Society

Today

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Hands off my prostate

Too much information. That’s what you’re about to get. I wouldn’t read another line if I were you. I will be talking, at length, about my prostate and, by extension, my old fella and why I will not let the medical clergy anywhere near either of them, not the private medics or the chaotic maniacs who work for the NHS. I don’t mind whipping it out for you, though – and so this is an article which is both repulsive in its personal revelatory details and will also, if anyone takes it seriously, result in 230 premature deaths over the next decade or something. I don’t think it’s going to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: ‘Misleading’ Reeves, trial without jury and Great Yarmouth First

Home What Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told voters about the economy in a special press conference on 4 November was at odds with what the Office for Budget Responsibility had told her, Richard Hughes, its chairman, explained in a letter to the Commons Treasury Committee. Asked directly by Trevor Phillips on Sky if she had lied, Ms Reeves replied: ‘No, of course I didn’t.’ Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘There’s no misleading there.’ Chris Mason, the BBC political editor, concluded: ‘On one specific element of what the Chancellor and the Treasury told us before the Budget, we were misled.’ Mr Hughes then resigned as the

Peter Jones

How I bonded with Tom Stoppard over the classics

Many years ago, and well retired, I was working in my study when the phone rang and a voice said: ‘This is Tom Stoppard. David West put me on to you.’ West was professor of Latin at Newcastle University and Tom called him when he had queries about Latin. But he had a question about the ancient Greeks which David could not answer, so he suggested Tom try me. I have no memory of what the question was, but my answer must at least have satisfied him because he continued to throw the odd leg-break my way. To give some idea of his range of interests, on one occasion he

The Spectator

Should a two-bedroom flat worth £2m be called a ‘mansion’? 

Many mansions Does a two-bedroom flat worth £2 million deserve to be called a ‘mansion’? — The word ‘mansion’ is borrowed from the old French mansion, which means any old house. And so it was in English until the 18th century. It also had associations with a home lived in by a priest. — The first instance of ‘mansion’ being used specifically for a grand home was in 1512, according to the OED. In 1865, the word was being applied to lodging houses in Brighton, while the Westminster Gazette in 1893 defined it as a house with a back staircase. By 1901 blocks of flats in London were being called

Yesterday

Alexander Larman

Meghan's Netflix Christmas special is unendurable

On the Live Aid charity single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, Bono sings the (somewhat incongruous) line ‘Well tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you’. Although he is referring to starving children dying in poverty rather than well-heeled Americans appearing on television, much the same sentiment applies to the unfortunate ‘special guests’ who have been corralled into the latest (and, presumably, last, unless the ratings pick up dramatically) episode of With Love, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix-funded wallow in self-regard and vanity. This instalment is festive-themed, and comes with all the joyful élan of a drunken department store Santa placing a lump of coal in a child’s stocking.

Druin Burch

Junior doctors are striking for the wrong reason

Oh God, another junior doctor strike. That seems to be the feeling of the country and of the junior doctors I’ve spoken to. Certainly it’s the feeling of the consultants, like myself, who will be covering for them. Why the BMA has called another strike is clear. They haven’t got what they wanted, and their current mandate expires in early January. What is less clear is whether they should be striking at all. During the last strikes I wrote that the majority of juniors weren’t striking chiefly for a pay rise, but because their jobs and prospects of career progression are being allocated to foreign doctors who, data shows, perform

Laurie Wastell

What the Blob doesn’t want you to know about ethnicity and crime

Should the police disclose the ethnicity and background of suspects in high-profile crimes, and how soon should they reveal this information? In the year since the Southport unrest – in which migrant hotels were attacked after online claims the attacker had been an asylum seeker – the British state has had to ask itself this question. While the ethnicity and nationality of criminal suspects were routinely talked about in the 1980s, since the 1999 Macpherson report into ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police, with its concerns racial stereotyping, the police have become far more reluctant to do so. When it came to Southport, for days we were only allowed to know that

Tuesday

Zoe Strimpel

How will Britain survive without Sally Rooney?

I am not sure there are numbers small enough to capture the net literary loss to Britain of Sally Rooney’s books no longer being published here. Nonetheless, it seems that the would-be criminal bestselling author is banking on the withdrawal of her books and the television based on them being a huge deal – one major enough to shift Home Office policy in favour of Jew-haters at home and abroad. What a heavenly idea: the most politically odious, witless writer in generations being locked up till I’m almost a pensioner Rooney, a keen supporter of Palestine Action, now a proscribed terror group in the UK since breaking into RAF Brize Norton

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The day net zero died

Quietly this afternoon, the government’s last remaining hope of achieving net zero by 2050 drained away. BP has abandoned its project to develop a ‘blue’ hydrogen plant on Teesside which was supposed to produce the gas at a rate of 1.2 GW. It is not just a defeat for net zero ambitions but for Ed Miliband personally, given that he had fought hard in cabinet to advance the project while Keir Starmer and business secretary Peter Kyle had favoured using the site for a rival data centre. The data centre is now likely to proceed – an energy-hungry project in place of a green energy one. It is not just

Stephen Pollard

Your Party's implosion almost makes me feel sorry for Jeremy Corbyn

I’ll fight you if you contradict my assertion that The Producers is the funniest film ever made. It’s celluloid perfection. And the musical – now running in the West End, do go – is almost as wonderful. But what I hadn’t realised until this weekend’s inaugural Your Party conference is that there are some people who take the film’s plot not as a brilliant comic device but as a ‘how to’ guide to running a political party. Despite a meagre 2,000 people attending the conference, they have still managed to find ways to split into a multitude of factions The Producers is about a Broadway impresario who comes up with

Sunday

The Reverend Michael Coren

Anti-Semitism still lurks in Christianity's shadow

Last year I visited Lincoln for the first time. It’s difficult to resist the elevated beauty and dominant cathedral, but also hard to avoid the plaque inside, full of contrition, explaining the 13th-century blood libel, where local Jews were accused of murdering a child so as to use his blood during their rituals. The result, predictably, was yet another wave of anti-Semitism, and Jews tortured and murdered. Such obscenities would be repeated about Jews throughout mediaeval England until their eventual expulsion in 1290. Yet even after England forcibly removed the Jewish population, the Christian idea of the Jew as an outsider, whose only role in the Biblical story was a

Paul Burke

The lost art of the British sex comedy

Today, would have been the 80th birthday of the long-forgotten actress named Mary Millington. Blonde, petite and delicately beautiful, she was the undisputed queen of an equally forgotten genre of cinema – the 1970s British sex comedy. There’s even a blue plaque in Soho celebrating Mary and her most successful film, Come Play With Me. Seamy cinemas in Soho were the natural home for Millington’s films but they were also shown in ABCs and Odeons all over the country. When I was at school, I worked at my local Odeon, which had three screens. Upstairs in screen one, you could see the big new release. Downstairs in screen two, last week’s big new

Claire Jackson

John Lewis's Christmas decorations are its tackiest yet

John Lewis’s new ‘heirloom splendour’ Christmas range features baubles that mimic a miniature vacuum cleaner, sewing machine, TV – permitted its status in the collection by dint of its bulbous antenna – and a morose-looking pink dog presumably modelled on a Staffordshire figurine. If one were to decorate an entire tree in these monstrosities, it would cost upwards of £300 – that is if you followed the advice of that other seasonal stalwart M&S, which opines: ‘We recommend 40 filler baubles as your base layer, 18 statement pieces and eight collectable ornaments for added wow factor.’ If you were to try to separate your statements from your collectibles, there’s more:

Saturday

Daniel Johnson

Tom Stoppard was himself to the end

‘Tom Stoppard is dead.’ For anyone who cares for the theatre, the English language, and especially for those of us who knew him, these words are as unthinkable as they are hard to bear. How can such a force of nature, such a generosity of spirit, such a voice of sanity, have fallen silent? And yet he has gone. To the end, his body emaciated by cancer, he was still the old Tom: self-deprecating but full of ideas and plans. He might have one more play inside him, he told me, but his fingers could no longer physically write and dictation somehow stopped the words from flowing. He was cared

Douglas Murray

Sir Tom Stoppard: ‘I aspire to write for posterity’

Sir Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, died at his home in Dorset yesterday aged 88. In 2019, he gave a rare in-depth interview to Douglas Murray. Sir Tom Stoppard is Britain’s – perhaps the world’s – leading playwright. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, his family left as the German army moved in. The Strausslers were Jewish. In adulthood he learned that all four of his grandparents were killed by the Nazis. His father was killed by the Japanese on a boat out of Singapore as he tried to rejoin his wife and two sons. In India his mother married again, to an English Army man who gave

Robin Ashenden

Claude Lanzmann would despair of today's Europe

The late Claude Lanzmann, director of the monumental Shoah – the nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust, released in 1985 and widely considered the greatest cinematic work on the subject – would have turned 100 this week, a destiny he missed by only eight years, dying in 2018. What would the filmmaker – who devoted almost a decade to his masterpiece, nearly obliterating himself in the process – make of Europe in 2025, a place where idealistic crowds of the young march for Israel’s annihilation, where the words ‘Dirty Jew’ are spray-painted on Parisian walls, and where, in the first six months of 2025, there were a registered 646 anti-Semitic acts

Nigel Jones

We’ll miss juries when they’re gone

At the dawn of my stellar journalistic career I served for two years as Crown Court correspondent of the Cambridge Evening News, and every working day would dutifully cycle to the city’s Guildhall to witness juries deciding the fate of the unfortunates who appeared before them. With that experience, I have more than an amateur interest in Justice Secretary David Lammy’s reported plan to scrap jury trials in all but the most serious cases, such as murder, manslaughter and rape, and replace juries with courts presided over by judges. Lammy’s motive is said to be the need to clear the vast backlog of 80,000 cases currently awaiting trial, as justice

Andrew Tettenborn

There are some crimes where only a jury can ensure justice

David Lammy’s plans to prune the right to trial by jury are certainly drastic. Juries would remain only for murder, manslaughter, rape and cases deemed to be in the public interest, with other offences carrying sentences up to five years tried by judge alone. Lawyers are predictably unhappy at these proposals. They see them as seriously compromising the traditional rights of defendants to be tried by their peers, not to mention revealing the hypocrisy of the man who, under the Tories, robustly defended the right to trial by one’s peers. They also think, rightly, that Lammy is now acting not so much from principle as from a desperate need to

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why the BBC keeps on blundering

The dust is settling on the BBC’s latest crisis over its sloppy editing of a Donald Trump video, but it won’t be long before the next blunder. The reality is that every BBC crisis is epiphenomenal: the anger that periodically flares up against the BBC is rooted in our frustration that it fails to do the impossible and provide cultural order and unity. This is hard to articulate, so we magnify secondary issues like the pay of its top presenters, and perceived bias in the news. In doing so, we ignore the real problem: that the BBC can’t win. We can no longer trust the BBC to shelter us from

Friday

Lucy Dunn

France finally agrees to intercept Channel migrant boats – but there's a catch

After months of pressure from Britain, France has agreed to begin intercepting small boats in the Channel. The move comes after Keir Starmer wrote a letter urging Emmanuel Macron to support the proposal, telling the French leader that we ‘have no effective deterrent’ for migrants hoping to get to the UK illegally by sea. As reported by Le Monde, Starmer insisted: ‘It is essential that we deploy these tactics this month.’ France will intervene only before traffickers have picked up passengers The plan will see French security forces allowed to stop the small boats while they’re at sea, the caveat being that France will intervene only before traffickers have picked up