Features

Thursday

Michael Henderson

My debt to the teacher who introduced me to Wagner

We saw the world end in Berlin, again. Another Ring Cycle – hurrah! – in the beautiful Staatsoper theatre on Unter den Linden. Christian Thielemann led the house’s superb orchestra from the dawn of Creation in Das Rheingold to the downfall of the Gods in Götterdämerung. It was a brisk Ring, coming in at seven minutes over 14 hours. The playing was magnificent, the singing of a very high order and the anti-mythological staging by Dmitri Tcherniakov startling. Particular praise must go to the Sieglinde of Lithuanian soprano Vida Mikneviciute – try saying that after a few scoops of pilsner. Thrilling hardly does her justice.

Taki

The irreplaceable Lady Annabel Goldsmith

During Jane Austen’s time, their roles would be reversed. Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who left us last week at 91, would be Darcy, with Mark Birley and Sir James Goldsmith as Elizabeth Bennet. Both her husbands were womanisers, well-born, but of inferior birth to her. I met her around 60 years ago, and she was as aristocratic as they come, and as down to earth as her puckish irreverence would take her. A quick smirk, a raised eyebrow would turn into something prurient and funny. Wonderfully mischievous, she enjoyed revving it up when the Austro-Australian Princess Michael would complain about me at Annabel’s annual summer party. Annabel would listen to the Austrian, then seek me out, come very close and whisper: ‘The Kents simply adore you.

Lara Brown

‘Trump isn’t easy’: Piers Morgan on his friends – and foes

When I meet Piers Morgan, he warns me he’s glued to the ‘moment in history’ happening on his TV screens that morning. He is watching Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages as part of the peace deal negotiated by his old friend Donald Trump. The two have known each other for 17 years, first meeting when Morgan appeared in – and won – Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. He tells me that Trump’s final words to him on the show were: ‘Piers, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re almost certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the Celebrity Apprentice.

Sam Leith

Prince Andrew: from playboy to PlayStation

Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Prince Andrew’s current travails that ‘according to visitors to Royal Lodge’, he now ‘spends much of his time playing video games’. Even before all the unpleasantness with Jeffrey Epstein’s child-rape allegations, one of the Prince’s more embarrassing qualities was his appearing as an ‘ambassador’ for this or that – usually accompanied by a helicopter trip to a golf course. Now he’s reduced – no chopper, no putting green; woe is him – to being an ambassador for adults who play video games. As an adult who plays video games, and even writes about them from time to time, I generally welcome news of figures in public life who do the same. Not on this occasion.

Rebecca Reid

The sheer joy of nighties

One of the many problems with the internet is that it’s increasingly difficult to know if something has become ubiquitous overnight, or if your algorithm is just serving you the sort of slop it thinks you’re stupid enough to buy. Case in point: nightdresses. Previously the preserve of pioneer women, convalescents and Victorian ghost children, nightdresses suddenly seem to be everywhere. I can’t open my phone without seeing a glamorous woman going about her morning wearing a beautiful and expensive nightgown. ‘Retailers have informed me that sales of nightdresses are higher than ever at present,’ Hannah Banks-Walker, a commissioning editor at Harper’s Bazaar, tells me. Delicious news. I am not alone.

Tom Gross

The westerners helping Hamas win the propaganda war

After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield, Hamas can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now. The terror group has survived and is once again exerting control in the areas of Gaza under its authority. Public executions, whippings, stonings and kneecappings have returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas executed at least 100 Gazans. Hamas’s survival was achieved not only through its remaining fighters and its holding of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of western apologists. A coalition of so-called progressives and professional activists has excused, rationalised and defended the group’s actions across universities and in newspaper editorials.

James Heale

The battle for Farage’s mind

If New Labour was Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, then Reform UK is perhaps Tony Blair’s. Distaste for the three-time election winner is a thread which connects much of the party’s leadership. Nigel Farage clashed with him at the European parliament in 2005. His deputy, Richard Tice, did the same as a Question Time audience member four years before. Their colleague Danny Kruger was once set to stand for the Tories against Blair in Sedgefield – but was forced out after promising a ‘creative destruction’ in public services. Such ‘creative destruction’ is precisely the approach Reform wants to take to the post-Blair political world.

Angus Colwell and Max Jeffery

The Ultras: meet Britain’s new Islamo-socialist alliance

Ayoub Khan seemed delighted. Last Thursday, it was announced that fans of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv would be banned from attending their match against Aston Villa next month, an outcome that Khan, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, had been lobbying for since September. That night, Khan took himself on a broadcast round to celebrate. Keir Starmer had said the ban was the ‘wrong decision’, but on Newsnight Khan told him to back off. ‘The Prime Minister should stay out of operational matters,’ he said. ‘That’s not a matter for him, sitting in No. 10.’ It has been a satisfying 15 months for Khan since his election.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Can anyone stop J.D. Vance becoming president?

As Donald J. Trump flew to the Holy Land on Sunday to declare peace, his Vice-President took to the airwaves to address the rumbling civil conflict on the home front. J.D. Vance did not rule out invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act in order to quell the violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in several American cities. ‘The problem is the fact that the entire media in this country, cheered on by a few far-left lunatics, have made it OK to tee off on American law enforcement,’ he told NBC News. ‘We cannot accept that in the United States of America.’ This is now Vance’s familiar role. He’s not bad cop to Trump’s good, exactly, more the administration’s favourite pitbull.

Nick Boles

Ukraine must stand as a fortress of European freedom

It is 35 years since I was last in Warsaw and the city is unrecognisable. Back then it was grimy and depressing, full of buildings still pockmarked by bomb damage. Nothing worked and nobody smiled. Now it gleams. The historic Old Town has been lovingly rebuilt and restored. Everything else is new: the cars, the shops, the office blocks and apartment buildings. The fashions are sharp and the teeth are white. It is a powerful tonic for beleaguered liberals. Don’t let the democracy-in-decline-mongers deceive you. Economic and political freedom work. And what the world needs is more of both.

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.