Max Jeffery is The Spectator’s online commissioning editor. X: @MaxJeffery_
Freddie Scappaticci was a thickset man with dark features and a walrus moustache. He was born in Belfast in 1946, joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army when the Troubles began and by the 1980s was a senior member of the organisation, whose job was to hunt for British spies. It has been widely believed for
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.
They were John Major’s kind of people, the audience in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre in the Cheng Kin Ku Building at the London School of Economics last night. They filed in quietly, took their seats politely, and waited relaxedly for the ex prime minister. One man slouched, careless blotches of black dye on his thinning
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery examines Britain’s new hard left alliance; Sam Leith wonders what Prince Andrew is playing; Michael Henderson reads his letter from Berlin; Madeline Grant analyses the demise of the American ‘wasp’ – or White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant; and, Julie Bindel ponders the disturbing allure of sex robots. Produced and
For a few days in Manchester last weekend, there was a utopia. The World Transformed conference of British socialists had taken over Hulme – the once rough but now bohemian part of the city – and in the middle of it all, at the Community Garden Centre, a collectivist’s dream was established. All day comrades
On Friday evening in the Windrush Lounge at The World Transformed conference in Manchester, British socialism was autocannibalising. No more comrade this or comrade that. No other little politburo manners. In a storage unit in an industrial estate – this was the lounge – Max Shanly, an influential left-wing activist and former Momentum member, was
Everyone wanted to get close to the president. For three hours outside the O2 Arena in London, a queue of admirers pawed at and posed with a fifteen-foot-tall billboard of his face. All of the marketing for yesterday’s event, titled ‘An Evening with President Barack Obama’, had used his official presidential portrait from 2012 in
The global military-industrial complex and its outriders were rammed into a giant indoor pigsty. Dealers and manufacturers and military men and politicians and officials from murky agencies and guys in cowboy hats and sunglasses who only really came to have their photos taken with guns – all of them in a crush to use a
Chris Hargreaves used to be a wellness coach with a promising future in reality television. In 2023, he starred in E4’s Big Celebrity Detox and tried to cleanse Kerry Katona’s soul with piñón blanco seeds. Today, he leads The Shield: a private volunteer police force of hundreds of officers. They plan to begin patrolling Britain’s
Who is Ritchie Wellman? He is a father, a boyfriend, an assistant operations manager at a local business and a part-time paedophile hunter. Right now, however, at 7 p.m. in a dusty car park down the road from Bournemouth pier, Ritchie is the commander of his own private policing unit, briefing his officers before their
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery reports from court as the Spectator and Douglas Murray win the defamation cause brought against them by Mohammed Hijab; Cosmo Landesman defends those who stay silent over political issues; Henry Blofeld celebrates what has been a wonderful year for test cricket; David Honigmann reflects on the powder
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First: Nigel Farage is winning over women Does – or did – Nigel Farage have a woman problem? ‘Around me there’s always been a perception of a laddish culture,’ he tells political editor Tim Shipman. In last year’s election, 58 per cent of Reform voters were men. But, Shipman argues, ‘that has begun to change’.
Mohammed Hijab sat at the back of the courtroom and ate doughnuts while his lawyer, Mark Henderson, delivered his closing submission. ‘You will have seen that my client is argumentative, can be provocative,’ said Henderson. ‘Some people might think that he is a bit of a smart alec, a bit too cocky.’ Hijab reclined in
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The Spectator and Douglas Murray have comprehensively won a defamation case brought by Mohammed Hegab. Hegab, a YouTuber who posts under the name Mohammed Hijab, claimed that an article about the Leicester riots, written by Douglas Murray and published by The Spectatorin September 2022, caused serious harm to his reputation and led to a loss of earnings.
These days, most English seaside towns are sites of national mourning. You pay your respects by walking up some deathtrap pier, dropping two pence in an arcade coin pusher and whispering, your flower now on the grave: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ But Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, has managed to stave off
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First: the new era of censorship A year ago, John Power notes, the UK was consumed by race riots precipitated by online rumours about the perpetrator of the Southport atrocity. This summer, there have been protests, but ‘something is different’. With the introduction of the Online Safety Act, ‘the government is exerting far greater control
Early on Sunday afternoon at the Epping Bean Café, where a cutesy sign hangs from a wall reading ‘Coffee makes everything better’, a man is enjoying a roast dinner as the staff prepare for violence. Chairs and tables are moved inside, and a tall flagpole for advertising the café, which could be a very effective
Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but he doesn’t want to talk about them. ‘I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,’ he says, ‘just under another name. They’re probably out there somewhere…’ His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers
Thursday evening. All quiet in Ballymena so far, after three nights of wrath. On the kerb of Waring Street – just off Larne Street, which rioters tore through on Tuesday and left burning and beaten – sit James and Casper, both 16. James is wearing a balaclava with a Rottweiler’s face printed on the front.
The country is slipping away. The whole place, slowly, but London suddenly, blinding glass slabs becoming East End blocks, ‘SPLENDID NEW APARTMENTS!’ turning to marshland, to golf clubs, to small towns and a train station, Laindon, Essex, which has a nice 4×4 Porsche parked outside. Decline is the mood of Britain, and I was going
