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The second passport used to be a backdoor: a legal hack for the well-advised, well-connected or well-heeled. You could acquire nationality in a country you’d hardly visited, without necessarily even speaking the language, and still find yourself welcomed with open arms – or at least waved through the fast-track lane at immigration. But that game is ending. More and more governments are closing the door on tenuous ancestral claims and pay-to-play citizenship. Whether through lineage or liquid assets, the old tricks to get a second passport no longer work. Nationality is being redefined – not as a loophole, but as a bond. The appeal of a second passport has always

President Trump swerved in his ‘Liberation Day’ event last week, speaking on an issue that has preoccupied America for months: the price of eggs. Trump said: ‘The first week I was blamed for eggs, I said, “I just got here”. The price on eggs now is down 55 per cent and will keep going down. They were saying that for Easter, “Please don’t use eggs. Could you use plastic eggs?” I say, we don’t want to do that.’ Like him or not, Trump has a way of understanding the zeitgeist. The egg crisis is threatening to become global. It has displaced even Marine Le Pen as a subject of discussion

There is a decent chance that most Spectator readers have seen at least one of the following: the much-ballyhooed Adolescence, the rather less controversial Black Doves, and the once-magnificent, latterly tawdry The Crown. From the travails of royalty to the horrors of a child killer, via the acrobatic derring-do of unusually witty spies, these shows include some of the greatest British actors working today. They are all quintessentially English in their settings. All three have been hugely successful and should, by rights, be programmes that the British television industry should be extremely proud of. Except, of course, they’re not British. Well, not wholly, anyway. Despite their Anglophile content, all three

Dubai-style chocolate, viral star of TikTok and Instagram, is so popular that Waitrose is limiting sales to two bars per customer. The upmarket supermarket chain has taken the move, the Times reports, ‘because we want everyone to have the chance to enjoy this delicious chocolate’. Some are sceptical. Steve Dresser, who heads up consultancy Grocery Insight, has questioned whether this is a marketing ploy, with Waitrose ‘trying to generate scarcity’. The supermarket says no, assuring the Grocer of the ‘incredible popularity’ of these £10 confectionery bars. It’s incredible all right. Even Waitrose’s yellow sticker fare is beyond my budget, so to me a tenner for a slab of chocolate sounds

At last, somebody has said it. Busking is akin to psychological torture, especially for those who have to live or work within earshot. This damning comparison came from no less than a judge at the City of London magistrates’ court, following a suit brought by Global Radio, the Leicester Square-based owner of LBC and Classic FM. The judge noted ‘the use of repetitive sounds is a well-publicised feature of unlawful but effective psychological torture techniques’. He found that the ‘volume’ of the buskers’ music was ‘the principal mischief’ but also delivered a damning assessment of the way out-of-tune pop songs are offensive to the human spirit. ‘It is clear that

It’s cherry blossom season in Japan and about half the population (according to a Kansai University study) will gather at the viewing spots to pose for photos (Japanese Instagram may collapse) and enjoy picnics in the shade of the sakura trees. Japan will also welcome close to four million visitors to witness the floral marvel. The season is brief, peaking in about a week and disappearing by the end of April, during which time the progress of the blooms across the country is followed with breathless enthusiasm by reporters on the news bulletins. We are assumed to be, expected to be, giddy with excitement about all this, and to swoon