Columns

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Is Burnham preparing to call a December election?

What is the purpose of a Budget? To stabilise the national finances? To kickstart economic growth? If you’re John Healey, it may be to show the markets that you’re fiscally responsible and the public finances are safe in your hands. If you’re Andy Burnham, the goal is to show the public that you’re trying to do something about the rising cost of living – and to convince Labour MPs that they were right to give you the job. But Burnham also has big plans to transform the country and this was a Budget more about tinkering than transformation. Yes, defence will get £5 billion more by letting the National Wealth Fund borrow off the public balance sheet to invest in defence companies.

Douglas Murray

Will we always have Paris?

Two worlds met in Paris last week. Thanks to the presence of Art Basel, some of the world’s most valuable art that wasn’t already in the city was shipped there. It arrived just in time for Paris to go up in flames. Most of the art fair went ahead as planned at the Grand Palais, but the final weekend was cancelled. Parisian friends and those who were visiting the city described scenes of Dada-esque absurdity. They navigated streets filled with burning bins and rioting ‘youths’ in balaclavas, before slipping into champagne receptions. Some who attempted to get out of the city spoke of Mogadishu-like scenes at Gare du Nord, where the country’s newest net-contributors were busily assaulting any available police and stealing the luggage of any tourist they could find.

Matthew Parris

The uncomfortable truth about Neets

It was, I believe, Fraser Nelson, the former editor of this magazine, who more than two years ago brought to Spectator readers’ attention the ballooning cost of disability benefits, and the way in which claims for mental-health disorders were skewing the system. Since then, the problem Fraser described has been universally recognised and its gravity acknowledged. The present government is worried about the cost and the trend and has commissioned Alan Milburn to report on the situation. Milburn is an impressive former (Labour) health secretary, who can be counted on for thorough research and balanced and intelligent judgment. His report is due next month.

Lara Brown

Do I consent to let you read this piece?

Few horror films are more chilling. A child stands, shaking, rooted to the spot. An elderly Irish couple advance on her in slow motion, puckering their lips. Before we reach the terrifying climax, the screen cuts out with the message: ‘Not everyone wants a hug. Even from the people who love them.’ This is Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s new campaign, ‘we-consent’, funded by Ireland’s Department of Justice. Its goal was to inform grandparents that giving their grandchildren a spontaneous hug without properly obtained verbal consent could be harmful, traumatic or maybe even reminiscent of sexual assault. The advert was met by mockery and outrage online.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

France is a warning – our civilisation is not immortal

Could it happen here? I suppose that’s the underlying thought many of us have had as we watch France burn. And the immediate response is, why wouldn’t it? I am old enough to remember in the early 2000s when people used to say France was a model of integration. Then in 2005 the suburbs went up in flames, followed by parts of the centre of Paris and other major cities. The Citroën flambé became a national dish and suddenly talk of ‘the French model of integration’ disappeared. That same year, eight home-grown terrorists of foreign origin attempted to blow up the London transport network, four succeeded and a little bit of that blasé British attitude that we know better than the French disappeared too. In 2011 our own cities started burning, but we learned nothing from that.

James Heale

Nigel Farage: ‘Kemi has had the easiest ride of any Tory leader in my lifetime’

What’s so frustrating about the last three or four months is you might have got the impression of chaos but actually it’s far from it.’ It is 8.30 a.m. and Nigel Farage is 30,000 feet in the sky, clutching a bacon roll and expounding his battle plans. Napkin tucked in like a bib, the Reform MP wields a bottle of brown sauce as he bids to get ‘back on the front foot’. With him on the ten-seater plane are his two most prized Tory defectors, Robert Jenrick and Danny Kruger, trilby in hand, plotting the day ahead. Today it is Plymouth, where a third of the council seats are up for grabs in May. On the Hoe, we stroll, admiring the statues. ‘Drake!’ Farage exclaims. ‘My house at school.’ He looks out to the waves, to the Eddystone Lighthouse beyond.

Madeline Grant

The perils of baby names

As a Warwickshire girl, born and bred, I am rarely one to take issue with Shakespeare. However, when the intensely drippy Juliet mused ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet,’ he may have committed a cardinal error. Only now, as I prepare to welcome a child into the world, do I realise how important names are. There’s the perennial dilemma: finding the sweet spot between ‘everyone is called this’ and ‘my child will get teased’. After all, you want a name that’s distinct but not an obvious bully-magnet, somewhere between ‘John Doe’ and ‘Moon Unit Zappa’. It’s important to maintain some secrecy. The question with which I am most bombarded by people who notice my bump is, ‘Have you thought of a name?

Lionel Shriver

Can we be surprised that France has descended into nihilism?

Given its corpulent government and inexplicably entitled populace, I’ve long been in awe of the fact that France functions at all. In the past four weeks, the verdict is belatedly in: it doesn’t. Early estimates of the riots: 1,500 shops damaged, destroyed and/or looted; 1,000 police officers injured; at least 1,800 arrests; innumerable cars burned; multiple architecturally irreplaceable public buildings set alight or vandalised. Two versions of the ‘unrest’ have emerged. For the left-wing press, ‘mostly peaceful’ minors protesting poor educational provision were joined by ‘mostly peaceful’ adults protesting the cost of living – who were then infiltrated by masked outside ‘agitators’ of totally unknown identity who looted and set stuff on fire.

Wednesday

James Heale

‘My contacts are my superpower’: An interview with Andrew Griffith

If the facts of life are conservative then Andrew Griffith is the man entrusted to remind voters of that truth. The new shadow chancellor’s political hero is David Young, the entrepreneur turned trade secretary. ‘Others bring me problems,’ Margaret Thatcher supposedly said, ‘David brings me solutions.’ Griffith’s task is to do the same for Kemi Badenoch as she seeks to reclaim the mantle of fiscal responsibility. When we meet in parliament, Griffith is a hive of activity: phone blazing, eyes darting as he juggles assorted engagements. A former chief operating officer at Sky and chairman of Just Eat, he has an address book full of City contacts. ‘They’re part of my sources of information as to what’s going on in the economy,’ he says.

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.

Mary Wakefield

Fentanyl, coming soon to a park near you

How do you explain to a child what ‘sharps disposal’ means and why a ‘sharps disposal unit’ for the binning of used needles is needed in a toilet next to the playground in our local park? It’s a nice park, actually, with tennis courts and trees, and the playground’s recently been redone. There are climbing frames, nets, a wooden castle and middle-class mothers repeating: ‘Good job, Oscar!’ every time their child takes a step. Opioids make good business sense: more addictive and the highs are short so the customer’s always calling The toilets are all right too, clean with a surprising lack of smears, and there are little signs in Braille beside each feature: tap, soap, loo roll.

Madeline Grant

England, whose England?

For a long time, the mainstream political parties have adhered to an omertà – a ‘never complain, never explain’ – on the subject of Englishness. The ghost of Powellism was deployed so effectively that the question of what it means to be English became the preserve of fringe figures on the right, while Westminster retreated into a fantasy world where national identity was, as once articulated by Sir Keir Starmer, defined by ‘cutting the half-time orange’. This cosy settlement is one of many things which the rise of Reform and Restore has blown apart.

Matthew Parris

What will survive of us

The recent 25th anniversary of 9/11 reminded me of a detail from that time. A short while after that terrible day, a memorial service was held at St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Tony and Cherie Blair attended, and in his address Mr Blair quoted the final paragraph of Thornton Wilder’s small jewel of a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Here, one of Wilder’s characters is remembering the five people who at the beginning of the story plunged to their deaths when a rope suspension bridge over a canyon in Peru snapped. She reflects that people still living remember them, but before long these people too will be dead.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Kemi Badenoch has given the Tories cause for hope

The old jokes are the best. When I arrived in Birmingham on Sunday evening for the Tory party conference, I immediately ran into a former Downing Street bigwig. ‘The Conservative party has two modes – panic and complacency,’ he noted. ‘Last year was panic. This year it’s complacency.’ Twelve months ago, everyone was miserable. Kemi Badenoch’s leadership was on the line and the Tories were on between 17  and 22 per cent in the polls. This year, everyone was delirious at having survived and congratulating themselves on having located a vast political battleground vacated by the leftward-lurching Andy Burnham and the rightward-lurching Reform UK. Badenoch’s personal ratings have soared and the Tories poll… er, between 17 and 22 per cent.

Douglas Murray

Reading is the ultimate life hack

The London Underground used to be a happy place for authors. We would get into a carriage and see rows of people, studiously ignoring their neighbours – unless their neighbour was a dog – and reading a newspaper or an actual, physical book. The same went for the New York subway and, to a lesser extent, all train networks. Today you get into a carriage and everyone is staring into the same phone screens that they stare into most of the rest of the day. Books give us some ability to see through, as well as put into perspective, the troubles of our time I try not to be judgmental about this, since I always try to see the best in people, however disgusting they might look.

Katie Glass

A radical solution to the prisons crisis

This Halloween, punters at a silent disco in Shepton Mallet’s former prison will be dancing on the graves of executed men, those who were hanged on the gallows (which remained until 1967) and buried in the grounds. The evening is promoted as ‘a scary night out behind bars’, hosted by ‘Governor Grim’, offering clubbers ‘Cell block anthems’ and ‘blood-bag cocktails’. At Shrewsbury’s old slammer, known for its cruel segregation cells, tourists sign up for ‘immersive’ prison escapes in ‘The Hole’: ‘A fun, challenging experience designed for families, couples and friends!’ Meanwhile, HMP Oxford, now a posh hotel, offers ‘prison break’ packages promising a “‘get out of jail free” card to luxury guests’.

Lionel Shriver

The Islamification of Texas

As the UK’s contribution to worldwide carbon emissions is less than 1 per cent and doesn’t affect global temperatures a jot, the worthies’ repeated justification for net zero is that Britain is obliged to set an example to the rest of the world. You may be pleased to hear, then, that in one respect the UK is indeed being held up as an example. See, say, the Nick Freitas (not Fuentes) YouTube video ‘Britain is gone, and America is next’. Alas, Britain serves as a cautionary tale, illustrative in conservative American circles of what happens to a western country that neglects to check wholesale Muslim immigration. In another video, ‘The immigration crisis that will destroy the West’, Freitas strolls through Whitechapel. ‘Where am I?

Wednesday

James Heale

Harold Wilson is the new Labour lodestar

After Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference on Tuesday, one veteran factionalist declared: ‘We are all Burnhamites now.’ Romantics love the rhetoric; cynics respect the ruthlessness. ‘Game recognises game,’ says one Labour figure. The Prime Minister’s address was pitched at a wounded party seeking support. Emotive and personal, yet also intensely political, it showed a keen awareness not just of Labour’s values, but of its interests too. Right to Buy, which attracted legions to the Tory ranks, will be halted for new homes; a new National Care Service will bring thousands more members into the unions’ fold.

Douglas Murray

The game you are not allowed to win 

Some years ago I heard a moving story about Roy Jenkins. An unpromising start to any anecdote but stay with me. It involved a croquet match during the late period of his life – as Chancellor of the University of Oxford – when Jenkins had become one of the grander, not to say more pompous, figures in our public life. According to someone playing with him, his Lordship had appalling luck. Although he wielded his mallet with all requisite skill, his ball would not go through the hoops. Eventually the grand old man stormed off the pitch in a great huff. Only after he had left did the other players discover that the ball Lord Jenkins had been working was from a different croquet set, and too big to fit through the hoops.

Madeline Grant

Britain is entering its Rococo period

There were many reasons why John Ruskin hated Rococo. The overly decorated style was a bête noire for the great architectural critic because he thought it the supreme example of excess and by its excess it concealed its true meaning. We are in an era of British life which I can only think of as ‘late Rococo incompetence’. The excess of bad news, government ineptitude and baffling decisions made by the state is now so great that we are struck dumb, incapable of meaningful reaction. The news cycle abounds with evidence of this tidal wave of depressing or destructive acts. The sheer number of hideous stories has desensitised us.