Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Aren’t women wonderful?

The mole specialist was wearing a pink Chanel-looking suit and pink diamanté shoes. By mole specialist, I don’t mean someone turned up dressed in Chanel to deal with moles on our land. I mean I went to see a top London dermatologist about a mole I was worried about, and when I walked into her office she looked so fabulous all I wanted to do was talk to her about her Jackie O miniskirt and jacket, given a twist with the sparkly stilettos. Before I could do that, however, she complimented me on my long striped coat. ‘Villa Gallo,’ I said, sitting down in front of her desk on the

Aidan Hartley

I’m losing the will to hunt

Laikipia, Kenya When I was eight I used to go fishing in the Indian Ocean beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar with Mohamed. Once we pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin – a filusi. In Spanish it’s known as the dorado, referring to its iridescent golden flanks. As we watched the fish suffocate in the tropical air, its pigment, sheathed with a patina of stippled green, was transfigured for a brief instant like a beam of sunshine on a church mosaic. Then the dorado’s brilliance faded, and by the time Mohamed picked up his knife and sliced open her belly, removed the guts and tossed the

The Spectator

Letters: Donald Trump’s messiah complex

He’s not the messiah Sir: To Freddy Gray’s meticulous dissection of Trumpian chaos theory (‘Shock tactics’, 12 April) I would add one element: religion. Donald Trump seems to believe the blood he spilt in the failed assassination attempt anointed him his country’s Redeemer: ‘I was saved by God to make America great again.’ Messiahs look to a higher authority than rational argument. Whatever ideas pop into the President’s head he judges right by definition. Tariffs will achieve miracles and wars will cease at his command. There is a strong Gnostic element to this cult, its followers believing Trump has some secret knowledge guiding his apparently wayward actions. To keep him

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 19 April 2025

Just like having a natural aptitude for drawing or music, some lucky people seem to be born with a gift for bridge. My friend Oliver Burgess is one of them. He plays with effortless elegance, visualising end-plays or spotting chances to false-card while most of us are still struggling to marshal our thoughts. Ollie’s gifts were obvious early on – but I hadn’t realised quite how early until I came across this hand from the Junior European Championships 22 years ago. Ollie (West) was just 18: North’s 4♦️ showed a raise to 4♠️ with six good diamonds. 6♣️ showed two keycards and a void. South’s 6♥️ asked for the trump

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

No one wants American cars

The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners stage-managed it with that in mind. Or perhaps the heroic tale of shop stewards confronting villainous Chinese managers while rescue teams scoured the horizon for emergency shipments of iron ore and coking coal was a different kind of smokescreen – to hide the fact that British steelmaking has been doomed for decades and what just happened is a job-saving nationalisation that will be a massive drain on public funds for as long as it takes to admit that the last British blast furnaces belong to history. I’m sorry to take

Henry Williams

Where have all the rabbits gone?

It’s spring and in this corner of rural Sussex, the bluetits are at the window, newborn lambs are bleating in their pens, and all the rabbits are dead. The burrows are still there, but the chewed grass, the little collections of brown pellets, the white bobtails scattering before your headlights at night, they are gone. I first noticed this in spring 2020, when the ancient nest of burrows in our local woods was suddenly empty. Around that time of year, the scores of rabbits gingerly setting out for the evening made a great meal for the fox cubs who first showed their faces around Easter. Both predators and prey have

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The simple elegance of fondant potatoes

In 1999, a relatively unknown American chef wrote an essay in the New Yorker uncovering the secrets of restaurants. ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ lifted the lid on both the underworld of professional kitchens and the mentality of chefs. In it, the writer meticulously took down ordering fish on a Monday (old), eating steak well done (for ‘philistines’), brunch as a concept (despised) and vegetarians in general (‘Enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit’). The no-punches-pulled writing, which was both lyrical and graphic as well as funny and forthright, was the first published essay by Anthony Bourdain, who would go on to become one of the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The unsayable case for cars

Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of any countervailing evidence, either because the display of such opinions confers status on the holder, or else because adherence to them is an article of faith among some social or professional group in which you need to be seen to belong. The only approved vision of the future involves extracting people from their cars and cramming them into mass transit Such beliefs are hence closer to religious creeds than to any conventionally formed opinion. Consequently, any contradiction of such accepted beliefs in public, however intelligent, is treated as heretical: a

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is it acceptable to go to bed before my guests do?

Q. I am a self-employed travel specialist, concentrating on holidays in Asia. Friends (and even friends of friends) plague me asking for tips on flights and itineraries. Then they go online and book direct instead of through me. Sometimes I have spent hours putting the holiday together for them. How can I politely say ‘no’ to people seeking such one-way favours? — M.B., London SW11 A. Clearly the petitioners do not realise that they will pay the same for the reservation either way, but that if you make it for them you will be rewarded with a small commission from the airline or hotel. Gush to the next enquirer: ‘I’d

Bruce Anderson

The Chinese tried to get me drunk

China: what next? Around the time of the millennium, I wrote that during this century, many of the world’s great questions would be answered in Chinese characters and that great fortunes would be made, and lost, in the China trade. That is one prophecy which might hold good. No one ever says that they could take or leave Maotai Churchill said that the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward, and it is worth following the Chinese example and thinking in epochs. Consider one of the most significant might-have-beens in history: the career of the 15th-century eunuch admiral Zheng He. He commanded an enormous fleet and

Dot Wordsworth

The feebleness of ‘transitive property’

‘If they cancel you,’ said my husband, ‘will I be cancelled too?’ He may well ask. But I’m not sure how I’d tell if I had been cancelled. I don’t make platform appearances, so it is not so easy to deny me a platform. A popular way of doing people down is by means of something that Renée DiResta in the Guardian called the Transitive Property of Bad People, ‘which connects people and institutions in a daisy chain of guilt by association’. I think the metaphor of a transitive property derives from American elementary education. The property appears in statements such as: if A is bigger than B, and B

Dan Hitchens

The assisted suicide bill should not survive

Until about six months ago, it would have been hard to find a more inoffensive politician than the Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater. A well-liked, upbeat, down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman, she entered politics because of a personal tragedy, the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox, in 2016. When asked on a Spectator podcast what was the worst piece of advice she had ever received, Leadbeater half-joked: ‘Have you thought about being an MP?’ Visibly a normal, friendly person plunked down in SW1, she won many admirers and attracted little controversy. Then in September Leadbeater came top of the private members’ ballot and chose to take up the cause of assisted suicide.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: British Steel seized, army sent to Birmingham and slim told to stay home in Beijing

Home Parliament was recalled from its Easter recess to sit on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982 to pass a bill to take control of British Steel, which amounts to no more than the works at Scunthorpe owned by the Chinese company Jingye since 2020. Scunthorpe, which employs 2,700 directly and thousands indirectly, is the last plant in Britain capable of making virgin steel. The bill, passing through the Commons and Lords, received the Royal Assent on the same day. The race against time was to supply the blast furnaces with coal before they were ruined by going cold; supplies from the United States

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Spare us from performative piety

Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the place for the rigours of Lenten discipline to begin. Some might say it is hardly the place for a clergyman at all. Peter Hitchens once commented on my clerical collar – stiff, crisp, linen – and said that if he saw a man wearing such a get-up at a racecourse he would assume he was an illegal bookmaker in disguise. Still, I recall that one of the most successful owner-breeders of all time was a clergyman. The vicar of Ashby de la Launde, the Revd J.W. King, won the Oaks,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been given the right to remain here by an deputy Upper Tribunal judge called Rebecca Chapman. The women insisted that they would face persecution in Albania for their sexual preferences. This is despite the fact that Albania decriminalised homosexuality 30 years ago and in 2010 adopted a law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  Rebecca was not impressed, however, pronouncing Albania to be a ‘patriarchal, conservative society in which homophobic attitudes still exist, particularly in rural areas’. (Those of you who have just read Rebecca’s description of

Katy Balls and Michael Gove

‘We’re going to a more radical place’: Wes Streeting on his plans for the NHS

A copy of a leading article from The Spectator is stuck to the wall of Wes Streeting’s office in the Department of Health. ‘Is Wes Streeting the Hamlet of the Health Service?’ we asked in October, warning against the perils of inaction. ‘We were so riled by it we stuck it there to hold ourselves to account,’ Streeting explains. ‘We’re going further than your prescription, though. We thought it was insufficiently radical.’ The Health Secretary has certainly been busy. Over the past few months, he has unveiled a range of reforms, including abolishing NHS England. His Blairite zeal annoys some in Labour. He languishes in 21st place in LabourList’s cabinet

Peter Jones

How Roman emperors handled hair loss

Donald Trump’s obsessive ‘awhairness’ makes one wonder: why is it so important to him? The topic was of some interest in Rome. The emperor Domitian wrote a treatise on baldness. So too did Cleopatra, who offered the following remedy: ‘For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as much as it will bear. Put on a rag and apply, having soaped the place well first. I have mixed the above with a foam of nitre, and it worked well.’ Pompey had himself depicted in statuary wearing a hairstyle associated with Alexander the Great, with a lock of hair brushed back from the forehead.

Luke McShane

Chess Masters

Good, but why now? Did they only just notice? Those were my thoughts when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. I’m similarly pleased and bemused by the new BBC series Chess Masters: The Endgame. I recall evenings after school more than 30 years ago, watching the Kasparov-Short world championship match in London on TV. So hurrah for a new prime-time scheduling slot! But millions of people play chess. Did we really have to wait this long? The real issue must be that finding a format to make chess look good on TV is hard. Partly that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; with so few attempts, it’s impossible to