time

Christmas is now a festival of family and overeating, yet it keeps its pockets of quiet reflection, even for those for whom the sacred has slipped away. There are times when life insists we do nothing, and some come at Christmas. Holidays bring downtime, moments when work and parties, preparations and cleaning, computer games and social media, all cease. William Henry Davies knew the value of time left fallow: What is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows. I remember a fertile silence as a young man in a wintry

Thursday

Patrick West

Iron Maiden at 50: how heavy metal became mainstream

The death of the Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne this July, and the huge reaction it provoked worldwide, represented something of a landmark to us heavy metal fans. After decades of having been shunned, scorned and ridiculed, this genre had not only become acceptable, but the passing of the frontman of heavy metal’s founding fathers became an occasion for national mourning. How different it had been in the 1980s. In that decade, heavy metal was deemed a form of music made by morons, for morons. And the undisputed kings of the genre in that decade were Iron Maiden. They were certainly my favourite band at the tail end of that

Chas Newkey-Burden

Christmas dinner is hell for vegans

It’s one of the last bastions of national orthodoxy, one that people look forward to for months, but many vegans dread Christmas dinner. It’s not the food that’s the problem – it’s the conversation. Veganism is now as mainstream as oat milk lattes, so for 364 days of the year it barely raises an eyebrow, but come 25 December it’s often seen as a personal affront to centuries of tradition. Politely declining the turkey is treated as a personal assault upon centuries of gravy-soaked heritage.  As the seasonal sitting wears on, even mild-mannered relatives can metamorphose into belligerent barristers for Big Meat. ‘But would you eat a pig if you

Rupert Shortt

The revolutionary meaning of Christmas

As stale as it is flawed, the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee’s view of Christmas nonetheless encapsulates secularist scepticism in revealing ways. Published three years ago, her broadside is a variation on complaints voiced every December in allied quarters for many decades. ‘Much as I dislike most Christian belief, the iconography of star, stable, manger, kings and shepherds to greet a new baby is a universal emblem of humanity . . . But the rest of it, I find loathsome. Why wear the symbol of a barbaric torture? Martyrdom is a repugnant virtue, so too the imposition of perpetual guilt.’ The Christian conviction is that God remakes human nature by defenceless love, rather

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

How to stop the next massacre of British Jews

No one remembers the ones they catch in time. Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein will quickly be forgotten and so will the carnage they planned to visit upon British Jews. The men were convicted at Preston Crown Court on Tuesday of preparing terrorist acts. A third man, Bilel Saadaoui, brother of Walid, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about planned terrorist acts. Walid plotted to open fire on a march against anti-Semitism in Manchester city centre before moving onto a Jewish area in the north of the city to continue the massacre. Police officers who got in the way were to be shot dead. It is not enough

Andrew Tettenborn

Is this finally the end of non-crime hate incidents?

Roll up for a Christmas surprise on the policing front. According to a leak from the College of Policing to the Telegraph, since confirmed by its chairman and in all likelihood condoned by a government desperate for an upbeat Christmas message, non-crime hate incidents are finally to go. Next month the College and the National Police Chiefs’ Council will formally announce a move to a more selective, and less intrusive, practice. Recording will be limited to a much smaller category indicating clear risks of harm or threats to particular communities, such as anti-Semitism. There is something deeply sinister about the state formally recording that a citizen has said something entirely

Druin Burch

The welcome tyranny of Christmas cheer

In 1946, buoyed by post-War optimism, the World Health Organisation adopted a famous definition. Health, it declared, was more than the mere absence of disease or infirmity, it was ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’. A beautiful and tyrannical idea, sentimentally idealistic and setting an impossible standard for human lives. In these qualities of cheerful and unreasonable despotism, it resembles Christmas. Our wish to make kids happy at Christmas turns us into untiring fifth columnists of festive tyranny On the first of November, collecting my cardboard cup of coffee in Costa, I noticed it was decorated with a festive scene. I scowled, which comes naturally, but felt

Francis Young

The ancient tradition of burning a Yule Log

To most modern Britons the words ‘Yule Log’ probably bring to mind that masterstroke of marketing that has enabled supermarkets to sell an ordinary chocolate roulade (with the addition of a plastic sprig of holly) as a speciality item for the Christmas table. But the edible Yule Log of our own day – to an even greater extent than the meat-free mince pies of modern Christmas – is a mere shadow of what it once was. The original Yule Log was an actual log – in theory, an enormous one that was large enough to burn between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night (5 January). Its evocative name preserved the pre-Christian Old English

Niall Gooch

The power and nostalgia of Christmas music

Picking up the children from school recently, I heard the lovely old carol ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ drifting slowly across the quadrangle. It was a recorded version played over loudspeakers as part of the Christmas light switch-on, rather than the work of rosy-cheeked choristers in gowns, and yet I felt a sudden, unexpected catch in my throat, and a pricking at the corner of my eyes. I am still trying to work out why I reacted, involuntarily, in that way. ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ does not have any specific personal resonance for me. Perhaps it was something to do with the poignant timelessness of the scene – children hurrying between ancient buildings,

Patrick West

Do Eskimos really have a hundred different words for snow?

Do the Eskimos have many more words for ‘snow’ than the rest of us, and does this question matter? As we approach the full blast of winter, now would seem a good time to lay this old chestnut to bed for good. The person we have to thank for setting this debate in motion is one of the founding fathers of social anthropology, the German-American Franz Boas (1858-1942). In his landmark work The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Boas mentioned in passing that ‘in Eskimo’, we find: One word expressing ‘snow on the ground’; another one, ‘falling snow’; a third one, ‘drifting snow’; a fourth one, ‘a snowdrift’. All quite unremarkable,

Damian Thompson

How transformative has 2025 been for Christianity?

21 min listen

Anglican author The Rev’d Fergus Butler-Gallie, Catholic priest Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith and Evangelical commentator Fleur Meston join Damian Thompson to reflect on 2025. They discuss Pope Leo XIV’s leadership so far, the choice of Dame Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury and why Christianity has been coopted by the far right. Plus, was the ‘quiet revival’ of Church-going the start of a trend – or just a blip? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

The ghosts of Andrew and Epstein will not stop haunting the royals

As the rest of the Royal Family prepare for the pageantry and pomp of their traditional Christmas, two ghosts have gatecrashed the party, in true Dickensian fashion. One phantom is that of the long-deceased Jeffrey Epstein, whose malign influence continues to stretch into the present day thanks to the release of the latest tranche of his emails with the great and good. And the second is that of a living figure whose reputation, rather the physical presence, is haunting the royals this festive season. The latter is, of course, the embattled Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, whose reputation has been traduced by his actions involving Epstein over the past decades regarding which Andrew denies