Features

Wednesday

Robert Hardman

After Harald, what’s the future for Norway’s royal family?

Affable, unflappable and imposing (he was a 6ft 2in ex-Olympian), the late King Harald of Norway was also blessed with good luck for much of his life. The first notable dose of good fortune occurred at the age of three, when his mother managed to spirit him and his sisters out of their home country hours before the Nazi invasion – and away to safety in the US. He returned to a nation so devoted to its monarchy that the children of post-war Norway pooled their pocket money to help buy his grandfather, King Haakon, a royal yacht. The Norge remains in service to this day, funded by an uncomplaining nation. Compare that with Britain’s royal family, who had to wave farewell to their yacht Britannia back in 1997 after a long and toxic political squabble.

Melanie McDonagh

Want to get on in society? Read an etiquette guide

A few weeks ago, an Irish Times columnist, Fintan O’Toole, wrote about receiving a copy of a 1930s book of etiquette issued by the Christian Brothers – a religious teaching order once notorious for the liberal use of the strap – called Christian Politeness and Counsels for Youth. He had fun mocking the strictures intended for the benefit of working-class Catholic boys. Indeed, he added his own: ‘Boys subject to physical or sexual abuse by Christian Brothers should remain silent on the subject and avoid at all costs giving scandal.’ Ha ha.

Wednesday

Vanessa Feltz

Piers Morgan, I’m coming for you

I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the bankruptcy court). So when Channel 5’s sparkling Vanessa succumbed to the noxious pestilence imperilling terrestrial TV, I blithely announced a rapid renaissance. I would simply launch a spanking-new show, At Home with Vanessa, on YouTube – a territory already staked out by telly titans Piers Morgan, Ant and Dec and Holly Willoughby. Speedily, I whisked up the notion of converting my living room into a studio, marshalling the punchiest TV peeps I know into a team, conjuring a format from thin air and plunging in.

Michael Gove

Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege

Jolyon Maugham has a point. There is a need for an inquiry in the aftermath of Jason Arday’s tragic death. But, not for the first time, the Good Law Project director has identified the wrong target. It’s not the press that needs to be investigated and held to account. If newspapers and magazines, including this one, err or fail, libel or traduce, then the courts can sanction and readers can desert. We survive, to publish, by public demand. The real focus of inquiry – sustained and detailed – should be Cambridge University and, in particular, its Faculty of Education. They were Professor Arday’s employers. Indeed, more than that, they were his champions and cheerleaders, beckoning the limelight to vaunt his appointment.

Al Carns

The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill only serves the IRA

More British military personnel were killed during the Troubles than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. As well as soldiers, innocent members of the public, MPs, police officers and the royal family were all targets. The Good Friday Agreement ended the armed campaign, but the fight to rewrite how the Troubles are remembered has continued. Warfare has become lawfare. When I resigned as armed forces minister in June, defence funding dominated the headlines, but the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill was the other reason I stood down. The Good Friday Agreement was a defining Labour achievement. Mo Mowlam walked into the Maze to talk to people most of the country would not have stomached sharing a room with. Peace required everyone to do things that were politically excruciating.

Eilis O’Hanlon

How Ireland succumbed to ‘radical chic’

When a law student from Co. Kildare was stopped this summer on suspicion of transporting a bomb across the Irish border for use by dissident republicans, her solicitor said she had not been aware of what was in the bag and that she had been ‘manipulated’. Yet the 25-year-old’s arrest highlighted an alarming revival in Irish republicanism – and the role being played by a younger, well-educated, middle-class generation. During the Troubles, much of Ireland mercifully avoided the pull of radicalism. There was always a certain degree of quiet sympathy for the IRA in predictable sections of the media and academia, but popular support for Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican party, in the 26-county Republic remained negligible throughout the worst years of terrorism.

Michael Simmons

Jenny Gilruth was my teacher – the bullying claims don’t surprise me

When I heard that a civil service insider had made bullying allegations against Scotland’s deputy first minister, Jenny Gilruth, I was not surprised. I’ve been at the receiving end of her ire myself. Gilruth taught modern studies – politics mixed with sociology – at my Edinburgh comprehensive school. She had a reputation for being a bit of a meanie and not someone you wanted to disappoint; she was certainly a disciplinarian. Those traits seem to have stayed with her as she climbed Edinburgh’s greasy public-sector pole, leaving teaching after a stint at Education Scotland before becoming an MSP and eventually John Swinney’s deputy.

D.J. Taylor

Tolkien knew the truth about power

One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni. Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister hits the newsstands these days without the Tolkien references piling up like so many windfall apples: The Hobbit plays put on with fellow-members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) youth group back in the 1990s; the fixation on the Ringbearer’s sidekick Sam Gamgee (‘Much more useful than Frodo’); the annual birthday tribute to a man who ‘brought up so many of us with his stories’. Here, clearly is a Middle-earth obsessive, Tolkien’s work a direct prompt for political action. Head a thousand miles north into the Scandinavian forests and the hard-right tocsin clangs even louder.

Patrick Drury

‘We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn’: the reality of lecturing Chinese students

Shanghaiing, the practice of drugging and kidnapping men on the US West Coast for service on ships bound for China, was made a federal offence in 1915, but every summer the university where I teach draws reverse inspiration from it when the Dean flies to China to round up students. Though it’s unlikely that he cruises the teen hangouts of Yichang or Xingtai, slipping laudanum into school leavers’ bubble teas, the demand for Chinese freshers is such that the use of press gangs by British universities would be neither unexpected nor much out of character. More than one in 20 students in Britain are Chinese. They contribute billions to the UK economy annually and without them several universities would go bankrupt and most would struggle.

Sophia Money-Coutts

Cut the price of stamps to save the Christmas card

Readers with a nervous disposition should turn the page because I’m going to be sprinkling the C-word across the next few paragraphs. It’s still August and clearly much too early to be discussing Christmas, but a campaign has been launched that requires attention now. First, a quick quiz. How much is a first-class stamp? Bzzzzz, time’s up. It’s now £1.80, which means a book of six is more than a tenner. Madness. I’ve taken to queuing in my local post office and buying stamps only when I require them, one at a time. If you knew the queue there as intimately as I do, you would appreciate this is a major sacrifice.

Peter Hitchens

How Prague cured me of my communism

Proust can keep his soggy madeleine. For me the word ‘Prague’ is a trigger of memory like no other. It stirs me up like some plaintive half-heard tune, or the faint scent of lavender in sheets left folded for years. Evil news from Prague, in another stuffy August long ago, turned my world over completely. This was 1968, a year of wonders, none of them very nice, which will not easily leave my recollection. It was the year I joined a Trotskyist sect. It was the year I punched a man (in self defence). It was the year I attended my first violent raucous demonstration, against the war in Vietnam, with the police horses thundering through the March mud in Grosvenor Square. A few weeks later Paris was full of tear gas and flying cobblestones, and how I wished I was there.

Wednesday

Tali Fraser

I watched Chris Packham’s climate crisis film so you don’t have to

The podium is out, what looks like a government logo fixed in the corner: we are watching the People’s Emergency Briefing, introduced by… Chris Packham. Trying to emulate the Covid conferences, he explains in this government-style briefing that the world is being destroyed by climate change and it is all our fault. The 50-minute film he introduces is based on a briefing at Westminster Central Hall, to which all MPs are invited, and consists of nine ‘experts’ lecturing its audience on how much this country must change to help the world survive, from energy to agriculture and national security – and which, according to the organisers, ‘lots of people cried’ upon hearing.

Mathias Döpfner

There’s still time to save the West

When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on ‘Why we need to strengthen the West’, I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this even up for debate? That we must explain and justify ‘the West’ at all indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening at all but the truth is that the West has become an invalid. What exactly, though, needs to be strengthened? The West is an idea, not a location. It is not a matter of geography, it is a way of life. The idea of the West rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the centre.

Tim Shipman

Revealed: the feuding at the heart of Reform

If Tolstoy had written about British politics, he might have noted: ‘Happy parties are all alike; every unhappy party is unhappy in its own way.’ Reform UK is beginning to resemble a laboratory test for the idea that every party run by Nigel Farage is unhappy in the same way. Just as in Ukip and the Brexit party, a highly dominant leader exists at the centre of a court, with extreme tensions between loyalist long marchers and arrivistes, between insurgency and respectability, between campaigning and preparing for government. On Monday a new round of bloodletting erupted, when the founder of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie, who defected to Reform two years ago, was suspended following his public criticism of Farage and the home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf.

Quentin Letts

Enjoy Anglican priests while you still can

Something amazing happened as I was walking my 91-year-old mother through Ledbury: we saw a bobby on the beat. He was even in a helmet, not a baseball cap. ‘A real policeman!’ squealed various people, reacting as they might to a steam train or an Austin-Healey, reminders of more distinctive days. The same surprise may soon be evident when we see dog collars. A new scheme, oversight ministry, adopted by some Church of England dioceses, is taking vicars off the streets. Instead of being front-line clergy they will become ‘oversight ministers’ and ‘area deans’, managers of lay, unpaid ‘focal ministers’.

Robin Simcox

Why won’t the UK curtail the Muslim Brotherhood?

What should the British government do about the Muslim Brotherhood? This question has confounded policy-makers for decades and was brought to the fore last month when the United States sanctioned, for the first time, a London-based Muslim Brotherhood leader. Announcing the sanctions, the US Treasury described Mahmoud al-Abyari as a ‘senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’ with a ‘long history of senior leadership roles’, including in its General Secretariat. For the United States, the secretive, transnational network founded in Egypt in 1928 is ‘the root of all modern Islamist terrorism’. To the Israelis, it ‘promote[s] a radical vision of Islam’. To Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the Brotherhood is ‘very dangerous’.

Owen Matthews

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes simply strengthening Putin’s hand?

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes against Russia helping Kyiv win the war or strengthening the hand of Kremlin hardliners? Since early summer, an escalating barrage by Ukrainian long-range drones and cruise missiles have devastated oil refineries, sunk or damaged more than 220 ships in the Black Sea and burned at least a dozen large warehouses of Russia’s Wildberries online retail chain. The result has been a nationwide fuel crisis and deepening economic pain. For millions of ordinary Russians, the conflict has finally moved off the television screen and into their daily lives. In public, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that he’s not for turning. The purpose of Ukrainian deep strikes is to ‘undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities’, he told state TV last month.

Harry Mount

Death to the dinner party!

It’s time to put the dinner party out of its misery. Oh, and the awards dinner, dining with the cruise ship captain and any evening gathering where you sit next to strangers for three hours. Does anyone actually enjoy dinner parties, apart from raging egomaniacs, who have their victims trapped until 11 p.m. (10.30, if you’re lucky)? Whoever thought a random allocation of two neighbours for hours would work as a system for amusement? Nine times out of ten, it’s complete agony. I ask you where you come from and what you do. Unless you’re that raging egomaniac, you ask me the same. And then we scrabble with mounting desperation and boredom to find common ground – to raise the conversation from mind-numbingly dull to ‘entertaining’.

Peter Hitchens

The great whataboutery delusion

If you live near the frontiers of acceptable opinion, as any thinking person must surely do, you quickly find that these badlands are policed mainly with insults and innuendos. And so you learn one morning, to your surprise, that you are an apologist for some repulsive regime which you strongly dislike. If you have been especially daring, you may be a ‘war crimes denier’ as well. Or you are charged with ‘whataboutery’, a word its users think will magically erase your case. Or, in many ways best of all, you are a conspiracy theorist. There is a myth that this phrase was invented by the CIA to try to discredit protestors against the Vietnam war, but the expression is far older than that.

Wednesday

Blake Neff

There’s a logic to Donald Trump’s incendiary diplomacy

On his very first day as Colombia’s new President, Abelardo de la Espriella received a dramatic house-warming gift: a billion dollars, courtesy of Donald Trump. Three days later, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the country – but correlation is not causation. The President’s ten-figure donative arrived as aid for the militarised crackdown de la Espriella has promised against Colombia’s fearsome drug cartels and jungle guerillas. And de la Espriella quickly showed himself eager to align with President Trump by adding Colombia to the Shield of the Americas, Trump’s signature new venture in Latin America. With this old-fashioned exchange of gifts, de la Espriella became the newest member of the eclectic global club of Trump allies. This is not a stable alliance.