Spectator Life

Pity the tufted ducks: Regent’s Park hasn’t been this manic since Donald Trump militarised it in 2018, and his very oedipal Chinooks terrorised the birds. Read about Trump’s father Fred, and you will understand him, and the Chinooks. But Trump left, and the cyclists multiplied.   I don’t live in London, so I don’t see the mission creep. The last time I was in the rose garden in the Inner Circle it was a weekday afternoon in early spring, and it was empty, doing what it is designed for: peace in a howling city. But that was then.

This week I was replaced by AI. I saw it coming, but it didn’t make the news any easier to deal with. To be honest, it terrifies me for the future of our species. If that sounds a bit over the top, hear me out. I am a writer. Not only that, I am a commercially successful one. Although you probably haven’t heard of me, I’ve published more than 300 short stories in women’s magazines over the past 15 years. From ghost stories in Woman’s Weekly to tales of romance in Take a Break Fiction Feast, I write them all. Sorry – wrote.  ‘Dear Geoff,’ the email said. ‘Going forward, our in-house team will be using AI tools to compile future editions, but we thank you for your many contributions to the magazine over the years. Kind regards, Rebecca.

In the regretful days that followed England’s World Cup exit last week, a video was played on repeat on social media. Someone had edited red and white into greyscale over a clip of England’s footballers linking arms and swaying, singing along to Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’.  At this tournament it became a tradition. England won a game, then a few more. The pundits finally fell silent. Ian Wright or Gary Neville whispered: ‘Drink it in.’ That famous guitar started up; the camera panned along the players’ line. We all knew the opening words: ‘Today is gonna be the day…’ No more ‘Sweet Caroline’. ‘Three Lions’ was played but the crowd only cursorily joined in.

Tonight, Lionel Messi will walk out for his third World Cup final at 39 years old. Should Argentina beat Spain, they will be the first side to retain the trophy since Brazil in 1962, and the case for Messi as the greatest player of all time will be closed for good. As a self-respecting Englishman, I will not be cheering for Argentina after Wednesday’s depressing semi-final. I’ll be silently supporting Messi for a very different reason. At 5ft 7in, he represents a victory for the least pitied disadvantaged group: the vertically challenged man.  Back in 2022, TikTok was awash with videos hailing ‘short king spring’: a trend celebrating the rise (no pun intended) of famous men under 5ft 8in.

Even though my career has been almost entirely in front of the camera, rather than behind it, I’ve long been obsessed with film equipment. How, then, can I resist a party in LA for Cine Gear, a trade show for new film kit? It’s a good place for the ‘creatives’ to meet the technical guys. The director Dan Trachtenberg is there, and we handle the latest Cooke glass. Cooke has been making lenses in Leicester since 1893, and they are still the best cine lenses in the world. I bought my set of Cooke Speed Panchros in the 1980s, when nobody wanted them because they were ‘slow’, but now they are back in fashion. They have a warmth and softness that modern lenses strive to emulate because their coatings involved radio-active elements that are not permitted in manufacture now.

Picture the scene: it’s midsummer, a bucolic wedding is mid-flow, the bride is radiant, the groom pristine. They stand above their guests in a doorway while caterers ascend the stone staircase carrying the ceremonial wedding cake. But wait! One of the caterers is wobbling! The cake is slipping! The caterer reaches for it but it falls from his hands and tumbles to the ground: splat. A dog appears from nowhere and begins to eat the crumbs. And all of it, every excruciating moment, is captured on camera. Is this one of my night terrors? Well, yes, but it was also the wedding of Anna Boden – the eldest daughter of Boden clothing founder Johnnie – to her now husband Oliver last week.

Generally speaking, I’m against moving major artworks from galleries in large cities to the provinces, where there are fewer people to see them. But there are exceptions. This summer bears witness to one such exception – the decision by the National Gallery to loan John Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’ to Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich as part of an exhibition celebrating the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth.  Because whatever you think you know of ‘The Hay Wain’ – one of Britain’s best known and beloved oil paintings – you’ll have never seen it like this before.

On the back of my copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1869 novel The Idiot, there’s a quote from A.C. Grayling that tells you what to think of it. ‘One of the most excoriating, compelling and remarkable books ever written,’ it reads, ‘and without question one of the greatest.’ That ‘without question’ bothered me. Why assume that every classic deserves its reputation? We should make up our own minds after having read one, as we do with any other book.   That wasn’t the only reason why I treated Grayling’s claims with scepticism as I edged my way into this gargantuan novel (I can’t remember exactly when that was, but I know I was a much younger man at the time).

Is it possible, or even acceptable, to feel the same grief for the loss of a favourite place – or holiday location – than for a person? I’d say yes, because people divide pretty much equally into two camps when it comes to the summer hols. There are those who love trying out new and different places, and then there are bores like myself, and my wife, who like returning to the same place every year. Same beach. Same menus. Same ice creams. Same pale rosé. Same owners. Same crowd.    In my case, I’m talking about Paloma Beach in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera.

I am always suspicious when the word ‘aristocrat’ finds its way into the press. Usually, the person in question is not an aristocrat at all, but a common-or-garden public school boy with a tenuous link to a baronet’s sister-in-law. But with last week’s exposé of Nigel Farage’s convicted fraudster adviser George Cottrell, we have a proper one. Cottrell is the grandson of a peer, Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton, and the nephew of two others, the former Tory treasurer turned Ukipper Alexander Fermor-Hesketh, 3rd Baron Hesketh, and the former Life Guards officer Milo Watson, 4th Baron Manton. His mother was briefly romantically involved with the then-Prince Charles.

My sister and her friends were watching the conclusion of Arthur Fery’s third round tiebreaker with Aperol-laced bated breath. Curiously enough, the match had already finished. Finally Fery began to speak: ‘oh thank God, he’s posh’, exclaimed one friend. Fery is this summer’s heartthrob, and a major coup for those who thought the posh boy had had their day. There’s been requisite time between the Hugh Grant heyday that it’s become novel and cool again; Leo Woodall laid some strong groundwork in 2024’s One Day, but it took Wimbledon’s Centre Court to cement the return.  I think the heatwave has a lot to do with it.

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.