Features

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

How I got under Macron’s skin

The journalist Jonathan Miller, a cherished Spectator contributor, died last week at his home in Occitanie, France. Below is an extract from the memoir he had only just completed, Shock of the News: Confessions of a Troublemaker. Here he explains how he came to write about French politics and culture for the magazine. I t was Andrew Neil who prodded me from my lethargy. Andrew lives on the posh Provençal side of the Rhône while we’re on the plouc side nearer Spain. I’m more likely to run into him in England or New York than France. But we keep in touch by email. When Emmanuel Macron began his manoeuvres for the presidency, I sent a gossipy email to Andrew explaining why I thought he might win, and how peculiar he was.

Dominic Sandbrook

Britain fought on the wrong side of the first world war

It’s more than two months since I returned from Dublin, and at last the hangover is beginning to fade. I flew out with our team at The Rest is History to record a series about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. Our guests were Paul Rouse, a professor at University College Dublin and former manager of Offaly’s Gaelic football team, and Ronan McGreevy, an Irish Times journalist and author of a terrific book about the murder of Sir Henry Wilson. On the first night Ronan took us for an excellent curry; on the second, Paul organised a pub crawl. Well, I say a crawl, but in truth we barely got beyond the first pub, the Gravediggers, which is just a few hundred yards from the graves of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.

Philip Patrick

Could Japan soon be governed by chatbots?

Tokyo Could Japan be the world’s first -algocracy – government by algorithm? The concept has been flirted with elsewhere: in 2017 a chatbot called Alisa challenged Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency. But there is reason to believe that if any major country is going to replace its politicians with AI, it will be Japan.  The citizens of Yokosuka in Kanagawa have had a remarkably lifelike AI avatar of their mayor, Katsuaki Uechi, at their service for over a year now. It (he?) speaks perfect English with a slight Japanese accent, with Uechi’s facial features manipulated to make it look as if he is pronouncing the words correctly. The avatar exists on the city’s website and YouTube channel, standing at a podium, making speeches.

Owen Matthews

Ukrainians have lost faith in Zelensky

Donald Trump this week boosted Ukraine’s air defences with new Patriot batteries, threatened Vladimir Putin with sanctions if he does not agree to a ceasefire, and even reportedly gave tacit approval to more Ukrainian strikes on Moscow. Trump’s newfound support for Ukraine is a welcome lifeline. The question is whether his help will be enough to stop Russia’s relentless attacks before Ukraine is engulfed in a critical military, political and social crisis that threatens to destroy it from within. Putin chose war over peace this spring because his spies and generals told him that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse. Alarmingly, they may be right.

Andrew Watts

Woke coke: would you drink Gaza Cola?

Andy Warhol believed that the greatness of America lay in how the richest consumers bought exactly the same things as the poorest. ‘You can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and, just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.’ The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland says that it’s the only drink that if a retailer doesn’t sell it, from an African beach shack to a Michelin-starred restaurant, it’s their fault, not yours. Some places do choose not to serve it, though. There is a clubman’s tale of two members of the Cavalry Club who asked if there was any Coca-Cola on the premises.

Jonathan Hinder

The left-wing case for controlled immigration

Controlled immigration was once a left-wing cause. It was a basic tenet of trade unionism – not to mention economics – that the number of workers in a labour market dictates the rate of pay. When more and more people compete for the same jobs, employers can cut wages. Those who care about profits rather than wages tend to be in favour of more migration. The capitalist will always dream of importing huge numbers of workers from countries with much lower wages, knowing they can be used to drive down rates of pay and improve profits. The rules of labour supply and demand remain just as true today, but it is no longer a prominent part of Labour thinking.

Michael Simmons

Broke Britain: how the Bank of England wrecked the economy

In February 2020, a few weeks before Britain was thrown into lockdown, Sajid Javid resigned as chancellor of the exchequer over a bust-up with the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. The fight was thought to be over Cummings’s attempts to dictate who could and could not work in No. 11. In fact, it was just one skirmish in a long-running and bitter power struggle between the two men. Two months before his resignation, Javid had claimed victory in a different battle against Cummings – one over who would occupy the governor’s office at the Bank of England. Cummings wanted Andy Haldane, then the Bank’s chief economist, who he believed was intellectually curious, allergic to groupthink and might give the Bank the shake-up it needed.

Thursday

Roger Lewis

The slow delights of an OAP coach tour

Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad. There will be cream teas, along with river cruises, coastal excursions, scenic drives and jaunts on steam railways.

Laurie Penny

Corbyn’s new party is Starmer’s creation

Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point in the same direction. Starmer’s team have been so busy admiring their enormous majority that it has taken them a while to realise that they are trapped with 400 left-wingers in every shade of red from post-Soviet carmine to the most delicate salmon pink, all of them high on victory and spoiling for a fight. One might as well try to herd 400 cats into formation. In our sclerotic two-party, first-past-the-post system, a majority as large as Starmer’s is meant to give the leadership a free hand.

Patrick Kidd

Does AI belong on the tennis court?

The evidence was clear, the official had dropped a clanger. At 4-4 in the first set of the women’s match at Wimbledon last Sunday, the British player Sonay Kartal should have had her serve broken when she hit a backhand long. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova saw the ball land well out of court, as did those watching the replay, but the line judge remained mute. ‘Replay the point,’ the umpire said, leading the Russian to complain that ‘they stole the game’. This nameless offender – let’s call him Hugh after Hugh Cannaby-Serious, the official who used to wind up John McEnroe – was napping. It turned out that Hugh had been switched off for a few points. Robots can be human too. Cameras have replaced line judges at Wimbledon after 148 years.

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Why should the hunt for the next Archbishop of Canterbury be ‘inclusive’?

On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton and Howley. Justin Welby announced he was vacating the throne of St Augustine on 12 November last year; it took until 28 May even to assemble the committee who will discuss the names of his potential successor. It will be a miracle if we know the name of the new Primate of All England by the autumn.

Charles Moore

Peerless: the purge of the hereditaries

The House of Lords is very old, but not quite continuous. In 1649, shortly after the execution of King Charles I, the Cromwellian House of Commons passed an act which said: The Commons of England assembled in parliament, finding by too long experience, that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the People of England… have thought fit to Ordain and Enact… That from henceforth the House of Lords in parliament, shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away. This measure was nullified, however, by the Restoration in 1660. The parliaments of King Charles II, and all parliaments since, have included the House of Lords. The hereditaries served their country loyally: 59 were killed in the two world wars, as were 316 of their sons.

Sophia Falkner

Good Lords: the House is losing some of the best

Keir Starmer has not been the luckiest general. But, in one respect, he has bested Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington will shortly be purged from parliament, two centuries after Waterloo. Like his ancestor, Charles Wellesley has led a life of public service. For that, he will shortly receive the sack as part of the greatest purge of active lawmakers since Oliver Cromwell. All this so Starmer can make way for the likes of Tom Watson, Sue Gray and Richard Hermer. Among the hereditary peers are Olympians and entrepreneurs, artists and academics Among the hereditary peers are Olympians and entrepreneurs, artists and academics. Some are genuine blue bloods, others political animals.

Rafael BardajI

The man who’s destroying Spain

Madrid In the mid-1990s, Spain’s socialist prime minister Felipe Gonzalez saw his political career collapse under the weight of a corruption scandal. A Supreme Court investigation revealed a fraudulent contracting scheme that illegally funded the Socialist party’s (PSOE) election campaigns. Despite intense media pressure from government-aligned outlets, two brave judges upheld the rule of law. Three decades later, another socialist Prime Minister – Pedro Sanchez – faces a similar reckoning. But this time, the scandal combines political manipulation, personal ambition and institutional degradation. Corruption is as old as power itself, yet in Sanchez’s case it takes on a uniquely modern and dangerous form.

John Whittingdale

Norman Tebbit transformed the country for the better

My first job in government was working for Norman Tebbit as his special adviser in the Department of Trade and Industry. I received the call 41 years ago, in the summer of 1984, and it was agreed that I would join him immediately after the Conservative party conference concluded that year in Brighton. He was already a hero of the Margaret Thatcher government. But few saw as close up as I did just how much courage – and compassion – Norman, who died this week aged 94, had. On the final day of that conference, in the early hours, an IRA bomb exploded in the Grand Hotel. Republican terrorists had nearly succeeded in murdering the Prime Minister. Norman was badly injured, enduring the agony with stoicism.

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Is Britain ready for France’s most controversial novel?

This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France’s most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in 2020, wrote many books during his long and varied life, but only one, The Camp of the Saints, is remembered. Even his admirers and sympathisers admit that the book isn’t a classic in the literary sense. In an article to mark the publication of a recent biography of Raspail, Le Figaro said the novel was guilty of a ‘certain kitschness, clumsiness, awkwardness and a nihilism that seems forced’. More than that, it has been accused of being overtly racist.

Kate Andrews

Meet Zohran Mamdani, the man who will ruin New York

Manhattan The Friday before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, the 33-year-old candidate Zohran Mamdani walked the entire length of the city. ‘We’re outside,’ he told his videographer as they began their trek at Inwood Hill Park, ‘because New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at!’ Like any good millennial, he documented every step. In his collared shirt and sneakers, he greeted and hugged supporters, who chanted his name. The celebrating was premature but justified. Four days later, Mamdani won 43.5 per cent of the vote in the first round, defying almost every pollster’s prediction. Within hours, the self-declared ‘democratic socialist’ was the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City.

Madeline Grant

Admit it: most wedding speeches are awful

Perhaps the most traumatic part of attending an American wedding – much worse than the bridesmaids coming in the wrong way, the proliferation of dinner suits and the tendency of couples to write their own appalling vows – is the tradition of the ‘rehearsal dinner’. This, an event the night before the wedding, is where the United States of America gets to play out its full psychotic breakdown in the context of a couple’s nuptials. It seems unfair to expect Home Counties dads to be masters of oratory Anyone, and I mean, anyone, is allowed to stand up and make a speech. Meaning that Uncle Robert E.

Philip Hensher

Public libraries deserve to shut – they’ve forgotten why they exist

The usual piece about public libraries runs like this. Public libraries are for ‘more than just books’. They are in a desperate plight after years of cuts, or better still ‘Tory cuts’. Librarians, who are heroes, struggle to go on serving their local communities. Libraries are hanging on by a thread, and because of those government cuts can’t be as useful as they once were. The only solution, of course, is more money from central government to local authorities, who, of course, will dash to spend the extra millions on reinstating public libraries and not add it to other things they want to splurge on.

Paul Wood

The Alawite women taken as sex slaves in Syria

Syria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held as sabaya, or sex slaves. After the Assad dictatorship fell, amid revenge attacks by militias loyal to the country’s new rulers, there were reports of abductions for rape and even of forced marriage. Alawite human rights activists say that some women are still being held prisoner and that kidnappings are still happening. They accuse the Syrian authorities of being unwilling or unable to stop it. The activists say that between 50 and 60 women and girls have been taken. These numbers are small compared with the 1,600 or more civilians killed in a spasm of sectarian violence in March.