The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, June 2024

The rise of reverse gaslighting Sir — To an otherwise excellent article, I have a small correction. In 1860, the Southern states did not keep Lincoln off the ballot. Unlike today, where voting ballots are printed by the states, in 1860, voters were not presented with official ballots at polling stations that allowed them to check off which candidate they were voting for. Instead, a nineteenth-century ballot or “political ticket” was a slip of paper, provided by each party, listing their candidates for whatever offices were up for election. This allowed voters to easily “vote the ticket” for their party without having to know the names of every candidate and office.

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culture
The Spectator

This month in culture: June 2024

The Fall Guy In theaters now Ryan Gosling’s career is rather bizarre if you think about it, from drippy romcom protagonist in The Notebook to brooding car noir hero in Drive to laughable failure in The Nice Guys to musical star in La La Land and Barbie. Now he takes a stab at renewing his hardass ways in The Fall Guy, an adaptation of Lee Majors’s 1980s series which pairs him with Emily Blunt and is, in a way, an homage to the careers of “stars who do their own stunts” even if Gosling does not do so himself. There’s even a stunt show planned for Universal Studios’ Hollywood theme park based on the movie, prior to its release.

Monday

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Cohen in court

Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen finally took the stand Monday in the so-called “hush-money” trial against his old boss in Manhattan. Cohen’s testimony has been much hyped by Trump’s critics, as the legal claim is that Trump improperly claimed payments made by Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels as legal expenses instead of campaign expenses. Cohen testified that his former client signed off on everything that he did, indicating that Trump directed him to pay off Daniels and suggesting that he would have known that they shouldn’t be marked down as a legal expense or retainer in the company books.

Saturday

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Why won’t phone companies stop kids using social media?

From our UK edition

When it comes to social media, parents find it difficult enough to keep up with their offspring’s online world. What hope, then, do governments and regulators have of keeping up with digital technology? This week, Ofcom has announced a new code of practice which aims to use powers granted under the Online Safety Act in order to ‘tame aggressive algorithms’. Such a move seems well-meaning, but official bodies will always be several steps behind the latest online trends. The onerous-sounding new rules will probably end up restricting the online freedom of less savvy adults more than of children.

Friday

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Does RFK know what he believes on abortion?

 Independent presidential candidate and former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted this week that he supports “full-term” abortions. In a sit-down interview with former ESPN reporter Sage Steele, RFK said that while he doesn’t think women should abort their children in the eighth month of pregnancy or beyond, he wouldn’t prohibit them from doing so.  “Even if it’s full-term,” he said, later adding, “I think we have to leave it to the women rather than the state.” RFK’s position is extreme, no matter how you slice it. The majority of Americans believe there should be some restrictions on abortions; only 37 percent believe abortion should be legal in the second trimester and just 22 percent say it should be legal in the third trimester.

Thursday

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How violent are prisons?

From our UK edition

Name calling Springwatch presenter Gillian Burke says she finds it ‘jarring’ to call animals by their English names, preferring Swahili. Some popular Swahili translations: – Elephant: tembo/ndovu – Giraffe: twiga – Lion: simba – Hyena: fisi – Hippopotamus: hippopotamus – I’m fed up of paying for a TV licence: Nimechoka kulipa leseni ya TV Full Marx A Labour politician named Karl Peter Marx Wardlow was elected as a councillor in Stockport. The fondness for left-wing parents to name their children after their political heroes is most obvious in Keir Starmer – his first name is also shared with Keir Mather, who won the Selby and Ainsty by-election for Labour last year.

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Letters: the Tory party has gone mad

From our UK edition

Right is wrong Sir: Katy Balls’s article ‘Survival Plan’ (4 May) starts from a false premise. The problem is not Rishi Sunak, but the current Conservative party’s underlying ethos. With Brexit, the lunatics took over the asylum. The ‘Get Brexit Done’ single-issue election resulted in a Conservative party, cabinet and parliamentary majority sharing populist right-wing views and convinced that the country supported them in all their beliefs. Although Brexit has clearly failed and Boris Johnson has been disposed of, many of the underlying convictions associated with the Brexit philosophy remain. The obvious demonstration of this was the disastrous election of Liz Truss as leader despite the common sense warnings of Sunak at the time.

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Portrait of the week: Tory defections, local elections and a China defence hack

From our UK edition

Home The local elections proved dreadful for the Conservatives but not quite perfect for Labour. The Conservatives lost 474 of the council wards in contention, ending up with 515; Labour gained an extra 186 to reach 1,158. Independents and others, some standing on the issue of Gaza, increased their councillors by 93 to 228, and took away Labour votes. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain got four seats. Reform won only two seats but took votes from the Tories; it almost came second in Blackpool South, where there was a by-election which Labour won with 10,825 votes to the Tories’ 3,218. Ben Houchen (Lord Houchen of High Leven) won a third term as Mayor of the Tees Valley as a Conservative; Sadiq Khan for Labour convincingly won a third term as Mayor of London.

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Tories for Starmer

From our UK edition

Nick Boles was once at the heart of a mission to renew Conservatism. He was one of a small number of modernisers, central to the Cameron project, who ended up serving as Tory ministers. He quit over Brexit and this week made his public debut in a new job as an adviser to Rachel Reeves. He was chosen to introduce the shadow chancellor’s speech about how Keir Starmer’s government plans to revive the economy. The lack of any serious clash of ideals between the main parties has allowed a lazy consensus to thrive This is part of a new movement in British politics: Tories for Starmer. It’s something we will see a lot more of as Labour approaches power.

Wednesday

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Biden’s Israel betrayal

President Joe Biden has been straddling an incredibly thin line when it comes to his stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict. The president historically has been supportive of the US’s alliance with Israel but his posture has been tested by a vocal pro-Palestinian contingent in the Democratic Party; in the Democratic primaries, they voted “uncommitted” to send a message to their party’s leader and in recent weeks have showed up on college campuses to demand university administrations divest from Israel. Biden has responded by remaining vocally pro-Israel but inching further away from Israel from a policy standpoint.

Monday

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Chicago plans to keep the DNC migrant-free

The Democratic National Convention is set to take place in downtown Chicago in a little over three months and Democrats are hard at work scheming to prevent handing any easy political wins to their Republican opponents. It’s already a problem that Chicago is a poster child for the left’s failed gun-control policies (nearly three dozen people were shot, at least seven of whom were killed, over the weekend and gang violence prompted the city to cancel its West Side Cinco de Mayo celebrations despite the city having some of the strictest firearm regulations in the country).Chi-town is also notorious for its political seediness, and the shamelessness with which its party bosses operate is on full display in DNC preparations.

dnc chicago

Friday

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Republicans versus MTG

If a motion to vacate the speaker of the House fails resoundingly, does it make a sound?The answer is, of course, yes — with a Capitol Hill press corps that loves nothing more than pitting all-too-willing Republicans against one another. Next week, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is poised to finally pull the trigger on her quixotic quest to oust Speaker Mike Johnson — but she’s likely to be left holding a bag of small-dollar donations and press clippings, which is what her detractors think she is actually motivated by.On one side of the push to oust Johnson is a trio of Greene, Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar.

Thursday

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Letters: the joy of a male book club

From our UK edition

The state of our defence Sir: Your article on the etiolated state of European, including Britain’s, defence, is spot on (‘The price of peace’, 27 April). Rishi Sunak’s belated conversion to increasing defence expenditure is welcome but is, frankly, too little, too late. What it most definitively does not do is place the UK on a ‘war-footing’. By contrast, Russia is already in that state. It spends between 6 and 8 per cent of its GDP on defence. It has established strategic alliances with China, Iran and North Korea, and now much of West Africa too. We need a severe dose of realism. To begin, we must stop pretending that Ukraine has any hope of pushing Russia back to the 2014 borders.

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How many people are attacked by sharks? 

From our UK edition

Horse trials Five Household Cavalry horses bolted in central London, with two reaching Limehouse before being calmed down. It may have been a shocking sight in the 21st century but it would have been ordinary life in the 19th century. – By the 1890s there were 300,000 horses in London. It was not uncommon for them to bolt in the street. Between 1854 and 1861, 62 people are recorded by Guy’s Hospital as having died as a result of collisions with horse-drawn vehicles. A bigger day-to-day problem was with dung, 1,000 tons of which were produced by the animals every day.– The last time a horse bolted in a London street was during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 when a police horse was spooked and ran riderless into crowds.

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Portrait of the Week: Yousaf resigns, Charles resumes duties and Poulter joins Labour

From our UK edition

Home Humza Yousaf resigned as the First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National party, posts he had held since the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon last year. He had precipitated confidence votes by terminating an arrangement with the seven Scottish Green MSPs. Royal Mail stopped imposing £5 penalties on letters with stamps deemed to be counterfeit after suspicions that China had produced many. Nigel Railton, the former chief executive of the Lottery operator Camelot, was appointed interim chairman of the Post Office. The Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund RedBird IMI abandoned its attempt to buy the Telegraph and The Spectator, which will now be up for sale. The King resumed public engagements by visiting a cancer centre with the Queen.

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Why Sunak should stay

From our UK edition

In the end, the Tories did just as badly as predicted in the local elections. They lost about half of the council seats they were defending as well as ten out of the 11 mayoralties up for election and did not even come close in London. It's a disaster, but one consistent with the opinion poll picture painted with such devastating regularity over the last year or so. Any Conservative now tempted to depose Rishi Sunak should study the pantomime playing out in Holyrood. The Tory motto, now, is to remember that there is always someone worse off than you are – and that person is usually in the Scottish Parliament. The SNP is reminding the world that changing leader does not help a party running from its record.

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2649: Shut up shop – solution

From our UK edition

The unclued lights, with the pairs at 1D/18, 17/6A and 26D/5, are stores which are no longer trading. First prize George Kingston, Sutton under Brailes, Oxon Runners-up Mrs J. Smith, Beeston, Kings Lynn, Norfolk; C. Stafford and F.

Wednesday

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Donald Trump: no more Mr. Nice Guy

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump gave a wide-ranging interview to TIME magazine. The article finally dropped on Tuesday and contains lots of interesting little nuggets about what Trump’s plans are for a second term, were he to defeat President Joe Biden this fall, and how his mindset has changed from his first go as president. Reporter Eric Cortellessa notes the Mar-a-Lago chief’s attitude shift in his opener: “Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: he was too nice.”This sentiment will be music to the ears of populist hardliners who felt the former president conceded too much, too often in his first term.

donald trump

Monday

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Dems torn as pro-Palestine protests rock universities

Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests are inspiring a nationwide movement while the Democratic Party finds itself split in two. A group of twenty-one House Democrats called on Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, to end the encampment or resign as progressives such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman joined in the Manhattan university’s protests Friday.The Democratic Party struggles with clashing opinions regarding the broader conflict as well as concerns over electability — particularly as “uncommitted” voters sent a message to President Joe Biden in the primary over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.