Mary Wakefield is commissioning editor of The Spectator.
My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or four times a year, when the weather warms up, she stands on her doorstep, smashed, and yells at the world. I don’t blame her. Rose has been through the mill. She’s a slight woman and
I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke out from their bodies. I don’t like the constant showing off of their puckered bums, or their disregard for the normal rules of mammal eye contact. There are nearly 13 million cats in Britain –
We should all feel scared to our bones about the persecution of the SAS, soldiers harried through the courts for jobs they did many decades ago. It’s not that the SAS should be allowed to behave like trigger-happy psychos, but as Paul Wood wrote in this magazine before Christmas, Special Forces are now being hounded
40 min listen
This week: The Spectator launches SPAFF The civil service does one thing right, writes The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons: spaffing money away. The advent of Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US has inspired The Spectator to launch our own war on wasteful spending – the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or SPAFF. Examples of waste range from
I was a twin when I was born, but this was in the days before decent scans and proper neonatal intensive care, and we were more than two months premature, so not long afterwards, my twin died. As a child, I thought nothing of it. It simply wasn’t relevant. But when I was drifting around
I never expected to have strong feelings for a member of Germany’s Green party, but I really do feel extremely sorry for Stefan Gelbhaar, once (but not now or ever again) an MP for Berlin. Women should hang together, say some feminists. I couldn’t disagree with this more Gelbhaar is a 48-year-old criminal defence lawyer
Too many conservatives are behaving as if Donald Trump’s inauguration has somehow done to wokery what garlic does to a vampire; as if they can now sit back and watch the orange mist vaporise ideological insanity across the West. A study released today by the University of York shows just how crazy this sort of complacency
32 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove offers up some advice to Keir Starmer (1:33); Mary Wakefield examines the rise of the ‘divorce party’ (7:28); Mitchell Reiss looks at the promise and peril of AI as he reviews Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, a collaboration between the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt,
Have you been to a ‘divorce party’ yet this season? If you haven’t, not to worry, there’s still time. Divorce season lasts for the whole of January, I’m told, so there’s a couple of weeks left to celebrate. And if perhaps the details of your own nasty separation aren’t yet finalised, or if your lawyer
45 min listen
This week: the fight for the future of the right From Milei in Argentina to Trump in the US, Meloni in Italy to the rise of the AfD in Germany, the world appears to be turning to the right, say James Kanagasooriam and Patrick Flynn. One country, however, seems to be the exception to this
At the beginning of the spring term of my second year at university, a French boy called Xavier looked up from where he was sitting, on the floor of my friend’s flat, and announced that his new year’s resolution was to give up fantasising. Xav was deep in unrequited love with my friend so we
38 min listen
On this week’s 2024 Out Loud: Cindy Yu examined Chinese work ethic (1:13); Michael Simmons declared his love of the doner kebab (6:28); Angus Colwell reported from Israel in July (9:27); Igor Toronyi-Lalic explained the inspiration behind the cinema of Marguerite Duras (14:41); Mary Wakefield analysed the disturbing truth of the Pelicot case (20:38); Fraser Nelson
75 min listen
This week is a special episode of the podcast where we are looking back on some of our favourite pieces from the magazine over the past year and revisiting some of the conversations we had around them. First up: the Starmer supremacy Let’s start with undoubtedly the biggest news of the year: Starmer’s supermajority and
71 min listen
Welcome to a special festive episode of The Edition podcast, where we will be taking you through the pages of The Spectator’s Christmas triple issue. Up first: our review of the year – and what a year it has been. At the start of 2024, the outcome of the US election looked very different, the UK had a
Now that John Lewis has produced a Christmas ad that celebrates family, starring white people as humans, all sorts of thinkers and commentators on the right have decided that the progressive madness is nearly over. One after the other they’re popping up in print, like bunnies who’ve decided the fox has gone. ‘Whisper it, but
Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe. There’s so much going on both visually and intellectually that there’s no room at all for a viewer’s own feeble thoughts. ‘When a work lands the excitement is physical, like biting into chocolate. You feel
38 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas
In The Spectator’s basement kitchen a few weeks ago, I cornered a young colleague, Angus Colwell, and asked him what he made of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder. The thrust of it is that we are not in an age of enlightenment so much as ‘endarkenment’ (Dreher’s term) and that, having turned our
It’s amazing how many people have responded to what they think of as the shattering catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory by crafting: making rag rugs, ceramic pots, knitting scarves. A woman I know from long ago is so traumatised that she has started quilting. I’m not sure what sort of quilt she’s making – a
Last week it was reported that a 14-year-old boy, Sewell Setzer, killed himself for the love of a chatbot, a robot companion devised by a company called Character AI. Sewell’s poor mother insists that the chatbot ‘abused and preyed’ on her son, and frankly this would make no sense to me at all were it
