Features

Thursday

Elisabeth Dampier

Why I’m voting for the AfD

On 23 February, I will vote for the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in the German general election. As someone with an immigrant parent, a postgraduate degree, and who works in the liberal world of film and TV, this is the last thing I’m supposed to admit to in public. My fellow Germans might understand my not wanting to vote for the Social Democratic party (SPD), the left-wingers who lead our deeply unpopular coalition government. But as an ‘educated’ millennial, surely I ought to vote Green? After all, our shamelessly non-neutral public broadcasters ARD and ZDF acclaim them the ‘party of youth’.

Catherine Lafferty

How the drive to end teen pregnancies aided the grooming gangs

How did the depraved cruelty of Britain’s grooming gangs go on for so long, so openly and with such seeming impunity? One overlooked but vitally important element of the scandal is that over the past 30 years the lines of defence girls had against sex crimes were deliberately taken down in the drive to reduce the country’s number of teenage pregnancies. Britain’s stubbornly high teenage pregnancy rate was the stuff of dozens of newspaper columns The first and most important line of defence any girl will have against male predation is usually her own family.

Douglas Murray

What real justice would look like for grooming gang victims

It is always interesting to watch a dam burst. In the past week, as Elon Musk and other prominent Americans discovered the British ‘grooming gang’ scandal, British politics has suddenly had to face up to something it has spent a quarter of a century trying to ignore. One would hope that the claim that thousands of underage girls had been gang-raped by thousands of men in cities across the country would be a subject of profound concern for our politicians. Who did this? Why? How can we help the victims and prevent any reoccurrence? But no society asks questions to which it does not want an answer. The language used about this mass crime has been coyly euphemistic. Take ‘grooming’.

Monday

Max Pemberton

How real is your ADHD?

Why does everyone suddenly seem to have ADHD? It’s a question that many of us working in mental health have been asking each other recently. Just a decade or so ago I rarely saw anyone in clinic with ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’; now I see at least one case a day. It’s bewildering. Have all these people simply been undiagnosed for years? Is ADHD a medical fad? No one yet knows. The increased awareness of mental health problems has been a boon for private doctors. It’s a gold mine ADHD used to be mainly diagnosed in children, but more and more people are now getting a diagnosis in adulthood.

James Kanagasooriam and Patrick Flynn

Right move: will Britain benefit from the global conservative turn?

The world appears to be turning on its axis – and moving hard to the right. The New World is tilting hardest. In Argentina, Javier Milei is taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy. In the US, Donald Trump is poised to deport migrants, deregulate the economy and drill, baby, drill. Canada’s tendresse for the maple-syrupy liberal Justin Trudeau has chilled into a bitter determination to oust him in favour of the anti-woke, pro-growth ‘true conservative’ Pierre Poilievre.  And where the New World has led, the Old is following. Giorgia Meloni is now Europe’s most consequential leader – upholder of some pretty traditional values with a strikingly hard policy on migration.

Amy Wilentz

The Vodou kingpin behind Haiti’s latest massacre

For a politician known for his ability to shock, Donald Trump managed to outdo himself with his baseless claim during last year’s presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing, butchering and eating household pets. Regardless of this racist lie – new Haitian immigrants to Ohio do not eat people’s pets and are in the main perfectly respectable – Haiti itself is a mess and a good place to flee. The country’s extreme problems can’t be denied, although the US is doing a good job of ignoring them. Dictators assume guilt by association: if one old person is against you, they may all be killed Since the devastating earthquake of 2010, criminal gangs have grown larger and more powerful.

Sebastian Morello

The Christian case for hunting

When I was a teenager, my closest friend, Henry, would vanish into the Shropshire Hills over the hunting season’s weekends. When he returned, it was with a wind-beaten face, wearing the traditional beagler’s white breeks and green socks, with a leather hunting whip slung over his shoulder. I knew nothing of this world, until one late autumnal Saturday he invited me to join him. As I watched the beagle pack race across the landscape, I realised I had stepped into a magical event, a hunting scene from a medieval tapestry brought to life. I was hooked. To this day, many sporting Christians throughout Europe honour St Hubert with songs and prayers after a hunt Beagling was my entry into field sports, but soon the door might be closed to others.

Michael Gove

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about the psychological significance of Bible stories. He speaks to The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove about supernatural relationships, the folly of net zero and what’s next for Europe. ‘A lot of the atheist argument misses the mark because the God that’s being disbelieved is never defined’ MICHAEL GOVE: In your book, you work intimately with Bible stories to bring out their meaning, their relevance and their importance. Why should anyone read the Bible? JORDAN PETERSON: The simple answer is because you have to have your story straight or you go off course badly.

John Connolly

‘They don’t want me to rise again’: China’s gene-editing scientist on why he’s back in the lab

Before he agrees to be interviewed, He Jiankui has one request: that he is introduced as a ‘gene editing pioneer’. This may come across as grandiose, but it is also indisputable. No one else in history, after all, can say they have created genetically edited human beings. In 2018, He dropped the mother of all scientific bombs when he announced that he had used Crispr, a gene-editing technique, to alter the DNA of two babies. In a YouTube video, He explained that the twins, ‘two beautiful Chinese girls’, codenamed Lulu and Nana, had been born safely just a few weeks before in Shenzhen. Both had had their embryos edited to prevent them catching HIV from their father. Later, it emerged that another woman was pregnant with a genetically modified baby.

Thursday

Roger Lewis

Good riddance to 2024

January. When the assisted dying bill comes in, I’ll be first in the queue. Non-stop nosebleeds, Covid-esque symptoms, leg cramps, a cough resistant to antibiotics, and unremunerated press interviews for my Burton/Taylor book. In the old days I’d be in New York, running amok with publicity handmaidens, going on television and racking up bills in the Gramercy Park Hotel. Now everything is done from the back-bedroom here in Hastings, where I dwell in the slum district, my window overlooking immigrants doing their laundry. Paul Bailey went to the trouble of getting his name removed from my acknowledgements. That’s real hatred February. First anniversary of my myocardial infarction, when I collapsed in Morrisons car park.

Kate Weinberg

How my father’s bedtime stories shaped my life

It’s half an hour before lights out when my dad arrives at my bedroom door holding Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. He kicks off his shoes, loosens his tie and wedges himself next to me in my small single bed, his toes waggling in their socks as they regain freedom after a long day in the office. In the evening he smells of the menthol toothpicks he always carries in his top pocket (in the morning, when he drops me off at school, he smells of the spicy pink toothpaste which I once tried and which burned the roof of my mouth).

Ali Kefford

Christmas on patrol with the Royal Navy’s submariners

This Christmas, a Royal Navy Trident submarine will be quietly prowling the seas as part of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent mission. She will have slipped out of HM Naval Base Clyde in Scotland in late August. Her location is a secret, known only to a handful of officers aboard. Even the highest ranks of the navy, such as the Chief of Defence Staff and the First Sea Lord, remain unaware of where their ‘bomber’ is. For the rest of the crew, the submarine’s whereabouts are a mystery, with only the temperature of the water against the hull offering them a vague sense of geography.

Ronald Hutton

How pagan is Christmas?

Many people today feel an ambivalence towards the history of the Christmas festival. They sense that it has deep pre-Christian roots and yet are also aware that most of the actual customs associated with it are relatively modern. The problem is that both views are correct. Most of the current trappings of the season are Victorian inventions or importations: the cards, the tree, the stocking, the turkey and Father Christmas with his reindeer and his sack of presents. Even local seasonal activities which look genuinely primeval have turned out not to be.

Rory Sutherland and Rick Rubin

‘Judgment is the price of being creative’

Rick Rubin is a legendary American record producer who co-founded Def Jam records, which helped popularise hip hop. He has worked with everyone from Johnny Cash (whose career he is credited with reviving) to Paul McCartney and Kanye West. He sat down with The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland to discuss creativity, Bach, Sherlock Holmes, JFK assassination theories and more. RORY SUTHERLAND: It’s a huge pleasure to see you again. Just for the benefit of older Spectator readers, it’s probably worth defining what a music producer does because it’s ambiguous. People might imagine someone sitting there, adjusting the levels on one of those enormous mixing decks. In fact you never touch any of that stuff. You don’t really play an instrument. And you don’t read music. (No shame in that.

Charles Cornish-Dale

How to turn eggnog into a superfood

Recently, scientists were baffled by the discovery that ice cream is a superfood. Yes, that’s right, people who eat ice cream tend to be healthier than those who don’t. A lot healthier. It’s ‘nutrition science’s most preposterous result’, according to the Atlantic. In fact, there’s nothing preposterous about it, if you actually know anything about the ingredients that go into ice cream. You’ve got high-quality milk protein and fat, sugars and a whole lot of vitamins and minerals. The fats make the protein and the vitamins and minerals more bioavailable – meaning you can absorb more – and they slow the digestion of the sugars, so you don’t get a massive sugar spike, just a gentle release of energy. The same could be said of eggnog.

Andrew O’Hagan

The Andrew problem: a short story

People offended by name-dropping are absolutely no fun. I’ve experimented with this concept on five continents – OK, four: Antarctica’s social whirl isn’t what it might be – and those who roll their eyes at shocking new developments in the world of celebrity are just the worst. Not content with having zero information to offer, they diminish what is given, and in a more efficient world such bores would be carried at high speed to the guillotine.

William Boyd

The lure of the spy novel

Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film as a director, The Trench. I always think about the film on 11 November, because during the shoot we observed a uniquely different minute’s silence in the labyrinth of trenches we had constructed on a soundstage at Bray Studios in Berkshire. The film follows a squad of young soldiers as they wait, over two fraught days in 1916, for the Battle of the Somme to begin. We paused filming at 11 a.m. and fell silent. I was standing in the frontline trench with a dozen young actors who were all in their totally authentic first world war uniforms, Lee-Enfield rifles in their hands. Time travel.

A.N. Wilson

The end of Christendom is nigh

If you are of a traditional turn of mind, you might well go to church this Christmas, sing the carols you knew in childhood and feel a bit of a Dickensian glow. If you are already Christian, the experience will confirm your sense that what is commemorated is the most stupendous thing in human history – the arrival of Jesus Christ, whether or not you believe the stories as told in the readings. Statistically, however, it is highly unlikely that you will be going back to church for months – probably not until next year. If you did venture into your local church on a normal Sunday, you would find a tiny band of old people like me who go regularly and who are wondering, all the time, how much longer it can all continue.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A Christian revival is under way

This is my second Christmas as a Christian. As an atheist, I had dismissed the bright lights and customs of Christmas as traditions that had evolved to keep our spirits up as the cold of winter creeps in. But the more I learn about, and participate in, the rituals of my adopted faith, the less Grinch-like I become. Christmas isn’t just crass commercialism, it’s vital to a western revival. Celebrating it is more important than ever. The date of 25 December was significant before the birth of Christ of course. It coincided with the Ancient Roman celebration of Winter Solstice, just as 25 March was the Spring Equinox.

Lawrence Osborne

Demonia: a short story

They passed into the harbour of Favignana at the beginning of spring, the island’s single small mountain heaving into view from the Trapani ferry, burned brown by centuries of parch and abandonment. A disused Bourbon castle sprawled upon its summit, while below it near the water stood an old tuna-processing factory with 19th-century industrial chimneys. The raffish little port lay alongside. They came down on to a deserted quay with the harbour on their right filled with the pale blue and copper boats of the bluefin fishermen listing in shallows. The fishermen seemed to have walked off into a different life, perhaps never to return.