Features

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The truth about Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater

In the 2004 film Mean Girls Ms Norbury (Tina Fey) cries to her High School students: ‘Girls! You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores!’ Do we? I ask because Sydney Sweeney, an American actress, is selling her bathwater to men with unfathomable desires. No woman would buy it. We have an infinite supply. Selling bathwater is hard. It’s the logistics. How do you distribute it? By fishing trawler? By pipe? Sweeney, who has marketing skills – and this is all marketing, she designed a Ford Mustang, which can’t be drunk, last year – has partnered, as they say, with a soap company, which will incorporate drips (dribbles?) of her bathwater into a soap. At least that is what we are told.

Dan Hitchens

Assisted suicide could destroy the hospice movement

The hospice movement is one of the great achievements of post-war Britain. Inspired by the doctor Cicely Saunders, who in effect founded the field of palliative care, it has united cutting-edge research with a profound understanding of suffering and how to relieve it. Britain’s hundreds of hospices are Saunders’s legacy. But can that legacy survive an assisted suicide law? ‘It has the potential to destroy the sector in its entirety,’ says Amy Proffitt, former president of the Association for Palliative Medicine (APM). If assisted suicide is integrated into palliative care, and hospices legally must facilitate it, then ‘many of the medical profession would leave the sector entirely’, Proffitt adds.

Tom Tugendhat

Don’t be fooled by the euphemisms around assisted dying

It’s funny the ways we lie to ourselves. The little lies. The white ones. We say we’re exhausted when we mean we’re unfit. That we’re joyful when we’re drunk. That we want to be alone when in fact we’ve simply been left out. Parliament is the same. We invent ways of saying things to mask the reality of the debate. But when we’re choosing how our citizens live and die, shouldn’t we be honest with ourselves at least? Shouldn’t we try to be as clear as possible? Euphemisms in the assisted dying debate cloak it in language of compassion and discretion, but behind the veil there are some ugly truths.

Hamit Coskun

Why I burnt the Quran

My name is Hamit Coskun and I’ve just been convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence. My ‘crime’? Burning a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Moments later, I was attacked in full view of the street by a man. I was hospitalised. Then I was arrested. Some may say that book-burning is a poor substitute for reasoned debate. I would counter that it was a symbolic, non-violent form of expression intended to draw attention to the ongoing move from the secularism of my country of birth to a regime which embraces hardline Islam. As I told Westminster Magistrates’ Court, what I did constituted political protest and the law, as I understood it, was on my side.

Rupert Redwald

Why corporate wokery refuses to die

Everyone thinks they know what the Blob is. A great wobbly blancmange of Sir Humphreys and (these days) Lady Tamaras: a public sector elite, slow to action but quick to push its ideological agenda in all manner of insidious ways. Wrong. Or rather, this is only the half of it. Whatever the gargantuan size of the state compared with pre-pandemic, what few people realise is the extent to which the private sector has been incubating its own Blob for years. To illustrate how Blob PLC can achieve its ends and – crucially – why people have gone along with it, we must follow its successful campaign to make British business bow to the diversity gods, and how it started at the very top – with the boards.

Max Jeffery

Have I unmasked Cambridge’s bike bandit?

The Cambridge bike bandit emerged. I watched the rough, smiling face of the old man who came slowly from his bungalow and urged me to join him around the back; he didn’t look like a thief. We entered his grassless yard filled with bikes, tyres and tools. ‘This Raleigh, £80,’ he said, withdrawing a creaky frame from the pile. ‘I just changed the tyre. You see? Not heavy. Made in England. Nottingham. You can try a little bit. Try it for ten minutes. I don’t mind.’ A source had told me about the bandit, a man who openly shifted stolen bikes from a suburban Cambridge home, so bad and unpoliced has bike theft become in the city. I had got the outlaw’s phone number and arranged to meet him under the guise of making a purchase.

James Heale

Nigel’s army: Reform’s plans for victory

‘I’ve changed my mind!’ It is a year this week since Nigel Farage uttered those fateful words, marking his decision to return as leader of Reform UK during the general election campaign. Much has changed in those 12 months. The party’s polling has doubled, membership has soared to 235,000 and new faces make up most of the backroom staff. Now that the party has hit 30 per cent in the polls, Reform strategists insist the vote share can go higher: 40 per cent is viewed as a realistic target. Zia Yusuf, the party chairman, likes to describe Reform as a ‘start-up’, breaking apart SW1’s monopolistic cartel. This high-ambition, high-growth strategy yielded 677 councillors in the local elections last month.

Thursday

Philip Womack

We’re losing the ability to read

A recent American study, called ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’, analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at two Midwestern universities. You may be surprised to discover that the title is not ironic. That they don’t read very well is an understatement along the lines of Spike Milligan’s ‘I told you I was ill’. The study’s subjects were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. A doddle, you’d think, for anyone reading Eng lit at a university. Well, you’d be wrong. Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens’s prose. It’s as if, dumbfounded, they’d been confronted with Linear B.

Bernard Cornwell

Is the Pope a Marxist?

Charleston, South Carolina H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.’ That surely explains the apparent surge of Americans who have been enquiring into the possibility of emigrating to Britain. I wish them well. I have no wish to leave America myself, but fully understand the motivation causing this surge. It is, of course, because the common people wanted and are receiving Donald Trump good and hard. Years from now, probably when I am gone, a fortunate historian will describe the Trump era in the detail and with the skill with which Robert Caro is describing the career of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Katja Hoyer

Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army

Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. ‘There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either,’ he said. The problem was twofold. Firstly, that is not the official policy of western allies. Secondly, Germany has not provided Ukraine with any long-range missiles. Partly that is a political choice by Germany, but there is also the fact of the inherent weakness of the Bundeswehr itself. Merz’s new government has recognised the limited nature of his military, vowing to build ‘the strongest conventional army in Europe’.

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.