Columns

Wednesday

Michael Simmons

‘It’s going to make Liz Truss look like a savant’: Are you ready for Burnham’s first Budget?

If I were Andy Burnham, I’d be terrified about the inheritance Keir Starmer has left. Yet instead of stepping gingerly towards Downing Street, he’s bounding along with glee. So delighted is he, in fact, that he seems not to have noticed that he’s walking into a trap. The problem for Burnham is that the snare has been laid by his own supporters. ‘He was brilliant,’ an elderly Mancunian woman said in a documentary about the Greater Manchester mayor last week. ‘Ten out of ten – 12 out of ten if you want. [My son] had 18 things wrong with him and within a couple of days [Burnham got him] the top rate of PIP.’ Everywhere Andy goes and every time he bumps into a voter, his spending incontinence kicks in and a new promise is made.

Wednesday

Noa Hoffman

Revealed: the Green plot against Zack Polanski

As Keir Starmer struggles to keep his crown, another leadership battle is raging. Away from the media spotlight, there is a fight for the future of the Green party between its various official ‘Special Interest Groups’ and its leader, Zack Polanski. What are they fighting about? Why, Palestine and racial politics of course.  On one side, Polanski and his officials are at least trying to appear to be dealing with allegations of anti-Semitism and extremism within the party. On the other, a powerful affiliate group, the Global Majority Greens (GMG), is accusing its leader of creating a ‘hierarchy of racism’, with allegations of anti-Semitism taken more seriously than other complaints.

Freddy Gray

Will the Iran deal destroy J.D. Vance?

When it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump is neither hawk nor dove. He’s a dealmaker who plays differing sides off each other. In so doing, he ends up disappointing warmongers and peaceniks in equal measure. In March, opponents of the war were accused of cowardice and disloyalty. This week, it’s the peace-sceptics being called ‘Panicans’ On 28 February, when he launched Operation Epic Fury, Trump’s more dovish supporters felt betrayed. The president who had campaigned against regime-change wars began a new conflict by channelling George W. Bush. ‘To the great, proud people of Iran I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,’ he said.

Douglas Murray

The radical left will regret embracing political violence

What are the circumstances in which it is right to smash up a building? When might one justifiably destroy an artwork? And what are the conditions under which one might splinter someone’s spine with a sledgehammer? Many on the left seem to have satisfied themselves on all these questions. But I wonder if they have even begun to reckon with the consequences. One can only hope that those who urge on ‘direct action’ have no idea how slippery a slope they are on Back in 2019 a group of activists from Extinction Rebellion took their views on fossil fuels to Belvedere Road in central London. There, at the site of the Shell building, they smashed windows, spray-painted walls and caused other criminal damage.

Lionel Shriver

The New York Times’s twisted reporting of Henry Nowak’s murder

Last week’s headline in the New York Times was obfuscating: ‘In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots.’ Because hatred is now irrevocably associated with the ‘right-wing’, innocent American newspaper readers will have presumed that these agitating, rioting reactionaries were also the authors of the ‘hateful attacks’. The New York Times and the PBS News Hour delivered such twisted, incomplete and minimised versions of recent incendiary events in the UK that I was obliged to tell the stories of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie to more than one ordinarily up-to-date American friend, because the salient details had been omitted from left-leaning reports.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

‘Rupert Lowe turns up for work, Nigel Farage doesn’t’: an interview with Kemi Badenoch

There was a moment backstage, before I interviewed Kemi Badenoch for a Spectator event this week, when I felt like John Sergeant with Margaret Thatcher bearing down on him as he pronounced her leadership in difficulty. I suggested to Badenoch that she was a rare example of a politician I had changed my mind about. ‘You mean you were very negative before?’ she said, fixing me with the full alpha female glare. I muttered something placatory, but the truth is that a year ago I thought she was rubbish – and that was the mainstream view in her own party. She was arrogant, flat-footed, absenting herself from a stage that was being dominated by Nigel Farage, resistant to advice, convinced she was great at PMQs when even Keir Starmer was wiping the floor with her.

Matthew Parris

The truth about two-tiering

What has been remarkable about Henry Nowak’s case was not the story itself, tragic though it is, but the potency of it to spark public anxiety. The anxiety is born of an in-built and nascent popular resistance to the idea that certain groups, the victims of unconscious bias, need special consideration in order to counteract that potential disadvantage. The expression ‘two-tier’ has in the Nowak case been applied to policing, but the principle is more general, and lies behind (for instance) campaigns to nudge public attitudes (and sometimes public policy) towards the disabled, older jobseekers, plus a ‘group’ which in fact comprises half of us: women. You can call it positive discrimination.

Lara Prendergast

Beware the ‘matrescence’ con

Every so often, a fashionable new concept is born. Witness the arrival of ‘matrescence’, which, for the uninitiated, is a phrase used to describe the physical, psychological, emotional and social transition a woman undergoes when becoming a mother. Or, as my mother and grandmother would have put it, and perhaps yours too: motherhood. ‘Matrescence’ first appeared in the 1970s, coined by the medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but it seems to be reaching maturity now. Adverts splashed across the back page of the New York Times make the case for the inclusion of the word in the dictionary. A ‘global movement’ is being launched (by a social networking site for women and a company that sells baby bottles) to put matrescence on the cultural map.

Douglas Murray

Are we allowed to feel angry yet?

I get the sense that the political and media class badly miss Katie Hopkins. Back when the reality TV star was still a regular on our screens and in our newspapers, she could be relied upon to be the focus of attention whenever the people in charge didn’t want the public’s attention to be focused where it ought to be. So when a British soldier was decapitated on the streets of London, or a suicide bomber went off at a pop concert packed with teenage girls, Ms Hopkins could be found saying something that a lot of people were thinking – only in a more colourful or unwise way.

Mary Wakefield

Save us from the Gospel according to Grok

The Rt Revd Martyn Snow, the handsome and up-to-date Bishop of Leicester, has decided that it’s OK, even admirable, for clergy to use AI to write their sermons. Bishop Snow was on the radio over the weekend, proud to share with listeners that in his diocese of Leicester, they’ve even had an AI expert come to give pointers to the priests. No more painful head-scratching on a Saturday afternoon for the lucky clerics of Leicester. ChatGPT will sort it. Just plug in a Bible verse and a few well-crafted prompts, and you’re off to the cricket, or to Pride, whichever way you swing. It’s one of those many times I wish Michael Wharton was still alive and writing.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Revealed: the missing Mandelson messages

Darren Jones has become the government’s Walter Model, the general known during the second world war as ‘the Führer’s fireman’ for his deployment to shore up any position which appeared lost. In that capacity, Britain’s first Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister had the thankless task of presenting the government’s case to the House of Commons on Monday following the publication of 1,500 pages of documents relating to Peter Mandelson. Jones himself was spared direct embarrassment because none of his exchanges with the disgraced peer came to light in the trawl of memos, emails and WhatsApp exchanges.

Rod Liddle

Kemi gives me hope

I had a notion the other day that there was possibly more I could offer to this fleeting world. A feeling that with life having been comparatively kind to me, perhaps there is something I could put back. I have these thoughts about once every month – and usually they are idly dismissed because they are either unrealistic or homicidal. For example, it would be well nigh impossible to smash every single white, middle-class, middle-aged liberal in the throat until his trachea exploded in a chiaroscuro of livid pink foam and vaporised black lung stuff. Way too many tracheas and not enough time, sadly.

Lionel Shriver

Who fancies a pint in Rachel Reeves’s ideal pub?

Even the most gormless of Labour politicians don’t try to persuade the electorate that taxation is a privilege – a glorious, much cherished opportunity to contribute to the greater good. Implicitly punitive, taxes are often levied on things that government wishes to discourage: smoking; drinking; latterly, carbon emissions. It follows that governments with severe, progressive tax regimes hope to discourage success, ambition, optimism, self-confidence, calculated risk-taking and a functional economy. That’s the big picture, but let’s get into the British weeds. Under this government’s guidance, HMRC is undertaking a revaluation of British pubs.

Douglas Murray

The lessons from Henry Nowak’s murder

I wonder how many readers have ever heard of the name Kriss Donald? The young Glaswegian was just 15 years old in 2004 when he was kidnapped by a local gang of Pakistani men. The group selected him because he was white and they had some beef with a group of white men with whom Donald had no connection at all. After driving around for hours, the gang – led by one Imran Shahid – stabbed Donald repeatedly before dousing his body in petrol and setting him alight. I also wonder how many readers have heard of the name Tony Timpa? The white, unarmed Texan was 32 in 2016 when he suffered some sort of mental breakdown in public. Instead of assisting him, police arrived at the scene and restrained him in such a way that he died.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Reform’s strange balancing act

Nothing illustrates the challenge facing Reform UK better than the strained interview Danny Kruger gave to the Today programme on Monday morning. Kruger, a former Tory MP who defected to Reform last September, has been charged by Nigel Farage with preparing the party for government. He clearly wanted the interview to be a high-minded examination of the intricacies of the Whitehall machinery. Instead, he had to deal with more pungent street politics. The interview quickly descended into questions about Robert Kenyon, the ‘plucky plumber’ and Reform candidate in the Makerfield by-election. Kruger, a thoughtful Christian, was clearly uncomfortable answering questions on sexual comments about Carol Vorderman which Kenyon had shared on social media in the past.

Rod Liddle

Might Restore scupper Reform?

I was as appalled as I dare say many of you to discover that Reform’s candidate in the forthcoming Makerfield by-election has a social media history of being opposed to the concept of abortion on demand. Those who wish to whitewash Robert Kenyon’s views will argue that this (reported) stance simply puts the candidate in roughly the same area as the Pope, Buddha, the Islamic scholars, Hinduism, Judaism, much of the world and UK populations and indeed the law. But it’s this kind of whataboutery which is, to my mind, destroying politics.

Douglas Murray

When did Sturgeon first notice her husband’s kleptomania?

What would you say if your spouse bought a luxury campervan? I know what I would say – something along the lines of: ‘Get that thing away from me. I refuse to spend wet weekends campervanning around the Highlands, and I don’t care whether the bathroom facilities are “luxury” or not.’ In other words, any spouse of mine would get a tongue-lashing. But then I have a spiritual aversion to campervans, having spent many a childhood summer stuck behind them on single-track roads in the Highlands, watching their foul residents bespoil many of Scotland’s best beaches. We cannot know what Nicola Sturgeon’s reaction was to this luxury monstrosity. She would have us believe that when Peter Murrell took receipt of his top-of-the-range campervan she had nothing to say.

Matthew Parris

Pity Andy Burnham

There is something infinitely melancholy in hearing what political ambition does to perfectly nice people. I awoke on Monday to hear Danny Kruger (an MP, formerly Conservative, now defected to Reform) defending his party’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election, one of whose past social media posts was simply too disgusting for me to repeat here. True, Mr Kruger was not defending the post itself, but the candidate’s right to a ‘private’ (protested Kruger) history of such social media comments. Well, maybe. But I seem to remember Kruger’s past speeches have been especially admired for their high moral tone – he is a strong Christian – and so his being forced to defend a candidate’s right to a history of filthy misogyny in a public forum will have hurt him.

Mary Wakefield

The rise of the child-haters

On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. ‘Adults-only holiday,’ read the billboard. ‘Entirely child-free.’ But this wasn’t ‘adults only’ in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: At last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit!

Wednesday

Noa Hoffman

Kemi has saved herself – but can she save the Tories?

Instinct matters in politics. Overthink and you can underperform. Try to box too clever and you get punched in the mouth by an opponent who trusts their own unrestrained judgment. Kemi Badenoch’s newfound popularity within her party is the result of trusting her instincts. The Tory leader is finding that no argument is as persuasive as being herself. Ahead of the King’s Speech debate, Badenoch had worked hard on a script with some well-honed attack points. But the most memorable line was unscripted.