Features

Thursday

Tim Shipman

Will Trump and Netanyahu launch another round of strikes on Iran?

An American political operator contacted me last week, before the blue tidal wave swept aside Donald Trump’s Republicans in Congress, with his favorite quote from the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, about an American president starting a war to distract from domestic difficulties: “Change the story, change the lead,” Robert De Niro’s character declares. The politico, who once ran an abortive Democrat campaign for president, then predicted: “The bigger the defeat, the bigger the bombs Trump drops on Iran.” At that point, the results of the Israeli elections had already eroded Benjamin Netanyahu’s chances of remaining Prime Minister and left two of the most dominant leaders of the last decade with their backs to the wall.

Monday

Owen Matthews

Trump is cynical and shocking about Ukraine – but is he also right?

What does “victory” in Ukraine mean – or “defeat?” Can there be lasting peace without justice? Direct talks between Russia, the US and Ukraine will finally commence in Abu Dhabi early next month, marking the beginning of the end of this bloody war. As Kyiv and Moscow, plus their respective allies, prepare to thrash out the details of a grand bargain, it’s vitally important to clarify what we mean by “victory” or “capitulation,” as those terms get thrown around by politicians observing the war’s closing act. A hot mess of false starts, betrayals, Russian dissembling and European denunciation lies ahead.

ukraine

Friday

Angus Colwell

Why are there suddenly so many dessert cafés in London?

Fifteen years ago, if you were eating at 239 Brompton Road in Kensington, just over from the Oratory, you may have been enjoying steak tartare, or grilled rabbit with mustard sauce, or tête de veau, a poached portion of calf’s head with turned potatoes. This was the former premises of Racine, a French restaurant by Henry Harris, which Michael Winner said was “quadruple historic.” Harris now runs Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, rated the best restaurant in the country this year, after closing the Knightsbridge site in 2015. At 239 Brompton Road nowadays, on the menu you’ll find a “cheesecake brownie served with vanilla ice cream, Oreos and warm Nutella and Lotus Biscoff sauce” (£10.95).

dessert store in London
Vending Machine of non tax covered cost
Michael Simmons

The British middle-class race to go private

Postwar Britain can be defined by a bargain made with its middle class: pay for public services but benefit from them too. Private education has always been the choice of a very small minority; private healthcare was reserved for the wealthiest and those whose employers paid for it. Middle England was content to send its children to the same schools as everyone else and use the same GPs, hospitals and dentists. This is no longer true. State spending continues to grow, yet large parts of the population now pay privately to supplement what their taxes have already provided. Eighty-four years ago, William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services set out five “giants” standing in Britain’s way: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump will never be a lame duck

Of all the rotten clichés in American political discourse, “lame duck presidency” is arguably the worst. It ought to be dragged out back – perhaps by the former homeland security secretary and infamous animal-slayer Kristi Noem – and strangled to death. Yet commentators have to say something about the midterms. And since it is likely that President Trump’s party will lose on Tuesday night, expect all sorts of explanations as to just what a damaged duck Donald now is. A weaker position on the Hill will push him back towards his favorite role: the outsider raging against DC If (as most pollsters expect) the Republicans lose both chambers of Congress, he’ll have been “crushed” and “humiliated.

Tuesday

Alan Bekhor

What Spinoza got right – and wrong

The scrupulously maintained traditions of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation in London, where I worship, still forbid the rabbi from pronouncing the name “Spinoza” from the pulpit. London, as the sister Jewish community of Amsterdam, inherited the same customs, and in both congregations, Baruch Spinoza continues to be regarded with a lingering sense of abhorrence on account of the herem, or excommunication, pronounced against him in 1656. In secularist philosophy, that excommunication has acquired an almost mythical status. Along with the trial of Galileo and the excesses of the Inquisition, it is often seen as one of the great episodes in the battle to emancipate western thought from religious obscurantism and intolerance.

Friday

Peter Hitchens

Why is Britain stoking conflict with Russia?

Is Britain becoming an army with a country, instead of a country with an army? Who is actually making national policy on Ukraine and war in general? The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roland Walker, delivered an astounding speech to soldiers last week. He said, as if he were prime minister: “Our citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritize defense and security.” And then he told the soldiers: “Ultimately, we’re going to need them to back us, to back you, to do the one thing that you do, that nobody else gets to do, and that is to take the fight to the enemy.” It was surely not his job to put the case for sacrifices by the voting public. Nor was it for him to tell politicians to explain this to the public.

Lieutenant General Sir Roland Walker in British Army ceremonial uniform at Westminster Abbey in London, July 2023.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon illustration
Louis Sarkozy

Who’s who in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s revolutionary guard

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the chief instigator of the recent riots in France and leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), is currently ranked second in most presidential polls. Marine Le Pen remains the favorite despite her continuing legal problems. But the polls do not reveal Mélenchon’s strategy, his organization, his coherence or his ruthlessness. It has become fashionable to dismiss his chances. He is too radical, they say, too inflammatory. As if that has not benefited other modern underdogs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z44ZraRn35w Born in Tangier in 1951, the former socialist schoolteacher became a senator at 35 and briefly served as a minister under the former PM Lionel Jospin. Mélenchon has spent the past 18 years building a party in his own image.

Thursday

Philip Delves Broughton

The riots are driving French politics to its extremes

Paris The wonderful thing about electric bikes, if you are fighting with French riot police, is the way they burn. You skid your Lime or Vélib’ into the middle of the Boulevard de Magenta, which leads from the Gare du Nord down to the Place de la République, and set it alight along with a pile of ordinary bikes, and soon you have a conflagration of rubber and battery chemicals. During the weekend’s street protests, the fires provided cover for rioters breaking into mobile phone, vape and jewelry stores and the money-transfer shops which serve the many immigrants who work in eastern Paris. By Monday morning, a vicious guard dog stood outside an Intermarché supermarket, snarling at customers coming in one by one.

Vigilante on bike

Friday

Graham Keeley

After years of socialism, is Spain about to turn to the far-right?

Good-looking and always smartly dressed, Vito Quiles sports a wristband with the red and gold of the Spanish flag. It is ubiquitous among Vox supporters. He has made a name for himself in Spain by supposedly reporting on the hate figures for the far-right: migrants, housing rights protesters, students and far-left leaders. He confronts these figures to create provocative content online. Quiles, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, is part of a small but growing number of right-wing agitators who are attracting young people to Vox, a far-right party which less than a decade ago was regarded as a political joke.

Louis Sarkozy

We cannot trust our AI overlords

It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the digital apocalypse is at our door. The advance of artificial intelligence is outstripping our fears and expectations. The machinery of the state, slow and predictable by nature, is so thoroughly outpaced in its capacity to control and regulate that it does not even realize it. Our politicians, running on antiquated software, cling to problems that are pressing but dated (such as the retirement age and the number of civil servants) and barely speak of the cataclysm on the horizon. Édouard Philippe, who is currently the frontrunner of the traditional right-wing constellation in France, recently remarked that he used LLMs (large language models) to write his emails. Such is the abyss of our backwardness.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Has Trump changed sides on Ukraine?

Has Donald Trump effectively changed sides in the Ukraine war? Over just a few tumultuous days, Trump’s already rocky relations with Volodymyr Zelensky have tumbled into something close to irreconcilable breakdown. After Trump announced that he would be de-sanctioning Russian diesel exports in an attempt to lower global prices, Zelensky had the temerity to call him “weak.” Trump responded bluntly that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” then squarely (and unfairly) blamed Zelensky’s continued strikes on Russian oil refineries for an international fuel price spike.

ukraine

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Do France’s student protesters have a point?

On September 21, students at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris, staged a protest. They had a list of grievances. Classes were overcrowded and there was a shortage of teachers. They were also dismayed at the decaying state of some of the school buildings and the automated university admissions platform they feel deprives them of autonomy. Students filmed the protest and uploaded the footage onto social media. It went viral. Across France, children in other secondary schools joined the protest. They aired the same complaints as their peers in Créteil – and more. Some students described seeing rats in classrooms, others of enduring leaking ceilings and moldy walls. For many, memories of the summer heatwave were still painfully fresh.

Tuesday

Michael Simmons

The wealthy person’s guide to fleeing Britain

Behind the scenes of The Spectator’s wealth tax debate last month there were lots of nervous whispers. “Wealthy people we work with are absolutely terrified about an exit tax,” one Westminster figure remarked. The economist Arthur Laffer, one of the debate’s speakers, couldn’t believe a wealth tax was even being considered. Britain is already near the top of his famous curve – the point beyond which taxation reduces the Treasury’s take – and seems determined to push things to destruction. The latest fiscal rumor – that we might seize millions on a wealthy migrant’s departure– is a dangerous one. According to reports, it’s also the reason Chris Rokos, the third-highest taxpayer on the Sunday Times tax list, has decided to leave for Greece.

wealthy

Friday

Esther Walker

I’ll do anything to keep Zack Polanski out of Parliament

On the morning of the 2005 general election, the young man who sat opposite me at work asked, “How did you vote?” “That’s none of your business,” I replied, in a silly, prim voice. A cruel look passed across his face. “You voted Tory, didn’t you?” he crowed. “That’s why you won’t say!” He started to point at me. “Tory voter! TORY SCUM!” I was appalled. It was my first experience of tribal politics and I didn’t like it. I can’t remember what I said in reply, but I certainly didn’t reveal how I’d voted. If I had voted for Michael Howard’s Conservative party, I would have been too ashamed to admit it and if I had voted Labour, I wouldn’t have wanted to admit that, either – not if it meant I was now a kindred spirit to this maniac.

Owen Matthews

What if AI is actually good at writing novels?

The spectacular fall from grace of Haitian-Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien in many ways resembles our own culture war over Jason Arday. The celebrated author, feted in TV studios and in the literary salons of Québec and Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés for his hard-hitting descriptions of the migrant experience, was accused on X both of serial plagiarism and of using artificial intelligence to write his latest novel. His accusers decried the soft bigotry of low expectations that caused the woke intelligentsia to turn a blind eye to mediocrity because their hero was a capital-B Black man.

James Dixon

The strange world of professional mourners

MournMate is a new online market-place that promises to connect bereaved families and funeral homes with professional mourners in the US. It was advertising for its first “500 Founding Members” when I looked and, curious to know what it was all about, I signed up. The qualifications and requirements were surprisingly broad – the site was looking for actors, musicians, public speakers, eulogy writers and anyone with experience of religious or cultural ceremonies. The advertised rate was $25 to $300 an hour, with an extra 50 percent for emergency bookings. Grief, it seems, has joined the gig economy.

Rupert Hawksley

From Playboy pin-up to prohibitionist: the man taking on British gambling

The August 2004 cover of Playboy features a topless Eva Herzigova (“The supermodel is supernaked”) and promises a piece about “America’s 10 sexiest bartenders.” If that isn’t enough to excite you, another article is puffed, no less conspicuously: “Weird new casino games (and the men who invent them).” Turn to page 73 and a bald, bespectacled man, with “prominent ears on a frank, slightly frowning face,” stares out at you. This, we learn, is the “Bill Gates of card game inventors” and his name is Derek Webb. The Englishman made his money at the poker tables in Derby: “I could play three times a week with a £50 buy-in and make £8,000 a night.” From 1979 to 1994, Webb split his time between the East Midlands and Las Vegas.

gambling

Thursday

David McCloskey

What the CIA and MI6 really talk about

The Special Relationship has seen more special days. Earlier this year, President Trump delivered his verdict: “How is the relationship? It’s the relationship where, when we asked them for help, they were not there. When we needed them, they were not there. When we didn’t need them, they were not there. And they still aren’t there.” Trump was referring to divisions between the US and UK over the wisdom and conduct of the war in Iran. (Even amid a spat, though, he can dish out praise. Just this week, following the arrest of five men outside RAF Fairford, used by American bombers to strike Iran, the President said the UK authorities had done an “amazing job.”) But his remarks landed at a moment of divergence in the US-UK relationship that extends well beyond Iran.

Tuesday

Elisabeth Braw

Is the West ready for the undersea war?

Last spring, a Chinese icebreaker turned up in the tropical waters of Palau. That was after Chinese research vessels arrived uninvited in the waters off Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines. In Europe, Russian research vessels and navy ships turn up uninvited too. The ships reveal nothing about the nature of their visits, but create fears of impending cable sabotage. These days, Russia and China are also building lots more submarines, and they’re impressive. Western countries, too, are building submarines, and all the while they’re trying to defend their cables and pipelines. Last week, the UK’s 12-meter Excalibur drone submarine used a testing range off the coast of Scotland to fire a torpedo.