Spectator Life

Move over Kim Kardashian, with your cover shots for Paper magazine. Same for you, Taylor Swift, with tickets for your Eras tour. For there’s a new phenomenon breaking the internet – with sales appearing to rival the speed of Glastonbury – and it’s not so much viral as venerable.  When I made a note in my diary for 10 a.m. on 1 July to get tickets for the Bayeux Tapestry display at the British Museum, little did I imagine just how difficult it might be. Prompted by my younger daughter’s project on the Norman Conquest, and its commission by Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother, I promised her we’d go and see it in the autumn when it came to London – its first trip to these shores since it was taken to France late in the 11th century.

Close your eyes and cast your mind back, if you will, to the summer of 2024. Britain had just crowned a new prime minister, our fortunes in a major football tournament hung in the balance, and the country braced for an incoming heatwave. So far, so déjà vu. But on TikTok there was only one serious question: were you, like Kamala Harris, having a Brat Summer? Were your energies, like those of the would-be POTUS, spent unleashing party girl vibes and embracing self-acceptance to the thumping sounds of Charli XCX?  If that passed you by, perhaps you remember 2025's Hot Girl Summer?

More than 90 people drowned in France between 19 June and the end of the month during the country’s intense heatwave. Government figures released last week were accompanied by a warning from sport and youth minister Marina Ferrari. ‘Very young children are particularly vulnerable and must not be left unsupervised,’ she said. ‘There are young people engaging in dangerous behaviour, such as “I’m going to jump off a bridge” or “I’m going into an unsupervised canal”.’ Such antics were de rigueur during the heatwave, particularly in cities such as Paris, where people cooled off by leaping from bridges into rivers and canals. In the Canal Saint-Martin, in the heart of the capital, two young men drowned in separate incidents.

Amidst the summer’s plethora of advertisements aimed at the moronic, desperate and gullible, an especially crass one stands out. Ralph Lauren have decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that their well-heeled and preppy customers need the unholy duo of the actor Tom Hiddleston and a computer-generated ‘Polo Bear’ to advertise their product.

Unsurprisingly, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (LLB) doesn’t judge No. 10’s recent occupants by their policies. Rather, it’s their interior design. First there was Theresa May, ‘desperately trying to keep everything lidded and controlled in mid-century John Lewis’. Then there was Boris Johnson in a ‘ridiculous operatic explosion’ of Lulu Lytle. As for Andy Burnham, he’ll probably go ‘mad for Manchester with graffiti everywhere’. If LLB were asked to redecorate No. 10, would he do it? ‘Well I’d have to really get a skittle on if it was for Keir Starmer, wouldn't I?’ he laughs.

We tend not to think too much about binmen. They operate in a shadow world, their rounds complete before most of us have even left the house. And when we do see them, do we not avert our eyes, recoiling from the filth and, if we’re really honest, slightly ashamed that someone else is doing the dirty work? Yet uncollected rubbish, conversely, is the first sign of a broken or bankrupt society; the winter of discontent, a pile of bin bags. We know, deep down, that we need binmen, even if we can’t quite acknowledge it.  Simon Paré-Poupart is familiar with all of this. In his two decades as a binman – or garbageman – in Montreal, he has been submerged in rubbish, day after day, and observed the people whose streets he cleans.

I have always thought of weather like that of the last week as Dating Weather.  It’s not that one can only date when it’s hot, or that one is more amorous in heat than cold (if anything, the reverse is true); but when I was young and single I was very poor. As George Orwell observed in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), in a line so good Nancy Mitford stole it: ‘It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money.' Dates in the winter necessitate a restaurant or a cinema or, at the very least, somewhere with heating – and that costs money. Dating in the summer is a walk in the park.  And now I am old and single, I am cash-poor – at least until the matrimonial acquest is sold.

The news that Dame Penelope Keith has died at the age of 86 has devastated lovers of great British humour, to say nothing of Spectator readers. The two are, after all, closely linked. Keith was that rare actress who was the lead in not one but two seminal sitcoms, The Good Life and To The Manor Born. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to describe her performances as the aspirational Margo Leadbetter and the aristocratic Aubrey fforbes-Hamilton as showing thespian range. But there was no actress better at skewering the pretensions and absurdities of a certain kind of Englishwoman. Even today, if you say of someone that they are a ‘Penelope Keith type’, it is shorthand for Middle England in excelsis – even if that type is vanishing far quicker than is desirable.

‘Catholic by upbringing but not particularly religious’ is how Andy Burnham described his religion to the Huffington Post in 2015. He will be, if he wins the leadership ballot, the first cradle Catholic PM. At the annual summer party for the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, its editor, Brendan Walsh, observed that Burnham still goes to mass ‘occasionally’ but that’s about as far as anyone goes to suggest he is actually practicing. His much-quoted observation from a Guardian interview in 2009, that ‘Three things are important in my life, apart from family. Everton FC, the Labour Party and the Catholic church - in that order’ is historic.

Kay and Derek’s ‘radicalisation’, as their daughter calls it, became impossible to ignore when they named their dachshund’s latest litter. Six males and two girls and of course they were named Nigel, Richard, Danny, Lee, Robert, Zia, Sarah and Suella. (Kay is secretly rather pleased the runt didn’t make it – she didn’t have to think about whether she would name him Rupert.) Previously their puppies had been given strictly non-political names – like Chips or Monty or Winston – and Kay had renamed Nelson when a neighbour got the wrong idea. There’s a saying about giving a dog a bad name, and you can’t call them something you can’t shout across a field without embarrassment.  That was the point when their daughter Meg stopped talking to them.

The season is here and at Ascot last week, rather than worrying about what hat to wear, the real pros were working out what drug to take. After a series of cubicle swabs, newspaper reports left no doubt as to racegoers’ consumption at 'As-ket': the coke consumed in the car parks alone probably financed the construction of at least three Medellin villas. It also explains the success of that ubiquitous pale blue Oliver Brown waistcoat – lined with two perfectly-sized little pockets.  Dealers’ menus, sent by WhatsApp and laden with emojis, reveal the astonishing array of exotic substances on offer to punters. We no longer live in an era of poorly cling-filmed coke (which turned out to be mainly speed) and hash pellets that look like rabbit poo.

France’s summer smash at the cinema is set to be a comedy called The Perfects. It opens next week with an all-star cast that includes Scottish actor Alan Cumming. The Perfects are a family of con-artists who flee France to escape the police and they end up in Scotland where madcap adventures in tartan ensue. It’s further proof that France can’t get enough of Bonnie Scotland. Films, television documentaries, newspaper features and even a puff piece earlier this month on the primetime lunchtime news about a visit to the most isolated pub in Scotland.

The most memorable thing about Keir Starmer's resignation speech yesterday was not the resignation. It was the soundtrack. As the Prime Minister tearfully announced his intention to depart Downing Street, the veteran anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray began blasting Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’ across Whitehall.  I was initially mildly surprised that modern broadcast technology proved incapable of filtering out a single protester with a loudspeaker somewhere down the road. As the speech dragged into its second minute, I was no longer entirely certain which audio I most wanted removed.  The great joke of the morning was that ‘Ode to Joy’ is a piece about reconciliation.

For the past 264 days, I have been hounded by a merciless small green owl. If I were to share this with friends, troubled whispers about my mental wellbeing would soon strike up. Disquieted, they might even cart me off to the hellscape of a wellness intervention. And yet this malevolent bird is entirely real. It is there when I unload the dishwasher, lamenting its disappointment in my efforts; and it is there when I put my daughter to bed, warning that it is about to become 'very angry'. Yes, Duolingo is an insidious Jiminy Cricket on modern shoulders – except that it lives in our pockets and, rather than dispensing wisdom, is an emotionally blackmailing shame merchant with rage issues. It wasn’t always this way.

Camilla bought their place in the Burnhams when she discovered she was pregnant with her third child – following a heavy après sesh at La Folie Douce in Megève. Realising they’d never ski again as a family of four, and with memories of the Costa Smeralda fading like an over-exposed Polaroid, she convinced Johnnie that getting a holiday cottage made financial sense. ‘Because they’re virtually giving away buy-to-let mortgages.’ And as Kirsty Allsopp, who went to the same school as Camilla but was at least ten years older, always says, it’s an income stream.

Sir Christopher Wren did it all. 51 City Churches after the Great Fire of London. St Paul’s Cathedral. Hampton Court, Greenwich Hospital, Royal Hospital Chelsea… But he never built an English country church. Or did he? This weekend, I went to an enchanting service at St Mary’s, Ingestre, Staffordshire, to celebrate its 350th anniversary. There is only one document connecting Wren to the church – his design for ‘Mr Chetwynd’s tower’. The Chetwynds built the neighbouring pile, Ingestre Hall. Their descendant, Aaron Chetwynd, lives in the neighbouring stables and kindly asked me to give a talk on Wren at the Ingestre Hall orangery after the church service. Walk inside St Mary’s and it's spine-tinglingly moving.

For a decidedly short London road, little Store Street in Bloomsbury, which connects the scholarly precincts of London University with the furniture stores of Tottenham Court Road, delivers a pleasant hit of history. In 1791, ur-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft lived here, then wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  In case you didn’t know, I also lived on Store Street in the 1990s, back when it was, to be honest, a slightly shabby sideroad, with a greasy spoon and grubby offices. Arguably quaint, and definitely honest, but not somewhere you’d want to linger.  Now, all is changed, changed utterly. In recent years Store Street has spruced up and become a destination in itself.

There are a handful of obsessive mania-types I can get along with swimmingly. Kleptos, heavy-drinking dipsos and nymphos to name a few. But at monomaniacs, I draw the line. Give me anything, anyone, at a social occasion — but not a one-topic conversation.   Why is it that the fewer interests people have, the more boring they become? One wonders what history’s great Renaissance men would have made of today’s crypto bros or blockchain fanatics. I pick on blockchain because, as with so many problems benighting the world, technology is to blame. I’m no Luddite, but I hereby shame content algorithms in the strongest of biblical terms saying, Verily, ye have spawned dullards.

Some time ago, I had a furious conversation with a tech bro, which played out something along these lines: ‘How cool would it be’, said the tech bro, ‘if you could just download a language into your brain, Matrix-style, without having to learn it yourself.’ I spluttered out my gin and tonic and managed to croak: but that’s horrible! What of discernment, taste, style and nuance? What of the exacting but enjoyable pains of memorising words, sparking new connections, and forming your own peculiar store of knowledge? If new knowledge suddenly appeared in your brain, I’d call that creepy, akin to being possessed. ‘But it’s so cool’, came the response.

Gerald’s just back from Florence. Two-and-a-half-thousand miles in the old Aston, thunderous straight six booming all over the Alps. ‘Took the Gothard Pass out of Switzerland. Bloody marvellous. You could hear us coming three valleys away! The old girl almost boiled over at seven thousand feet. The Aston was pretty, hot too, hahaha, wasn’t she, Lucinda?’  Long-suffering Lucinda, who has been married to Gerald for 48 challenging years, has heard all the stories before and only winces inwardly.