Society

Friday

Lawrence Osborne

The glorious weirdness of Christmas in Thailand

Bangkok Christmas in Thailand is one of the strangest festivities of the modern world. A country that is almost entirely Buddhist, which does not recognise Christmas as a public holiday, whose people have almost no idea what the event means, nevertheless erects giant glittering Christmas trees in its malls and intersections. These are larger and more numerous than the ones you see in London. It’s not difficult to imagine a future where British tourists fly to Bangkok to rediscover the mood of Christmas, not in shopping but in pagan feeling. December shoppers in the Bangkok mega-malls are greeted by choirs of small girls in Santa hats who ring bells and

Melissa Kite

On the trail of the White Lady

As we reached the top of the hill and saw the view in front of us my heart thumped so hard I slammed my foot on the brake and declared that we had to turn back. A wind- and sea-battered piece of terrain jutting out into the Atlantic ocean told us very loudly to go away. I heard it in my head, as clear as a person saying it, and I pretended I hadn’t, but I had. So I stopped the car above that desolate valley and sat there, frozen, not knowing what to do or even how to turn the car in the narrow space. Having climbed a steep

Catriona Olding

How I met Jeremy

In the early 2000s, academics, philosophers, politicians, members of the royal household and business people – including the CEO and the owner of a newspaper group – sometimes came round to the house for tea, drinks or dinner. Anxious to keep up, I started to read the papers more thoroughly. The Economist and New Statesman I found dull. On the recommendation of a friend, I bought The Spectator. The writing was better. Sometimes you’d find arguments for and against a subject, for example fox hunting, in the same magazine. But more than that – it was entertaining. Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life column, however, was in another league. It was poetry;

Rupert Hawksley

Washing up is an artform

Right, who’s doing the washing up? It’s 6 p.m. on Christmas Day and the table, which was meticulously set for 12, is now a mess of paper hats, gravy spills and glasses – so, so many glasses. Just don’t go into the kitchen, where you’ll find, in no order at all: six saucepans (unsoaked), 12 plates, one grater, 12 bowls, three baking trays, two sieves, four ceramic dishes, one warm turkey carcass and at least 17 bone-handled knives which absolutely cannot go in the dishwasher. There are vague murmurings that someone should probably do something about it. I hate to say it, but if you haven’t done any of the

David Shipley

The evil of the grooming gangs is finally being exposed

It has now been six weeks since the inquiry into ‘Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’ fell into chaos. Over the course of several days, numerous survivors quit – claiming that the civil servants running the process were seeking to dilute the inquiry – and the man being considered as chair stood down. Since then there has been silence from the government. There is still no chair nor terms of reference. It is important that we all understand the sheer evil of what has been done and what has been hidden from us by the state This is despite Louise Casey’s damning report in June, which revealed the sheer scale of these

Gavin Mortimer

David Lammy is wrong about Brexit and the EU

David Lammy believes Britain should rejoin the EU customs union to boost economic growth. In an interview on Thursday, the Deputy Prime Minister argued that leaving the EU had ‘badly damaged’ Britain’s economy. A reversal of Brexit would be good for business he suggested. It was ‘self-evident’ that other countries had ‘seen growth’ after joining the customs union, Lammy told the News Agents podcast. The deputy PM avoided the question of whether Britain should rejoin the euro, as did Health Secretary Wes Streeting earlier in the week. Having declared that Britain was worse off out of the EU, Streeting was asked if the government was planning to take Britain back

Druin Burch

Why GPs are reluctant about online booking

‘Moaning Minnies’ is how the Health Secretary Wes Streeting has described GPs opposing his rollout of online appointment booking. Originally, that moniker referred to German artillery pieces – and it’s pleasant for a doctor like myself to imagine we still possess that sort of firepower. But Streeting meant that the British Medical Association’s GP committee, which he has accused of undermining the attempt to make primary care more accessible, are a bunch of whining complainers, rather than us ordinary doctors. So, is Streeting right? General practice, as everyone is painfully aware, is in trouble. Except in a shrinking minority of places, the old model that made it so valuable is

Philip Patrick

Fifa's great World Cup rip-off has gone too far

Today’s World Cup draw in Washington, presided over by Fifa president Gianni Infantino with best buddie president Donald Trump at his side, is intended to whet appetites, set pulses racing and, most importantly, get fingers twitching on booking sites for tickets, flights, and hotels for next summer’s North American extravaganza. The World Cup 2026 is poised to be not just the biggest ever, but the biggest rip-off ever For those giddily contemplating the trip to North America next summer – not least we Scottish fans who have been denied a place at the party for so long – a cold, hard reality is about to bite. For the World Cup

Lara Prendergast

Benefits Britain, mental health & what’s the greatest artwork of the 21st Century?

23 min listen

‘Labour is now the party of welfare, not work’ argues Michael Simmons in the Spectator’s cover article this week. The question ‘why should I bother with work?’ is becoming harder to answer, following last week’s Budget which could come to define this Labour government. A smaller and smaller cohort of people are being asked to shoulder the burden – what do our Spectator contributors think of this?  For this week’s Edition, host Lara Prendergast is joined by opinion editor Rupert Hawksley, arts editor Igor Toronyi-Lalic and columnist Matthew Parris. Rupert points out the perceived lack of fairness across the Budget, Matthew thinks we shouldn’t be surprised that a Labour government delivered a Labour

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Who knew that King Charles could be funny?

Describing the royal family as ‘funny’ is not, perhaps, the first thing that comes to mind when talking about the Windsors. After all, anyone with a long memory remembers the horrors of It’s A Royal Knockout in 1987. Meanwhile, the performers who tend to get the biggest laughs from them at the Royal Variety Show are usually those offering the broadest, silliest laughs. Just think of the late Queen enraptured by the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of Frank Skinner, Harry Hill and Ed Balls (Ed Balls!) all performing George Formby’s ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ in 2018. However, King Charles has always been someone with a more developed sense of humour, even if his long-standing love

Silkie Carlo

The sinister rise of facial-recognition Britain

Britain has long been one of the most surveilled democracies in the world. But under Starmer’s government, things are about to take a more sinister turn. It seems we are all going to be watched by facial recognition cameras as well. It seems will all have to pay the price for the state’s gross incompetence According to a Home Office consultation launched on Thursday, the government is developing a new legal framework to expand the use of facial recognition technology. Rarely seen outside of China, live facial recognition cameras – which constantly scan live CCTV footage – could be installed in every town centre up and down the country. It used to be

Lisa Haseldine

Putin ‘morally responsible’ for Salisbury novichok poisoning

Vladimir Putin is ‘morally responsible’ for the death of Dawn Sturgess, a public inquiry today has concluded. The mother of three died in Salisbury in June 2018 after unknowingly spraying herself with the nerve agent novichok, which had been discarded three months earlier by two Kremlin agents sent to kill the former spy Sergei Skripal. The operation was so sensitive that it ‘must have been authorised at the highest level by President Putin’ as a ‘demonstration of Russian power’, the inquiry’s chair Lord Hughes said. Keir Starmer condemned the Kremlin’s ‘disregard for innocent lives’ Lord Hughes said that disguising the novichok in a perfume bottle ‘dramatically magnified’ the risk of

Robert Taylor

No tap water has left all of Tunbridge Wells disgusted

I’ve lived in Tunbridge Wells for 20 years, and have never met anyone disgusted. Until this week. Yup, we’re all disgusted now. As you would be if you couldn’t flush your loo for days on end, nor take a shower, nor wash your hands, nor drink a glass of water without schlepping to a communal bottle station and waiting in a long queue. The Royal bit in our town’s name has never felt more inappropriate. The Royal bit in our town’s name has never felt more inappropriate What on earth happened? Well, it all started on Saturday, when thousands of us noticed the water pressure in our taps was weak

Matthew Parris

The mind-body conundrum

I’m committed this winter to too many expensive building projects at once. As the balloon of my bank balance drifts ever lower towards the waves, and the crests of red ink lick the wicker of my basket, I’ve realised something has to be thrown out. Thus it was that last week I found myself in London’s Hatton Garden. Tucked into my little knapsack was my passport and a couple of one-ounce mini bars of gold I had bought after the last banking crisis, and stored in an old kettle. It was late afternoon, and dark. Hatton Garden is a strange street, lined with jewellers and bullion dealers, and peopled by

The Spectator

Letters: How to clear the courts backlog – without scrapping juries

Tried and tested Sir: Your otherwise excellent leading article opposing proposed restrictions on jury trials (‘Judge not’, 29 November) misses two important points against the proposals. First, one can go much further than pointing to 3,000 days of unused capacity. The capacity itself can be expanded quite readily. It was once normal for courts to sit on Saturdays. Moreover, the court day once started at 9 a.m. and, after a break for supper, could go on well into the late evening – the ‘black cap at midnight’ is not a myth. The modern court day is 10.30 to 4.30, with an hour for lunch. A 9.30 to 5.30 day would

Flora Watkins

Bring back the album

Usually when my tweenage sons ask about relics from my 1990s adolescence – ‘What’s a landline?’ ‘What’s a phone book?’ – we’ll have a good laugh about these obsolete artefacts of the not-so-distant past. But last year when my ten-year-old asked about ‘Immigrant Song’, which he’d heard on the soundtrack to a Marvel movie, and I replied, ‘Oh, I think it’s on the third Led Zeppelin album’, his response left me winded: ‘What’s an album?’ What’s an album? The horror! How had this abject failure of parenting happened? I’ve raised my kids in as analogue a household as possible, with piles of books, newspapers and magazines on every surface. I’ve

Matt Ridley

The great climate climbdown is finally here

Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent Cop summit in Belem, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to secure new pledges for a cut in fossil fuels, Cop achieved less than nothing. The venue caught fire, the air conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper. Bill Gates’s recent apologia, in which he

Max Jeffery

The ‘Crewkerne Man’ is reviving political satire for the AI age

You’ve probably seen the videos. Kemi Badenoch delivering her Budget response in the form of a rap to a sobbing Rachel Reeves. Keir Starmer as a McDonald’s drive-thru worker. David Lammy as a Spice Girl in a tight dress. Reeves (again) as the Grand High Witch from The Witches. Behind the videos is one man. He runs the Crewkerne Gazette, an online publisher of viral political videos made with artificial intelligence. The ‘Crewkerne Man’ would not give me his name when we met for lunch in Somerset last week. What I can say is that the most important political satirist of the moment is a large guy in his mid-thirties

Honor Gibbs

The art of the party trick

I’ve decided I need a party trick. This thought occurred to me at a recent dinner party as I watched my mother effortlessly tie a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue. So ensued 20 minutes of entertainment as everyone thought that they too would give it a go. No one succeeded, and my mother remained the undisputed champion. But when the floor was opened to any other demonstrations, I had nothing.  My failure to inherit any sort of skill is a bit of mystery since my father also has an arsenal of party tricks. While most of his peers spent their early twenties in clubs and at parties,

Rachel Johnson

A poignant and perfect send-off 

We knew the church would be packed as Shelley had died so young. We knew the church would be freezing, as her funeral fell during the Arctic spell that whitened the bracken and iced over puddles the colour of Dairy Milk. When we drove into Simonsbath just after lunchtime, the sun was only grazing the hilltops, leaving valleys in deep shadows. We’d allowed plenty of time, but the lanes were already crammed with vehicles. My husband and I had intended to stand at the back of St Luke’s so as not to take up precious places, but thanks to Ivo’s near-village-elder status we were ordered into the emergency seating in