Features

Wednesday

Tom Holland

The way of the cross

Declarations of hope that Notre Dame can be resurrected have been much in evidence this Holy Week. Such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, that other great emblem of Paris, Notre Dame provides the French with evidence that their modern and secular republic has its foundations deeply rooted in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame has always been more than just an assemblage of stone and stained glass. It is a monument as well to a specifically Christian past. Last summer, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat in another cathedral, Winchester, listening to the bells peal.

Douglas Murray

Last rights | 17 April 2019

Four years ago, the Assisted Dying Bill was overwhelmingly defeated in parliament. The euthanasia debate hasn’t disappeared, however. One recent poll showed that 90 per cent of the UK’s population now support assisted dying for the terminally ill. So is a relaxation of the law inevitable? Would it represent progress? Or is it very dangerous? Our literary editor Sam Leith joined our associate editor Douglas Murray to discuss.   Sam: I find myself, possibly in accordance with my position as one of The Spectator’s hand-wringing liberals, in favour of assisted dying but I want to be clear on the narrowness of that position. The Assisted Dying Bill would not have allowed us to euthanise the incapable.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Thank God for hymns!

Before embarking on this hymn to hymns, I’ll admit that hymn-enthusiasts feel a slight sense of anticlimax on Easter Sunday, when the pleasingly austere hymns of Lent are replaced with the too-happy, exclamation-mark-ridden hymns of Easter. Within minutes of the start of the Easter Eucharist, our mouths will ache from repetitive singing of the over-vowelled word ‘Alleluia’. I’ll also admit that I sometimes long for hymns to be over. I check to see how many more verses there still are: three down, three to go. I’m relieved if the vicar says ‘omitting verses five and six’ of a slow seven-verser. Anything to speed up our increasingly padded and long-winded Anglican services.

James Tooley

They tuck you up

I first came across Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’ when I was 18 in the late 1970s. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do…’ I was working as a volunteer in a care home for physically handicapped adults in Camden, north London. I had dropped out of school without doing my A levels. When I visited my parents over Easter, my father was angry about my newly acquired pierced ear and earrings: ‘What does it say about who you’re associating with? You’ve really upset your mother.

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel’s folly

 Montpellier An embattled, incompetent leader distrusted and disliked by a vast majority of voters. A wobbly economy that might be tipped into recession by Brexit. A re-energised opposition. Huge street protests. Squabbling with European partners. The government is paralysed, the opposition is emboldened — and the nation stands humiliated, as the world looks on in horror wondering how a leader who was so popular two years ago could get things so wrong. Not Theresa May, but Emmanuel Macron, the politician who may be the greatest Brexiteer of them all. As the saga of British withdrawal enters its final chapter, Macron has emerged as the loudest advocate for pushing Britain out the door, deal or no deal, consequences be damned. Why does he behave in this way?

Rachel Johnson

Kiss off | 11 April 2019

It’s out of control! If I play doubles first thing, have a lunch, then go to perhaps two parties in an evening, I can be embracing more than a hundred people in the course of my day. It’s so unhygienic — especially in the flu season, when someone gives you a sticky peck before telling you in the next breath how ill they are. It all makes me envy the royals, who have a trusty and time-honoured system of self-protection from this imposition. Princess Anne sticks out a white-gloved hand.

Mark Palmer

Boxed in

Friends in Herefordshire said they were both fit and well but confessed to ‘watching far too much television’. I thought nothing of it until a Wiltshire couple whom my wife and I have known for ever said almost the same thing but with more foreboding. ‘We’ve got to break the habit of watching so much — even the good stuff.’ That’s the problem. There’s just too much good stuff on telly. It’s starting to become an issue, a tyranny of sorts, and certainly a drain on what Americans like to call ‘downtime’.

Katy Balls

The bodycon Tory

‘Get some boomerangs,’ Liz Truss says to her aides. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury isn’t looking for something to throw — she is referring to the short videos on Instagram for which she is becoming famous. She has carved out a reputation in Tory circles for her love of social media, which she uses to poke fun at friends, rivals and herself while promoting her upbeat brand of liberal, free-market conservatism: what she calls ‘Tories with attitude’. If a battle is to be fought for the soul of the Tory party, it’s one she intends to join. Once described as a Cameron cutie, Truss has been on a journey since first entering government seven years ago.

Toby Young

iPlod

Monday wasn’t the best day for the government to launch Online Harms, its white paper on internet regulation. As Sajid Javid was proudly proclaiming that Britain would have the toughest internet laws in the world, it emerged that a British woman had been arrested on a trip to Dubai and faced up to two years in prison for describing her ex-husband’s new wife as a ‘horse’ on Facebook. So does the Home Secretary want the UK to have tougher internet laws than the United Arab Emirates? If so, he might find himself at odds with the Foreign Secretary, who has been working behind the scenes to secure the poor woman’s release.

Melissa Kite

Uncool Britannia

A famous actor looks tearfully into the camera. It is Michael Sheen, or possibly Ewan McGregor. His voice cracks as he says: ‘For just £5 a month, you could help an MP recover from the shock of having his Brexit amendment rejected. Just £5 will help pay for counsellors trained to help our brave MPs debate EU withdrawal motions. Please donate now so that MPs like Nick Boles know you care. They give so much of themselves, and ask so little…’ I exaggerate, but only a bit. We keep hearing from MPs about how the stress of Brexit is harming them mentally and emotionally. You might think the nation’s elected representatives would be apologising to the public for the mess they have made. Instead, they just moan to us that their mental health is at risk.

Thursday

Chris Daw KC

Blurred lines | 4 April 2019

It is late, on a wet Tuesday evening in November, and I am driving home, listening to endless talk of Brexit on the radio. The phone rings in the car and cuts off the news. It’s an unknown mobile number; I press the answer button on the steering wheel. A moment’s hesitation and a woman’s voice comes over the speakers; middle-aged, well-spoken. She’s almost in tears and struggles to get her words out. ‘You don’t know me, and I’m so sorry to ring you this late. I got your number from my lawyer friend Stuart, and he told me you are the person I need to call. It’s about my son. He’s in a police station now. He’s been arrested for rape.’ I have been a criminal barrister for more than 25 years and a QC since 2013.

James Forsyth

The losing game

Iraq, the financial crisis, the expenses scandal — all of these undermined trust in politicians. They created an impression of a governing class that was devious, inept and venal. But the damage they did to public faith in politics is nothing compared with the damage that will be done by a failure to deliver Brexit. Brexit is the result not just of a referendum but of two general elections. The Tories would not have won a majority in 2015 without their pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. In 2017, Labour wouldn’t have been able to deny the Tories a majority if they had not been committed to respecting the result of that referendum. Yet Brexit is now in danger of being cancelled altogether.

Katy Balls

The model Tory

A few weeks ago, Johnny Mercer spoke in Westminster on the future of conservatism. At the end, the audience was asked by the host who should be the leader capable of delivering all this and a voice from the back shouted: ‘Johnny!’ It was his wife, Felicity. She’s not alone in her admiration. Throughout parliament, there’s talk of Brexit having been messed up not just by Theresa May but a whole generation of career politicians. So perhaps, it’s argued, the new leader should be from a younger generation, with a very different CV. Someone who can make inexperience into a virtue. This 37-year-old former army captain might not be running for the job — ‘It’s not a position you self select to’ — but he certainly hits the right notes.

Cosmo Landesman

With friends like these

There was a time when you couldn’t walk down your local high street and not be set upon by a succession of ‘charity muggers’ — those relentlessly cheery and chatty young men and women who want your money for worthy causes like Cancer Research UK, Greenpeace, Oxfam or Age UK. These days the high streets are relatively free from their presence and their sales pitch is more restrained. But there’s a new breed of brazen ‘charity muggers’ who want your money — and they’re called your friends. I used to get emails from friends asking me to dinner or for drinks; now, on a daily basis I get emails from friends asking me for money — money for their favourite charity.

Andrew Watts

Have I got talent?

The contestants for the 13th series of Britain’s Got Talent, the variety show which starts on Saturday, certainly showed variety: next to me in the queue underneath the London Palladium are small children, a singer boasting about knowing Robbie Williams’s dad, and a Chelsea Pensioner in full Scarlets. A young researcher tries to put us at ease: ‘Have you come far?’ The Pensioner stares at her. ‘From Chelsea,’ he barks. Britain’s Got Talent is event television, the sort of show audiences still watch live and talk about, on Twitter or even while sitting together at home — it’s like Question Time for ITV on Saturday nights.

Robert Hardman

Bonne chance, Ireland

Seventy years ago this month, a prime minister led a divided nation towards the exit from what was then one of the world’s most important organisations. On that occasion, Ireland was the country wanting to leave and there was no backstop to hold things up. Despite the pleas of the other member states, the Irish walked out of the Commonwealth. I was reminded of that moment this week as the budding bromance between the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and France’s President Emmanuel Macron unfolded. Relations have never been better, Mr Varadkar cooed to nods from M. Macron. As well he might. For Varadkar has just returned his nation to the Commonwealth fold — by signing up to the French Commonwealth.

Douglas Murray

Salvini’s common touch

While Britain continues to try to struggle its way out of the EU, perhaps it is wise to consider what is happening inside the bloc itself, not just in Paris where the fumes from burning cars fill the apartments and approval ratings for Emmanuel Macron continue to slide as he engages in a national listening exercise (which actually consists of him delivering Chávez-length lectures to the French public). But over the border in Italy, where the tone of the era is being set. Being both interior minister and deputy prime minister is a tremendous position for Matteo Salvini to be in.

Thursday

Dea Birkett

Doing it for themselves

They cut virgin paths through tropical forests, paddled dugout canoes over West African rapids, sailed along the Yangtze in a sampan, climbed the Rocky Mountains with a gun-toting guide, galloped across the Iraqi desert in search of sheikhs, slept under the stars and ate a lot of snake. It’s easy to be seduced by the exploits of the Victorian women travellers. Broadcaster Mariella Frostrup pays homage to ‘their courage, curiosity and pioneering spirit’ in her new book, Wild Women and Their Amazing Adventures Over Land, Sea and Air, a collection of 50 pieces of travel writing by women. Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, now revived by the National Theatre in London, features the 19th-century traveller Isabella Bird in the cast of celebrated proto-feminists.

Katy Balls

Let battle commence…

To most of the cabinet, it does not matter if Theresa May announces a timetable for her resignation: they can’t see her lasting until the summer and the race for her successor is now on. Coffees are being bought, dinners laid on, allies sounded out — all in expectation of a contest being called at any moment. This time, the leading candidates hope to be ready with campaign managers, teams, manifestos and more. Even those holding back are doing so strategically. And given that this is the Conservative party, there will be blood. If there is a general election this year, Tories are adamant that May won’t lead them into it. ‘There is a strong sense that she shouldn’t lead us into an election anytime, anywhere, any place,’ explains a member of government.

James Forsyth

After May

The most effective political insult of modern times was delivered by Norman Lamont in 1993, when he declared that John Major’s government gave ‘the impression of being in office but not in power’. But it is truer of Theresa May than it ever was of Major. Lamont argued that Major paid too much attention to opinion polls, meaning that the government reacted to events, rather than shaping them. But May’s position is far, far worse: she has lost control of the House of Commons. On the most important issue of the day, there is something close to a shadow government operating. Such is May’s predicament that the best card she had left to play was the precise timing of her departure. She told Tory MPs that she'd quit if they passed her deal; she didn't say when.