Society

Monday

Alexander Larman

Is Earl Spencer telling the truth about Charles III?

When Earl Spencer was interviewed by Larry King in 1997, he had nothing but words of praise for the-then Prince Charles, in the aftermath of Diana’s death and funeral. When Larry King asked if the Prince of Wales had had anything to say about Spencer’s fiery eulogy, his guest replied, “Not about the speech, no, but he was perfectly polite all day,” and went on to stress that, “Nothing nasty has ever been said about it by him to me.” Spencer attempted to claim that he was drawing a distinction between Charles as king and Charles as unpleasant brother-in-law.

Earl Spencer
Josh Sims

Meet the adult toddlers who play with toys

A colleague of mine has a sizable collection of sportscars. He has, he notes, every expression of his favorite, the Lotus Esprit. He lovingly cleans them, occasionally changes up the way they’re displayed. What he might then jokingly add is just how easy this is. The biggest of his cars is just a few inches long. They’re models, of the kind that small children might push over the carpet making “brrm, brrm” noises, once they’ve passed out of what the toymakers call the “bash and crash” phase, when motorway carnage is the name of the game.   What might appear strange to an older generation – overlooking their own love of train sets – is that this mid-life interest in toys is not unusual.

Friday

Charles Moore

Where are my reparations?

The natural coalition of rural people which was forged 25 years ago, before the hunting ban, is forming once more. In Westminster, we recently gathered under the Countryside Alliance banner to hear David Blunkett, David Cameron and others set out the issues. Poor Andy Burnham had inadvertently stoked our feelings by joking feebly about how he hardly ever visits farms and considers DEFRA the least important government department (would it were so!). There are strong current individual issues – the proposed trail-hunting ban being the most egregious and the inheritance taxes for farms the most economically damaging – but the sheer number of government-inspired rural harms is astonishing. The Alliance counts 27 of them.

reparations
Charles Steel

The autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world

Ben Delo, the source of one half of Reform’s £72 million mega-donation, wrote in The Spectator last year about being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome as a child. The self-confessed geek, now 42, was socially awkward. He did not fit in and he did not care to. His condition would shape the course of his life, making him very good at math, very rich and hellbent on getting involved in politics. Christopher Harborne, the crypto billionaire who has matched Delo’s donation, we know much less about. Despite being a billionaire many times over, the 63-year-old has the air of a chemistry teacher and an aversion to interviews. Like Delo, who until recently lived in Hong Kong, he also forged his way in the Far East, living in Thailand.

autistocracy
Dot Wordsworth

How whimsy took over

An intelligent reader is annoyed by whimsy. “Clothes, interiors, children’s birthdays...  it’s everywhere!” she exclaims. “What is whimsy anyway?” It is indeed everywhere. “Whimsy has been institutionalized,” wrote James Marriott in the Times, its symptoms including Larry the Downing Street cat and the saintly Paddington Bear. This recognizes a modern side to whimsy that is sentimental and twee. But to me its historical side acquires interest from a remark in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Whimsy may be related to whim-wham as flimsy to flim-flam.” Flim-flam was only one such reduplication with a vowel variation expressive of contempt.

Peter Bear

Forget sturgeon caviar – go for lumpfish

Pity the poor lumpfish. It’s lumbered with an unflattering name, or its equally unattractive moniker “sucker fish.” It also looks unappealing. The poor blighters are endowed with a stubby nose and knobbly, spotty, tubercular skin that gives them their lumpy look. With a carbuncled, ridged back, bulging eyes and a suction disc so it can attach itself to rocks, it hardly cuts the sexiest figure. But God bless the lumpfish, it does deliver poor man’s caviar in spades. It couldn’t look more different from the king of caviar, the sturgeon, which is the most elegant fish in the ocean. Long, sleek and silver, the sturgeon flows effortlessly through the water like Concorde flying through the sky. It has handsome stitching along its body.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: what should I do if my guests don’t want to take their shoes off?

Q. My brother and I have bought a flat together in central London. It was expensive but we will save a fortune over time through not having to take taxis. Now we are in our new pristine flat we realize we don’t want whatever there is on London pavements being tramped through it, so we take our shoes off at the door. Male friends seem happy to slip their footwear off, but girls who have come in high heels don’t want to. My mother says it’s because they are worried about their legs “looking stumpy” but whatever, they really don’t seem able to relax without them. The plastic surgical overshoes you have recommended in the past don’t work with heels. – Name withheld, London SW1 A. You are right, but a wonderful alternative now exists for high-heel wearers.

Rory Sutherland

Driverless cars must learn to drive like Brits

I’ve ridden in Waymo driverless taxis in both Miami and Austin and it is, as you would expect, a slightly surreal experience. When an empty vehicle turns up, displays your glowing initials on the roof, then invites you to unlock the doors via your phone, you feel as if you’re in a science-fiction film. Once you drive off, it feels doubly weird. Yet what’s most surprising is how quickly it ceases to feel strange. After three minutes, you pay scarcely more attention to the progress of the vehicle than you would when riding in a car driven by any competent human driver. A colleague of mine who has used Waymo on faster roads tells me you experience another burst of unease when the car first hits 50mph, but this, too, rapidly dissipates.

Peter Hitchens

How Prague cured me of my communism

Proust can keep his soggy madeleine. For me the word “Prague” is a trigger of memory like no other. It stirs me up like some plaintive half-heard tune, or the faint scent of lavender in sheets left folded for years. Evil news from Prague, in a stuffy August long ago, turned my world over completely. This was 1968, a year of wonders, none of them very nice, which will not easily leave my recollection. It was the year I joined a Trotskyist sect. It was the year I punched a man (in self-defense). It was the year I attended my first violent raucous demonstration, against the war in Vietnam, with the police horses thundering through the March mud in Grosvenor Square. A few weeks later Paris was full of tear gas and flying cobblestones, and how I wished I was there.

Sophia Money-Coutts

Does a dog-friendly car exist?

The valet parking man at Gatwick climbed out of my car with an expression that suggested he’d just driven a Panzer at the Russian border as opposed to bringing a very underpowered VW Polo around from the car park. “Madam,” he began, unsteadily. “I need to have a word with you about the state of your car.” I apologized. My Polo is an abysmal state. Empty coffee cups, paper napkins, crinkled bags that once contained sandwiches or donuts, plastic water bottles, 58 hair ties, decaying dog biscuits and poo bags (albeit unused) all litter the floor. It’s also disgracefully muddy because Dennis doesn’t go in the boot. He either sits beside me in the front, or lies along the back seat as if I am his chauffeur and he is a debutante who’s overdone it at The 400.

Lloyd Evans

Never trust a happy jogger

What is it for? Jogging means being in a hurry to get nowhere in particular as fast as possible. And it qualifies as certifiable behavior. The madman can see the purpose of his actions but the sane man can’t. City-dwellers are more prone to this mental abnormality than rural folk, who prefer not to go loping through fields of wheat or scampering over the muddied divots of an open moor. In cities, the lunatics are -everywhere, which makes it tricky for the authorities to detain them under the Mental Health Act. Some joggers know that chasing around their neighborhood like a hamster on a wheel is a little crazy. Hence “jogger’s face,” the anguished expression worn by many of the semi-athletes as they galumph along the streets. “Why am I doing this?” they cry inwardly.

Dean Godson

Can Britain learn from Sweden’s immigration crackdown?

There is a decisive shift occurring in European politics. It’s happening across nations – and parties. It lies behind the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s victory in the Saxony-Anhalt state election last weekend. And it is the underreported factor in Sweden’s recent general election. In almost every part of the continent, the politics of crime, security, migration and citizenship is driving governments to harden their borders and toughen their approach towards integration, especially when it comes to Islamism. On the center-right, the Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker has outlined that he plans to bring in a ban on what he calls political Islam.

Peter Hitchens

How I became a Canadian nationalist

This is how I became a Canadian nationalist. I did it on the rebound. I never wanted to, and it is a strange experience to find myself pounding the arm of my chair when Mark Carney, of all people, defies the Almighty Trump. But it is so. Once, like that poor man who speaks the first lines in The Godfather, I believed in America, arsenal of liberty, land of the free, inheritor of Magna Carta and so on. Then, after a couple of years in Moscow, I went to live in Washington, DC. And it was there that I was wooed and eventually seduced by the land of maple syrup. To begin with, it was the discovery that soppy British sentiment about the US was not in practice returned. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t like us as that they had barely heard of us. Legally, Britain didn’t seem to exist.

Mary Wakefield

The real reason children no longer enjoy reading

At the tail end of the summer holiday, my son and I had a shouting match in King’s Cross station. For more than three hours on the train south from Durham, he’d been staring at a single question on a comprehension paper. The text began with a description of a road running through the moonlit countryside, and question three asked: “Why does the author compare the road to a gray silk ribbon?” Between Durham and Peterborough, I had repeated that question, with increasingly psychopathic calm. “So darling, why does the author compare the road to a ribbon?” By the time the Arsenal stadium came into sight, I could feel small things inside my brain starting to come loose and on platform 1I lost my cool. “Just give me an answer, anything! Tell me it’s a metaphor, at least.

Toby Young

I’ve found the perfect school for Harry and Meghan

As the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, I have to acknowledge that I still have some way to go to match the radioactive negativity Harry and Meghan generate with their every move. The Sussexes’ accumulated expertise in committing increasingly nauseating acts of hypocritical entitlement with every week that passes should qualify them both for a Regius Chair in Blithe Privilege at the University of Self-Regard. The latest episode in their narcissistic odyssey – The Sillyad – has been their agonizing over where to send their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, to school. Harry and Meghan’s decision to educate them in England is, in its way, admirable.

Michael Simmons

Labour must go further and faster in the North Sea

John Healey stood in front of two giant robotic arms this week and promised to “make Great Britain growth Britain again.” The Chancellor also promised, borrowing a catchphrase from his neighbor in No. 10, to deliver “good growth in every postcode.” In the North Sea, 150 miles east off the coast of Aberdeen, lies the first big test of this promise. The 6,000-ton Jackdaw extraction platform is ready to start pumping gas from a field three miles below the surface. Twenty years after the Jackdaw field was first successfully prospected, it will, at the stroke of a ministerial pen, finally be allowed to operate. Industry bosses were told to prepare for a possible government handshaking visit on September 15.

Bill Kauffman

Pale Dread is the next great Washington novel

My only novel, Every Man a King (published in 1989), included a caricature of a famous political figure for whom I worked – and whom I might treat more kindly today, for as the years melt away so do the harsh judgments. As Babs Streisand sang, what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget. Judging by A.G. Doran’s new novel, Pale Dread, set in the State Department during the chaotic first Trump administration, its author has chosen to forget nothing of his sentence in our nation’s capital.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Technology is crowding out the arts

From the beginning of human history until the day, relatively speaking, before yesterday, every civilization has given scope to, and thus been the product of, human genius in every one of its manifestations including the representative, the literary, the musical, the architectural, the mechanical and technical arts and the sciences. Naturally, each of them had its special characteristics and talents with which it became associated and for which it became known: in the case of China, her bureaucratic and military sophistication; in that of Japan, her refined aestheticism and grace of living.

Josie Cox

My New York City survival guide

It’s September in New York City. Mercifully, the sweltering heat is abating. The putrid smell of trash is lifting ever so slightly and the kids are back at school after what feels like 100 years of overpriced summer camps with mortgage-worthy price tags. For me, it also means swapping my usual attire – best described as “I’m a freelance writer and can therefore wear whatever the hell I want” for the more publicly appropriate slacks and a nice shirt as I head back to the classroom to teach graduate students about the art and absurdities of communication. I’ve been co-teaching two of these classes every fall for the past five years and enjoy the structure they bring to my otherwise higgledy-piggledy week.

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Ed Sheeran has done nothing wrong

So now we know what happens if you refuse to prostrate yourself before the Gaza cult. If you politely decline wearing the keffiyeh like a holy shroud and chanting “Free Palestine” on a mindless loop. They will destroy you. They will hound you like an infidel and seek your excommunication from polite society. Just look at what is happening to Ed Sheeran. The anti-Ed hysteria really is spinning out of control Pop’s Mr. Nice Guy, penner of bloodless ballads, is being ripped to shreds online. He’s damned as a “coward,” a “lowlife,” even as “complicit” in one of the great crimes of the 21st century. “Call off the rest of your American tour!” cry the frothing Ed-hunters. What sin did he commit to warrant such venom?

ed sheeran