Society

Friday

Rory Sutherland

My points-based system for choosing our leaders

Our esteemed London editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. "The people of this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong." His remark sits within a fine conservative tradition: there is William F. Buckley, who stated: "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty." There is Thomas Sowell, who wrote: "Intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas…Whether their ideas turn out to work... is another question entirely." And of course there is Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to read PPE at Oxford.

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Dot Wordsworth

When does a drama become a psychodrama?

When Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing as its candidate last time around, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish Secretary, rejoiced at avoiding "three months of psychodrama – who’s up, who’s down, who’s getting on with who…" But as Gareth Roberts remarked in The Spectator’s Coffee House, "I’m not quite sure what the difference is between psychodrama and good old-fashioned plain original-flavor drama." Indeed, Mr. Alexander’s characterization of psychodrama sounds like the essential lineaments of pure politics: "Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out," as King Lear puts it. King Lear itself might be a classic psychodrama, if madness is the defining feature.

psychodrama
Piers Morgan

No one likes Arsenal, we don’t care

Arsenal’s triumph in finally winning the Premier League again after 22 long, often eyeball-wrenchingly tortuous years has gone down like one of Keir Starmer’s motivational “I’m not leaving!” speeches, which is ironic given the Prime Minister is an avid Gooner like me. It’s hard to understand why a club that boasts a fanbase including us, Jeremy Corbyn, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, the late Osama bin Laden and Prince Harry (whose matchday allegiance has followed a similar path to his royal duties, in that he never turns up) attracts such opprobrium that we were recently named the “most-hated supporters” in the league. But as with Millwall in their hooligan heyday, if no one likes us, we don’t care.

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William Cook

My annual pilgrimage along the route of the Berlin Wall

Each time I return to Berlin – that wonderful, awful city where I whiled away the best days of my misspent youth – I take a walk along the cobbled path that marks the route of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime since it came tumbling down, there isn’t much left to see. A few stretches have been preserved as memorials, but it’s mainly an absence not a presence – a ghostly gap between the backs of buildings, a fissure between past and present, between the hard truths of the last century and the uneasy ambiguities of today. Why do I persist with this melancholy Wanderung, year after year? Because a walk along the Mauerweg (as Berliners call that zigzag footpath) is the best way to take the temperature of this Faustian metropolis.

Berlin Wall
Bill Kauffman

The many versions of ‘Come Saturday Morning’

Wedding season has begun. First out of the gate this year was my young first cousin once removed, who entered marital bliss in a lovely Catholic ceremony in the small western New York city of Lockport, hometown of the logorrheic novelist Joyce Carol Oates and the supermodel cum hemorrhoid-cream spokeswoman Kim Alexis. As I sat nursing a non-alcoholic beer (I should’ve stuck with water) at the reception I awaited the father-daughter dance, and not only for its poignancy. I have paid attention to these ever since reading a newspaper article several years back that said Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” was then the second-most-popular song for this wedding-reception custom. Hmm.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The difficult pursuit of happiness

For six centuries, from the Renaissance forward, the architects and creators of modernity have promised and predicted a new world, one which, in Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words, would be dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness.” The birth of that world in its political aspect is being celebrated this year in the United States, as well as, to some extent or another, throughout the West. This phrase, so vague and rhetorical as to be meaningless, is also the best definition there is of the modern project. Hence the 250th anniversary of the birth of the US is an obvious moment to consider how far America, and with it the world it has so radically influenced, have advanced since 1776.

Ruaridh Nicoll

In Cuba, we’ve all become preppers

We may not be happy campers here in Havana. But increasingly we are campers. Enter any home, from the most privileged (a relative term these days as the blackouts rise to 22 hours a day) to the poorest, and the trappings of off-grid living are everywhere. Some of the kit wouldn’t shame the back of a hedge-fund weekend warrior’s tricked out Jeep as it wended its way into the wilds of Glacier National Park. Do you know what an Ecoflow Delta Ultra 3 is? Well I didn’t, until recently. It’s the latest in “portable power stations.” Basically a big battery, it can keep a freezer running for 12 hours, or power several fans through the night. But at $1,500, it’s 150 times the average Cuban monthly pension.

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Joel Salatin

How to save American farming

Farm bankruptcies in the US have risen by 50 percent in the past year. Soybean farmers lost an average of $100 per acre in 2025, according to the Department of Agriculture, while corn growers are set to lose $150 per acre this year. Meanwhile, the national beef herd is at its lowest level since 1950 and retail prices have jumped by 40 percent in the past 18 months. Normal businesses would diversify away from corn or soybeans and try to profit from the rising price of beef, as well as goods such as eggs and tomatoes. They would, in other words, react to the changing realities of the market. But American farms are not normal businesses. Most of my fellow farmers are stuck in a world of perverse incentives, from government subsidy and bailouts to financialized capital and farmland.

cults
Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith

The rise of the cartel cults

“And this,” I was told, five minutes after arriving in Mexico, “is where they murdered the Archbishop.” I was at the entrance to the car park at Guadalajara airport. The archbishop was Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who died in a hail of bullets on May 24, 1993, along with six other people. He was murdered for daring to criticize the cartels, at least according to the official narrative. There are other theories: he may have been caught in crossfire between rival cartels, or it may have been a case of mistaken identity, and Posadas was assumed to be a cartel head, many of whom, presumably, look like archbishops; or else it was the work of the government itself, which feared Posadas knew too much about its collusion with the cartels.

George Farmer

How to reclaim your life

I stopped charging my phone beside my bed four years ago and have never regretted it. Alarm clocks seemed destined to go the way of the DVD, but I am on a solo mission to restore them to bedside tables around the world. The harsh tone of the alarm is certainly no match for what Spotify can give us, but it’s worth avoiding the 30 minutes of doomscrolling that the phone inevitably causes. Since making the switch from the waking blue-light bath, I have rediscovered those early hours of the morning, with their associated peace and silence, before children and work invade my limited headspace. Carving out that half hour before the noise begins has helped restructure my priorities in life. Every year the Pope chooses a preacher for the Roman Curia’s annual Lenten retreat at the Vatican.

Thursday

Michael Gove

The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians

I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope. He has produced the most powerful political document of the year, taking on the greatest challenge of our times. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, deals with the changes which will be wrought to all our lives by artificial intelligence in the months and years ahead. AI will transform our economies and societies massively and irrevocably; it will change what it means to be human; it may even mark the end of humanity itself. If it takes the Pope to alert us to this revolution then perhaps the Reformation wasn’t such a good idea after all.

AI
Alexander Larman

AI Ozzy Osbourne is a terrible idea

If you were one of the millions of Ozzy Osbourne fans who mourned the death of the Black Sabbath frontman when he died last summer, then you may, or may not, be delighted at the news that he is soon to be resurrected, albeit in holographic form. Granted, a return from the dead might not seem entirely unlikely for the one-time "Prince of Darkness," but the form that his comeback will take is purely down to AI wizardry. The idea of a gleaming, sanitized Ozzy is a depressing one both technologically and in terms of what it represents for the music industry The digital companies Hyperreal and Proto Hologram are promising a whizz-bang experience that will allow no doubt grateful audiences not only to view Osbourne in his pomp, but also to interact with him.

Michael Murphy

Ireland is desperate for its own George Floyd moment

Ireland is in the midst of its own "George Floyd moment." At least, that’s how a string of international headlines have portrayed the death of Yves Sakila, a Congolese shoplifter who was pronounced dead in hospital after being restrained by security guards, one of whom appeared to kneel on his head or neck. The circumstances of the 35-year-old’s death are being investigated, but, as yet, there is no evidence it resulted from racism or excessive force. Court records show Sakila had a history of theft, and a post-mortem reportedly found no signs of foul play or visible injuries on his body. That has not stopped activists and parts of the establishment from co-opting a personal tragedy to fuel a campaign of racial grievance.

Wednesday

Theo Zenou

Meet the anti-Gretas: the women celebrating nuclear energy

Over the course of their lives, Americans have an average carbon footprint of 1,300 tons of CO2. Paris Ortiz-Wines, a young woman from San Francisco, has already canceled hers out. She could hop on a flight every week for the rest of her life, eat ribeyes at every meal and sip almond milk all day long, and still be in the clear. Back in 2021, Ortiz-Wines played a key role in the campaign that stopped the closure of California’s only nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. This has already saved more than 30 million tons of CO2 emissions.  Ortiz-Wines is part of a new generation of women advocating for nuclear energy, even though surveys show most women are skeptics. Call them the Nuclear Power Rangers.

greta thunberg nuclear
Nicholas Farrell

Our local nudists are running wild

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It was midnight, more or less, and my middle daughter, Magdalena, 18, said with all the untroubled bravado of youth: "Let’s go and find il rospo!" She was at the wheel of the Land Rover Defender and we were involved in a nocturnal driving lesson. Rospo is Italian for toad. And if you say "Dio Rospo" ("Toad God"), that’s blasphemy, so as a good Catholic she doesn’t, whereas, as a bad one, I do because it is funny, as God would surely agree. We drove on slowly, passing half a dozen or so parked cars with solitary men inside them "Il rospo" is our family nickname for the fat man with the eyes of a dead person who emerges after dark in the village thanks to the theft of part of our beautiful beach by highly trained nudists.

Tuesday

Damian Thompson

What Pope Leo fears about AI

Pope Leo XIV has just passed the first great test of his pontificate. He has published a thoughtful encyclical on a controversial topic that (a) does not contain whole sections obviously farmed out to progressive lobbyists; (b) is not stuffed with semi-literate jargon; (c) does not display myopic hostility to capitalism; and (d) has been broadly welcomed by conservative Catholic commentators. Or, to put it more simply, it could not have been published in the name of Pope Francis. (I’m wording that carefully: popes rarely write their own encyclicals, and cynics suggested that the Argentinian pontiff did not even bother to read his.

Monday

Sam Leith

The Andrew investigation is looking increasingly desperate

"Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime" is the can-do attitude attributed to Stalin’s chief of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. There’s more than a flavor of that attitude, I think, in Thames Valley Police’s investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Two days ago, the news was led by a story, briefed by the police, that the scope of the investigation into the former Duke of York for possible Misconduct in Public Office was being widened to include questions of sexual misbehavior.

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Friday

Andrew Tettenborn

Why did police handcuff Henry Nowak?

Britain's police are meant to police without fear or favor, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that they don’t – think of how they hold, or too often do not hold, the ring impartially between supporters of Israel and Palestine, Muslim and Christian preachers, supporters and opponents of trans rights, or whatever. Does all this matter? The Nowak case, with an obvious victim, shows clearly that it does There is a tendency for the great and the good to say this is no very big deal; the police are doing their best in difficult situations, complainants are normally tiresome culture warriors or enablers of hate speech. Events in Southampton Crown Court over the last two weeks show how wrong they are. Partial policing can potentially be deadly.

Henry Nowak

Wednesday

Jawad Iqbal

The unbearable smugness of Arsenal fans

Arsenal are Premier League champions after a 22-year wait: their first title since the famous Invincibles season under Arsène Wenger in 2004. The title was sealed after Manchester City (serial champions, let’s not forget) failed to beat Bournemouth last night, handing Arsenal an unassailable lead at the top of the table with one game remaining. The team deserves all the plaudits for winning the Premier League, but what is it with Arsenal and their fans when it comes to celebrations? Why do they always go so over the top? It is cringeworthy stuff, reeking of a certain smug sense of undeserved entitlement, and enough to bring out the “celebration police” mentality in every other fan across the land.

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Tuesday

Gareth Roberts

My strange beef with Azealia Banks

It’s always fun when worlds collide – when two people whose paths should rightfully never intersect smash into one another like a car and train at a level crossing. I’ve enjoyed many such occurrences on the political scene over the years – like Mrs. Thatcher doing the video vote on Saturday Superstore with René from ’Allo ’Allo. But I never expected to find myself involved in one. I have to admit I never expected to get into the middle of a rap beef, let alone one connected to the Daily Telegraph That all changed on Saturday evening. There I was happily rolling pastry in the kitchen when suddenly my phone and other connected smart devices started flashing and pinging like a Chernobyl control panel.