Columns

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

I bid fond farewell to Great Lives

By my bed at home is a little shelf on which I put useful things for the morning. Coins, keys, my smartphone, some eardrops and… I looked at it, and it looked back at me. ‘You won’t be needing me any more,’ it seemed to say, ‘probably ever again in your life.’ I confess a tear pricked my eyes. It was true. My BBC pass, on its blue lanyard, is often beside my bed, ready for when I go straight from Derbyshire to the BBC studios in New Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus. Some of my most memorable programmes have celebrated a life most listeners won’t have heard of How many times have I walked from the Tube station, up Upper Regent Street, past the ‘pepper pot’ church, John Nash’s All Souls at Langham Place, and in through those BBC revolving doors.

Wednesday

James Heale

Can Andy Burnham resist the techlash?

If Andy Burnham wants a reminder of the case for artificial intelligence (AI), he need only walk down the streets of his Makerfield constituency. Drives are dominated by Ford Transits and VW Transporters, the favoured vans of the self-employed. Blue-collar, hard-working, manual labourers: these will be the people most secure in the coming jobs revolution. Their accounting is made easier via new online systems; their public services smoothed by better programmes. Wigan council is using AI to cut costs in the care system; the nearby Heinz factory deploys it in its production line. Burnham wants a ‘Makerfield test’ for all aspects of policy. Yet what does that really mean when AI is so fast-changing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Douglas Murray

I like a good hypocrite

I’ve always admired Diane Abbott, though admittedly only for one thing. Many years ago the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington campaigned against private schools. As a good socialist this comes as part of the ideological package, and Abbott was more than happy to join in the class war against parents who are in a position to educate their children outside the state system. However, as some readers might remember, when it came to her own school choice Ms Abbott looked around the local state schools and decided that none of them was good enough for her own progeny. So she sent her son to the City of London School, a private school for boys. Confronted with this hypocrisy, Abbott did the sole thing that I admire her for.

Lionel Shriver

Just stop asylum

In late July, when roughly 72,000 migrants stormed the tiny Spanish enclave in North Africa, Ceuta (thanks to which I finally learned to pronounce ‘Say-OO-ta’), Spain was quick to announce that nearly all the rampaging foreigners had returned to Morocco within days. Since, even the European Parliament has classed the mass breach of the territory’s borders as an ‘invasion’. Yet why did tens of thousands of young men abruptly reconsider their plans to throw themselves on the mercy of the Spanish state? Did they suddenly realise their ad-free subscription to Duolingo had lapsed? Did they experience belated moral qualms about attempting to burden strangers with responsibility for their lives and livelihoods?

Madeline Grant

The fantastical world of Ed Davey

I’m sort of in awe of Ed Davey. How does he still manage to wake up every day and, despite all the other challengers for the title, somehow knock it out of the park as the nation’s most embarrassing political leader? His address to the Liberal Democrat conference this week was a masterpiece. There he was, the Postmaster’s Friend, wedged into a pair of dad-chinos and reminiscing about his radical days at the college JCR. Davey is in some ways the perfect Lib Dem leader – an id for embarrassing middle-class England. If you cut him, he bleeds organic muesli and opposition to planning applications. He ticked every box in his speech. He evoked Liberal Britain’s prelapsarian Eden: the opening of the 2012 Olympics, complete with a prolonged panegyric to Mo Farah.

Wednesday

Michael Gove

Can Reform reform?

Of all the uses to which Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne might put their money, there are few more innocent than giving it to a political party. Neither want, nor expect, preferment, honours or patronage. Both are idealistic by nature and philanthropic by habit. They have all the personal wealth they need to fund their lifestyles, and harbour hopes only for enriching Britain by their actions. I might not agree with all their ideas for how one might make this country stronger, or indeed how best to spend £72 million to improve our governance. But they have shown themselves a good deal shrewder than me in making money, and they should be entitled, within the law, to spend it as they wish.

Madeline Grant

America is not our friend

Imagine, if you will, King Charles in the Deep South. The aesthetics are easy enough: it doesn’t take much to picture His Majesty in crumpled linen, Her Majesty the right side of a large mint julep. But imagine if, in Richmond, Virginia, Charleston or New Orleans, His Majesty makes an off-the-cuff comment about how good it would be if the territories he was speaking in seceded from the United States and that it would be ‘a very great thing’ if claims of the Confederacy were honoured. His Majesty, in a show of tact, acknowledges that Washington D.C. might be a little miffed, but does so with a chuckle. After all, everyone knows that the aspirations of the US are old hat anyway. Except of course the King didn’t do that. He went to Washington and was the epitome of grace and charm.

Douglas Murray

Who exactly can wear a face covering?

I’m trying to work out what the new rules are in this country. I think I’m getting there, though any Spectator readers who can assist might help me avoid an appearance at the local magistrates’ court. On political party funding, this week’s new rules seem clear. You may collect immense amounts of money from trade unions if you are a political party protecting the interests of trade unions. But if you don’t enjoy the largesse of the unions and are a party of business, you are not allowed to receive money from people who have done well in business. Furthermore, the Labour party’s in-house brainiac, Angela Rayner, has made it clear that any person who does give large sums of money to a party that is not her own can be described as a ‘foreign dictator or fascist oligarch’.

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 grey 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?

Matthew Parris

How to defeat Reform on immigration

It’s now 24 years since I started writing about the urgent need to reform or quit the asylum provisions of conventions to which Britain is party. My Times column in June 2002 was headlined ‘This foolish Convention on refugees should be scrapped’. My argument was simple. The 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the lodestone of the application of the European Convention on Human Rights to the problem) was designed for a very different era. The second world war had redrawn our continental map and a principled framework was needed to rescue beached groups at risk.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Meet the most powerful woman in Britain

Some years ago Antonia Romeo, now the Cabinet Secretary, was stuck in a boring meeting about civil service reform. She regarded the plan as inadequate to create the leaner, meaner machine she hoped to see. ‘Basically you’ve given me a Ford, when I’m more of a Ferrari girl.’ It was a moment which summed up the official who is now accruing arguably more power than any of her predecessors. Romeo is glamorous, suspiciously racy and likes to move fast towards her goals. When Andy Burnham became Prime Minister she secured a seat in the Prime Minister’s outer office, the first time a cabinet secretary has ever sat there. She has written her own job description (signed off by Keir Starmer and now Burnham).

Douglas Murray

Would Sadiq Khan back a rave in a mosque?

I must return, regrettably, to the subject of the Church of England. Readers with long memories may recall the year of our Lord 2024. In February of that year, the people who are meant to care for Canterbury Cathedral allowed a ‘silent disco’ to take place over two nights in the place where St Thomas à Becket was martyred. Two thousand revellers turned up to take part in what became known as ‘a rave in the nave’. Naturally the Church of England authorities denied that this constituted any sort of defilement of one of England’s holiest places. Fast forward to September of that same year and it was Peterborough Cathedral’s turn. That was when it announced an Ibiza-themed nightclub evening with DJs spinning an ‘epic’ set of ‘soul, funk and contemporary hits’.

Madeline Grant

Long live death’s dark humour

One of the things people don’t tell you about grief is the humorous side of it. Many will warn that grief can erupt at strange times and that memories of those who have died spring upon you in unusual places. But few mention the fact that loss can put you in situations where the only real solution is to laugh. My father died at the end of last month. He was much loved and is much missed. He was also a great raconteur and, as we have been sorting through photographs to display at the wake, I realise too that he was a great laugher. I’ve lost count of how many images we’ve seen of him with his head thrown back at a party, laughing. Consequently, it seems almost appropriate that there have been moments of laughter since his death.

Lionel Shriver

Don’t sympathise with Lindsay Clancy

The declaration of a mistrial in the filicide case of Lindsay Clancy coincides, for me uncomfortably, with a new UK reissue of my 2003 breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. The book concerns a mother whose son becomes a high-school mass murderer. She agonises over whether something has always been wrong with him or something is wrong with him because something is wrong with her. Prior to publication, I’d imagined that the commercial hook would be the frequency with which self-pitying adolescents were taking their misery out on their classmates and teachers, since when I wrote the novel school shootings had yet to be fictionalised. Instead, what hit a cultural nerve was ‘maternal ambivalence’. The text dares to explore parenthood in de-romanticised terms.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Who will remember Keir Starmer?

I am starting to think that Keir Starmer might have been in it for himself. In saying that, I am not trying to echo that laziest of all critiques of politicians that ‘they’re only in it for the money’. Good luck to anyone trying to make money from politics in Britain these days. Rather, I mean that the former prime minister’s decision to leave the House of Commons and trigger a by-election is not the behaviour of a patriot. There were many people in the legal world who were nervous when the former director of public prosecutions decided to put his name forward as a Labour candidate for parliament. DPPs are meant to be politically impartial, like BBC presenters.

Mary Wakefield

The young men of Middlesbrough just don’t care

No one looking back on the last fortnight could say that Middlesbrough didn’t make the most of its time in the spotlight. I’ve been in the north-east these past few weeks and opening the local papers has been like a diabolical advent calendar: a new horror for every day. On Saturday 22 August we discovered that five Middlesbrough boys, aged 17 to 23, with 22 convictions between them, had raced the wrong way down the A66 and smashed into a police car, killing themselves and the two poor officers too. On the Sunday we learnt that the speeding boys had been chasing another car, a Volvo, which, in the early hours of Saturday had reversed repeatedly into the front of one of the boys’ houses.

Noa Hoffman

The Greens are coming for north London

When Sir Keir Starmer announced that he was standing down as an MP on Tuesday, jubilation erupted among Green activists. Zack Polanski’s party has already proved it can take on Labour’s campaign machine in ethnically diverse parts of Manchester; Starmer’s resignation now presents the perfect opportunity to do the same in London. At the time of the 2021 census, the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras was 21 per cent Muslim and 45 per cent non-white. At the 2024 general election, Starmer received almost 50 per cent of the vote, while the Green party and the independent pro-Gaza candidate Andrew Feinstein secured a combined 29 per cent.

Matthew Parris

Time’s up for Burnham’s happy thoughts

Kemi Badenoch, headlines my newspaper, ‘prepares Tories for early general election’ with her big reshuffle this week. I do not myself think an early election is the probability. It would be hugely risky. Labour would certainly lose scores of seats to Reform; and the requirement for Andy Burnham to produce an actual manifesto rather than – as at present – a distracting sprinkle of happy thoughts would make his government an easy target for a dangerous Conservative ‘They’re coming for your money’ campaign. Reform are still strong. Better, perhaps, to wait until (as I expect) Nigel Farage loses his mojo, the Greens fail to recover theirs, and Britain begins a slow return to something like the two-party system that first-past-the-post tends to encourage.

Wednesday

James Heale

Is Andy Burnham ready for the world stage?

If Andy Burnham has a golden rule, it seems to be this: do the opposite of Keir Starmer. The new Prime Minister has made a habit of differentiating himself from his predecessor. He has backed away from assisted dying and changes to the jury system, purged Starmer loyalists and swapped Eeyoreish despair for Tiggerish hope. Burnham’s visit to Ukraine this week offered yet another example. While it took Starmer four days to make his first overseas visit as prime minister, Burnham waited four weeks. Both men are keen supporters of Kyiv – yet the new Labour leader clearly wants to do foreign policy differently. ‘I’d rather do my trips with a real reason behind them,’ he said. ‘I’m here for a reason.

Douglas Murray

Harry and Meghan deserve a second chance

A little while back I came across a copy of Ted Hughes’s Laureate poems which had an inscription to some friends. Inside was an unpublished squib by the late poet laureate which read: ‘The Royalist/ Is afraid/ The Queen’s a pin/ In a hand-grenade.’ If I understand the poet’s meaning correctly then I count myself such a royalist. I dislike criticism of the royal family, especially of the monarch. When it happens it feels too much like people hammering at something fundamental – far more fundamental than the critic appreciates. If criticism is to be made it seems to me that it should be done privately, so as not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the rather magical arrangement we have on these islands.