Features

Wednesday

Jon Harvey

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a triumph

Incredible stories, otherworldly creatures, false identities, a cavalcade of trickery: the original Odyssey is packed with everything you could want from a big-screen blockbuster. And like all great stories, it’s more than just a fantasy adventure. It’s about survival, marriage, truth, what it means to be a man and much more. It’s also roughly 2,700 years old, and by picking it for his latest movie, Sir Christopher Nolan has definitively proved that the old ones are the best. But why, really, has he decided to go Greek? Screenwriters have always been suckers for a good ‘coming home’ story. It was such a popular genre in ancient times that the Greeks even coined a name for it: ‘nostos’.

John Power

Social media has saved comedy

In 2022, a 16-year-old called Kane Parsons began to post a web series called ‘Backrooms’ on his YouTube channel, drawing inspiration from a famous 4chan meme. That year, the film studio A24 contacted him and began production on a full-length feature film of the same name, which was released in May. The film has grossed $350 million worldwide and Kane, who turned 21 last month, is the youngest director ever to have a film open at number one in the North American box office. Social media, for all its apparent flaws, has created a new meritocracy in the world of entertainment Parsons’s stunning success has started a race in Hollywood to scout for talent in the online world.

Matt Ridley

Turtle doves and the myth of rewilding

In the latest success story for reintroducing species to the British countryside, turtle doves, reared in captivity and released at three locations in Somerset and Devon last year, have returned to breed. Turtle doves have steeply declined in numbers, hanging on in the south and east of the country, but this scheme opens a new front in the battle to save the species as a British summer visitor. In May 2025, 244 captive-bred turtle doves were set free across three sites. Like others of their species, they spent the winter in Africa but a handful found their way back to south-west England this summer. Reintroductions like this are now all the rage among conservationists because it is a policy that can have spectacular results.

Margaret Mitchell

Are you enjoying a ‘nun girl summer’?

The nuns were wrapping up their night prayer when I entered the chapel at Tyburn Convent. I couldn’t see them but heard their soft voices singing the last phrases of the ‘Salve Regina’: ‘O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.’ Across the road in Hyde Park, an outdoor concert heaved. What was I doing, spending my Friday night here instead? I had come to see if the rumours of a ‘nun girl summer’, as it’s being called on TikTok, were true. Earlier this year, a video of two nuns discussing their ultimate frisbee skills went viral: ‘Sister, you are so good at that!’ ‘Sister Miriam, you also are!

Tali Fraser

The Welsh government’s mad decolonisation plans

A teenager in Wales might want to play video games, hang out with their friends or even, dare I suggest it, read a book. The Welsh government, however, would prefer they put on a headset and confront their ‘unconscious bias’. It has created a £1.2 million metaverse, the ‘world’s first anti-racist virtual world’, to teach Welsh teens about their ‘white privilege’. But this is only one element of an official commitment to end racism by 2030. Not today, not yesterday, but a specific year in the future. The idea for an Anti-racist Wales Action Plan – ArWAP – was born following fervour around the Black Lives Matter movement, and an official plan followed in 2022.

Michael Simmons

Shut up about your disability

Britain is crippled. More of us than ever before are disabled. One in four, at the last count. But it is a statistic so obviously at odds with reality that anyone with working eyesight should question it. Instead, it has been adopted as fact by government, doctors, charities and benefits assessors. This mass collapse in health – nearly four million more people describing themselves as disabled in the past decade – is driven, we are told, by genuinely worsening mental health and a surge in diagnoses of conditions such as ADHD and autism. So vast is the problem that a government review last week found the sickness-welfare system ‘not fit for purpose’.

Wednesday

John Power

Inside Labour’s plot to sideline alternative media

Labour came to power in 2024 with five stated missions: to improve economic growth, the NHS, street safety, clean energy and the distribution of opportunity. If Keir Starmer had been honest about his plans, he would have pledged just one – restricting access to social media. This is the goal the government has pursued obsessively. Starmer turned to it as his premiership collapsed around him, imposing a social media ban for under-16s. As Andy Burnham seizes the reins, he will have to grapple with divisions in his party over defence and welfare – but his MPs remain united in their crusade against so-called online harms.

Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings: ‘There’s going to be an all-out attempt to decapitate Farage’

In January, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, joined The Spectator’s Quite right! podcast. This week, Nigel Farage suggested that ‘perhaps Dominic Cummings was right… when he said Whitehall will break the law to stop Reform winning power’. Cummings was one of the first to predict what troubles lay ahead for Reform. You can read his edited remarks here. Think about what the old system will do to stop Nigel Farage getting in. It’s not going to be politics as usual. Keir Starmer has already signalled this, when he says that he can live with the Tories winning, but he can’t live with Farage winning. The people around Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Donald Trump.

Tim Shipman

Will Nigel Farage’s big gamble pay off?

When Reform high command gathered in the boardroom of their Millbank headquarters last Tuesday, the meeting was supposed to be to select candidates in their 120 most winnable seats and choose dozens of campaign managers. It went on for six hours, as party chiefs instead addressed a growing sense of unease that the great momentum of 2025 has been lost. A source familiar with the discussions reveals that Chris Bruni-Lowe, pollster and message man, has been concerned for months that Reform needs to do something big to ‘take back control’. ‘Chris challenged people, saying things aren’t working the way they need to,’ the source says.

Robert Hardman

Prince Harry’s holiday from hell

Has grace-and-favour accommodation now fallen from grace – and favour, too? In recent days, we have learned that both our head of state and our (likely) head of government are giving up the free homes that come with the job. The King has said he will not live at Buckingham Palace once major refurbishment works are completed next year. His heir has let it be known that he won’t live there either. The monarch is very happy living at Clarence House, just as his mother was when she became Queen in 1952. Back then, Winston Churchill formally advised the Sovereign that she had to move into the Palace. No modern prime minister would dream of telling the Sovereign where to sleep, least of all one who plans to follow his example. Andy Burnham has said that he will not live at No.

Max Jeffery

Gen Z’s surprising nostalgia for the old high street

Dave and Lynne are remembering the good old days when kids had their baths in galvanised tubs in front of the fire. ‘No inhibition,’ says Dave. ‘Straight with your clothes off. Straight in there. Mum’ll throw a bucket of water over you. Wash yourself. Another bucket of water.’ Dave manages the E. Langston hardware shop, but it isn’t a real business. Not anymore. Some years ago, its premises were transposed from Piper’s Row in Wolverhampton to the Black Country Living Museum. Its life is happier here. There’s not much left on Piper’s Row today: an off licence, a bus stop, a cheap hotel. The Black Country Living Museum was founded in 1978 to teach people about life during the Industrial Revolution.

Gus Carter

Who really runs Manchester?

‘It’s basically a dictatorship,’ one insider tells me. If you want to build anything in Britain’s second city, you have to get permission from the so-called ‘Manchester mafia’. These are the officials who have overseen the city’s extraordinary redevelopment. The number of towers in Manchester has increased sevenfold since Andy Burnham became mayor in 2017. You might assume that Burnham is the boss of this mafia family. But you’d be wrong. ‘He just appears at the meetings and says, “Yes, yes, that’s fine”,’ explains a source. ‘His political involvement is minimal,’ confirms Andrew Teacher, a real estate adviser who’s worked in the city. ‘The ship was motoring along well before he arrived.’ The vast redevelopment had almost nothing to do with Burnham.

Damian Thompson

Is there any route back for the Society of St Pius X?

As any Catholic master of ceremonies will tell you, it takes only the tiniest sartorial mishap to lend a Python-esque flavour to moments of the utmost solemnity. On 1 July the rebel traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX) created four new bishops in defiance of Pope Leo XIV during a five-hour open-air Latin Mass in a Swiss alpine meadow. The consecrating prelates wore dark-red velvet chasubles over scarlet-and-gold dalmatics with matching gloves. They descended from their thrones bearing sacred chrism. Afterwards the new bishops stood in a row, mitres perched on their heads for the first time. Liberal bishops wear stumpy headgear.

Tali Fraser

The real story of Manchesterism isn’t the one Andy Burnham is telling

‘Manchesterism,’ Andy Burnham declared in his Makerfield by-election campaign video, ‘is the end of neoliberalism.’ The path to power, he believes, lies in the Mancunian Way. Not the ring road that sits atop Manchester’s actual Downing Street, but his record as mayor of Britain’s ‘second city’ – and the idea that it proves his philosophy of unlocking growth and productivity for the whole country. Yet the Mancunian Way is littered with potholes. Manchesterism is not new. It did not begin with Burnham, nor with any Labour figure in Manchester. The name is borrowed – stolen, really – from the free-trade Manchester Liberalism of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who fought price-fixing, tariffs and protectionism in the 19th century.

Charlie Methven

What’s the point of Eton?

If the Battle of Waterloo was won on Eton’s playing fields – as Wellington allegedly said – might Xi Jinping’s 21st-century ambitions for China end up being pushed there too? A picture of the list of next year’s King’s Scholars, currently doing the rounds of Old Etonians, shows that of 14 places awarded for September 2026, ten are going to pupils with Chinese names. ‘Yet another nail in the coffin,’ grumbled the OE who sent me the picture the other day. The scholarships were established by Henry VI for ‘poor, scholarly boys’ in his kingdom. These days, with the upper-middle-class English increasingly priced out of paying the £65,000-a-year fees, they are more sought after than ever – and bitterly resented when they go elsewhere.

Wednesday

Charlie Baker

Make weddings short again 

As every single one of my friends – and their spouses – is a tasteful soul, it goes without saying that every wedding I have ever attended has been the last word in elegance. You do hear things, though. Of Balham-based chartered accountants behaving like Victorian land magnates by renting stately homes for their nuptials. Of multi-venue events in five-star resorts by the lapping shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Of women having to buy, rent and borrow ten dresses for the summer that makes up wedding season. I could go on. So I am not surprised to read that one in three people is now turning down wedding invitations because they’ve become so expensive.

Lara Brown

The fuss over gay conversion therapy is a charade

Politicians love banning things. Even if the threats they worry about don’t actually exist. In February 2019, amid Conservative defections and the slow death of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, Conservative MP Bill Wiggin decided that the most pressing task for parliament was banning the consumption of dog meat. Not meat for dogs, but meat made out of dogs. And no, you are right, you don’t get it at the deli counter at Waitrose. Or indeed anywhere in the UK. Wiggin was honest enough to admit there was no actual evidence that dog meat was being eaten in the UK. And he acknowledged that it was already illegal to sell dog meat for human consumption. But that, he told the House, shouldn’t stop us from ‘setting an example to the world’.

John Power and William Atkinson

Revealed: Ed Miliband and the shady funding of net zero

There is a problem with British politics. Dark money from abroad is being funnelled into our system. A complex web of interlocking charities, thinktanks, advocacy groups and campaign outfits is being bank-rolled to push a policy agenda onto the public that makes us poorer, puts us in hock to hostile powers and undermines working people. According to the left, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are puppets of such shadowy interests: Tufton Street thinktanks bankrolled by oil companies, Christian fundamentalists and perhaps even Russian money. These allegations are well-ventilated and have been exhaustively investigated. Most lead nowhere. Yet no similar scrutiny is applied to a far bigger lobbying effort – the concerted campaign to push a ruinous net-zero agenda.

Max Jeffery

The truth about how the British Empire is taught in schools

William Dalrymple says that children ‘don’t learn’ about the British Empire at school. It is an ‘elephant in the room’, he claimed on the Green party leader Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics podcast last week. This isn’t true. I learnt about the Empire at school. Studying A-level history a decade ago, we spent a year covering the Raj. The Indian Mutiny, 1857. The Amritsar Massacre, 1919. On viciously cold mornings, my teacher, Ms Pearmain, would open the windows and say that boys’ brains were slowed by comfort. It kept her lessons in my head. It would have taken Dalrymple a few seconds to do some research and realise his error. In schools which follow the national curriculum, lessons about the British Empire are prescribed by the government.

Gavin Mortimer

Why is Giorgia Meloni courting Emmanuel Macron?

Emmanuel Macron has lost a friend in Keir Starmer. The French President paid tribute to the outgoing British Prime Minister last week, describing him as a man of ‘dignity, decency and courage’. When one door closes another one opens, and while Starmer was organising the removal vans, Macron was welcoming Giorgia Meloni to the Côte d’Azur. Last week’s Franco-Italian summit was the first of its kind since 2020; Meloni was elected prime minister two years later. For Macron, she posed a threat to European ‘values’ because her party had its roots in postwar fascism Her victory did not go down well with Macron and his centrist government.