Features

Thursday

Rachel Johnson

How not to be a spy

Like our former ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson, I was once vetted by the security services. My brush with the spooks started, as in a Cold War spy novel, with a meeting on a bench in St James’s Park after a distinguished foreign policy wonk of my acquaintance had suggested lunch. As the weather was fine, we decided to pick up sandwiches from the café and sit admiring the pelicans. The diplomat explained the Foreign Office was scouting for new blood for the Policy Planning Staff. I was at the Financial Times and had never knowingly had a blue-sky thought in my life but this sounded… different. The sun shone. Ducks splashed. Tourists wandered past, photographing squirrels.

William Atkinson

The Tories must free themselves from the cult of Thatcher

Like every Tory Boy, I had a Margaret Thatcher poster. I put it up when I was 15 and had just joined the party. Above my bed, resplendent in blue, the Iron Lady glowered down at my teddies. Naturally, it came down when I first brought home a girlfriend. For any young Tories lacking in Thatcher tat, this week’s Conservative party conference will provide plenty of opportunities for purchasing some. It (almost) coincides with the 100th anniversary of Thatcher’s birth on 13 October. The occasion has been heralded by a series of think-tank initiatives, dinners and conferences and the release of a one-volume edition of Charles Moore’s biography. The Iron Lady’s spectre looms as large as ever over this conference. Many of today’s Conservatives remain in hock to her.

Tim Shipman

Kemi Badenoch: how I plan to save the Tories

Kemi Badenoch is in ebullient form. She promises the Conservative party conference, which begins this weekend in Manchester, will be ‘more fun than usual’. But that does not mean the Tory leader plans to sweep on stage like Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns. ‘I won’t be wearing any jumpsuits with sequins on,’ Badenoch says. ‘I won’t be singing “Insomniac”.’ The state of the opinion polls, with the Tories at well below 20 per cent, ought to give her sleepless nights, but she is upbeat. What, I wonder, is her karaoke song? Her three children ‘are the DJs’ in the Badenoch household and ‘all they sing are Taylor Swift songs’. I push my luck and suggest she could try ‘I Will Survive’, Gloria Gaynor’s anthem for defiant women let down by useless men.

Thursday

Rupert Hawksley

Save our charity shops!

If, like me, your tailor of choice is the British Heart Foundation or Save the Children, it is beginning to feel like the end of days. Old people are still dying, their wardrobes still being emptied into bin bags – but we vultures are being starved of their corduroy carrion. Charity shops are in crisis. Scope has shut more than 50 stores this year already. Two more – in Beverley and Fleet – are closing this week. Taunton, Portsmouth, Skipton and Bangor are all completely Scopeless. The Charity Retail Association (CRA) is gloomy, explaining that the British Heart Foundation, Barnardo’s, Oxfam and Cancer Research UK – the big four – have all been struggling to maintain healthy sales.

Damian Thompson

The Antichrist is back

The monster known as the Antichrist has been stalking Christians for nearly 2,000 years. Mostly it has fed the nightmares of frightened peasants or credulous fundamentalists. But now it has emerged from the most secular place on Earth, Silicon Valley, and its prophet is a billionaire venture capitalist married to a man. The origins of the Antichrist legend lie in the Book of Revelation, in which the nations submit to a Beast whose name is concealed by the number 666. He forces everyone to receive a mysterious ‘mark on their right hands or foreheads’ without which they cannot buy or sell anything. This triggers the return of Jesus at the Battle of Armageddon.

Henry Jeffreys

Hell is a wine list

Wine lists give me the fear. I can still recall the prickle of adrenaline when my father handed me the leather-bound menu when I was in my early twenties because I had started working for a wine merchant after university. Should I play it safe or take a punt on something unusual that some people might hate? Perhaps it would be safest to pick the second cheapest. Their drinking pleasure was in my hands. Argh, the pressure. You’d think that after 15 years of writing professionally about wine this anxiety would have faded. It actually gets worse. The more I know, the more indecisive I become. Is the wine a bit too young? Was it a good vintage? Meanwhile the rest of the table is getting thirsty. One can ask the staff but in many places they’re just as clueless, if not more so.

James Delingpole

Believe it or not, Russia is great

I have been invited to Moscow by the Russian Orthodox patriarchate because the organiser is a fan of my podcast. Everyone at home thinks I am either dangerous or mad. My mother is convinced I’m going to be bumped off by the FSB or killed by a drone. Others claim I have become a useful idiot of the evil dictator Putler because the patriarchate are merely his stooges. ‘Is that true?’ I ask the patriarchate’s media affairs guy. ‘Well, under Peter the Great we were run by the government. And under communism we weren’t allowed to exist. So you could argue that, historically, we’re about as independent as we’ve ever been.’ When I put the same question to an archbishop, his response is more forthright.

Stephen J. Shaw

Could a ‘futurehood’ revolution save Britain?

As the collapse of birthrates accelerates across the developed world, even our language is struggling to keep up. Over nine years of demographic research, I’ve resorted to coining my own vocabulary just to describe what’s unfolding. ‘Birthgap’, for the widening gulf between generations – too few young to support too many old. ‘Yesterlands’, for once-thriving communities now quietly hollowing out. ‘Retronomics’, for the slow yet continuous un-ravelling that follows demographic decline, as nations are forced to retrofit their economies to fit their shrunken societies. Lately, I’ve been searching for another missing word – this time, to capture the invisible sense that a society still believes in its own tomorrow.

Theodore Dalrymple

The folly of psychology

A young Chinese girl, at school in an English-speaking country, approached me after I gave a talk at a conference and asked for my advice about what she should study. I knew nothing of her, except that she was pretty, with beautiful dark eyes, and was almost certainly of high intelligence. I was touched by her naive assumption that I would answer benevolently and in her best interests. It suggested that she had not yet encountered much of human malignity. ‘What are you interested in?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking of history and psychology.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘definitely not psychology, at all costs not psychology.’ My answer emerged spontaneously, without any reflection – too spontaneously, in fact.

Laurie Penny

Don’t cure my autism

I admit that when Donald Trump announced he had found the answer for autism, I was curious. As an autistic person, I was hoping that whatever medieval quackery he came out with would require us to do something fun, like carry a hedgehog at all times or take heroic quantities of cocaine, both of which would certainly make the world more interesting for those of us who struggle with social cues. Leading the hunt for this miracle cure has been US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, a man whose grip on reality has softened since a worm quite literally ate part of his brain.

Tim Shipman

Who does Shabana Mahmood have in her sights?

After a fortnight in which Keir Starmer lost both Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson but also reshaped his cabinet and his Downing Street team, one of the Prime Minister’s senior aides remarked to a friend: ‘Would I swap the last two weeks? Probably not, because the cabinet we’ve got and the No. 10 we’ve got are exactly what we need to turn the country around. Shabana will do really great work in the Home Office.’ Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, may not be the best-known figure in the Labour firmament, but the Downing Street official is far from alone in pinning the party’s hopes for re-election on her.

Thursday

Peter Frankopan

A new era of nuclear weapons is here

The world is moving into a more dangerous age. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, last year set a grim record, namely the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in more than seven decades. At the same time, we are seeing a fundamental realignment of global geopolitics – made clear from the recent meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation in Tianjin and the ‘Victory Day’ parade held in Beijing shortly afterwards. There, the leaders of what many in the West see as an emerging new world order stood shoulder to shoulder as Chinese military hardware was put on display to mark 80 years since the end of the second world war. That anniversary underscored the commemoration last month to mark the only two occasions where atomic bombs have been used.

Matt Ridley

The cultification of science

My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ (in his own words) that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’. Its title alone gave away the joke: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.’ Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise which is real science realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense.

Nick Carter

MDMA should be licensed for veterans with PTSD

‘Stuff starts to get real, real quick,’ recalls former US Marine, Tyler Flanigan. An Iraqi sniper had just shot out the tyres of his truck and a key member of his team had been killed. ‘We were sitting ducks.’ ‘I couldn’t easily name a single day in Iraq that I wasn't shot at or didn’t have something explode next to me,’ says his fellow US Marine veteran, Nigel McCourry. Combat experience is hard to forget. Civilian life offers daily triggers that throw you back down ‘IED alley’, reliving the flailing feeling of being blown up and the horror of gathering friends’ body parts in bags. These former US Marines discussed their trauma in the documentary Dead Dog on the Left.

James Heale

Danny Kruger: ‘There’s no going back for the Tory party’

‘The Conservative party is over.’ Until recently, such talk could be dismissed in Westminster as typical Nigel Farage hyperbole. But the decision of Danny Kruger to defect to Reform UK this week has left some Tories wondering if their party’s condition is fatal. Kruger – MP for East Wiltshire since 2019 – wrote speeches for David Cameron, corralled troops for Boris Johnson and ran Robert Jenrick’s leadership campaign last year. Until this week, he was seen as one of the Tory party’s most prominent thinkers. He is the biggest defection to Reform yet. When we meet in his new party’s headquarters, Kruger is reflecting on the brutal business of politics. Outside, Union Jacks flutter at half-mast for the funeral of the Duchess of Kent.

Emily Hill

The rise of performative reading

‘To be or not to be’ may be the question but when it comes to eliciting answers, I’ve always preferred Mr Darcy’s epic conversation starter: ‘What think you of books?’ Two hundred years on, it has become harder than ever to find out what anyone actually thinks of books – and not just because our attention spans have been so corroded by dopamine addiction. There are more books published today than ever. TikTok creates relentless literary sensations, and the day after the murder of Charlie Kirk, AI-produced histories were available on Amazon giving ‘the full story’.  If social media is to be believed, everyone is reading so much it’s impossible to keep up. But what matters most is not what you think about books but how your books look.

Freddy Gray

‘Like a cockroach, I refuse to die’: a meeting with the Tate brothers

‘I detest lateness,’ texts Tristan Tate, who’s offered to pick me up from a hotel in Bucharest. ‘So I’ll either be 15 minutes early or right on time.’ Minutes later, he messages again: ‘All my talk on being late and cops pull me over haha.’ Tristan and his older brother Andrew seem to have a knack for getting into trouble. They’ve been accused of all sorts: rape, actual bodily harm, sex trafficking, controlling prostitution for gain, organised crime, money-laundering, witness-tampering. To the BBC and bourgeois parents everywhere, they are infamous: the vilest beasts of the manosphere, monetisers of misogyny and leading purveyors of far-right hate. Are the Tates really that bad, though?

Elisabeth Dampier

Never date a German man

Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married an Englishman, finding Teutonic attitudes towards romance unbearable. Dating can go on for years, often ending in a quiet, dry dissolution after a decade. If you’re lucky, the relationship will limp on towards marriage, driven more by the need to save on taxes than any belief in what many Germans consider an antiquated institution. Two hundred years ago, we had the tragic intensity of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a cornerstone of the Romantic movement. It was so wildly popular that it sparked one of the first waves of romantic consumerism: perfumes, clothing and even mugs depicting scenes from the novel were sold.

Michael Gove

Weimar Britain: lessons from history in radical times

The Ancient Greeks believed the past was in front of us and the future behind. Man could look history in the face and learn from it, while the future was unknowable, hidden, the wind whistling at our back. It is in history, its patterns, and what it reveals about human nature, that we have the best guide to our times and how they might develop. The government may wish us to focus on innovation this week – new nuclear reactors, AI data centres, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at the state banquet – but if we really want to understand the convulsions gripping our society it is to the past we should look for signs.

John Power

The Oxford Union’s lynch-mob mentality

The case of George Abaraonye, the incoming Oxford Union president who rejoiced in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, has provoked fierce debate about free speech at Oxford. Abaraonye considered the murder of the 31-year-old father of two, whom he had met at an Oxford Union debate, to be a cause for celebration. On a WhatsApp group he posted several messages cheering the assassination and on Instagram he crowed: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool.’ Now messages from student group chats linked to the Oxford Union reveal that those who objected to Abaraonye’s conduct have themselves been subjected to threats and intimidation designed to silence them.