Culture

Camilla Long’s 3* review of Moonlight doesn’t make her a racist

I have a bone to pick with Camilla Long – a colleague of mine at the Sunday Times, where she is the film reviewer. She gave five stars to a stop-motion animation film called Anomalisa a year or so back and I went to see it on her journalistic recommendation. Oh, and also cos it had Jennifer Jason Leigh voicing one part, the most underrated actress of the last thirty years. It was godawful; pretentious, badly scripted, shallow and dull. I thought about suing Camilla for liking a film I had not liked and thus making me endure two hours of misery. Or maybe outing her as a racist. Why?

In defence of Wayne Shaw’s pie-munching stunt

Uh oh, football’s puritans are riled up today. They think the sport might have been brought into disrepute during last night’s FA Cup tie between Sutton and Arsenal. Why? Because Sutton’s substitute goalkeeper, the gloriously fat Wayne Shaw, ate a pie on the subs bench during the match. Shaw’s stunt — which amused anybody with a sense of humour — may have broken the FA’s gambling laws, we are told, because Sun Bets, who had sponsored Sutton for the game, had offered 8-1 that Shaw would indeed be seen eating a pie during the match.  Shaw had heard of the bet before the game. Rather than take offence that people were laughing

Are we doing enough to secure Britain’s digital future?

The UK’s digital economy represents nearly one third of the UK economy, and if nurtured properly, it could transform government, society and culture. But are we doing enough to secure Britain’s digital future – and if not, what more can be done? This was the topic discussed by politicians and financial and technology experts at a recent Spectator dinner, hosted by Mastercard. One of the main topics of conversation was around British start-ups and the investment opportunities available in the UK. Jeremy Silver, CEO of the Digital Catapult, has built and sold two technology businesses in the past fifteen years – selling both of them to American tech companies. That’s

The obsession with diversity in theatre risks spoiling Shakespeare

Twelfth Night launched at the National Theatre this week, with Malvolio turned into Malvolia. ‘We’ve definitely upped the gender-bendedness of the play,’ says Phoebe Fox, who is acting Olivia. Otiose, one might think, since the original is gender-bent to perfection. But Shakespeare did not have to wrestle with the strict controls now demanded in the subsidised theatre. In the same feature in which Phoebe Fox speaks, Ben Power, the deputy director of the National, tells the Sunday Times, ‘There are agendas we are aware of now, and we have targets in terms of gender and ethnicity, because we want to be as diverse as possible, speaking to our audiences, reflecting

How to get away with murder

Given our seamy obsession with serial killers, real and fictional, one would expect the crimes of Stephen Port to have made more of a mark on the national psyche. Port was convicted in November of the rape and murder of four young men in Barking, east London over a 15-month period. His modus operandi was cold and calculating: He would contact men on gay hook-up sites and incapacitate them with ‘date rape drug’ GHB, before sexually assaulting and murdering them. A further seven men were drugged and/or raped but lived. Port is serving a whole-life sentence; he will die in prison. What makes these crimes particularly shocking is that the

James O’Brien spreading ‘fake news’ via the BBC is a must-watch

The row about ‘fake news’ and the ‘crooked media’ appears to be ongoing.  And every time the BBC and other mainstream media mention it they present themselves solely as the victims of such phenomena.  So let us turn to just one edition of the BBC’s Newsnight. On Wednesday of this week the programme was presented by James O’Brien.  Now in the first place Mr O’Brien is a strange choice to present this programme.  Not just because his awkward, cut-out, Lego man gait makes it obvious why he has made his career in radio, but because he is the sort of hyper-partisan figure who, if they came from the opposite political

Ken Loach’s Bafta’s diatribe shows he is stuck in the past

Ken Loach, who seems to defy the rule that you get more right-wing as you get older, used his Bafta acceptance speech last night to attack the Tories. He said that the Government would ‘have to be removed’ and went on to say:  ‘In the real world, it’s getting darker. And in the struggle that’s coming between the rich and the powerful…the big corporations and the politicians that speak for them on the one hand, and the rest of us on the other the film-makers know which side they’re on.’ To be fair to voters, they seem to be quite set on removing governments, or at least overturning the status quo:

The David Beckham email leak should trouble us all

What would you do if naked pictures emerged of a celebrity you liked? Or one you didn’t? What about a slew of emails that were meant to be private that were hacked and then leaked into the public domain? Would you turn away from them, tutting. Or might you be tempted to read them? Would your inclination to read them increase if you liked the person, or if you really disliked them? We seem confused about all of this at the moment. The leak of David Beckham’s emails has condensed the confusion. Most of us believe that private communications should be private. Most of us believe that people’s private communications

Paris wants to fight terror with culture. Will it work?

The news about the machete man in the Louvre broke just as my Eurostar was approaching Paris. Was this just a one-off, or were there more terrorist attacks to come? In the Gare du Nord that lunchtime, the atmosphere was humdrum. Armed policemen passed by like ghosts, unseen and unnoticed. For Parisians, these incidents have become a normal part of daily life. I figured the Louvre would still be cordoned off, so I headed for the Musée d’Orsay. If the Louvre attack was part of a co-ordinated assault on the cultural institutions of the French capital, the Musée d’Orsay would be another prime target. Would the museum be closed, as

Yes, the Spectator’s writers disagree. That’s why they’re Spectator writers

Matthew Parris’s article about the madness of the Brexiteers has caused much interest on social media, as did Alex Massie’s article along the same lines on Friday. I’ve been amused to see this described by some as a evidence of mutiny on HMS Brexit. A magazine’s star writers attacking each other with some passion, and sparing no weapon in the process. What’s going on? Simple: the same thing that has been going on since The Spectator was first published 189 years ago. We have no party line on Brexit, or anything else. That’s why writers of the outstanding calibre of Rod Liddle, Charles Moore, Matthew Parris, Hugo Rifkind and many more write for us:

PETA’s Warhammer ban reveals the hypocrisy of its fake fur policy

There are lots of problems with Warhammer fans. Bad haircuts, terrible dress sense, to name just two. These aren’t even stereotypes; as a little girl I went to the Games Workshop multiple times with my brothers, so have first-hand experience. Still, I feel strangely defensive over Warhammer because it has been the victim of a vicious smear campaign. PETA has launched the most bemusing of attacks on the brand after spotting that some of its characters wear fur clothing. The Viking-style ‘space wolves’ have caused particular offence. I should emphasise at this stage that the fur isn’t actually real. Warhammer, as its disciples will know, is made out of plastic, which fans lovingly glue together before painting on the finer details –

Has the term ‘British’ lost all meaning?

We’ve been filling in our son’s school application form this week. Below his name, date of birth and gender – which I’m horrified to see only has two options, despite the form clearly stating that it is indeed 2017 – is ‘ethnicity’. I suppose I’m meant to put ‘White British’ although I dislike the phrase. Nine-times out of ten when I see the W-word used in the media it’s as an insult or gripe, usually followed by ‘privilege’ or – shudder -‘feminist’. Of course, there’s another term we could use instead: English. According to the Guardian: ‘English patriotism is on the rise at the expense of a sense of British

How Alexander Chancellor saved The Spectator

On the wall behind my desk hangs a picture of Alexander Chancellor when he was editing The Spectator, with cigarette and telephone in one hand and looking very much the hero that all of us in the magazine have long regarded him. His death, announced earlier on this morning, is awful news: we have lost not just a columnist but the godfather of the magazine. Some editors improve their publications, others aren’t so lucky – but Alexander saved The Spectator. The magazine as we know it today – its tone, its mix, its success – is his. Before he took over, sales were tanking. We were the only publication to support

Alexander Chancellor, 1940-2017

Alexander Chancellor, who died this morning aged 77, created the modern Spectator. Since 2012, he has also been a weekly columnist with his Long Life column – which darted from the vagaries of growing old, to memories of his time as editor of The Talk of the Town in the New Yorker, to the wicked foxes who nabbed his beloved ducks at his Northamptonshire house. Spectator editor from 1975 to 1984, he was responsible for giving the magazine the amusing, anarchic, clever but readable feel it has today. It was Chancellor who employed Taki – still happily with us – and had the inspired idea of pairing his High Life

A female culture war has begun

I didn’t go on the women’s march last weekend, and it’s not the kind of thing I’d go to. However, Trump’s previous form with regards the female sex is a reasonable cause for at least registering a protest. This is not to deny there are things I wish would be protested more, such as Rotherham, but I accept that’s basically whataboutery and no reason to ignore Trump’s behaviour. But you’d think, looking at an event like this, that there was a sort of culture war in which women were set in conflict with the patriarchy, represented by the three-times married president. Lots of women were marching for the right to have

We are living in a seriously phony age

At the risk of coming across all Holden Caulfield, this is a seriously phony age. Everywhere you look there are people objecting to things they think other people have said or would like them to have said. This past Saturday provided a fine example when in Washington and various other Western capitals some people decided that a fine response to the Trump administration is to pretend that it is ‘anti-women’ in some way. Various politicians, Guardian journalists and others without lives walked around for a day tilting furiously at this imaginary enemy. Some took their daughters with them, as though it is a good idea to inebriate the next generation

Forget ‘peace and love’. Protest language has turned violent

So Madonna says she doesn’t really want to blow up the White House. Her remarks at Saturday’s women’s march — ‘Yes, I’m angry, yes, I am outraged, Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House’ – have, she says, been ‘taken wildly out of context’. She has missed the point. No-one remotely thought that she would personally mix the Semtex, or offer any help to someone else to do so. But she was using inflammatory language which she ought to know somebody, somewhere will take seriously. If an unhinged loner in the backwoods of Virginia heads to Washington with a pick-up full of explosives she

Julie Burchill

The hypocrisy of the ‘Free Melania’ feminists

I like to prance around showing off in hats and shouting at men as much as the next broad but – apart from the fact that I can get it at home – there were several reasons why I chose not to join a whole batch of my bitches on the Women’s March this weekend. Firstly, I was sure it would be full of ‘Strong Women‘, a phrase I hate at the best of times – and feel should only be used if the lady in question can tear a telephone directory in half with her bare hands – and which seemed especially inappropriate to describe a bunch of overgrown Violet

Only the right kind of women are invited to march against Donald Trump

The Women’s March on Washington is going to be big. Officials say 1,800 buses have been registered to park in the city today. The subway will open at 5 a.m. (it usually starts running at 7 a.m. at weekends) to accommodate the numbers. In all, 250,000 people are expected to join the rally to show their disapproval of Donald Trump, dwarfing the numbers that attended his inauguration and parade a day earlier. It is fitting that women are taking the lead. Trump’s misogynist language and disregard for half the population has been one of the most shocking parts of his aggressive campaign. So it is a shame that the march

Britain’s spy agencies could do with a woman’s touch

I always knew security agencies were missing a trick with the ladies. Currently, less than four in ten workers in MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are female, which isn’t just embarrassing, but bad for national security; because women have the potential to be great spies.  But things are about to change. Since 2015, intelligence services have been on a massive drive to get more women into the ranks, scouting around Mumsnet for older, patriotic would-be agents. GCHQ has even announced a competition to find 13 to 15-year-old girls for the industry, having realised the worth of social-media savvy young girls.  I’m surprised it took the intelligence agencies so long to recognise the