Features

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Revealed: Ed Miliband ignored MI6’s warnings over Israel sanctions

When Andy Burnham was quizzed at PMQs last week about his and Ed Miliband’s decision to sanction the Israeli government over its handling of Gaza, the Prime Minister was surprisingly frank about the trade-offs. He presented it as a decision to prevent ‘the collapse of the two-state solution’ for a peace deal in the Middle East, which he claimed was ‘dying before our eyes’. In his statement to the Commons, Miliband referred to ‘ethnic cleansing’. But Burnham also admitted: ‘We gave the most careful consideration to… all of the risks. The Foreign Secretary and I took close advice from the security services and, of course, officials in the Foreign Office and in our embassies.

Charles Steel

The autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world

Ben Delo, the source of one half of Reform’s £72 million mega-donation, wrote in The Spectator last year about being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child. The self-confessed geek, now 42, was socially awkward. He did not fit in and he did not care to. His condition would shape the course of his life, making him very good at maths, very rich and hellbent on getting involved in politics. Christopher Harborne, the crypto millionaire who has matched Delo’s donation, we know much less about. Despite being a billionaire many times over, the 63-year-old has the air of a chemistry teacher and an aversion to interviews. Like Delo, who until recently lived in Hong Kong, he also forged his way in the Far East, living in Thailand.

Toby Young

I’ve found the perfect school for Harry and Meghan

As the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, I have to acknowledge that I still have some way to go to match the radioactive negativity Harry and Meghan generate with their every move. The Sussexes’ accumulated expertise in committing increasingly nauseating acts of hypocritical entitlement with every week that passes should qualify them both for a Regius Chair in Blithe Privilege at the University of Self-Regard. The latest episode in their narcissistic odyssey – The Sillyad – has been their agonising over where to send their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, to school. Harry and Meghan’s decision to educate them in England is, in its way, admirable.

Esther Walker

Don’t fear the manosphere

I don’t pry too much into the online life of my son. At 13, Sam is a good boy. He does well at school, eats his veg, loves his mum and captains his county cricket team. What more could I want? I suppose he could be more accurate when lobbing his pants at the laundry basket, especially considering he’s a spin bowler, but that’s a small detail. Last year, he started working out. He asked for weights and a pull-up bar. That was fine by me: boys have wanted big muscles since the dawn of time. Even my father owns a chest expander, that orangey-yellow and black one that was in every 1970s household. And Dad, who is now 91, taught history at Oxford and translates Goethe for fun, so it must be OK.

Peter Hitchens

How I became a Canadian nationalist

This is how I became a Canadian nationalist. I did it on the rebound. I never wanted to, and it is a strange experience to find myself pounding the arm of my chair when Mark Carney, of all people, defies the Almighty Trump. But it is so. Once, like that poor man who speaks the first lines in The Godfather, I believed in America, arsenal of liberty, land of the free, inheritor of Magna Carta and so on. Then, after a couple of years in Moscow I went to live in Washington, D.C. And it was there that I was gently wooed and eventually seduced by the land of maple syrup. To begin with, it was the discovery that soppy British sentiment about the USA was not in practice returned. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t like us as that they had barely heard of us.

Damian Thompson

Death at the Athenaeum

During the 1980s my friend Canon Brian Brindley was arguably the ‘highest’ clergyman in the Church of England, celebrating Solemn Masses of rococo splendour in Holy Trinity, Reading, a dreary little Victorian church on the Oxford Road. He also possessed the essential qualification of a great English eccentric: he did not know how eccentric he was. When I was a cub reporter on the Reading Chronicle I would sometimes run into Brindley parading through Sainsbury’s dressed as an 18th-century Roman monsignor. His buckled shoes with red heels – painted by himself – clopped like horse’s hooves against the linoleum as he scoured the aisles for ever creamier puddings. I once watched him sail into a civic dinner in Reading in a cream tropical cassock with violet buttons.

Tim Hayward

The impossible dream of a clean white shirt

I have no wish to sound like a worn and bitter hack, sand-blasted by weltschmerz, but I don’t have many ambitions left. It’s not like I want to write the Great Western Novel. AI can do that and who the hell reads any more? And I worry about ‘bucket lists’. They always seem remarkably similar. Ridiculous self-imposed sporting targets like marathons; the health-and-safety sanitised absurdity of ‘adrenaline’ experiences; pathologically unimaginative travel. I blame advertising for this. Indiscriminate 30-second reels of yoga/skydiving/surfing/beaches/hiking/street food in Thailand/stargazing in Machu bloody Picchu. God we’ve become dull. Even our ‘wildest dreams’ are commoditised and fully predictable.

Wednesday

Michael Simmons

Labour must go further and faster in the North Sea

John Healey stood in front of two giant robotic arms this week and promised to ‘make Great Britain Growth Britain again’. The Chancellor also promised, borrowing a catchphrase from his neighbour in No. 10, to deliver ‘good growth in every postcode’. In the North Sea, 150 miles east off the coast of Aberdeen, lies the first big test of this promise. The 6,000-ton Jackdaw extraction platform is ready to start pumping gas from a field three miles below the surface. Twenty years after the Jackdaw field was first successfully prospected, it will, at the stroke of a ministerial pen, finally be allowed to operate.

Natasha Hausdorff

The Israeli settlements lie

There are few phrases in international affairs repeated with greater confidence or subjected to less scrutiny than ‘illegal Israeli settlements’. It appears in UN resolutions, government statements, NGO reports and news bulletins as though it were an established fact. Add the words ‘under international law’ and apparently further discussion becomes unnecessary. The trouble is not just that this is political rhetoric masquerading as law, but that it is in fact contrary to real international law, properly applied. The claim rests upon a series of propositions about Israel’s borders, the legal nature of occupation and the meaning of provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, propositions which have hardened into orthodoxy through repetition.

Gwion Wyn Jones

The death of biblical literacy

We are often told these days, most recently in James Marriott’s much talked about book The New Dark Ages, that the world has a problem with reading. During such an emergency, then, it could be quite invidious to claim that some manifestations of this problem may be more or less bad than others. But it is difficult not to bemoan especially one crisis that cannot be blamed entirely on bloated screen times: the decline of biblical literacy. I have observed this first-hand when teaching history undergraduates at Oxford. These are the brightest and most hard-working young historians in the world. But it is not an uncommon occurrence to be met with blank stares when I mention the prophet Jeremiah or question them on the Exodus narrative.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The fraught world of dinner party presents

‘Oh, why do the middle classes feel they must bring a present?’ Those words were spoken by Lady Charteris when she was the wife of the Provost of Eton and a dinner-party guest arrived clutching a bottle of wine. The scene took place between 1984 and 1992, when Andrew Boggis (who recalled it in a Times obituary addendum) was Master in College. The conventions of dinner-party arrival have changed beyond recognition in the ensuing 40 years. What was seen as a ‘middle-class’, ‘common’ or ‘naff’ act in the late 1980s is now the done thing. To arrive at a friend’s house for lunch or supper without a present for the hostess would seem lazy and mean.

Tali Fraser

Are you ready for Labour’s war on Middle England?

The socioeconomic duty (SED) might not sound sexy but bear with me: this is the tool the Labour party plans to use to ramp up its attack on the middle classes. The SED was described by its Labour ministerial creators in 2009 as ‘socialism in one clause’. It would, they promised, create ‘a new social order’. It was also described as Harman’s Law after Harriet Harman, who introduced it in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s premiership but never got around to putting it into practice. Well, this Labour government is about to finish the job – Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 is go, and it may earn itself a new name: Middle England’s end.

Dean Godson

Can Britain learn from Sweden’s immigration crackdown?

Should Sweden now replace Australia, with its famed points system for immigration control, as the overseas model of choice for the British Right? As Sweden prepares to go to the polls in a desperately close election this Sunday, it is well worth considering what Stockholm has achieved over the past four years – not just on migration, but also in the intimately correlated terrain of gang crime and extremism; in short, what the French call les aspects régaliens, those matters which lie within the exclusive competence of the State. Scandinavia is certainly in vogue.

Sebastian Faulks

Is reading really dead?

I get up early and head to Liverpool Street. Meet Isabelle Ralphs and Amy Batley from Hutchinson Heinemann publishers and we take the train to Colchester, then a taxi to the giant Penguin Random House (PRH) warehouse, where I am to sign 3,000 copies of my new novel, Farewell to Eden. (I have already signed 3,000 loose title pages or ‘tip-ins’ at home.) Dave, the local PRH chief, brings in the wooden pallets full of books on a sort of fork-lift arrangement. Isabelle passes each one in from the left, I sign, and Amy, on the right, makes small piles which Dave shifts onwards and replaces with new piles taken from the pallets. Thus the stacked 10ft-long table in front of me remains ever full. I am the Sisyphus of rural Essex. To clear the table takes seven-and-a-half hours.

John Power

Politicians need to learn from Andrew Tate

When Mel Stride put out a YouTube Short last month, it got zero views. That, surely, is worth repeating: zero views. Stride’s unloved ‘short’ was a poorly cropped clip of a GB News interview, similar to dozens of other clips he had posted on his YouTube channel before being sacked as shadow chancellor. Most of them have fewer than ten views. Stride was born in 1961, so he can perhaps be forgiven for not being au fait with the latest meta on social media. But most of our MPs have similarly amateurish operations, despite recognising the importance of social media in modern communications.

Wednesday

Patrick Galbraith

How much more can British farmers endure?

Lately, for reasons that are far too baroque to go into, my wife and I have been looking at farm tenancy agreements from 1983. In a way they are deeply dull (all those drains and clauses about fence maintenance) but they are also fascinating in that they reveal how farming has changed. If you were after a few fields for your sheep or cattle, back when Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ was riding high at no. 1, you had to really fork out. Ten pounds an acre, for pretty marginal land, was the going rate, and rent rises year on year were the order of the day. Fast forward 40 years and a lot of grazing is worth almost nothing.

Tim Shipman and James Heale

Inside Reform’s plan to make Britain ‘fall in love with Nigel Farage again’

Emulating Donald Trump may be a strategy with diminishing returns in British politics, but Nigel Farage plans to channel the US President’s time on The Apprentice if he becomes prime minister, telling his cabinet ‘You’re fired!’ if they fail to deliver within 100 days of taking office. In a bid to show voters Reform UK is serious about delivering change, Farage will tell his party conference in Birmingham this week that ministers will be forced to resign, or face being kicked out, if they cannot keep their promises. The pledge will form a centrepiece of Reform’s second annual jamboree, where the party will outline its plans for ‘the first 100 days’ in Downing Street. An aide says Farage will dispense with failing colleagues without qualms: ‘Nigel doesn’t give a fuck.

Cosmo Landesman

The unsaid truth about suicide

Did you know that in the UK September is a month devoted to suicide prevention? And that on the 10th of this month, it’s World Suicide Prevention Day (WSPD)? No, neither did I. And neither did any of my friends. Yet we’re all aware that suicide is a serious problem. Every 90 minutes someone in the UK or Ireland dies that way. It’s the biggest killer of men under 45. And suicides among teenage girls and young women have almost doubled in recent years. We’ve been having these suicide prevention events every September for more than two decades and yet the rates are not going down. Maybe it’s time to challenge what I’d call the suicide prevention consensus.

Matt Ridley

Don’t blame climate change for the Himalayan flash flood

The tragic and terrifying Himalayan flash flood was caused by a chunk of mountain collapsing into a narrow gorge, sending a tsunami of mud and rock that gathered mass as it shot down the steep Trisuli river valley. More than that is not yet clear. Did a breakaway hanging glacier take a rock face with it or was it the other way round? Was there time for the debris to dam the valley and form a lake that burst or did the 60-metre flood of mud come from ice, river water, rock and soil that accumulated in the valley as the tsunami descended? Some people are already certain they know what caused this. Either climate change did it or China did it. Assorted greens rushed to blame global warming with confidence bordering on certainty.

Francis Pike

‘He’s in prison because he’s not corrupt’: Will Britain stand up for Imran Khan?

Imran Khan is dead. At least he may as well be. Last week, the former England cricket captain Michael Atherton stuck his neck out and interviewed Khan’s two sons, Sulaiman, 29, and Kasim, 27, at Lord’s for Sky TV. Showing maturity and restraint, of which their father would be proud, Imran’s sons explained at length how the Pakistan government was orchestrating their father’s murder. The response to the interview was explosive. In protest, the craven Pakistan Cricket Board immediately threatened to withdraw the country’s team from the ongoing Lord’s Test match. They did not follow through. Sulaiman reported that his father, in addition to having a problem with one of his eyes, had ‘rising blood pressure due to isolation and solitary confinement’.