Features

Wednesday

David McCloskey

What the CIA and MI6 really talk about

The Special Relationship has seen more special days. Earlier this year, President Trump delivered his verdict: ‘How is the relationship? It’s the relationship where, when we asked them for help, they were not there. When we needed them, they were not there. When we didn’t need them, they were not there. And they still aren’t there.’ Trump was referring to divisions between the US and UK over the wisdom and conduct of the war in Iran. (Even amid a spat, though, he can dish out praise. Just this week, following the arrest of five men outside RAF Fairford, used by American bombers to strike Iran, the President said the UK authorities had done an ‘amazing job’.) But his remarks landed at a moment of divergence in the US-UK relationship that extends well beyond Iran.

Michael Henderson

I’m a Manchester City fan – but we deserve absolutely no mercy

Fifty-nine years ago this month, a barrel-chested footballer called Francis Lee left Bolton Wanderers for Manchester City, and an impressionable eight-year-old followed him. Within a year ‘the City’ were First Division champions, and ‘Franny’, my childhood hero, had become an England international. Early memories are usually the most vivid. FA Cup winners in 1969, the men from Maine Road completed a trifecta of domestic pots the following year with the League Cup – and added a dollop of cream with the European Cup Winners’ Cup. The years of plenty didn’t last. In those days prizes were distributed more widely. But what larks.

Angus Colwell

The hunt for Britain’s wokest bar

Annalisa Quinn is an editor at the Boston Globe magazine, and through a mixture of good fortune, good journalism and good writing, she published the perfect story for our times last week. On 31 August, a lesbian bar in western Massachusetts called Last Ditch posted on Instagram that ‘it is with love we inform our immuno-compromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional’. Previously, KN-95 face masks were the minimum level of protection required to attend the bar at all times. The owners were swiftly accused of being eugenicists. One commentator said: ‘People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.’ Another wished the venue to be firebombed. Last Ditch attempted an apology.

Lisa Haseldine

A middle-class guide to apocalypse prepping

Earlier this month, the government launched its ‘Prepare’ campaign, urging us to plan for all manner of emergencies and put together a kit of food and supplies big enough to last several days. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner helpfully revealed what she’d be stockpiling: ‘Mascara, concealer, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, some baked beans and a tin of custard – I like custard.’ This is perfect timing: Putin seems to be breathing a little more heavily down our necks and – phew! – I’ve just moved into a house with an understairs cupboard big enough for an emergency pantry. A quick glance online tells me I can buy so-called ‘go bags’ complete with first aid kits, head torches, mess tins and fire starters from roughly £175. All very useful, no doubt, but not much fun.

Owen Matthews

What if AI is actually good at writing novels?

The spectacular fall from grace of Haitian-Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien in many ways resembles our own culture war over Jason Arday. The celebrated author, feted in TV studios and in the literary salons of Quebec and Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés for his hard-hitting descriptions of the migrant experience, was accused on X last week both of serial plagiarism and of using artificial intelligence to write his latest novel. His accusers decried the soft bigotry of low expectations that caused the woke intelligentsia to turn a blind eye to mediocrity because their hero was a capital-B Black man.

Penny Mordaunt

Can Michael Gove and I save Britain? 

Friday. I address intelligence agencies, law enforcement and behavioural scientists as they gather in Krakow. I tell them how they can help combat anti-Semitism in their work. The speech is a prelude to a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum. Words are not enough. While we meet, Lithuania highlights Russian attempts to bully pro-Ukrainian Nato countries with airspace incursions. Saturday. China has held the Robot Olympics, firmly fixed on a tech-enhanced future. This weekend we Brits held an event of similar magnitude. Ours is devoid of AI-enabled humanoids; instead, it is all high lift cams, low growls, beer, nylons, rouge, flat caps and the exquisite aroma of Castrol R. Do not dismiss the Goodwood Revival as backward--looking.

Wednesday

Esther Walker

I’ll do anything to keep Zack Polanski out of Kentish Town

On the morning of the 2005 general election, the young man who sat opposite me at work asked, ‘How did you vote?’ ‘That’s none of your business,’ I replied, in a silly, prim voice. A cruel look passed across his face. ‘You voted Tory, didn’t you?’ he crowed. ‘That’s why you won’t say!’ He started to point at me. ‘Tory voter! TORY SCUM!’ I was appalled. It was my first experience of tribal politics and I didn’t like it. I can’t remember what I said in reply, but I certainly didn’t reveal how I’d voted. If I had voted for Michael Howard’s Conservative party, I would have been too ashamed to admit it and if I had voted Labour, I wouldn’t have wanted to admit that, either – not if it meant I was now a kindred spirit to this maniac.

Freddy Gray

Is Abdul El-Sayed America’s next Obama?

Twenty years ago, as America fought in the Middle East, a junior Democratic senator from the Midwest, a forty-something man with a Muslim name, decided he was going to run for president. Against the odds, Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois, who’d dabbled in Marxist academia and whose father was born in Kenya, went on to become the first non-white commander-in-chief. Two decades on, as America fights another war in the Middle East, an even more unconventional Midwestern Democrat is rapidly advancing. Dr Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, whose father was born in Egypt, is currently the favourite to win his senate race in Michigan in November – even as Republican campaigners spend millions of dollars branding him a terrorist sympathiser.

Tim Shipman

Burnham’s bet: is the Prime Minister planning to call an election?

On 1 September, Andy Burnham gathered Labour MPs in No. 10 for a rousing speech. ‘We are a fighting force,’ he said. ‘We can win the next election. We have an opportunity now. We’ve got the initiative.’ Some of those present wondered if this was the Prime Minister rolling the pitch for an early election. One MP recalls a comment by Burnham in a smaller group that night: ‘We’ll hopefully see some of you back after the election. Er, most of you!’ Downing Street is adamant the PM would say no such thing, even as a joke. A party adviser accused the source of ‘trouble making’. Burnham’s senior aides deny there is any prospect of an early election. ‘Not going to happen,’ says one. A senior figure in No.

James Dixon

The strange world of professional mourners

MournMate is a new online market-place that promises to connect bereaved families and funeral homes with professional mourners in the US. It was advertising for its first ‘500 Founding Members’ when I looked, and, curious to know what it was all about, I signed up. The qualifications and requirements were surprisingly broad – the site was looking for actors, musicians, public speakers, eulogy writers, and anyone with experience of religious or cultural ceremonies. The advertised rate was $25 to $300 an hour, with an extra 50 per cent for emergency bookings. Grief, it seems, has joined the gig economy.

Michael Simmons

The wealthy person’s guide to fleeing Britain

Behind the scenes of The Spectator’s wealth tax debate this month there were lots of nervous whispers. ‘Wealthy people we work with are absolutely terrified about an exit tax,’ one Westminster figure remarked. The economist Arthur Laffer, one of the debate’s speakers, couldn’t believe a wealth tax was even being considered. Britain is already near the top of his famous curve – the point beyond which taxation reduces the Treasury’s take – and seems determined to push things to destruction. The latest fiscal rumour – that we might seize millions on a wealthy migrant’s departure – is a dangerous one. According to reports, it’s also the reason Chris Rokos, the third-highest taxpayer on the Sunday Times tax list, has decided to leave for Greece.

Elisabeth Braw

Is the West ready for the undersea war?

Last spring, a Chinese icebreaker turned up in the tropical waters of Palau. That was after Chinese research vessels arrived uninvited in the waters off Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Here in Europe, Russian research vessels and navy ships turn up uninvited too. The ships reveal nothing about the nature of their visits, but create fears of impending cable sabotage. These days, Russia and China are also building lots more submarines, and they’re impressive. Western countries, too, are building submarines, and all the while they’re trying to defend their cables and pipelines. Just this week, the UK’s 12-metre Excalibur drone submarine used a testing range off the coast of Scotland to fire a torpedo.

Rupert Hawksley

From Playboy pin-up to prohibitionist: the man taking on British gambling

The August 2004 cover of Playboy features a topless Eva Herzigova (‘The supermodel is supernaked’) and promises a piece about ‘America’s 10 sexiest bartenders’. If that isn’t enough to excite you, another article is puffed, no less conspicuously: ‘Weird new casino games (and the men who invent them)’. Turn to page 73 and a bald, bespectacled man, with ‘prominent ears on a frank, slightly frowning face’, stares out at you. This, we learn, is the ‘Bill Gates of card game inventors’ and his name is Derek Webb. The Englishman made his money at the poker tables in Derby: ‘I could play three times a week with a £50 buy-in and make £8,000 a night.’ From 1979 to 1994, Webb split his time between the East Midlands and Las Vegas.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Revealed: Ed Miliband ignored MI6’s warnings over Israel sanctions

When Andy Burnham was quizzed at PMQs last week about his and Ed Miliband’s decision to sanction the Israeli government over its handling of Gaza, the Prime Minister was surprisingly frank about the trade-offs. He presented it as a decision to prevent ‘the collapse of the two-state solution’ for a peace deal in the Middle East, which he claimed was ‘dying before our eyes’. In his statement to the Commons, Miliband referred to ‘ethnic cleansing’. But Burnham also admitted: ‘We gave the most careful consideration to… all of the risks. The Foreign Secretary and I took close advice from the security services and, of course, officials in the Foreign Office and in our embassies.

Charles Steel

The autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world

Ben Delo, the source of one half of Reform’s £72 million mega-donation, wrote in The Spectator last year about being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child. The self-confessed geek, now 42, was socially awkward. He did not fit in and he did not care to. His condition would shape the course of his life, making him very good at maths, very rich and hellbent on getting involved in politics. Christopher Harborne, the crypto millionaire who has matched Delo’s donation, we know much less about. Despite being a billionaire many times over, the 63-year-old has the air of a chemistry teacher and an aversion to interviews. Like Delo, who until recently lived in Hong Kong, he also forged his way in the Far East, living in Thailand.

Toby Young

I’ve found the perfect school for Harry and Meghan

As the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, I have to acknowledge that I still have some way to go to match the radioactive negativity Harry and Meghan generate with their every move. The Sussexes’ accumulated expertise in committing increasingly nauseating acts of hypocritical entitlement with every week that passes should qualify them both for a Regius Chair in Blithe Privilege at the University of Self-Regard. The latest episode in their narcissistic odyssey – The Sillyad – has been their agonising over where to send their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, to school. Harry and Meghan’s decision to educate them in England is, in its way, admirable.

Esther Walker

Don’t fear the manosphere

I don’t pry too much into the online life of my son. At 13, Sam is a good boy. He does well at school, eats his veg, loves his mum and captains his county cricket team. What more could I want? I suppose he could be more accurate when lobbing his pants at the laundry basket, especially considering he’s a spin bowler, but that’s a small detail. Last year, he started working out. He asked for weights and a pull-up bar. That was fine by me: boys have wanted big muscles since the dawn of time. Even my father owns a chest expander, that orangey-yellow and black one that was in every 1970s household. And Dad, who is now 91, taught history at Oxford and translates Goethe for fun, so it must be OK.

Peter Hitchens

How I became a Canadian nationalist

This is how I became a Canadian nationalist. I did it on the rebound. I never wanted to, and it is a strange experience to find myself pounding the arm of my chair when Mark Carney, of all people, defies the Almighty Trump. But it is so. Once, like that poor man who speaks the first lines in The Godfather, I believed in America, arsenal of liberty, land of the free, inheritor of Magna Carta and so on. Then, after a couple of years in Moscow I went to live in Washington, D.C. And it was there that I was gently wooed and eventually seduced by the land of maple syrup. To begin with, it was the discovery that soppy British sentiment about the USA was not in practice returned. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t like us as that they had barely heard of us.

Damian Thompson

Death at the Athenaeum

During the 1980s my friend Canon Brian Brindley was arguably the ‘highest’ clergyman in the Church of England, celebrating Solemn Masses of rococo splendour in Holy Trinity, Reading, a dreary little Victorian church on the Oxford Road. He also possessed the essential qualification of a great English eccentric: he did not know how eccentric he was. When I was a cub reporter on the Reading Chronicle I would sometimes run into Brindley parading through Sainsbury’s dressed as an 18th-century Roman monsignor. His buckled shoes with red heels – painted by himself – clopped like horse’s hooves against the linoleum as he scoured the aisles for ever creamier puddings. I once watched him sail into a civic dinner in Reading in a cream tropical cassock with violet buttons.

Tim Hayward

The impossible dream of a clean white shirt

I have no wish to sound like a worn and bitter hack, sand-blasted by weltschmerz, but I don’t have many ambitions left. It’s not like I want to write the Great Western Novel. AI can do that and who the hell reads any more? And I worry about ‘bucket lists’. They always seem remarkably similar. Ridiculous self-imposed sporting targets like marathons; the health-and-safety sanitised absurdity of ‘adrenaline’ experiences; pathologically unimaginative travel. I blame advertising for this. Indiscriminate 30-second reels of yoga/skydiving/surfing/beaches/hiking/street food in Thailand/stargazing in Machu bloody Picchu. God we’ve become dull. Even our ‘wildest dreams’ are commoditised and fully predictable.