Latest from Coffee House

Monday

19 Oct 2026

Has Netflix missed a trick with Meghan Markle?

Now that Meghan Markle has successfully – in her own estimation, at least – once again won the battle for hearts and minds in Britain after her trip to Nottingham with Prince Harry, her thoughts have turned once again to her resumption of her former profession. I refer, of course, to acting, and to the rumors that she was to be given a plum starring role in the third series of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, in which she was said to be reading for an unspecified but pivotal part. A fly-on-the-wall documentary following their return to Britain would have been a guaranteed ratings hit These rumors have now been shut down. And, true to form with all things involving the Duchess of Sussex, there is a spat about who is telling the truth.

Robert Bryce

In Texas, it’s Musk vs Talarico

Here’s an update on the state of Trumpism in America: last month, the richest man in world history threw $158 million into a last-ditch attempt to rescue the worst candidate for US Senate in American history. It’s part of what one US media outlet is calling “Elon Musk’s massive Texas rescue mission.” But even a trillionaire’s fortune may not be able to rescue the execrable Ken Paxton from defeat on November 3. That $158 million donation followed a $10 million gift in August from the “Elon Musk Revocable Trust” to a political action committee closely tied to Paxton. If Paxton, the sitting Texas Attorney General, loses to Democrat James Talarico, historians will remember it as a massive defeat for Donald Trump and Trumpism. Why?

Druin Burch

Barbarism cannot triumph in France

On Bastille Day, 1883, the people of Limoges inaugurated a beautiful new town hall, paid for from the legacy of a rich burgher with no children. On Saturday, rioters set fire to it. “Barbarism is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step.” That was Alain Finkielkraut, but I know it because Clive James quoted him when he wrote of how to keep our societies and values alive. He said we liked to think being cultured warded off barbarism, but that barbarism doesn’t care if we are cultured or not. He was only half right. Barbarism does care: it hates us for being cultured. Barbarism, whether imported or home bred, wants to see our culture burn.

Sam Leith

The utter absurdity of the Sally Rooney affair

Last week I got an email from a colleague I respect on another magazine, prefaced with the assertion that it concerned “a matter we feel will be of importance to you as an artist, writer or journalist” and inviting me to subscribe my name to an open letter in support of the Irish novelist Sally Rooney. The issue in question, in case there are any readers of this who missed the news story, is that Rooney's publisher Faber has announced that with the full support of their author they are withdrawing all Rooney's novels from publication in the UK. Governments shouldn't, if they can possibly avoid it, put themselves into the position of being arbiters of hermeneutics. The absurdities proliferate fractally That's a big deal. Sally Rooney sells a lot of books.

Sunday

18 Oct 2026

Gavin Mortimer

The truth about the anarchy in France

France has had its share of riots in recent years but the scenes of urban warfare that erupted on Saturday were unprecedented. The Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Gregoire, said entire streets “have been devasted.” His shocked deputy, Lamia El Aaraje, said the capital suffered “a level of violence that I believe we had never seen before.” In Limoges, the city hall was burned to the ground and those in Lille and Marseille were badly damaged. A tourist office in the heart of Lyon was razed and in Agen the branch office of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was ransacked.

Louis Sarkozy

France is paying for its indulgence of the young

France is ablaze (again). Limoges’s nineteenth-century town hall was set on fire and declared largely lost. The prefect’s residence in Bordeaux was ransacked. The Galeries Lafayette were looted and, in the words of the mayor of Paris, entire streets “methodically wrecked.” This is what happens when a society treats the lycéen – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle We could expend many words analyzing why: a failing justice system, a lack of political courage, the left’s insurrectionist tendencies. But one underestimated reason is the rise of the Child King. This, in essence, is what happens when a society treats the lycéen (the student) – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle.

Saturday

17 Oct 2026

Tali Fraser

Why have people become so selfish?

People often get confused between the stocks and the pillory – two medieval forms of corporal punishment for crimes like drunkenness. Your feet are locked in the stocks but the more recognizable image comes from the pillory, where your neck and wrists are slotted into a wooden contraption as rotten vegetables are pelted your way. The punishment hasn’t been used since the late 18th century but was never formally abolished; it should make a comeback for a certain type of public nuisance. How often have you got on a train only to be greeted by an indistinct racket, supposedly music, blaring through a speaker? Nobody wants to hear it apart from the person playing it, and nowadays, even if confronted, they don’t relent.

Friday

16 Oct 2026

Freddy Gray

The winter of Trumpian discontent

We seem to be fast approaching the winter of Trumpian discontent. The midterms are just weeks away, the mood within the White House is strained, and knives are being drawn on Pennsylvania Avenue. There’s the fuss over Katie Zacharia, the somewhat verbally challenged White House press secretary, and the surprisingly tough treatment meted out to her by Sean Hannity on Fox News on Thursday night. There’s the apparent volte-face over the fate of Nidal Malik Hasan, as Donald Trump declared that Hasan’s execution will not in fact be live-streamed. "He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad," said the Commander-in-Chief. "But this event will not be streamed.

William Atkinson

Why are people surprised when animals defend themselves?

Should Altai the tiger be euthanized? Hardly the cheeriest way to start, I know, but since he mauled a man to death at Yorkshire Wildlife Park last Saturday, here at The Spectator we have been debating the fate of the Doncaster-based big cat. Why the man chose to enter Altai’s enclosure remains unclear. But as tragic as his death is, the park’s decision to spare Altai is surely the right one. Altai was only acting according to his instincts; there is no justice delivered or example set by killing him, only the sorry loss of a beautiful young animal. Zoos have stringent safety requirements to make these incidents as rare as possible.

Graham Keeley

After years of socialism, is Spain about to turn to the far-right?

Good-looking and always smartly dressed, Vito Quiles sports a wristband with the red and gold of the Spanish flag. It is ubiquitous among Vox supporters. He has made a name for himself in Spain by supposedly reporting on the hate figures for the far-right: migrants, housing rights protesters, students and far-left leaders. He confronts these figures to create provocative content online. Quiles, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, is part of a small but growing number of right-wing agitators who are attracting young people to Vox, a far-right party which less than a decade ago was regarded as a political joke.

Olivia Potts

It’s the season of short ribs

I hereby officially declare autumn open! I am picturing myself bedecked with a wreath of perfect autumn leaves. The bright October sun beams down, warming the cool, crisp air. I am dressed in jewel tones – possibly a cloak – and I’m cradling a pumpkin in one arm and holding a leek in the other, my own autumnal orb and scepter. There are buckeyes all around. The reality of autumn is probably more prosaic: an oversized sweatshirt, some gravy smeared up my forearm, and a grimly determined look as I gaze on the pumpkin and leek lying on my chopping board. It’s probably raining. But I am certainly surrounded by buckeyes, thanks to my small kids. Still, the feeling is the same: it’s exciting when it’s time to begin cold-weather cooking.

Jay Beecher

Believe women? No – believe evidence

Jane Doe’s case against Cornell and seven former students has become a Rorschach test. One reading is that its a case of gang rape and institutional cover-up. Another reading, based on the text messages sent at the time, is murkier, messier and far less convenient for the outrage industry. These messages tell a different story from the narrative surrounding the lawsuit, and the “believe women” brigade would prefer you didn’t read them. On October 19, 2024, Jane Doe, a 20-year-old Cornell student, attended a sorority event at Moonies Bar in Ithaca. By her lawsuit’s account, she had had about ten drinks by 11 p.m. She walked to the Chi Phi frat house to see a male friend, Matthew Ingalls. Ketamine was present. Other men came into the room.

Roger Kimball

Jack Smith’s plot against the republic

Six hundred and thirty-nine thousand. Thanks to the indefatigable Chuck Grassley, we now know that that’s the number of individuals whose names Special Counsel Jack Smith hoovered up for Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice when Joe Biden occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (“Occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” it may almost go without saying, seems more accurate than saying “when Biden was president.”) Senator Grassley has been terrier-like in pursuing evidence of wrongdoing by people like Jack Smith, Merrick Garland and their many confrères in the deep state, which is to say, the Democrat State. Grassley had earlier shown that nearly 5,000 GOP donor checks, mostly for piddly amounts, had been collected as “evidence” by Garland’s minions.

Jonathan Spyer

The West needs a coherent plan for tackling Iran’s proxies

Saudi missiles hit the Houthi-controlled Yemen Petroleum Company’s al-Sabaha facility near the Yemeni capital of Sana’a on Tuesday night. The Saudi strikes came in response to the Houthis’ earlier targeting of King Khalid International Airport on Saturday, when 12 people were killed. Another individual died in a similar attack the following day. The ongoing and deadly exchanges of fire accompany a fierce ground conflict now under way in Yemen between the Iran-backed Houthis and the forces of the Saudi-supported Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), representing the legally constituted government of Yemen.

Louis Sarkozy

We cannot trust our AI overlords

It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the digital apocalypse is at our door. The advance of artificial intelligence is outstripping our fears and expectations. The machinery of the state, slow and predictable by nature, is so thoroughly outpaced in its capacity to control and regulate that it does not even realize it. Our politicians, running on antiquated software, cling to problems that are pressing but dated (such as the retirement age and the number of civil servants) and barely speak of the cataclysm on the horizon. Édouard Philippe, who is currently the frontrunner of the traditional right-wing constellation in France, recently remarked that he used LLMs (large language models) to write his emails. Such is the abyss of our backwardness.

Freddy Gray

Robert Pape: America’s political violence is spiraling

32 min listen

Freddy speaks with University of Chicago international security scholar Professor Robert Pape about his book, Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Face of Violent Populism, exploring how demographic transformations, widening wealth inequality, and the normalization of political violence across the political spectrum are intersecting to pose a profound internal threat to American democracy and global stability https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Thursday

15 Oct 2026

Owen Matthews

Has Trump changed sides on Ukraine?

Has Donald Trump effectively changed sides in the Ukraine war? Over just a few tumultuous days, Trump’s already rocky relations with Volodymyr Zelensky have tumbled into something close to irreconcilable breakdown. After Trump announced that he would be de-sanctioning Russian diesel exports in an attempt to lower global prices, Zelensky had the temerity to call him “weak.” Trump responded bluntly that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” then squarely (and unfairly) blamed Zelensky’s continued strikes on Russian oil refineries for an international fuel price spike.

Simon Diggins

Revealed: NATO’s plan to combat Russia

Amid the Sturm und Drang of Donald Trump’s White House and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, General Alexus Gregory "Grynch" Grynkewich laid out what he terms NATO’s “Theory of Victory.” This is a concept of operations that will “block the initial attack... blunt it and prevent further advance. And, if required, break the enemy’s forces and the operational war fighting system that is arrayed against us.” In short: Block, Blunt and Break. General Grynkewich was careful not to point fingers but the location of his talk, at the Warsaw Security Forum, left no doubts as to who the potential ‘adversary’ General Grynkewich is both SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s lead operational commander) and USEUCOM, the commander of all US troops in the European theater.

Nicholas Farrell

Why did my mother go mad?

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna My mother Joyce was a very beautiful woman who became what “normal” people call “mad.” My question has always been: why did she go mad? But also: did she in fact go mad? She had meditated under a blanket with the Beatles and the Maharishi in Bangor in 1967. She had been the life and soul of every party. But that was not, I feel, the explanation. She died in poverty in 1982, aged just 50, in a hospice in distant Newcastle upon Tyne where she had returned from Kent in desperation to live in the derelict two-up two-down where she had grown up. I was there with her throughout that final year. “Paranoid schizophrenic,” some doctor once told me, whatever that means. For let us not forget the Russian proverb: “The paranoid is always right.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

My advice for Tucker Carlson

Although I tend to keep my romantic nature under wraps, every year Helena, my wife, and I go on a “luxury mini break” either to Birmingham or Manchester. By strange happenstance this always seems to coincide with the Conservative party conference and the same was true this year, thus we headed off to Birmingham with a detour via Oxford. Normally I never wish to leave Somerset, especially without having had Sunday lunch, although this is less of a penance than normal as our cook has retired and we have not yet found a replacement, if anyone is interested… But this time I did so happily as we were taking our eldest son, Peter, to Oriel College.

Rachel Johnson

The world’s greatest hotel has blocked the invasion of influencers

Antibes The poule de luxe stalked through the lobby on six-inch spike heels. In her wake shambled a small son and broken wallet of a husband. She held a selfie stick aloft to film every second of herself storming to her lunch reservation, single-minded in her search for prime social media content scraped from the best hotel in the world: the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Boulevard John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Antibes. She had an expression that reminded me of Hitler’s smirk on the occasion of his pilgrimage to Napoleon’s tomb on his first and only trip to Paris in June 1940. It was one of glazed triumph that she had got there and wanted it all recorded for posterity.

Douglas Murray

There is no such thing as a clean execution

There are times when the absence of Jonathan Swift is acutely felt. One such moment came at the end of last month with the botched execution of a woman in Tennessee called Christa Pike. Pike has been in prison on death row since 1996 when she was convicted of the torture and murder of a classmate when she was just 18. She had originally been sentenced to death by electric chair. But society has become more benevolent since the 1990s and so, at the age of 50, Pike was prepared for execution by lethal injection. If society sanctions the ultimate punishment, it should not look away from what that punishment looks like The injections went ahead but they did not work.

Wednesday

14 Oct 2026

Daniel Thorpe

Azerbaijan’s hijab ban has infuriated Turkey

There are few countries in the world with relations as close as Turkey and Azerbaijan. The two countries hail from the same Turkic ethnic roots, their languages are more or less mutually intelligible, and military cooperation has been strong – particularly in Nagorno-Karabakh against the Armenians. There’s even a phrase, “one nation, two states,” commonly echoed by both sides. Yet, a rift is now brewing between the two brotherly Muslim countries – over hijabs. Last month, the Azerbaijani government imposed restrictions in schools that “do not correspond to the principle of secular general education,” effectively banning headscarves worn by schoolgirls.

Alexander Kolyandr

What was the point of Trump’s diesel deal with Russia?

Donald Trump’s telephone call with Vladimir Putin last Friday was supposed to be about a suspected outbreak of plague in Russia, but it ended, as their conversations tend to, with a deal. Russia, the President announced, would supply America with more than 300,000 tons of diesel immediately, 500,000 tons in November, a million tons “immediately thereafter” and another three million “within a short period of time.” The Treasury issued a license exempting Russian diesel from American sanctions until April. In the same breath, Trump proclaimed another energy ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv, the second in a month, and took another swipe at Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he would plainly like to see replaced at the ballot box.

Bridget Phetasy

Shane Gillis won’t silence me

I was mid-hip thrust when I found out Shane Gillis had called me a whore. Technically I found out four hours later, when I reviewed the footage of Saturday Night Live. My tripod was on the bench, my ring light was clamped to the squat rack and my boyfriend Tanner was holding the back-up phone for the side angle. Tanner films all my content. He is not allowed to look at me. Solidarity means centering yourself in other people’s trauma, in front of a camera, with good lighting The “joke” was about how women dress at the gym. I know it was about me, because everything is. So I did what any survivor would do. I went to my car and filmed myself crying.

Tuesday

13 Oct 2026

Ross Clark

Why Tom Cruise’s Digger flopped at the box office

Has climate hysteria finally run its course? I ask because the latest Hollywood blockbuster on the subject seems to have bombed. Digger, in which Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon so intent on drilling that he causes an ice shelf off Greenland to collapse, provoking climatic disaster, took only about $8 million in its first weekend, not great when it needs $280 million of box office takings just to break even. According to seasoned observers it is on course to lose Warner Bros $245 million, which would make it one of the worst cinema disasters of all time. Not even an endorsement from Jane Fonda, who described it as “a new way to wake us up about climate change” seems to have enticed the public. This didn't used to happen.

Gareth Roberts

Greta Thunberg is a protest addict

Greta Thunberg is in Paris. Yes, as if the French haven’t got enough on their assiettes with “youths” and “students” reducing the cradle of European civilization to smoking ruins, the overgrown Shirley Temple of Stockholm rocked up this morning outside a school in Saint-Denis. She told the crowd, “Young people are not being included in the conversation. Our future is being robbed away from us!” The clumsy structure of the latter sentence gave me an eerie sensation of an Armageddon-themed ABBA lyric. I can picture a mournful Frida singing it over flickering firelight. Few are the child stars, like Roddy McDowall or Bonnie Langford, who can sustain an adult career Greta certainly gets around, doesn’t she? Her passport must be like a tattered old dollar bill.

Aiden Abbott

Trump’s unconvincing imitators

The recent US adventures in Venezuela and Iran have not, on the American side, wrought the same losses of life and limb as those of Vietnam or World War Two. No field medics ferrying the dying and the dead. No trenchfooted cripples waiting for their commanders to find the difficult words for the difficult hour. Nobody in front of whom one might feel it inappropriate to begin a speech with: “Warriors, good afternoon.” Hegseth reached for an epic register only to be let down by his B-movie rhythm and hiccupy delivery Or, as Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary of War, put it last month: “We are no longer the ‘Woke Department’ or the ‘Weak Department.’ Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.

Benedict Rogers

The bravery of Joshua Wong

Joshua Wong, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy activists, turns 30 today. He should be in the prime of life, developing a career, perhaps starting a family. Instead, he is languishing in a prison cell, where he has spent much of the past decade. Wong faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. His crime? Peacefully – though persistently – demanding the freedoms that were promised to Hong Kong. Wong's crime? Peacefully – though persistently – demanding the freedoms that were promised to Hong Kong Wong was first jailed nine years ago, when – together with pro-democracy legislator Nathan Law and student activist Alex Chow – he became one of Hong Kong’s first political prisoners.

Katherine Dee

Cornell and the myth of pre-Sexual Revolution America

I have always been afraid of watching the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I grew up hearing about how my mother, upon seeing it in the theater, had walked out and immediately vomited. The movie, which follows New York schoolteacher Theresa Dunn through a series of at times humiliating sexual encounters (and the lasciviousness of the 1970s) until one of her sex partners murders her, is an adaptation of a novel, itself inspired by the real-life death of Roseann Quinn. Just two days after her body was found, Quinn was described as having “no regular boyfriend but the type of girl who would have a guy in if he brought her home” in the New York Times. Mr. Goodbar is a deeply anxious picture of post-revolution sexual guilt In the panic-stricken moral universe of Mr.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s schools protest has been hijacked

This is not going to be an easy week for the French police. More than 200,000 people are expected on the streets today in “Act 5” of the high school protest, and on Saturday the Gilets Jaunes will join a demonstration about the cost of living crisis. The extreme-left and their anarchist allies are set on disorder There will be violence. There was on Monday, which was supposed to be a relatively quiet day in preparation for today. It was anything but. In a school in Aubagne, in the south of the country, a 14-year-old boy opened fire with a hunting rifle, wounding two teachers and terrifying his classmates. Police are still working to establish a motive. Elsewhere in France, eight teachers were assaulted by protesters.

Bethel McGrew

Why does the internet hate the young man killed by a tiger?

If a predatory animal attacks a harmless human, do we root for the animal or the human? Not everyone holds that answer to be self-evident, as witnessed in the discourse around last weekend’s Yorkshire Wildlife Park tragedy in the United Kingdom. Details remain scarce about the delusional young man who vaulted into the enclosure with a Siberian tiger and was swiftly mauled to death. Whoever he was, the internet has declared the gene pool well rid of him. By all accounts, the horrific scene unfolded too fast for park rangers on site to make a life-saving intervention. In the haze of early reports, some people (including myself) mistakenly thought there may have been an opportunity missed to intervene with a real gun.

Monday

12 Oct 2026

Freddy Gray

Trump’s decade of power: what went wrong?

31 min listen

Freddy speaks with Spectator columnist Christopher Caldwell about the ten-year legacy of Donald Trump since his 2016 election victory, assessing his second administration's high-water marks alongside the recent political and personal controversies that Caldwell argues have eroded voter trust, unraveled his populist appeal, and raised sharp questions about the future of the conservative movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Sam Leith

Why aren’t all executions public?

There is a boring, snooty, self-righteous school of thought that the judicial killing of a human being is a grave and dignified sacrament of the state. It says that where the law provides for the government to take a life, that is about as serious a decision as, in peacetime, it gets. This school of thought has it that the preceding judicial process must be exhaustive; that the condemned, no matter how repulsive their crimes, should be treated with respect by virtue of their status as human beings; that the whole punitive apparatus must see the process through with the sort of impersonal solemnity appropriate to its momentous arrogation of the right to take a life. Black caps, drawn curtains, ceremonious and exact procedures, shuffling clergymen…all that stuffy malarkey.