Society

Friday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Hamas’s return is revealing Gaza’s true colours

Remember that weird little Covid ritual of 2020, when every Thursday at 8pm people stepped out onto their doorsteps and applauded? Banging saucepans, clapping their hands, they lit up the miserable skies with cheers for the National Health Service. It was mawkish, and orchestrated to the point of theatre. But its aim was to express a kind of collective gratitude for those who had become the most visibly important figures in the national story. Nurses and doctors were held in the highest esteem. They were ‘society’s best’. That’s why all those people applauded. Crowds of Palestinian Arabs whooped and whistled, and filmed on their smartphones. They called out ‘Allahu Akbar’

Eliot Wilson

Why is the army’s top brass waging war on private members’ clubs?

The British Army – at its smallest size since we lost our American colonies in the 1770s – is facing the most challenging period in its history. More soldiers are leaving than joining. Why are they walking away? A sternly-worded letter from the Deputy Chief of the General Staff (DCGS), Lieutenant General David Eastman, rebuking colonels for their dealings with private members’ clubs, shows one reason why many are fed up with the Army. Eastman is concerned that the Army’s intended status as a ‘modern, inclusive, and forward-thinking organisation’ might be undermined Eastman is concerned that the Army’s intended status as a ‘modern, inclusive, and forward-thinking organisation’ may be undermined

Andrew Tettenborn

Human rights scepticism is now mainstream

When Nigel Farage introduced a bill in the House of Commons requiring the UK to leave the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) this week, it was clear that something has changed in British politics. It wasn’t the absence of deluded heckling from Labour MPs or Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, both of which were fixtures of the debate. And, no: the Reform leader’s bill didn’t get anywhere. No-one expected it to, but that was not the point. Such bills are not generally taken as serious legislative proposals; they are more ballons d’essai to gauge reaction. And reading between the lines, the reaction to this one is both informative, and also encouraging

Alexander Larman

It’s all over for Andrew Mountbatten Windsor

It’s all over for Prince Andrew or, as he is now known, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. The former Duke of York, ex-trade envoy and, for all we know, Grand Pooh-Bah of Kazakhstan, has been stripped of every one of his titles. Andrew has also been ejected from his Windsor mansion by his brother, the King. Mr Andrew Windsor, as we can now, finally, call him, has been served the punishment that his arrogant, selfish actions have merited all along In a terse, angry statement, Buckingham Palace that said that: ‘His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew will now

Chas Newkey-Burden

Halloween is being spoilt

It may be a pagan festival but thank God for Halloween and all its joys: the child’s delight at being dressed up and out after dark, our thrill at pretending to be frightened, the faint sense that for one night, the ordinary world has slipped its moorings. On Halloween, the country briefly remembers how to laugh at fear, instead of scrolling through it. This crown jewel of autumn strikes me as one of those events that manages to be both utterly absurd and, in its way, rather necessary. Like the Eurovision song contest, or marriage. Everyone from kids in Poundland skeleton suits to adults with too much eyeliner join this

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Embracing the occult, going underground & lost languages

34 min listen

Big Tech is under the spell of the occult, according to Damian Thompson. Artificial intelligence is now so incredible that even educated westerners are falling back on the occult, and Silicon Valley billionaires are becoming obsessed with heaven and hell. An embrace of the occult is not just happening in California but across the world – with ‘WitchTok’, a new trend of middle-class women embracing witchcraft. Is this spooky or just sad? And to what extent are they just following in the tradition of the Victorian charlatan? Host Lara Prendergast is joined by the Spectator’s associate editor – and host of the Holy Smoke podcast – Damian Thompson, alongside writers

The Spectator

Letters: The difficulties of reporting on Gaza

Future proof Sir: Douglas Murray asks why Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech understated the problems (‘Imagine what Enoch Powell might have said’, 25 October). The simple answer is that it couldn’t have said everything, but many of the omissions cited are referred to in Powell’s later speeches. During the 1970 general election campaign in Birmingham, for instance, Powell noted that ‘this country is today under attack by forces which aim at the actual destruction of our nation and society as we know or can imagine them’. He gave many examples of a ‘new psychological weaponry’ rendering the majority ‘passive and helpless’ by asserting ‘manifest absurdities as if they were

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

I’ve been enslaved by my Apple watch

Aside from streaming on an iPad, one of the few entertainments on offer when riding a stationary bike is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart-rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the blood oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has

Madeline Grant

Landlords need protecting too

Do you know how much faeces 30 dogs can produce over a couple of years? I have some idea because I recently helped my mother regain access to the small cottage adjoining her house, after she had rented it out to a nightmare tenant who caused incalculable damage. It took nine months to evict the tenant after she stopped paying rent, having already been in considerable arrears. Reclaiming the property proved onerous and expensive, involving legal instruction and eventually High Court enforcement. Upon finally entering with enforcement officers, some of us retched. We found half an inch of dog mess all over the floor and smeared across walls; empty bottles;

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Datageddon: Britain’s stats have become dangerously unreliable

There were cheers in the Treasury last month as the nation’s statisticians discovered a spare £3 billion down the back of the sofa. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) admitted that VAT receipts had been under-reported by £1 billion last year and £2 billion this year. The newly found cash will go some way to filling the Chancellor’s £30 billion fiscal black hole, but not everyone was celebrating. Just 150 miles west along the M4, at the home of the ONS in Newport, Wales, the mood was grim. The embattled agency was splashed across the papers for the wrong reasons. This error was just the latest in a long line

Mark Mason

How the Northern line brought T.E. Lawrence to The Spectator

If only the Northern line could get its act together. Last week saw further buffing of its reputation as the ‘Misery line’, with signalling problems that disrupted journeys for days and kept engineers baffled. But it could all be so different. The Northern could be famous for having the deepest station (Hampstead, 192ft), the highest point above ground level (the Dollis Brook viaduct, where the line runs 59ft above the road) and indeed the final station when the whole network is listed alphabetically (Woodside Park). It also has the only station with a single-syllable name. I’ll leave you to work that one out. Clue: it’s not, as someone once suggested

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘People can’t take a joke these days’: Michael Heath on wokeness, The Spectator and turning 90

When I joined The Spectator, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-storey Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She was married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with the home secretary, David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was Boris Johnson, then editor, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with assistant editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing,

Joan Collins

The day James Blunt stripped off in front of me

The beautiful British actress Samantha Eggar has died in LA. I hope that will be the last in a spate of deaths among friends and celebrities in the past three months. First it was Terence Stamp, the handsome actor who starred with Samantha in The Collector, which made them both into stars. Then the legendary Robert Redford, whose many fabulous performances in exceptional movies make today’s film output look positively anaemic. The Way We Were, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Indecent Proposal are just a few of the brilliantly entertaining films he starred in. I met him only once, on a flight from New York to

Luke Coppen

Satanic verses: the origins of Roman Catholic black metal

In his youth in the early 2000s, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s ‘most evil album’. The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its sing-song tones. English was also out of the question: he didn’t want to sound like Abba. That left Latin, the native tongue of the occult and, it is said, of demons. In a quest for suitably devilish lyrics, he pored over arcane texts. That led him to Latin editions of Sayings of the Desert Fathers – bad-ass

Catriona Olding

LSD was a fuss about nothing

The flight from Nice to Bristol was packed. As soon as the doors closed I spotted a hummingbird hawk-moth bumping about the lights beside the overhead lockers. Poor thing. I often see them on my little terrace, wings a blur, freakishly long proboscis burrowing deep into the flowers. A woman with a steely bob a few rows in front jabbed at it with her inflight magazine and when the creature landed at her feet stamped it to dust, saying loudly to the people around her: ‘You’re all safe now!’ The lady beside me, a hospital cleaner from Liverpool, clenched her fist. I had three hours to wait before the connecting

Melissa Kite

The war over my grass verges

Hanging a pair of gates at the rear of the house gave us so much satisfaction, it suddenly seemed strange that we had waited so long to do it. When we first moved here, I fell so in love with the place, and was so lost in a dream about rural Ireland, that I left the back of the property ungated, even though the rear of the house almost adjoins a small public road. Not a road, a boreen. A lovely little lane with grass down the middle. What possible hostility could occur on that? I was enjoying such naive notions about how relaxed our existence was going to be

Toby Young Toby Young

Bernard Cornwell: ‘I don’t believe in writer’s block’

They say never meet your heroes, but Bernard Cornwell didn’t disappoint. Knowing I’m a superfan, the events team at The Spectator asked me to interview him on stage on Monday and he was everything you could hope for: funny, candid, clever. The default register of very successful people in my experience is insincere modesty, but Cornwell was something different – falsely immodest. That is to say, there were moments when he blew his own trumpet, but in a way clearly intended to be ironic. The lasting impression was of someone completely at ease with his achievements – not puffed up, but justifiably proud. Few authors can match Cornwell’s accomplishments. He

Aidan Hartley

Somali nomads are living the good life

Northeastern Kenya We were in beautiful bush country up towards Somalia, in pastures that shone like spun gold in the sunset as herds of Boran cattle came into the bomas to suckle their calves. My hosts, Ogadeni clan stockmen who had invited me to travel here to look at their herds, showed me their favourite animals and then went off to pray, as hundreds of cows lay down to chew the cud. After prayers came a supper in jugs of frothing warm milk. In return, the herders accepted the bundles of qat leaves I had brought as a present for us all to chew. We became a little stoned on

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

My portable charger obsession

A femtosecond, derived from the Danish word femte meaning ‘fifteen’, is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to 10-15 or 1⁄1,000,000,000,000,000 of a second; in other words one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. A femtosecond is to a second as a second is to approximately 31.69 million years. Similarly, a femmosecond, from the French femme meaning ‘wife’, is a slightly briefer unit of time equivalent to the twinkling of an eye. It defines the imperceptibly fleeting interval between my wife saying ‘Rory, why on earth have you bought another portable charger?’ and my wife saying ‘Rory, could I borrow your