Features

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

The new banality of evil

‘Remember, lads: Subscribe to PewDiePie.’ With these words, the killer began broadcasting his slaughter of 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, live on the internet — and a new form of terrorism was born. For those unfamiliar with internet subculture, PewDiePie is a Brighton-based videogames blogger whose YouTube channel, the largest in the world, is known for its politically incorrect humour. His crown is about to be snatched by T-Series, a Bollywood music channel.

J. Meirion

Wanted: UK doctors

For years, Britain has been failing to train enough doctors and has been importing them instead. This has been a well-known and much lamented fact, raising several ethical issues. Is it right for us to rob developing countries of their much-needed medics? Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, said at the Spectator’s health summit this week that Britain should stop ‘denuding low-income countries of health professionals they need’. Quite so. Which makes it all the more shocking that last year, for the first time ever, the UK imported more doctors than it trained. And the problem Stevens highlights has, under his leadership, been getting steadily worse.

Katy Balls

They can’t all be right

Has there been a Brexit disaster? It depends on your point of view. When John Bercow ruled that the Prime Minister could not bring the same deal back for a third vote, there were a great number of MPs who seemed delighted. But they were at opposite ends of the Brexit debate. Needless to say, they can’t all be right. Dominic Grieve, who longs for a second referendum, welcomed the decision — thinking that the panic, and the government’s inability to answer the question, would mean the decision being thrown back to the public. Bill Cash, one of the longest-standing Eurosceptics, also seemed pleased — appearing to calculate that Britain is set to leave the EU on Friday next week unless parliament votes for something different.

James Forsyth

Will it never end?

The government has lost the ability to run the country. It is no longer in charge of its own destiny, let alone that of the nation. What makes this so humiliating is that power has been ceded not to parliament, but to the European Union. The immediate future of our country will be decided in Brussels and the capitals of the EU, not in Westminster. It will be the EU that decides whether or not to offer the UK an extension to the Article 50 process, and how long it will be. Once the extension has been agreed, then parliament — which has already voted against leaving without a deal — will rubber-stamp it. Not since Denis Healey was forced to ask the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan in 1976 has this country been so humiliated.

Justin Marozzi

Horror show | 21 March 2019

OK, Archers fans out there. All five million of you. Ask yourselves a straightforward question. Why on earth do you — do we — listen to this show full of completely awful people? Why do we subject ourselves to this 13 minutes of daily torment, not to mention the Sunday omnibus, wallowing in the lives of fictitious characters who, let’s be ruthlessly honest, are almost universally loathsome? Don’t get me wrong. I love The Archers. I have lain in bed sweating with a fever in Mogadishu, glued to the comings and goings in Ambridge. In 2005, as al Qaeda’s bearded bombers did their worst in Baghdad, I hunkered down in my trailer hooked on Ed and Will’s fight over Emma.

Paul Wood

‘The Islamic State will never die’

 Beirut As I write, Isis is still holding out on a few hundred square yards of dirt in the village of Baghouz in Syria. This is all that remains of a ‘caliphate’ that was once almost half of Syria and a third of Iraq. The fighting has now gone on twice as long as the battle for Mosul, a city of a million and a half. Isis has just sent a taunting message to President Trump, saying he spoke too soon when he tweeted: ‘We have defeated Isis in Syria.’ But they know that the end is inevitable and coming fast. An Isis video apparently filmed in Baghouz shows people squatting in the open next to cars and trucks packed with furniture and blankets. A man asks the camera: ‘What is our fault? What is our crime? Why are we being bombed?

Thursday

Fiona Lensvelt

A modern mysticism

I first met a tarot reader in a hotel lobby in central London on my birthday four years ago. I was a book critic at the time and was aware that the cards had inspired writers from W.B. Yeats to T.S. Eliot and Italo Calvino — perhaps there’s a novel in this, I thought. This was serious research. I was less interested in my destiny than I was in the way tarot worked. That was just as well because no sooner had I sat down than my reader piped up: ‘This has been an especially trying time for you and I’m afraid that it isn’t going to get easier.’ She went on, at length, before I told her there wasn’t a great deal of drama in my life: I had a stable relationship, a good job, family and friends who supported me. Was she confusing my past with my present?

Katy Balls

Will there be an election?

When a British government loses control over parliament, the natural remedy is to hold a general election. Why prolong everyone’s agony? But despite Theresa May having now failed twice to pass her signature Brexit deal, there is no sign she is willing to go back to the country. Jeremy Corbyn is keen for an early election to break the deadlock and others are beginning to agree with him. Asked this week what would happen if the government’s deal was rejected for a second time, a cabinet minister replied: ‘an election in two weeks’ time’. It’s a sentiment shared by Charles Walker, the vice chair of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tories.

James Forsyth

It’s not over yet

Almost three years have passed since Britain voted to leave the European Union, and yet we are still no closer to a Brexit resolution than we were on that June morning. No one is in control and this country’s whole system of governance is creaking. We are in an interregnum that shows no sign of ending. What is remarkable about this moment in our history is that something must break the impasse. This means that, although Theresa May’s deal suffered the biggest defeat ever for a piece of government business and was defeated a second time by a three-figure margin, it is not dead yet. Many cabinet ministers, including several of those who are very critical of May, think there is a chance that the deal will pass at the third time of asking.

Isabel Hardman

A dose of understanding

What a baffling group of people anti-vaxxers are. They rail against one of the miracles of modern medicine, peddling scare stories about vaccines which had nearly eradicated many deadly childhood illnesses in the developed world. Baffling, of course, is too soft a word for many: they’re dangerous, because their anti-science views don’t just put their own children at risk, but wider society. The uptake of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in Britain is at 87.5 per cent. This sounds a lot, but isn’t close to the 95 per cent threshold that the World Health Organisation (WHO) says will ensure ‘herd immunity’ — which is when a disease cannot spread through a community.

Tom Goodenough

Bible bashers

Being a street preacher can be a thankless business. Since moving to Britain from Nigeria nine years ago, 64-year-old Oluwole Ilesanmi has toured the country reading aloud from the Bible, spending hours outside train stations, urging people to see the light. Sometimes he makes a convert; most of the time his preaching falls on deaf ears. Last month, it resulted in him being arrested. Saturday 23 February began like a typical day for Ilesanmi. He went to Southgate tube station in north London and preached for a few hours. His spiel included a disobliging reference to Islam, which seemed to rile a passer-by. To Ilesanmi’s surprise he was then accosted by the man.

Douglas Murray

Bloody liar

It is more than 15 years since the Bloody Sunday soldiers last appeared in public. For months I sat in the room with them to watch their evidence at Lord Saville’s inquiry. And while Lionel Shriver is right that the sight of terrorists benefiting from an immunity denied to our soldiers is grotesque, there are competing qualms. Not only because British soldiers should be held to a higher standard than terrorists. But because, having watched all of the Bloody Sunday shooters testify, I can say with certainty that they include not only unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars. As one soldier after another appeared before Lord Saville, it became clear that the soldiers of 1 Para were intent on spurning this last effort to get to the truth of what happened that day.

Thursday

Toby Young

The rise of the woke corporation

New employees at the British headquarters of Accenture, a global management consultancy, were slightly taken aback during a recent induction morning when the head of human resources encouraged them to wear rainbow-coloured lanyards declaring themselves ‘allies’ — not just at the meeting, but permanently. In addition, they were given the option of adding the word ‘ally’ in the same rainbow pattern to the footers of their company email addresses. Anyone confused by HR language — a reference to the second world war perhaps?

Rachel Johnson

Publish and be damned

The other day Will Self unburdened himself on the state of fiction with crushing hauteur. ‘What’s now regarded as serious literature would, ten or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young adult fiction… in terms of literary history, it does seem a bit of a regression. If you consider that Nabokov’s Lolita was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, it’s a different order of literature…’ Stop right there! Will Self’s top pick was Lolita. This was the novel of the 20th century that stood the test of time. But would Lolita even be plucked from the slush pile in 2019, let alone be listed as one of the 100 best novels ever written by Le Monde, Time, and newspapers passim?

Leah McLaren

Too good to be Trudeau

An Italian friend who lives in Rome texted me to ask about the current political crisis in Canada that is threatening to topple the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. ‘I honestly can’t see what the “scandal” is,’ he said. ‘Is it all just because Justin forgot to say “please” when asking his attorney-general for a deferred prosecution agreement?’ No and yes — and that is also what makes this scandal so uniquely Canadian. In Britain, good manners are often an act of passive aggression, while Canadians are pathologically earnest in their civility. We tend towards well-mannered moderation both in life and politics.

William Cook

The world at his feet

How much is Jadon Sancho worth? Fifty million? A hundred million? As the speculation mounts, the numbers keep growing. Jadon is the star player for Borussia Dortmund, one of Germany’s leading football teams. He’s already won his first England cap — and he’s still only 18. If you know anything about football, you already know about Jadon. If you don’t know anything about football, you’ll know about him soon enough. He’s the kind of player who comes along only once in a decade — a Glenn Hoddle, a Paul Gascoigne, a Ryan Giggs, a Gareth Bale. He’s the most gifted British footballer of his generation. And from when he was eight until he was 14, I used to watch him virtually every week.

Cindy Yu

China’s singles market

 Shanghai ‘How old are you, young lady?’ A small, curious crowd starts to surround me. ‘How tall are you? What do you work as?’ The parents camping out in Shanghai’s infamous marriage market have no time for small talk. They come here every weekend, rain or shine, seeking a partner for their grown-up son or daughter. Age, wage, height, education — everyone has a wish list, and they also condense their own child into such a list. Today’s special: me. The so-called Matchmakers’ Corner has seen tens of thousands of Chinese parents, including members of my own family, come to investigate what (or who) is out there. A great many parents worry about their child’s stubborn singledom.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Return of the Bern

 Washington, DC Bernie in PC mode sounds unnatural, like a vicar talking about grime music. It makes millennials swoon Bernie Sanders likes private jets. That, at least, is the malicious word being put about by Hillary Clinton’s former aides this week, just days after Sanders announced that he is again running for president. Sanders, you’ll recall, lost a vicious fight against Clinton for the Democratic nomination in the first half of 2016. Yet in the weeks leading up to the November election, he held 39 rallies in 13 different states that were pro-Hillary and anti-Trump. Pretty noble of him, you might think, given how the Clinton machine had taken him down. According to Team Hillary, however, Bernie behaved like a bolshie diva.

Fraser Nelson

‘I’m not appealing to the nutter vote’

A woman dressed as a nun is standing outside the London Palladium with a placard, warning about ‘an evening with a religious extremist’. She refers to Jacob Rees-Mogg, who sold all 2,300 seats at the venue in a fortnight — a feat that enraged his critics all the more. The nun eventually found a loudspeaker to address Spectator subscribers, who waved cheerfully as they filed in to the theatre. This stage has played host to entertainers like Bruce Forsyth, Marvin Gaye, Tommy Steele and Jimmy Tarbuck — and now, the backbench MP for North East Somerset, offering an evening of political discussion. We live in strange times. He arrives late, fresh from a meeting with the European Research Group of Tory Brexit MPs, where they had to accept their game was up.

Matt Ridley

Beware pseudoscience

‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong. Increasingly, in a crowded market for alarm, it becomes necessary to make the scares up.