Features

Thursday

Harriet Sergeant

The inconvenient truth about cannabis and mental illness

Mash’s older brother was the same age as Anthony Williams when he slaughtered a stranger in a brutal and random attack. He was in the grip of a psychotic disorder caused by cannabis. We do not yet know what drove Williams, a 32-year-old African Caribbean man, to allegedly try to murder ten people during a 14-minute knife rampage on a train. But Mash is in no doubt cannabis often plays a part in attacks like these. ‘In my community smoking weed is normalised,’ he says. ‘We laugh and joke about hearing voices or having a “para” [a paranoid fit].’ He counts on his fingers: ‘Two brothers, two cousins and multiple friends’ who have experienced hallucinations and delusions. He shakes his head sadly. ‘Weed is killing my people.

Andrew Gimson

Is Zack Polanski our Zohran Mamdani?

Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Zack Polanski offers the thrill of cost-free rebellion. Mamdani leapt to prominence at the end of June by unexpectedly winning the Democratic party nomination in the New York mayoral race, and doing so as an avowed socialist who claims that by taxing the rich he will relieve ‘the despair in working-class Americans’ lives’. Polanski has made waves since the start of September as the new leader of the Green party of England and Wales, using a rhetoric calculated to appeal to left-wing activists, while proclaiming himself the champion of plumbers and hairdressers. He has conjured up an alliance between utopian socialists like himself and sturdy, hard-working people who provide services on which we all depend, and who are struggling to get by.

Tim Shipman

Gilded age: the lessons from Trump’s second term

Washington, D.C. When John Swinney, the SNP leader, and Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. ‘If you’re going to do it,’ Scotland’s First Minister suggested, ‘you might as well go big.’ This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term.

Thursday

Michael Simmons

Datageddon: Britain’s stats have become dangerously unreliable

There were cheers in the Treasury last month as the nation’s statisticians discovered a spare £3 billion down the back of the sofa. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) admitted that VAT receipts had been under-reported by £1 billion last year and £2 billion this year. The newly found cash will go some way to filling the Chancellor’s £30 billion fiscal black hole, but not everyone was celebrating. Just 150 miles west along the M4, at the home of the ONS in Newport, Wales, the mood was grim. The embattled agency was splashed across the papers for the wrong reasons. This error was just the latest in a long line of data disasters. That’s because the quality of Britain’s official data, like much of British life, has deteriorated to the point of being dangerously unreliable.

Mary Wakefield

‘People can’t take a joke these days’: Michael Heath on wokeness, The Spectator and turning 90

When I joined The Spectator, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-storey Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She was married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with the home secretary, David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was Boris Johnson, then editor, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with assistant editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing, staring mistily into the middle distance. ‘Petsy looks like a Bond girl. Doesn’t she look like a Bond girl?

Daniel McCarthy

Trump should beware of backing regime change in Venezuela

Few Americans find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention in Libya. Regimes were successfully changed, but what came after Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi was civil war, regional instability and mass migration that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbours. Now the Donald Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolas Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. But that will also do to the Americas, including the United States, what the war on terror did to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Luke Coppen

Satanic verses: the origins of Roman Catholic black metal

In his youth in the early 2000s, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s ‘most evil album’. The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its sing-song tones. English was also out of the question: he didn’t want to sound like Abba. That left Latin, the native tongue of the occult and, it is said, of demons. In a quest for suitably devilish lyrics, he pored over arcane texts. That led him to Latin editions of Sayings of the Desert Fathers – bad-ass early Christian monks – and St Augustine’s Confessions.

Damian Thompson

How the occult captured the modern mind

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with ‘magick’. Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods.

Arabella Byrne

Hex appeal: the rise of middle-class witches

In King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, written in 1597, he vigorously encourages witch-hunting and, in particular, the tossing of witches into the sea. Only the innocent would sink. As a way of identifying witches, it was clear and presumably efficient. These days, we have no such clarity. But witches walk among us. I’m not talking about women in black pointy hats, but something far scarier: the middle-class witch. In the past, she might have been called a depressive, a spinster or a divorcée. Now, she’s probably a middle-aged woman in the Home Counties with a TikTok account, a litany of spells and deep trauma. Modern witchcraft has always invited confusing cliches. Blame L. Frank Baum.

Tim Shipman

The gym, the hairdresser, the campaign trail: the inside story of Kemi’s first year

On the day of the local elections in May, when the Tories suffered a historic setback, Kemi Badenoch went to the gym and got her hair done. A screenshot of the Tory leader’s diary, leaked by a disgruntled Conservative, shows she planned a Harley Street dental appointment at 9 a.m., followed by 90 minutes at a boutique pilates gym at 11 a.m., followed by an hour-long visit to the hairdresser at 1 p.m. Plenty of politicians take it easy on election day, but the leak is significant because it shows someone still wants to wound her. For her internal enemies, she remains on probation. ‘Thousands of loyal Conservative party activists went out that morning in a desperate attempt to door-knock voters,’ an internal critic charged.

Thursday

Michael Henderson

My debt to the teacher who introduced me to Wagner

We saw the world end in Berlin, again. Another Ring Cycle – hurrah! – in the beautiful Staatsoper theatre on Unter den Linden. Christian Thielemann led the house’s superb orchestra from the dawn of Creation in Das Rheingold to the downfall of the Gods in Götterdämerung. It was a brisk Ring, coming in at seven minutes over 14 hours. The playing was magnificent, the singing of a very high order and the anti-mythological staging by Dmitri Tcherniakov startling. Particular praise must go to the Sieglinde of Lithuanian soprano Vida Mikneviciute – try saying that after a few scoops of pilsner. Thrilling hardly does her justice.

Taki

The irreplaceable Lady Annabel Goldsmith

During Jane Austen’s time, their roles would be reversed. Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who left us last week at 91, would be Darcy, with Mark Birley and Sir James Goldsmith as Elizabeth Bennet. Both her husbands were womanisers, well-born, but of inferior birth to her. I met her around 60 years ago, and she was as aristocratic as they come, and as down to earth as her puckish irreverence would take her. A quick smirk, a raised eyebrow would turn into something prurient and funny. Wonderfully mischievous, she enjoyed revving it up when the Austro-Australian Princess Michael would complain about me at Annabel’s annual summer party. Annabel would listen to the Austrian, then seek me out, come very close and whisper: ‘The Kents simply adore you.

Lara Brown

‘Trump isn’t easy’: Piers Morgan on his friends – and foes

When I meet Piers Morgan, he warns me he’s glued to the ‘moment in history’ happening on his TV screens that morning. He is watching Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages as part of the peace deal negotiated by his old friend Donald Trump. The two have known each other for 17 years, first meeting when Morgan appeared in – and won – Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. He tells me that Trump’s final words to him on the show were: ‘Piers, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re almost certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the Celebrity Apprentice.

Sam Leith

Prince Andrew: from playboy to PlayStation

Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Prince Andrew’s current travails that ‘according to visitors to Royal Lodge’, he now ‘spends much of his time playing video games’. Even before all the unpleasantness with Jeffrey Epstein’s child-rape allegations, one of the Prince’s more embarrassing qualities was his appearing as an ‘ambassador’ for this or that – usually accompanied by a helicopter trip to a golf course. Now he’s reduced – no chopper, no putting green; woe is him – to being an ambassador for adults who play video games. As an adult who plays video games, and even writes about them from time to time, I generally welcome news of figures in public life who do the same. Not on this occasion.

Rebecca Reid

The sheer joy of nighties

One of the many problems with the internet is that it’s increasingly difficult to know if something has become ubiquitous overnight, or if your algorithm is just serving you the sort of slop it thinks you’re stupid enough to buy. Case in point: nightdresses. Previously the preserve of pioneer women, convalescents and Victorian ghost children, nightdresses suddenly seem to be everywhere. I can’t open my phone without seeing a glamorous woman going about her morning wearing a beautiful and expensive nightgown. ‘Retailers have informed me that sales of nightdresses are higher than ever at present,’ Hannah Banks-Walker, a commissioning editor at Harper’s Bazaar, tells me. Delicious news. I am not alone.

Tom Gross

The westerners helping Hamas win the propaganda war

After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield, Hamas can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now. The terror group has survived and is once again exerting control in the areas of Gaza under its authority. Public executions, whippings, stonings and kneecappings have returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas executed at least 100 Gazans. Hamas’s survival was achieved not only through its remaining fighters and its holding of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of western apologists. A coalition of so-called progressives and professional activists has excused, rationalised and defended the group’s actions across universities and in newspaper editorials.

James Heale

The battle for Farage’s mind

If New Labour was Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, then Reform UK is perhaps Tony Blair’s. Distaste for the three-time election winner is a thread which connects much of the party’s leadership. Nigel Farage clashed with him at the European parliament in 2005. His deputy, Richard Tice, did the same as a Question Time audience member four years before. Their colleague Danny Kruger was once set to stand for the Tories against Blair in Sedgefield – but was forced out after promising a ‘creative destruction’ in public services. Such ‘creative destruction’ is precisely the approach Reform wants to take to the post-Blair political world.

Angus Colwell and Max Jeffery

The Ultras: meet Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance

Ayoub Khan seemed delighted. Last Thursday, it was announced that fans of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv would be banned from attending their match against Aston Villa next month, an outcome that Khan, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, had been lobbying for since September. That night, Khan took himself on a broadcast round to celebrate. Keir Starmer had said the ban was the ‘wrong decision’, but on Newsnight Khan told him to back off. ‘The Prime Minister should stay out of operational matters,’ he said. ‘That’s not a matter for him, sitting in No. 10.’ It has been a satisfying 15 months for Khan since his election.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Can anyone stop J.D. Vance becoming president?

As Donald J. Trump flew to the Holy Land on Sunday to declare peace, his Vice-President took to the airwaves to address the rumbling civil conflict on the home front. J.D. Vance did not rule out invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act in order to quell the violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in several American cities. ‘The problem is the fact that the entire media in this country, cheered on by a few far-left lunatics, have made it OK to tee off on American law enforcement,’ he told NBC News. ‘We cannot accept that in the United States of America.’ This is now Vance’s familiar role. He’s not bad cop to Trump’s good, exactly, more the administration’s favourite pitbull.

Nick Boles

Ukraine must stand as a fortress of European freedom

It is 35 years since I was last in Warsaw and the city is unrecognisable. Back then it was grimy and depressing, full of buildings still pockmarked by bomb damage. Nothing worked and nobody smiled. Now it gleams. The historic Old Town has been lovingly rebuilt and restored. Everything else is new: the cars, the shops, the office blocks and apartment buildings. The fashions are sharp and the teeth are white. It is a powerful tonic for beleaguered liberals. Don’t let the democracy-in-decline-mongers deceive you. Economic and political freedom work. And what the world needs is more of both.