Features

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Labour’s class war on moorland

This year has been a bad one for wildfires in Britain. In June, nearly 30,000 acres burned near Carrbridge in the Highlands. In August, a careless camper, I’m told, ignited 5,000 acres in the North York moors, setting off 18 unexploded shells, shrapnel from one of which narrowly missed a gamekeeper. The pollution from wildfires was ten times worse this year than in the wetter weather of last year. Yet Keir Starmer’s government has chosen this autumn to ban the one practice that has been preventing more such dangerous fires: the managed burning of heather on much of England’s moorland. In doing so, it has ridden roughshod over advice from scientists, firefighters, land managers, farmers and environmentalists, ignoring or misrepresenting evidence along the way.

Rosie Lewis

The parents gaming special educational needs

As a foster carer and adopter, I’ve spent more mornings than I care to count coaxing my 13-year-old daughter into her uniform and then into the car. She has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the UK’s most underdiagnosed neuro-developmental condition, which leaves her with a brain wired for impulsivity, memory lapses and emotional storms that no local school can contain. Each day, I drive her across several counties to the only specialist placement that can meet her needs. Four hours a day, every week day. While I’m grinding through the traffic, taxpayers are footing bills that could fund whole classrooms. Councils and schools spent a record £2.26 billion on special educational needs and disabilities – ‘Send’ – transport last year.

Poppy Pearce

French parents do it better

I arrived in Paris as an au pair in 2022. I was in my early twenties and armed only with GCSE French and a suitcase that could barely fit in my chambre de bonne – nine square metres of ‘characterful’ living space under the eaves, with a window just large enough to glimpse the Eiffel Tower if I leaned out at a dangerous angle. How did I end up here? After graduating, I wanted to immerse myself in a new city and polish my French. A few years on and I am still nannying, though I have returned to London. It seems I’ve become a career nanny by accident. But I’ve come to understand more about the different styles of parenting in the UK and France than I ever thought possible – and feel sure that British parents could learn a lot from our friends across the Channel.

James Heale

Why Sheridan Westlake is the Tories’ best weapon

Who is responsible for Labour’s recent woes? For some Conservatives, the answer is obvious – Sheridan Westlake. He is that rarest of beasts: an effective Tory operator who has served every leader since John Major. Flaxen-haired with an impish grin, he is spoken of by colleagues as part myth, part political mastermind. Yet ask him what he does, and the stock answer is modest: ‘I simply do the photocopying.’ ‘He just likes getting up in the morning and kicking socialists. He’s in it for the love of the game’ The resignation of Angela Rayner last month is widely attributed within Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) to an effective campaign by the party’s attack team.

Emma Park

Britain’s glassmaking tradition is fracturing

We live in a strange era in which much of our day-to-day experience is constructed for us digitally on a screen. Even in the ‘real’ world, many objects that inhabit our homes will have been designed on a screen, made by computerised machines, and have that flat, wobble-free digital aesthetic – not only electronics, but furniture, tableware, toys, clothes and books. It is probably impossible to resist this digital colonisation of our physical space altogether but, in some cases, there is an antidote: choosing objects that have been designed and made by hand, or by tools intended to assist humans rather than replace them. I am not talking about fine art but about ‘applied’ or ‘decorative’ arts and crafts, the products of small businesses or makers.

Tim Shipman

Here be dragons: the truth about Chinese espionage

On 3 July a Chinese man, Xu Zewei, was arrested in Milan to face extradition on nine charges relating to the hack carried out by a group called Haf-nium during the Covid pandemic. Western companies had secrets stolen in 2020 and 2021 when a weakness in the Microsoft Exchange servers was exploited. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, later said 70 British firms had fallen victim to ‘a malicious act by Chinese state-backed actors’. The court documents claim that officers of China’s ‘Ministry of State Security and the Shanghai State Security Bureau directed Xu to conduct this hacking’.

Thursday

Theo Hobson

The Church of England’s muddle over sex and marriage

Whatever you think of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, there can be no doubt about this: she firmly backs the Church of England’s current official teaching on sex and marriage. Indeed, as the bishop who was recently in charge of updating that teaching, it might be the case that she upholds it more completely and sincerely than anyone else. Perhaps some readers would like to be reminded what the Church’s current official teaching on sex and marriage actually is. It is this: marriage remains the preserve of heterosexuals. Homosexuals may have their unions blessed in church. Um… that’s it. That’s all that can be said for sure. What about this obvious question: does the Church condemn sex outside of marriage? There is no clear answer.

Flora Watkins

My toxic affair with my Land Rover

For the past decade I’ve been in a toxic relationship. Sure, there were red flags – most of them on the dashboard – but it was love, or at least lust, on my part. My Land Rover seduced me with its size and strength, its rugged interior, how safe it made me feel when I was behind the wheel. I was love-bombed with promises of passing the 300,000-mile mark, manipulated by the ease with which three Isofix booster seats slotted into the back. Yet my Land Rover has cost me dear, both in terms of friendships – my left-leaning, EV-driving neighbours sneered when we lived in London – and in the money I’ve lavished on it: thousands of pounds a year to keep our relationship on the road. It also drank heavily.

Ian Williams

Did Jonathan Powell torpedo the China espionage trial?

The antics of Keir Starmer and his top security adviser over the collapsed China espionage case bring to mind the slapstick British movie Carry On Spying – which is precisely the message it will have conveyed to Beijing. Instead of Bernard Cribbins, Kenneth Williams and their team of fictional incompetents, the real-life Whitehall farce has Jonathan Powell on a single-minded mission to appease China. Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, has been accused of torpedoing the trial to avoid embarrassing China at a time when he is leading efforts to rebuild diplomatic ties with Xi Jinping. One can only imagine the despair in Britain’s security agencies and the Crown Prosecution Service, who would not have brought the charges unless they were reasonably confident of success.

Lara Prendergast

The Spectator state of mind

It is party time in New York as we toast the launch of The Spectator’s swish new office on Fifth Avenue. The building, an art deco number originally designed by George F. Pelham, thrusts skywards, just a few blocks from the Empire State Building – and we’re right at the top. The Spectator State of Mind. The office is a work in progress: walls half-demolished, wires hanging out, plaster on show. Yet even in its unfinished state, it looks beautiful. We spend the day getting the place in shape for our ‘hard hat party’, improvising with gaffer tape and a few well-placed lamps to conjure up a vibe. I lay out the napkins, each printed with amusing quotes about the magazine. My favourite? ‘You can go to hell – you and your irrelevant rag’: Sebastian Gorka.

Lisa Haseldine

How Germany is preparing for war

Hamburg What would happen if Russia was planning an attack on Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia – and the threat was sufficiently great that Nato felt the need to send troops east across Europe to face off against Moscow? This was the scenario the German Bundeswehr spent several days rehearsing last month, working out how the army would transport its soldiers towards Nato’s eastern flank in the event of conflict in the Baltics. For three days, the port city of Hamburg played host to the exercise Red Storm Bravo: 500 soldiers, along with roughly 300 members of the emergency services and other civilian organisations, took part – the largest military exercise in the city since the end of the Cold War.

Rachel Johnson

Jilly Cooper was utterly unrivalled

Jilly Cooper, the last great Englishwoman of my lifetime – after Queen Elizabeth II and Debo – has died. The lights are going out all over Rutshire. During her life, Jilly shone as an author, a friend and a person – the definition of effervescent. You had to meet her only once to become a founder member of the Jilly Cooper Adoration Society. When she wrote her last book, Tackle!, about a rural football club complete with ‘bitch invasions’ and ghastly Wags, I told her that, in a way, she was the beautiful game, only she gave entertainment to millions not by striking a ball but by putting one word in front of another on her ancient typewriter, Monica. (A friend told me she liked to write topless in the garden, with a glass of wine.

Tanya Gold

Palestinian nationalism has come to Cornwall

This is West Cornwall, land of fishing, jam first and Trotskyite crafters. There is a sizeable community of nutters yearning for a Cornish intifada: the freedom within, and the freedom without. The old joke is: the duchy is shaped like a Christmas stocking and all the nuts are in the toe. Extinction Rebellion (XR) used to be the big thing down here. My cleaner, a serious deal in XR, screamed at me when my husband put a Tory sign in our garden for the 2019 general election campaign – but fashions change. There are other things to be extinguished now. Since 7 October 2023, the nutters have embraced their own version of Palestinian nationalism and, this being West Cornwall, it is art-themed.

Douglas Murray

The increasing fear felt by Britain’s Jews

If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the day well – Tuesday was the second anniversary of the 7 October massacre, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage. Tuesday’s hate-fest was not, of course, an unusual event. The first demonstrations in support of the 7 October massacre of Jews took place in west London on the day of the massacre itself. And the protests have not stopped since. In fact, they have only swelled in number.

David Shipley

The civil service is killing restorative justice

Failing institutions don’t like challenge, let alone being shown up. Few institutions are failing more tragically than our prisons – and the situation is getting worse. This is because the officials who preside over this debacle are purging the few people who have actually been making a positive difference. The latest organisation to be banned from prisons is Sycamore Tree, a Christian charity which arranges meetings between prisoners and people who have been the victims of similar crimes to those they committed. It charged prisons nothing and had operated successfully for more than 25 years, running courses for more than 40,000 prisoners. The story of its banning was broken by Inside Time, the prison newspaper read by inmates and staff at jails across the country.

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Welcome to the age of de-extinction

Colossal, a $10 billion biotech firm with a knack of grabbing headlines, has announced it is on the way to de-extinguishing the dodo, the very icon of extinction. Like most of Colossal’s announcements, this one included a hefty helping of hype. All the firm’s scientists have actually done on this occasion is prove they can grow primordial germ cells of pigeons, one of many necessary steps – and not the hardest one – in reviving the fat and flightless bird of the pigeon family of Mauritius that was the dodo. In a couple of years, Ben Lamm, who runs the company, will probably present us with a fat and flightless pigeon with a funny beak and say: ‘Look, a dodo!

Bernard Cornwell

My plot to take on the peach-tree thief

Summer is icumen to its end, but my peach tree yielded a fine crop this year, though most of it was stolen. My mistake was planting the tree close to the road in my front garden, which made it easy for the thief to see and approach. I doubt that the thief reads The Spectator, so it’s safe to reveal my wife’s plan to inject next year’s crop with a powerful laxative. But the few peaches we managed to pick ourselves proved delicious. I was surprised that a peach tree would survive in Cape Cod, let alone thrive, but I constantly forget that we are on the same latitude as Lisbon and our summers are predictably warm.

David Shipley

The luxury of French prisons

Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of the French Republic, has been convicted and sentenced to five years for a ‘criminal conspiracy tied to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign’. For those of us more familiar with Anglo-Saxon criminal law, there’s much to be confused by. France, like many ‘Napoleonic’ legal systems, draws no distinction between determining guilt and sentencing. Both are, of course, determined by the same magistrates or judges. As a result, French courts often hear defendants’ lawyers insist upon their client’s innocence with one breath, before saying that ‘should the judges find them guilty, their sentence should be light because…’. This is all very bizarre to British ears.

Bijan Omrani

Learning to speak Latin and Ancient Greek can save civilisation

Finally, some good news from Oxford. The university has recently been through a gloomy patch. It slipped from the top three in UK rankings for the first time since records began. The Oxford Union president-elect, George Abaraonye, also shamed the institution by gloating over the murder of Charlie Kirk. However, the university’s classicists are bringing light into the darkness. Dons at four colleges – Jesus, Harris Manchester, Brasenose and Queen’s – are engaged in an extraordinary initiative that is widening access to the subject, improving standards and bringing back a Renaissance spirit to the study of ancient languages. In short, they have started to teach their students to speak Latin and Ancient Greek. This idea may seem eccentric.

Owen Matthews

Moldova has been saved from Russian influence, but at what cost?

The European Union, guardian and champion of democracy, rightly takes a dim view when ruling parties ban their opponents, refuse to open polling stations in areas likely to vote against them, censor opposition news channels and allow a large staff of foreign election monitors to police social media in the run-up. If Serbia, say, or Georgia tried systematic election rigging of this kind, Brussels would be the first to call foul and disregard the result as illegitimate. But when it’s the EU that’s running the interference, as in Moldova this week, the rules are apparently quite different. This week the pro-EU party of Maia Sandu, Moldova’s President and a former World Bank official, won a slim majority in a general election.