Features

Thursday

Arabella Byrne

Is it ever acceptable to ask to swim in a friend’s pool?

I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the blue lining beneath pale feet; the peculiar, chlorinated smell of the pool hut where you do the knicker trick; the scratchy pool towel, the near-collapsing deckchair by its side; the greying sky overhead. There’s the swimming, too, but that’s not what gets me. No, the English pool is a particular social idea, a knowing nod to vulgarity, a paradis artificiel in our rainy climes. Chips Channon, an early adopter, knew it when he insisted on putting in a pool at Kelvedon in 1937, as did Viscount Astor when he went against his mother Nancy’s wishes and did the same at Cliveden.

Sean Thomas

The lost art of getting lost

One of the quietly profound pleasures of travel is renting cars in ‘unusual’ locations. I’ve done it in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Syria and Peru (of which more later). I’ve done it in Yerevan airport, Armenia, where the car-rental guy was so amazed that someone wanted to hire a car to ‘drive around Armenia’ that he apparently thought I was insane. Later, having endured the roads of Armenia, I saw his point – though the road trip itself was a blast. Recently I rented a motor in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they were slightly less surprised than the Armenian had been, but nonetheless gave me lots of warnings and instructions, chief of which was: ‘Don’t rely on Google Maps, it doesn’t work out here.

Nick Timothy

Racing is being regulated out of existence

As a parable that sums up the dysfunction of the modern state and the over-regulation of industry, this has it all: government by unaccountable quango, ministers whose actions are the opposite of their words, puritanical campaigners given the power to dictate how people spend their money, a refusal to recognise glaring trade-offs and the cost of regulation, and the complacency with which a great British success story might be killed off. The success story in question is horse racing. With five million fans a year visiting 59 courses, racing is Britain’s second most popular spectator sport after football. And we are good at it. We have the best horses, the best trainers, and four of the top ten races in the world. The industry contributes£4.

Gareth Roberts

End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough

Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men. Then it became a day, then a week, then a month, and now it spreads throughout the summer, accompanied by all manner of feast days and ‘visibility’ events. Its expansion coincided with the addition of all the letters after the first three. This is when it became a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality – very old hat – but just about anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional, ranging from wearing wigs to not fancying any kind of sex at all. Every peccadillo was deemed worthy of a flag and a float. But the wheels finally seem to be coming off the Pride clown car. What was mushrooming is now shrivelling.

Lara Brown

The next front in the gender wars

April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that you can pick your gender, like you would a hat in the morning, seemed to have ended. The highest court unanimously confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – immutable, material and not up for ideological reinterpretation. Yet if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the gender industry doesn’t give up; it adapts. Numerous organisations, many taxpayer-funded, now exist for the sole purpose of pushing back against any resistance to trans orthodoxy. Defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity. The semantic contortions have already begun.

Thursday

Sophia Money-Coutts

The brutality of being a bridesmaid

There stands the bride. Perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect fake tan. She may not have slept the previous night or eaten for six months but, still, she’s beaming. And there behind her stand the bridesmaids. All 95 of them. ‘My sister-in-law asked how much weight I could drop because the dresses only went up to a size 12’ When Kathryn McGowan got married in County Down this month, she couldn’t decide which of her pals should have the honour of holding her train and checking she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. ‘It was quite stressful,’ she said of the dilemma, ‘and then one day the idea came to me.’ Instead of having the average number of bridesmaids (in the UK, this is three to five), she’d have 95 of them, aged between six and 40.

Lloyd Evans

Butlin’s is cashing in on nostalgia

Butlin’s is no longer a holiday ‘camp’. The company has evolved from its postwar heyday and now describes its properties as ‘resorts’ which are crammed with restaurants, bars and venues for live gigs. It’s like a cruise but on dry land. I went to Bognor Regis for a nostalgic ‘Ultimate 80s’ weekend where the performers included half-forgotten acts such as Aswad and T’Pau, and the remnants of the boyband Bros. The site lies 200 yards from Bognor’s shallow, pebble-strewn beach. The town itself is doing all right, if not exactly thriving. The charity shops are cheap, the estate agencies are full of recently vacated bungalows and the funeral parlours offer a special service for customers in a hurry.

Charlie Taylor

Can anything solve Britain’s prisons crisis?

While we were inspecting HMP Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey, a commotion broke out on one of the wings. ‘What’s up?’ one of my team asked the nearest prison officer. ‘Bloke who’s getting out tomorrow has just been told he’s being shipped to Rochester jail.’ The man was manhandled towards a prison van. ‘If I was him, I’d kick off too,’ the officer added quietly. Reducing the prison population will do nothing to stem the flow of drugs pouring into every jail in the country That week things were so desperate in the south of England that the prisoner was being forced to spend one night in a jail 20 miles away so that new arrivals could be squeezed in that afternoon.

Richard Williams

The BBC’s war on the SAS

The SAS is under fire, not from terrorists or insurgents, but from ill-informed commentators and our state broadcaster. Our Special Forces are globally respected, they have been a vital part of Britain’s national security capability for nearly 80 years and they run enormous risks so that we might all be kept safe. Nevertheless, an exercise in making sure that they, like all who serve the Crown, are held properly to account risks being used by the ignorant, the sensationalist and the malicious to undermine the regiment and weaken our security.

Michael Gove

Starmer vs the workers: the real Brexit betrayal

Keir Starmer looked blank. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, seemed confused. Only the old Stalinist Seumas Milne seemed really to understand. It was 2019. Labour’s front bench team, and their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s close advisers, were being upbraided – from the left. Why were they putting the interests of international capital ahead of our workers? Why were they abandoning the chance to implement a meaningful industrial policy? Why were they giving up on the chance to save British steel, to give all support necessary to our manufacturing sector, to make a stand against neo-liberalism? The person in the room making the challenge, over ginger beer and sandwiches, was not Owen Jones, James O’Brien or Mick Lynch. It was me.

Richard Johnson

Labour must learn to love Brexit

The problem with Keir Starmer’s approach to Brexit is that it fundamentally misunderstands the country. It isn’t that the Leave-voting public have realised that they made the wrong choice, foolishly tricked by the slogan on the side of a bus a decade ago. Voters in Grimsby have not suddenly been won round to the virtues of the Common Fisheries Policy. Most Leavers do not suddenly think shorter queues at the airport in Sofia is worth the downward pressure on wages caused by thousands of young Bulgarians who (understandably) will think Britain’s £12.21 minimum wage is more attractive than Bulgaria’s roughly £3 per hour. The reason people feel dissatisfied with Brexit is not that the UK has diverged from the EU but because it hasn’t diverged enough.

Angus Colwell

Are the ‘lanyard class’ the new enemy?

Globalisation, liberalism, neoliberalism, managerialism, internationalism, multiculturalism, human resources, wokeness, identity politics, progressivism, EDI, DEI, corporatism, proceduralism, elitism, environmentalism, transnationalism: there are a lot of things that voters are said to be protesting against. But now there’s a new buzzword going round. What voters are really annoyed about is the ‘lanyard class’. Lord (Maurice) Glasman came up with the phrase. I visit him in the House of Lords (wearing my parliamentary lanyard, of course) to ask him what he means. ‘The lanyard came into my head about 18 months ago as the symbol of the progressives,’ he says. ‘It was more of a poetic idea: “The Lanyard”.

Alice Loxton

The short history of short histories

My friend Ruby recently started a TikTok channel called ‘Too Long Didn’t Read’. With boundless enthusiasm and a colourful wardrobe, she prances around Hampstead Heath, summarising classic novels in 60 seconds. The channel ‘sums up anything ever written so you can talk about it to your mates’. Ruby is not alone in her approach of offering such educational digests. Scan the tables at Hatchards in Piccadilly and you will find endless shortest histories, or – for brevity’s sake – ‘shistories’. Popular formulas include ‘The Shortest History of …’, ‘A Brief History of … or ‘A Little History of …’.

Tom Jones

Inside the Conservative clubs that are turning Reform

My first job was working behind the bar of the Richmond Conservative Club in North Yorkshire. The place was as you might expect: dark blue doors, no women in the bar – other than on Fridays – and a ban on red ties. There were portraits on the walls of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. The local MP, William Hague, sometimes held his surgeries there. The Richmond club is still open, but many others have closed since the 1950s, when more than a thousand clubs offered cheap beer, snooker and bingo to almost three million Tory members. The party’s membership is now a fraction of what it once was; only 95,000 people voted in last year’s leadership election. Last month, in the run-up to the local elections, Nigel Farage visited the recently closed Frodsham club in Cheshire.

Thursday

Paul Wood

The Kurds have finally given in to Erdogan

All wars end, one way or another. One of the longest wars in the Middle East, between Turkey and Kurdish separatists, may finally be over. After 40 years of bitter struggle, the Kurdistan Workers’ party, the PKK, has declared that it will disarm and disband. It’s an achievement, of a sort, for the PKK’s imprisoned founder, Abdullah Ocalan: he might become a free man. It’s a triumph for Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan: he might become President for life. The Kurds have adjusted to a new reality in the region. From Ankara to Riyadh, the chess pieces are shifting and the board might end up looking very different. This might even be accomplished without blood being spilled. The PKK is designated as a terrorist group by Britain and many other western nations.

Susannah Jowitt

Death comes to the Chelsea Flower Show

It’s a matter of life and death at the Chelsea Flower Show this year. No murders are planned as far as we know, but there will be gravestones and even a coffin. This is to be a celebration of death. The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Flower Show will include funeral flowers in the Grand Pavilion for the first time since it moved to Chelsea in 1913. The display is being put together by the Farewell FlowersDirectory and, I’m told, there will be no tightly wired whorls of white carnations spelling out ‘LOVE YOU MUM’. Instead, passers-by will be left thinking of country churchyards, wild grasses and meadow flowers; species like campions, cornflowers and cow parsley.

Damian Thompson

Leo XIV’s papacy is off to a surprisingly promising start

Rome In the days before the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV, traditionalist Catholics were so worried about interference from evil spirits that, according to reliable sources, they arranged for a priest to conduct what’s known as a ‘minor exorcism’ outside the walls of the Vatican. Such ceremonies, which typically involve the sprinkling of holy water mixed with blessed salt, aren’t such a big deal as the major exorcisms of a demon from a person; they are blessings intended to remove Satan’s influence from places where it may occur. But the fact that some clergy in Rome thought the Sistine Chapel might be one of those places reveals the depth of the wounds inflicted on the Church during the turbulent reign of Pope Francis.

Max Jeffery

The search for the mother of three abandoned babies

Elsa had been alive less than an hour and her umbilical cord was still attached when she was wrapped in a towel, put in a Boots shopping bag and left on the Greenway, a cycle path built on a Victorian sewage pipe that runs through east London. She was abandoned on 18 January 2024 by a rose shrub on the coldest night of the year. She was not the first baby to be abandoned in that area of the Greenway near Plaistow. On 17 September 2017, a baby boy was discovered wrapped in a towel under a bush about a mile and a half from where Elsa was later found. The hospital called him Harry. Then, on 31 January 2019, someone found a newborn girl, also wrapped in a towel and put in a shopping bag. She was beside a park bench 500 yards from where Elsa would be left.

John Power

Abolishing the care worker visa is a mistake

For years I worked as an NHS manager, seeing first-hand the consequences of Britain’s broken social care system spill over into hospitals. Elderly patients, who no longer required medical care, were frequently marooned on wards because there was no one to support them at home. Behind every delayed operation or jammed A&E corridor was the same bottleneck: a care sector too understaffed to function. The government’s decision this week to abolish the care worker visa may please Labour strategists wary of Reform, but it’s incomplete. Ministers are killing off a flawed solution without putting anything in its place.

Zoe Strimpel

‘No peens in our pond’: the ‘Pond Terfs’ manning Kenwood ladies’ pond

For a century, Kenwood ladies’ pond on Hampstead Heath in north London had been a haven for women – gay, straight, secular, observant and everything in between. Then in 2019, the City of London Corporation, which manages the bathing pond, issued guidance dictating that trans women could swim there. Suddenly a schism appeared among the regulars: pond Terfs who protested the change vs a mostly younger, right-on cadre who applauded it. Trans women have reportedly been swimming at the ladies’ pond informally for decades, but this was a quiet, largely unacknowledged practice that happened unobtrusively – not a source of division or discord among swimmers.