Society

Thursday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Cornwall’s fishermen are being drowned by bureaucracy 

Bill Johnson is the assistant harbour master in Mousehole and skipper of the pilot Jen, a small boat of the inshore fleet. I know him because in summer, when tourists fill the tiny harbour with pleasure craft, he stands on the wharf offering conversation and advice. He is, of course, regarding the wreckage of Mousehole as a centre of the pilchard industry and home to Cornish people. A century ago, the harbour was a forest of masts: now just six fishing boats sail out of here. The rest are kayaks and paddleboards. But Bill is a kindly man, and he smiles on them. Fishermen were poster boys for Brexit, much

Christopher Howse

The Spectator’s 2023 Christmas quiz

Fairly odd 1. What had for 50 years been the name for Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit before it was changed this year? 2. Why did the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby, have to pay £510 in fines and costs? 3. Which country overtook France as the biggest buyer of Scotch whisky, despite imposing an 150 per cent import tariff? 4. For whose visit did Papua New Guinea declare a public holiday, only to find he decided instead to fly straight home from the G7 summit in Japan? 5. Which parents named their new son Frank Alfred Odysseus? 6. In which country were six children and two adults

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The dying art of thank-you letters

‘Still no word of thanks. No letter, no email, no text. No acknowledgement that it even arrived. Did it arrive? Did I post it to the wrong postcode? Did I tap in the wrong account number? Of course it arrived. He just can’t be bothered to thank me. Such bad manners! I blame his mother for not bringing him up properly.’ These are the insomniac thoughts of the older generation as they try to come to terms with the younger generation’s bewildering non-thanking habit. The silence of early January, the non-landing of letters from grandchildren and godchildren on the mat, the non-pinging of affectionate emails of gratitude, really pains them,

Dot Wordsworth

Why are quotes so often misattributed? 

‘Macmillan,’ said my husband with rare succinctness. Someone on the wireless had just asked who it was who said: ‘Events, dear boy.’ I agreed with my husband, as in moments of weakness I do. But what is the source of the quotation? The first rule is that most common quotations were not said by the people to whom they are attributed. The second rule is like unto it: a few big names – Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde – attract quotations as magnets attract iron-filings. So, talking of iron, Churchill’s phrase the iron curtain had been used before him. It secured attention, though, when he used it in a speech at

Roger Alton Roger Alton

My sporting questions for 2024

Could this be the year when England’s men win their first international football trophy for 58 years? After all, they have the best striker in Europe in Harry Kane and the best attacking midfielder in Jude Bellingham, both of whom are being treated like Wellington and Nelson at their respective clubs BayernMunich and Real Madrid. This should be about time too that pundits admit that the way Bellingham lit up the European Championships in Germany makes him, at the very least, Bobby Charlton’s equal. If he is not Sports Personality of the Year in 2024, something very odd must have happened in the space-time continuum. If Bellingham is not Sports

Peter Hitchens

My Christmas in Bucharest as Ceausescu fell

I never intended to spend Christmas 1989 on a short break in Bucharest. I had enjoyed a long, thrilling autumn in dark, sad cities in eastern Europe, running and marching with ecstatic crowds as they overthrew communism. But this had all been in the calmer, less exotic regions of the Warsaw Pact, where dumplings were on the menu, passions were equally stodgy, and both rebels and governments would rather hold press conferences than open fire on each other. I was in lovely but dreary Dresden when news came that Nicolae Ceausescu’s baroque dictatorship was tottering, and my foreign desk urged me to head to Hungary and on into Romania as

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Kitchen renovations are a zero-sum game

Writing a few weeks ago in The Spectator, Toby Young slightly begrudged his wife’s decision to install a new kitchen in the Acton home they have shared for 15 years. As Toby explained, the original kitchen ‘had been done to quite a high standard in the style known as “Victoriana”, which meant William Morris wallpaper, antique-glass light shades and a small, dimly lit kitchen… This was the height of fashion in the late 1980s and will probably be bang-on trend again when we put the house back on the market in ten years’ time. But my efforts to persuade Caroline to wait out the fashion cycle came to nought.’ There’s

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

‘The chocolate soufflé is too good for people’: Pavyllon at the Four Seasons Hotel, reviewed

One in, one out, as Rick says in Casablanca. Le Gavroche, which was the first restaurant in Britain to win three Michelin stars – and this was before Michelin stars indicated poor mental health in gifted chefs – closes in January, which is serious news in the land of London restaurants: a kind of Congress of Vienna with Michel Roux bowing out with the blood of infinite chickens on his knife. I don’t love Le Gavroche the way other critics do but I admire it, even if it means ‘urchin’, which is not witty when you consider its prices. There was a scandal involving staff’s tips going to management –

Alexander Larman

The Crown is going out in a blaze of camp glory

Say what you like about Netflix and Peter Morgan, the producers and creator of The Crown respectively, but they’ve certainly gone out in a blaze of either glory or outrage. The final six episodes of the sixth season were released separately to the first four, and it isn’t hard to see why. Taken cumulatively, their daring blend of fantasy, heavily fictionalised historical events and mischievous provocation amount to nothing less than the send-off that this always divisive and perennially popular show has merited since it began in 2016. It would take too long to detail all the divergences from the truth that the final episodes offer. Some of the most

Bruce Anderson

Let’s hope for good cheer this Christmas

A couple of years ago, I saw a charming cartoon. A boy and a girl aged about seven were in an earnest conversation. ‘Of course I don’t believe in Father Christmas,’ said the boy. ‘But we’ve got to keep up the pretence for the sake of the parents.’ This Christmas, all over the world, many parents will be especially keen to dwell on the great festival’s innocent joys. Innocence: in many places the fear is that the glory of birth will give way to the massacre of the innocents. Like the shepherds, a large number of people are sore afraid. Unlike the shepherds, their fear has no relief at hand

Wednesday

Joanna Williams

Why are MPs endorsing Stonewall’s rainbow laces campaign?

Our Members of Parliament are not short of stuff to do. There’s immigration – of the legal and illegal varieties – an economy on life support, post-lockdown problems with education, mental health and getting people back to work, as well as the NHS collapsing under the weight of its own waiting lists. Yet, remarkably, ten of our trusted representatives have found time amid their crushing schedules to become part of a charity’s marketing campaign. The Labour party features heavily, with Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Stella Creasy, Angela Eagle and several others putting in an appearance; Alison Thewliss and Kirsten Oswald from the SNP are game, and so, too, are a number of

Tuesday

Jawad Iqbal

Turkey’s shameful referee attack was waiting to happen

All football matches in Turkey have been suspended after a club president invaded the pitch and punched a referee in the face. The ugly and violent assault took place at the end of a game between Ankaragucu and Caykur Rizespor, which ended in a 1-1 draw. Faruk Koca, the Ankaragucu president ran up to the referee, Halil Umut Meler, and struck him in the face. Meler fell to the ground, only to be kicked by other people while he tried to protect himself. The referee had to be led to safety surrounded by a cordon of police officers. He is now recovering in hospital after sustaining a facial fracture. Koca and two

Alexander Larman

The convenient timing of Meghan and Harry’s Christmas video

There’s that well-known saying of ‘anything you can do, I can do better’. In what can only be an attempt to upstage the official Royal Family’s latest offering, this seems to be the credo of Harry and Meghan as they release a new, wholly vainglorious video showing the ‘impact’ of the Archewell foundation in 2023. If you’ve ever seen a teenager create a flashy ‘what I did on my holidays’ clip that is clearly designed to go viral on social media, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect from this entirely immodest offering. Over a tinkly would-be power anthem that begins with the lyrics ‘Over the hills and

Monday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why Nigel Farage failed on ‘I’m a Celebrity…’

The coronation of Sam Thompson, Scrappy Doo in human form, as King of the Jungle in this year’s I’m A Celebrity… was an inevitability. It was unthinkable that Tony Bellew – his still, stoic Scouse sparring partner – would not come second. And that Nigel Farage wouldn’t trail in third. When Farage made it through the public votes, all the way up to the final, there was much amused speculation about him coming out on top. The ‘banter’ outcome would’ve seen Farage take the crown, just for the sheer devilment of it. Yes, that would’ve been delicious, the ultimate wind-up of Farage’s many detractors. It was a pleasant daydream to imagine

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Stop sending Christmas cards! 

Christmas cards are the pits, aren’t they? A positive engine of seasonal ill-will. They take hours to do, if you do them properly, and wing across the country (and have you checked the price of a stamp lately?) to be received by people you like but don’t see, or people you see but don’t like – and to find themselves consigned to the recycling bin, in many cases, within thirty seconds of being opened. You feel guilty when you get a card from people you failed to send one to; and resentful when you don’t get a card from people you remembered to send one to. It strikes me, though, that we

Kristina Murkett

Teenage teachers won’t fix Britain’s classroom troubles

Teaching in the UK is in trouble. Less than half the number of secondary school teachers required this year, a record low, have been recruited, according to government figures released last week. STEM (science, engineering, technology and maths) subjects are particularly struggling: we only have 17 per cent of our target number of physics teachers and 63 per cent of maths teachers (down from 88 per cent last year). Yet this is a problem across the curriculum: the only subjects where the government met its targets were classics, PE and history. Teach First, the largest teacher training programme in the UK, announced this weekend that in order to tackle this

Sunday

James Hanson

Nigel Farage has left the jungle. What now?

Nigel Farage has left the jungle. For a brief moment it looked as if the original Brexiteer might pull off yet another electoral upset. Instead, he finished a creditable third on I’m a Celebrity… one of the biggest popularity contests on TV. This won’t be the last we hear of Nigel Farage Throughout the series, left-leaning commentators have accused ITV of deliberately ‘fun-washing’ (a depressingly 2023 phrase) Farage’s reputation. The comedian Stewart Lee wrote an especially humourless piece for the Guardian, which included a passage implying that because of Farage’s appearance in the jungle, Ant and Dec were somehow sympathisers of the Norwegian white supremacist Anders Breivik (yes, really). I

Ed West Ed West

The Tories aren’t being honest about foreign marriages

Western liberalism was built on the principle of marrying out. Our beliefs about the freedom of the individual ultimately stem from the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage, which helped create a worldview that was open, trusting and opposed to both clannishness and xenophobia. The medieval Church’s insistence that marriage be consensual was revolutionary and strange; back in the 13th century a romantic poem, The History of William Marshal, has the protagonist coming across an eloping couple who have defied their parents to seek true love. Our hero then robs them, and since the story was commissioned by Marshal’s sons to glorify him, we can assume that public opinion might have thought this

Niall Gooch

The Turner prize doesn’t make sense anymore

In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing philosophy in the US. ‘The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not… express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ He was giving voice to a venerable, and continuing, strain in left-liberal thought which regards conservatism as little more than incoherent grumbling about inevitable and irresistible change. In this view, such change is, naturally, best managed by those clever, mature left-liberals. Conceptual art has, like so many previous artistic movements, run out of steam There is a grain of