Columns

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Rishi and Suella’s fates hinge on the Rwanda ruling

The first King’s Speech for more than 70 years was a festival of the expected: the royal reading of a No. 10 press release. Some dividing lines were drawn between the Tories and Labour and some loose ends tied up – but there was no real change in political direction. ‘It’s a continuance of the direction and path we are on,’ explained a senior government figure. ‘The most inspiring thing Rishi has done is refusing to endorse Braverman’s comments’ But if current polls are any indicator, to continue in the same direction means a landslide Labour victory and a Tory defeat of historic proportions at the next election. ‘It won’t spark rebellion but it certainly won’t lead to much excitement,’ was one MP’s quickfire assessment of the speech.

Mary Wakefield

Are smartphones making us care less about humanity?

Generation Z were the first to grow up attached to smartphones. They spent their adolescence bathed in screen-light and now they’re depressed and anxious. Should we have seen it coming? Until very recently my parent friends were in determined denial. Z is the best generation that has ever lived, they said, free from prejudice and determined to recycle. I remember a piece by Caitlin Moran in which she insisted that her children were far more noble and caring than her contemporaries. No one picks up their iPhone to grapple with complex ideological truths Well, those optimistic days are over. The stats are now too stark. We daren’t take the kids’ phones away – we fear their rage – but we mothers huddle in the pub and brood. What’s gone wrong? Is it Instagram? TikTok?

Douglas Murray

Are you a creative or a destructive?

There is a stage direction in The Glass Menagerie in which Tennessee Williams describes a tune that will recur through the play. Like a piece of delicately spun glass, he says, it should summon the thought of ‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken’. The cleverer young people want to live lives of hope, not demanding solutions, but finding them I think of that line often. Not least this week when two young protestors from Just Stop Oil took their hammers to the ‘Rokeby Venus’ of Velázquez at the National Gallery. Last year their cohorts threw soup over Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. Others glued themselves to the frame of another Van Gogh and others still to the frame of Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Starmer’s foreign policy problem is only just beginning

This could have been the week that Keir Starmer buckled under pressure from his party and called for a ceasefire in Gaza. A fifth of his MPs have publicly backed one, including 13 frontbenchers and big names such as Anas Sarwar, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham. Starmer’s suggestion in a radio interview that Israel could be justified in defending itself by cutting off electricity and water to Gaza had already led to more than 25 Labour councillors quitting, while several shadow ministers are on resignation watch.  Labour’s divisions over Israel are more complicated than the party right vs the hard left Instead of U-turning in the face of party mutiny, Starmer doubled down.

Rod Liddle

Is this where world war three starts?

Daugavpils You can tell quite a bit about a place by the number of national flags on display. One or two on public buildings here and there is a healthy genuflection to a moderate and comfortable patriotism. But groups of the same national flag every five paces, on every building and festooning the parks and boulevards – well, there’s something going on, isn’t there? You’re in a place where trouble is surely just around the corner, a place where the national authorities may not feel entirely secure. What sort of trouble? Well, one wouldn’t want to be over-dramatic, obvs, but in this particular case, world war three.

Matthew Parris

When righteous anger goes wrong

From abroad I’ve returned to a country where, in language to which the word ‘shrill’ hardly does justice, fellow British commentators have been letting fly on both sides of the argument about Gaza and how Israel should or should not respond to Hamas’s unspeakable attacks on 7 October. There’s just one thing both sides – the British Muslim banner-wavers and those who bay for a war of attrition in Gaza – seem to agree upon: that whatever the answer might be, it is, in the most important sense of the word, simple. It is not simple. Things so rarely are. The simple bit is who – in the immediate – is right and who wrong, and few of us need reminding of the answer here. But it’s the hard bit that matters: can a remedy be found by the means proposed?

Douglas Murray

It’s time to cut our ties with Qatar

A friend of mine was recently doing business with the Qataris. Nothing strange there: a lot of people have in recent years. But of course Qatar is one of the main funders – and the main international host – of the terrorist group Hamas. The Gulf state has form in the area. In the decade before the Taliban seized back – or were gifted – Afghanistan, they had a lovely office in the safety of Qatar. Because while the Qataris would hate an Afghan situation in their own fiefdom, they are happy to play the role of supporting such extremists elsewhere. The UK is arguably not just flush with Qatari cash but deeply, widely compromised by it In any case, for more than a decade, Qatar has played host to Hamas, allowing it to operate out of Doha.

Lionel Shriver

What did Hamas think was going to happen?

Much misfortune the woebegone couldn’t have seen coming: a raging fire in the house next door that spreads to yours. The invention of some kooky technology called ‘the internet’ that puts your travel agency out of business. Yet other calamities are foreseeable. If you suddenly stop filing tax returns without a good excuse – like, dying – it’s a virtual certainty that the all-seeing computer will come after you. So when compounding fees and interest leave you skint, our sympathies are apt to be scant. What did you think was going to happen?

Wednesday

Katy Balls

The Tory vote squeeze

When the cabinet gathered on Tuesday morning, the meeting started as a sombre affair. Just days before, the Conservatives had suffered – in the words of polling expert Sir John Curtice – ‘one of worst nights any government has endured’. The Tories lost both the Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire by-elections to Labour. The Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, managed to lighten the mood when she intervened to say that it hadn’t gone unnoticed that it was Rishi Sunak’s 365th day as Prime Minister. Loud banging on the table ensued, led by Jeremy Hunt. A year into Sunak’s premiership, neither he nor his supporters are where they would have liked to be. Aides said in January that they wanted to get Labour’s lead down to ten points in a year. That looks ambitious.

Rod Liddle

What Hamas promised to its electorate

Things you do not hear very often, number one: a pro-Palestinian protestor denouncing Hamas for the barbarity of its incursion into Israel on 7 October, appalled at the savagery of those attacks upon children, grandmothers, etc. It may seem as if, in saying this, I am stating the obvious – because support for that pogrom was, I would suggest, strong among some of those carrying Palestinian flags on marches through London and elsewhere. Six Arab language journalists were suspended by the BBC when it was discovered that they retweeted messages glorifying in that day’s murder. They were not members of Hamas. Ordinary Palestinians interviewed, cowering in the rubble of Gaza, were not quoted condemning the attacks which led directly to their present misery.

Kate Andrews

Rishi’s smoking ban inspired me to light a cigarette

What has Rishi Sunak’s government achieved in its first year? The highlights include a renegotiated Brexit policy and setting more practical net-zero deadlines. But Sunak asked the country to judge him on his ability to deliver his pledges set out at the start of the year. If polls are to be believed, voters are preparing to do just that. Inflation is falling, but that’s largely due to interest rate hikes announced by the Bank of England. The economy is growing, but barely. The NHS waiting list keeps rising – 7.6 million now in England alone. On this last point, no doubt the six-figure salaried consultants who keep striking deserve part of the blame. But to say the Sunak government is struggling to make good on its promises would be putting it rather gently.

Douglas Murray

Does the Met know what jihad means?

Ever since the atrocities in Israel more than two weeks ago, I have had one main thought. Yes, Israel has its problems. But we also have ours. Subsequent weeks have borne that instinct out. For years I have noticed that in all the wars and exchanges involving Israel – no matter the actual size or scale of the conflict – the reaction at home grows worse each time, not least in our institutions. Last weekend there were massive demonstrations against Israel in London, as in cities across the West. And I say ‘against Israel’ with care. These protests have not been dedicated to finding a compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Few acknowledged Hamas’s massacre. Still the crowds just turn up, as they are expected to again this Saturday.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Facebook’s not-so-secret police

I was greatly tempted by Sam Leith’s suggestion in a column on The Spectator’s website this week that we should all shut up about Israel and Palestine because we don’t know what we’re talking about. Certainly the crisis there has made London dinner parties almost unendurable – and it is true that as soon as anyone brings up Sykes-Picot, which they always do, I begin to choke on my baba ganoush and start demanding that the host open another bottle of Fairtrade Palestinian pinot noir. But then I thought that if in future I wrote about only those things of which I have a perfect understanding, pace Wittgenstein, I’d be well and truly buggered as a columnist.

Katy Balls

The SNP’s reckoning is coming

The SNP party conference in Aberdeen this week wasn’t the nationalist jamboree activists had hoped for. Even though it was Humza Yousaf’s first conference as party leader, several of his MSPs stayed away and the main hall was half-empty most of the time. ‘The key word was “flat”,’ says one attendee. It was Nicola Sturgeon, Yousaf’s predecessor, who attracted the most excitement, when she made a cameo appearance on Monday. The former first minister had to deny she was the ‘Liz Truss of the SNP’ – a reference to the former prime minister’s attempts to upstage Rishi Sunak. ‘You’ve got to hand it to her for the hubris,’ said one unimpressed nationalist. At least Yousaf has won praise for his handling of the events unfolding in Israel and Palestine.

Lionel Shriver

Keep your politics à la carte

It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in Kenya. One pernicious aspect of mutually hostile groupsterism is prix fixe politics. Your side shares a rigid, prescribed collection of beliefs, and joining the club entails embracing every single one, while despising a compulsory roster of enemies and backing the folks on your team – whatever friend or foe may say, whatever friend or foe may do. As in French restaurants, there are no substitutions. Letting go of indefensible positions your gang is ‘supposed’ to maintain is a relief Rarely has set-menu morality been put on more vivid display than last week.

Matthew Parris

The four big questions our politicians need to answer

Anyone would think (anyone, that is, who has followed our three main annual party conferences this autumn) that Britain’s principal political parties were proposing distinct solutions to Britain’s problems. After all, the heat if not the light emitted by domestic politics in recent years has been unremitting. Sir Keir Starmer spent more than half his conference speech in Liverpool attacking Rishi Sunak and the last 13 years of Conservative government. Mr Sunak, meanwhile, rose to a level of scorn quite untypical of this relatively polite man, when in his Manchester speech he laid into another relatively polite man, Sir Keir, and the Labour party he leads.

Douglas Murray

Why do we allow protests that glorify slaughter?

There are times when you wonder how history happened. And other times when you realise how it did. The past two weeks have been one such time. The inconsistencies, naturally, have been legion. People who label everything as aggression, including microaggressions, who believe that speech is violence and that misgendering a trans person is ‘literal genocide’ are the same people who have spent the past fortnight with nothing to say, or have adopted an ‘it’s complicated’ stance, when Jews are slaughtered in their hundreds. All those people who filled the streets when a Minnesotan cop killed George Floyd seemed to have no solidarity left when Hamas came for the Jews.

Wednesday

James Heale

What are the Tories for if not lower taxes?

‘I didn’t come into politics to raise taxes on working people,’ said the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in Liverpool this week. ‘Indeed I want them to be lower.’ That was a direct electoral attack on Reeves’s opposite number, Jeremy Hunt, who has increased the already huge fiscal burden on the British public. If the Tories aren’t the party of lower taxes, what are they for? The challenge for the Treasury whips is how to stop tensions in the tearooms over tax from spilling out into the open Hunt’s more immediate challenge comes from a tax rebellion within his own ranks.

Rod Liddle

I stand with Israel

I had a brief exchange of messages with a British Muslim bloke on social media who had asked me, very politely, why I had posted a picture of the Star of David with the words ‘I Stand With Israel’ underneath. A good question, really – I more usually think this kind of keyboard-warrior grandstanding embarrassing and self-promoting, all that light-a-candle-we-are-the-world- Je-Suis-Charlie cant. I succumbed this time because there was nothing much else I could do to express my horror at Saturday’s savagery and barbarism, other than maybe join the Israel Defense Forces. When they refer to ‘Hamas militants’ do they imply there is a fringe within the otherwise excellent organisation?

Mary Wakefield

I regret not having more children

Life doesn’t always work out perfectly. You can make the wrong decisions. You can leave things too late. I wish, though I’m not distraught about it, that I’d had another child, maybe two even, and given my small son siblings. The tacit assumption was always that children are an obstacle to the noble process of self-actualisation I’ve been thinking about this in the context of our shrinking population – the great global baby bust – and wondering why more women don’t express regrets. Often, for any number of reasons, the decision to have children is out of our control. But even so, there must be many hundreds of thousands like me who wish with hindsight that we’d got a move on, had some or more. Why don’t we say so?