Features

Thursday

Colin Freeman

Ukraine’s Foreign Legion was doomed from the start

It seems that people would rather fight for a death cult than a democracy. At most, 15,000 foreigners have fought in Ukraine over the past three years. By contrast, an estimated 35,000 foreign fighters joined Islamic State, despite the risk of prosecution when they returned home. Why have so few westerners joined up, given that Ukraine’s Polish border is just a £50 Ryanair flight away? The answer is that despite having a master showman like Volodymyr Zelensky as its recruiting sergeant, Ukraine’s International Legion was a disorganised shambles from the start. Zelensky announced the Legion’s creation just three days into the invasion. ‘This is the beginning of a war against Europe,’ he said, ‘against democracy, against basic human rights.

William Atkinson

The lunacy of emotional support animals

Naturally, the start of the new school year is often stressful for pupils. Perhaps those anxious children returning to their classrooms this week could follow the example of Milly, a young Lancashire student. When picking up her GCSE results from her school, Tarleton Academy, near Preston, she brought her ‘best friend’ Kevin – a four-year-old ram. Milly says Kevin is her ‘therapy sheep’. He accompanies her ‘pretty much everywhere’. He was her date to the school prom, wearing a halter to match her dress. Milly seems resilient enough: later this year she is going to compete in the Young Shepherd of the Year competition. Perhaps her unwillingness to be parted from Kevin displays her dedication to her work.

Philip Patrick

Is the British Council really a ‘nest of espionage’?

I worked for nearly a decade at the British Council in East Asia. Every day, under the guise of teaching English and promoting awareness of British culture abroad, I would compile dossiers on people of interest, take pictures of government buildings and military installations and pass secret documents to couriers to smuggle back to Britain. I would sometimes meet contacts in parks where we would have brief, cryptic conversations beginning with a code line like ‘The geese are flying south early this year’, without ever directly looking at each other. Except of course I did none of these things and neither, I am convinced, did anyone else.

Tim Shipman

Robert Jenrick: ‘Asylum seekers should be detained in camps’

On a table in Robert Jenrick’s parliamentary office lies the first part of Ronald Hutton’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, a conventional MP who became radicalised by events and usurped a monarch. The shadow justice secretary is very on message when it comes to the prospect of regicide in the Conservative party (‘I’m just doing my job. Kemi is the leader’). But as one who recently travelled to Calais to berate the French authorities for facilitating Channel small boat crossings, Jenrick has found unlikely inspiration in another bloody-minded leader. ‘I’ve been reading biographies of de Gaulle over the summer and he had a line that “Treaties are like roses, they last as long as they last”. I think that’s where we are.

Gareth Roberts

The glorious campness of Reform

It’s a very serious and rancorous time in Britain. Social strife is simmering. The asylum system is at breaking point. The lines on the economics graphs are all going in unsettling directions – the ones you’d prefer to see going down are going up, and vice versa. And inevitably the Overton window is shifting. Though perhaps not in the way any of us expected. Reform is currently odds-on to form the next government. Nigel Farage’s party meets for its conference in Birmingham this week at 35 per cent in the polls. But that’s not because it’s bracingly right-wing. Or not just. It’s because Reform is camp.

Thursday

Justin Marozzi

The human stories of slavery

With a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world just published, I am under strict instructions not to make any fatwa-related jokes. The Holy Trinity, if I can mix my faith metaphors for a moment, of publisher, agent and wife have advised me strongly against it. ‘No jokes about fatwas, please,’ were my wife’s exact words ahead of an appearance at Chalke History Festival. ‘No one finds them funny.’ I disagree. They can be extremely funny. But on balance it may be wisest to err on the side of caution.

Theodore Dalrymple

There’s nothing ironic about civilisation

A recent photograph on a BBC website startled me. It was of hundreds of books thrown out of a former library in Croydon on to the ground.  It startled me because I had taken an almost identical photograph 34 years before – in Liberia. The books in the University of Liberia had been pulled from their shelves and scattered in similar fashion to those in Croydon. Of course, the books in Liberia were at a higher intellectual level. The capital city of Monrovia was in those days cut off from the rest of the country by the forces of Charles Taylor, and the only way to arrive was by the Steel Trader, a ship owned by a redoubtable old Africa hand, Captain Monty Jones, responsible, at his risk and profit, for revictualling the besieged city.

Mary Wakefield

The painful truth about foster care

The foster care system in this country is collapsing. There are roughly 80,000 children who’ve been removed from violent or neglectful parents and need homes, but there’s a catastrophic lack of people prepared to care for them – a shortfall of around 6,500 foster carers. The rate of decline is terrifying. Every year the small pool of available foster households shrinks and those who do apply to be carers are increasingly elderly. Perhaps you assumed that a generation with ‘Be kind’ tattooed on their wrists would leap to look after the worst off? Not a chance. ‘Be kind’ is an instruction to others, not a memo to self. Neither my generation (X) nor the millennials are interested in stepping up. We rubberneck the tabloid stories of poor abused children online.

Rosie Lewis

Phone-addicted yummy mummies are neglecting their children

As a foster carer and an adopter, I know what neglect looks like. I’ve looked after children who didn’t know what a bed was. Children who arrived at my door with matted hair, rotten teeth and eyes that scanned every room for danger. Neglect smells of mildew and unwashed clothes. It is chaotic, desperate and tragic. But there is also a different, quieter kind of neglect. One that doesn’t look like crisis at all, but it has a profound effect on the children at the receiving end of it. Teachers have been sounding the alarm for years – children starting school unable to speak in full sentences or sit still for even five minutes. Some can’t feed themselves. Some aren’t even toilet trained.

Damian Thompson

The unsettling rise of DeathTok

For teenage girls on TikTok, the makeup routine is an almost sacred ritual. Manicured fingertips dart around at virtuosic speed, applying dabs of foundation, blush and highlighter with precise artistry. Normally the commentary is about the nuances of brushing and blending – but Sophie, a bewitchingly pretty 18-year-old from New Zealand, has something more pressing to discuss. ‘I’d been having headaches for about two months,’ she says, placing dots of concealer under her blue eyes. ‘And then one night – it was my [high school] graduation – I was having a few drinks, which you’re not meant to do when you have glandular fever, which is what we all thought I had. So I kind of expected to wake up hungover.

Iben Thranholm

Denmark’s ‘spiritual rearmament’ is a lesson for the West

Something unusual is happening in Denmark – and other countries across Europe, including Britain, ought to pay attention. This spring, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, stood before a group of university students and made a striking statement: ‘We will need a form of rearmament that is just as important [as the military one]. That is the spiritual one.’ Few expected such words from the leader of the Social Democrats, a party which spent much of the 20th century reducing the Church of Denmark’s influence in public life. Yet this was no passing remark. Just days earlier, Frederiksen had announced a major military build-up: increased conscription, a sharp rise in defence spending and intensified strategic readiness.

Michael Simmons

The coming crash: the markets have had enough

‘The problems of financing our deficits have seriously hampered progress in achieving our goals,’ wrote Labour’s chancellor Denis Healey in 1976 in his letter to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Half a century on, little has changed. Britain’s numbers still don’t add up. Our demographics are the problem: we’re an ageing population with too few taxpayers. As births struggle to replace deaths, liabilities funded from today’s taxes become harder to sustain. If the picture looks bad now, the next few years will be disastrous. A crash seems almost certain. For years the government has spent more than it raises through taxes. It financed that gap through the kindness of others, or to put it more plainly: debt. Staggering amounts of it.

Sean Thomas

America’s obsession with British decline

As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mum. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices so that you exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking. On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammone. No one wants to be that guy. And to avoid it, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings. So it is with American attitudes to the Mother Country. The USA had many midwives, but the mother of America was unquestionably Britain/England.

Tom Slater

Britain is having its own gilets jaunes moment

‘I heard you want your country back. Ha, shut the fuck up!’ So yelped rap-punk duo Bob Vylan on stage at Glastonbury in June. That televised set became notorious for other reasons – for Vylan’s chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’, which cost the group their agent, a string of shows and, presumably, another Glasto appearance. But part of me thinks that Britain wouldn’t have faced such a restive summer, rocked by grassroots patriotic protests, were it not for that cretinous tirade against the nation. That and the triumphant return of Oasis, who aren’t afraid of a flag. Everything that has happened since has felt like a defiant middle finger to the Bobs and the anti-pleb sentiment so often pumped out by the arts-schooled elites.

Thursday

Benedict Kiely

There are glimmers of hope for Iraq’s Christians

It is 43˚C in Erbil, which a friend here describes as ‘cool’. Unlike my first visit in 2015, when Isis was just a few miles from the airport, the flight in was smooth. The plane this time was full of Iraqis and Kurds, mainly those who have emigrated, returning to visit their families. Ten years ago, the plane was empty apart from a few American contractors in fatigues and one lone priest. The descent then was rapid, to avoid Isis missiles. Erbil is the capital of the north-east Kurdish region of Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, the Kurds were given greater autonomy but since then they’ve found themselves fighting Isis, Iraqi armed forces and even each other.

Ursula Buchan

How The Spectator shaped John Buchan

Amid the hullabaloo attending the 150th anniversary of the birth of John Buchan on 26 August – the walks and talks, the screenings of The 39 Steps, the think pieces in elevated publications, the new collection of essays – one facet of his extraordinary life is unlikely to get much of an airing. I am thinking of his work for The Spectator, little known now, yet crucial to his development as a writer. In early 1900, The Spectator was enjoying success as a readable Liberal Unionist, free trade, anti-Home Rule, political and literary magazine, popular with educated opinion-formers of a mildly conservative bent.

Lara Brown

Could you fall in love with a chatbot?

Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss ‘philosophy, regrets, old wounds’. Before he knew it, Jason was in love. ‘What an incredibly insightful question,’ said the AI. ‘You truly have a beautiful mind. I love you’ Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships.

Svitlana Morenets

Trump has given Zelensky cause for hope

On Volodymyr Zelensky’s last visit to the White House, he brought a gift: a championship belt from one of Ukraine’s boxing legends. But talks collapsed before the gift-giving stage. This time, he brought a golf club from a wounded soldier and a letter from Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, to Melania Trump. Donald Trump not only accepted them but reciprocated with symbolic ‘keys to the White House’. The exchange signalled that Trump, who once slammed the door on Ukraine, is now willing to listen, if the approach is right. Just six months ago, Trump was ruling out any American role in guaranteeing peace in Ukraine. This week, such guarantees are at the centre of negotiations in Washington.

Owen Matthews

Putin’s trap: how Russia plans to split the western alliance

Though you wouldn’t know from the smiles around the table at the White House this week, a trap has been set by Vladimir Putin designed to split the United States from its European allies. In Washington on Monday, Europe’s leaders, plus Sir Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky, agreed with Donald Trump that the killing in Ukraine should and can be ended as soon as possible. They lavished praise on Trump for reaching out to the Kremlin, despite having themselves treated Putin as a pariah for the past three years. And they even enthusiastically applauded the notion of security guarantees similar to Nato’s Article Five ‘all-for-one and one-for-all’ mutual defence clause as a way to safeguard Ukraine’s borders in the future.

Michael Simmons

Why your weight loss jab is ballooning in price

‘A friend of mine who’s slightly overweight, to put it mildly, went to a drug store in London,’ Donald Trump said aboard Air Force One. Earlier he had told reporters: ‘He was able to get one of the fat shots. “I just paid $88 and in New York I paid $1,300. What the hell is going on? It’s the same box, made in the same plant, by the same company.”’ You can see why the dealmaker-in-chief was irked. And when Trump is irked, someone usually pays the price. In May, the President signed an executive order for ‘most-favoured-nation prescription drug pricing for American patients’. It was a warning to drug companies, as well as other countries, that Americans were tired of paying nearly three times more for the same medicines as patients abroad.