Society

Thursday

Madeleine Teahan

Carrie Johnson and the reality of having four children

While I am delighted to hear that Poppy Eliza Josephine Johnson, the fourth child of Boris and Carrie Johnson, arrived safely on Saturday, I’d be lying if I said that a small part of me didn’t die on seeing Carrie Johnson’s latest Instagram photos of the last days of her pregnancy. The cinematic shots of little tots kissing her belly, in her immaculate home, were not even the most implausible part of the shoot. Instead, it was the photo of her sitting alone, devoid of any children climbing up her legs or chewing her luscious hair. One elderly gent witnessed me trying to cross the car park with three kids

James Hanson

Phone theft is out of control in London

It just happened to be my birthday. A Friday lunchtime at the start of November. Broad daylight. I had left Oval tube station and was about to turn onto my road. But as I strolled along the pavement, airpods in, replying to happy birthday messages on WhatsApp, the inevitable happened. Snatch. My phone was lifted straight out of my hand by a teenager on a bike. I suppose it served me right for listening to The Rest is Politics at the time. The police, of course, were completely uninterested when my phone was stolen. My case was closed within 48 hours, despite the theft occurring on a road plastered with

Jawad Iqbal

We expect too much of Emma Raducanu

No one seriously expected Emma Raducanu to beat Iga Swiatek in her second round match at the French Open. Swiatek, a four-time champion in Paris, is nicknamed the ‘Queen of Clay’, having won 37 of her 39 matches at Roland Garros. Even so, few will have anticipated the scale of the drubbing that took place. Raducanu admitted ‘I have to improve’ after being completely outplayed during the 6-1, 6-2 defeat. One match commentator even went as far as to describe Raducanu as ‘Iga’s personal ball machine’. That is cruel and unfair. Raducanu was simply outclassed by a far better opponent and given a brutal lesson in tennis at the highest

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

We still need Jane Austen’s icy wisdom

I managed to sit through most of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius the other night. I endured luvvies and minor academics and even Cherie Blair, all wide-eyed at the brilliance of their heroine. She was inevitably presented as edgy and funny and brave and ground-breaking and mould-breaking and ball-breaking and oozing girl power. One of Austen’s prime targets is clumsy groupthink, which makes her pretty relevant to the age of social media Equally predictably, no one mentioned the key to her writing’s power, to her authorial authority: her moral intensity. It’s the truth about her that’s universally unacknowledged. It is hard to talk about – we don’t like moralists nowadays,

Philip Womack

We’re losing the ability to read

A recent American study, called ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’, analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at two Midwestern universities. You may be surprised to discover that the title is not ironic. That they don’t read very well is an understatement along the lines of Spike Milligan’s ‘I told you I was ill’. The study’s subjects were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. A doddle, you’d think, for anyone reading Eng lit at a university. Well, you’d be wrong. Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens’s prose.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Will Labour’s rail replacement service leave travellers stranded?

By spooky coincidence, on Saturday night I watched an old episode of Slow Horses in which a passenger died mysteriously on a replacement bus between High Wycombe and Oxford Parkway – and on Sunday I woke to reports that the first service of the new era of rail renationalisation, the 5.36 from Woking to Waterloo, had also featured a replacement bus. Nobody died, but it wasn’t a good omen. Nor was it quite the ‘turning point for the future of our railways’ that Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander declared. South Western Railway’s return to state hands this week was in fact the fifth major passenger franchise to go that way –

The Spectator

Will renationalising the railways lead to a better service?

Domestics policy Brigitte Macron, wife of Emmanuel Macron, was seen to push him in the face as the doors to their plane opened on arrival for a visit to Vietnam. The French President claimed they were just joking. It will kindle memories of awkward moments between Donald Trump and his wife Melania, as well as the incident in June 2019 when police were called to the south London home of Boris Johnson’s then-girlfriend Carrie Symonds after reports of a heated argument, apparently about wine being spilled on a sofa. – It is increasingly hard for politicians to keep their domestic disputes private. Harold Macmillan and his wife, Dorothy, got  through

The Spectator

Letters: Britain sold its fishing industry down the river

Hard reset Sir: Once again we must debate Brexit (‘Starmer vs the workers’, 24 May). The ‘reset’ agreement does give more control over UK domestic policy to the EU, if the points outlined in it are followed through. I assume they will be, as that’s what Labour’s front bench wants. (The prospect of us rushing through EU passport control, as Michael Gove and others suggest, is still unlikely, though – the document states only that there will be the ‘potential use of e-gates where appropriate’.) Britain must pay for many of the extra ‘benefits’. Apparently the boost to the UK amounts to £9 billion by 2040, but I’m unable to

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The war on normality

Exciting news. To ‘showcase the vibrant diversity of both marine life and the LGBTQ+ community’, the visionary Bristol Aquarium has just announced a one-off tour of non-binary fish. On 28 June, its Sunset Seas exhibit will ‘celebrate love, life and the beauty of being yourself’ by illuminating with brightly coloured lights a collection of creatures that ‘defy the binary, change sex and mirror the spectrum of identities found in the human world’. Adults-only tickets are a mere £18.50, so rush to reserve your place now. We’re presumably to conclude from this racy reveal that because some fish can change sex and hermaphroditic undersea organisms are commonplace, for humans sex is

Douglas Murray

The derangement of Harvard

It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said that he would ‘rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University’. Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today. Harvard is currently having a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way in which the university responded to the 7 October attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still on-going, more than 30 Harvard University student organisations signed a letter which claimed to hold the ‘Israeli

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army

Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. ‘There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either,’ he said. The problem was twofold. Firstly, that is not the official policy of western allies. Secondly, Germany has not provided Ukraine with any long-range missiles. Partly that is a political choice by Germany, but there is also the fact of the inherent weakness of the Bundeswehr itself. Merz’s new government has recognised the limited nature of his military, vowing

Arabella Byrne

Is it ever acceptable to ask to swim in a friend’s pool?

I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the blue lining beneath pale feet; the peculiar, chlorinated smell of the pool hut where you do the knicker trick; the scratchy pool towel, the near-collapsing deckchair by its side; the greying sky overhead. There’s the swimming, too, but that’s not what gets me. No, the English pool is a particular social idea, a knowing nod to vulgarity, a paradis artificiel in our rainy climes. Chips Channon, an early adopter, knew it when he insisted on putting in a pool at Kelvedon in 1937, as did Viscount Astor when he went

Sean Thomas

The lost art of getting lost

One of the quietly profound pleasures of travel is renting cars in ‘unusual’ locations. I’ve done it in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Syria and Peru (of which more later). I’ve done it in Yerevan airport, Armenia, where the car-rental guy was so amazed that someone wanted to hire a car to ‘drive around Armenia’ that he apparently thought I was insane. Later, having endured the roads of Armenia, I saw his point – though the road trip itself was a blast. Recently I rented a motor in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they were slightly less surprised than the Armenian had been, but nonetheless gave me lots of warnings and instructions, chief of which

Peter Jones

Why did the ancient Greeks have so many gods?

Writing in a lesser organ, Matthew Parris wondered whether most ancient Greeks ‘really, sincerely, did believe in their bizarre pantheon of gods’. Belief in a single god was at that time limited to two peoples: Jews and Zoroastrians (and Egyptians once, briefly). To everyone else, perhaps the sheer variety of the world, the extraordinary generative power of nature and the impossibility of making secure predictions about anything suggested a multitude of powers at work. Since it was obvious that earth and sky combined to control nature – man’s only resource – it was not unreasonable for the ancient Greeks to see those features as the first two gods and then,

Toby Young Toby Young

My sitcom-worthy walking holiday

I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes it sound more physically demanding than it was. Billed as ‘gentle guided walking’, it was more like an ambling holiday, and the distances weren’t very great. On the second day, I was anxious to make it to the pub to watch the League One play-off final, so raced ahead and completed the walk – the entire walk – in less than an hour. It was a packaged tour organised by HF Holidays, a co-operative set up as the Holiday Fellowship in 1913 by Thomas Arthur Leonard, a non-conformist social reformer.

Christian Wolmar

How to survive a Chinese banquet 

When heading to China on a business trip, I was somewhat bemused to be warned about the banquets I would be attending. Do not sit next to the host, I was told. I was to find out why. Learning the rituals of banquets is an essential part of doing business in China. I was treated to at least one every day on a ten-day trip around the country – and sometimes two or three. There is no such thing as a casual business lunch. Any meal will turn into a semi-formal event held in a private room and hosted by the most senior person in the organisation. The meal starts

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

A challenge for the electric car sceptics

I once heard of a couple who were teachers in their mid-fifties. Having pooled the proceeds from selling both their flats when they moved in together in the 1990s, they found themselves in the happy position of owning a mortgage-free west London house worth more than £1 million. He was originally from Norfolk, and was eager to move back to a larger and prettier country home costing half the price. They could then bank £500,000 in tax-free profits, retire early and travel the world. She, however, was a lifelong Londoner who refused to leave London. Not knowing all the facts, I cannot say who was right. But it might help

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The naked truth about life modelling

When I left university, I prepared for a short spell of poverty while I sent off amusing and opinionated articles to newspaper editors who needed the work of smart alecks like me to entertain their readers. My short spell of poverty lasted 17 years. In the meantime, I survived on odd jobs, including a stint as a life model. ‘Starts at ten,’ said Piers, a friend who taught at a college in Kensington. Before my shift, I flipped through Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art in case a life model was expected to know the classical poses by heart. I imagined Piers starting me off with an easy one: ‘The

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do you leave a party early?

Q. How can you leave a party early – e.g. at midnight rather than 4 a.m. – without everyone thinking you are letting the side down? My partner and I really enjoyed a recent wedding of two friends but we had to take a flight to the wedding and therefore had a really early start. By midnight we had been up for 16 hours without a break and, although it was really fun, we were shattered and just wanted to go back to the hotel. However, when we mentioned we were leaving, the whole table turned on us and we had to stay on till the bitter end. What should