Features

Thursday

Philip Patrick

‘It is sad that we are sometimes seen as just killers’: an interview with Japan’s last ninja

Getting an interview with Jinichi Kawakami, the man known in Japan as ‘the Last Ninja’, was no easy task – but nor should it have been. Ninjas, Japan’s legendary covert operatives and assassins, were renowned for their elusiveness, so it would have been disappointing if tracking one down had proved a cinch. It took a good deal of research and persistence before I was granted an interview by landline telephone – which also seems appropriate since ninjas were reputedly able to make themselves invisible. Kawakami is head of the Banke Shinobinoden school of ninjutsu (ninja culture), director of the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum and Ninja Council, and a professor of Ninja Studies at Mie University.

Owen Matthews

What does Putin want? Whatever he can get away with

The US general Mark Clark knew a thing or two about dealing with Russians. In the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany, Clark commanded the American occupying forces in Austria. His Soviet opposite number, and nominal ally, was Marshal Ivan Konev. The two war heroes were tasked with pacifying the conquered and divided country at the dawn of the Cold War. ‘The Russians were not interested in teamwork,’ recalled Clark in his 1950 memoir, Calculated Risk. ‘They wanted to keep things boiling… They were accustomed to the use of force. They were skilled in exploiting any sign of weakness or uncertainty or appeasement. This was their national policy.’ Two things infuriated Clark more than anything.

Paul Wood

The secrets of ‘God’s influencer’

Assisi In a medieval church built of white stone, pilgrims and tourists shuffle past the body of a 15-year-old boy in a tomb with a glass side. The boy is handsome, with dark curly hair, and wears a blue tracksuit top, jeans and Nike trainers. Everyone peers through the glass and some realise, with a start, that the perfectly preserved face and hands are eerily lifelike silicone. The real remains, decomposing for almost 20 years, are inside the effigy. This is Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager known as ‘God’s influencer’, who is about to become the first millennial saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The tomb is held up from behind and so appears to levitate, surrounded by a corona of bright light.

Laurie Graham

AI killed the Easter Bunny

On the grounds of advancing age, I had decided to ignore all the chatter about artificial intelligence and devote my remaining time to things I could properly understand. Then I discovered that one of my own copyrighted properties, the fruit of a year’s work, had been scraped into the AI maw without so much as a by-your-leave, and it became personal. I wrote to my MP who responded with template blandishments. This government… committed to blah blah… exciting prospects… safeguarding… potential opt-out system… a close watch, yadda yadda… Feeling impotent and no further forward, I returned to my knitting. It took the murder of the Easter Bunny to rouse me from the torpor of denial.

Ross Clark

The radical barristers who really lay down the law in Britain

The facade of Garden Court Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is reassuringly traditional. The barristers who work there occupy buildings which were once home to the Earl of Sandwich and the Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval. If there were any building in London in which wigs and gowns would seem a natural form of dress, it would be here. But the facade is just that. For behind the pedimented Georgian windows there operates arguably the most radically effective cell of left-wing activists in Britain. Barristers are supposed to adhere to the cab-rank principle: they act for the first client who comes calling.

Angus Colwell

The creeping Dubai-ification of London

In December 2023, a TikTok influencer called Maria Vehera opened a packet of ‘Dubai chocolate’ in her car and filmed herself eating it. Since then, 124.6 million people have watched her swallowing this pistachio-based gloop. Oh Maria, what have you done? A butterfly flaps its wings – or an influencer eats some chocolate – and soon people are setting their alarms for 5 a.m. to queue outside Lidl for the ‘drop’ of LIDL’S OWN DUBAI CHOCOLATE. Guess what? M&S made one too (£8.50). Morrisons then had the bright idea of creating a pistachio cream Easter egg. Waitrose’s Dubai chocolate was so popular it had to ration it to two bars per person. Knock-off brands now feature at the counter of almost every news-agent in London.

Ian Williams

How China bought Britain

Somewhere in the bowels of the Foreign Office, civil servants are still working on the government’s ‘China audit’. The report was commissioned by the new Labour government to ‘assess trade-offs in the UK-China relationship’ and to ‘ensure consistency across government, business and academia towards engagement with China’. Little is known about its workings or who’s being consulted. Instead of bringing clarity, the process is deepening confusion, and there are worrying reports that the audit has been pared back to support Keir Starmer’s ‘pragmatic’ approach. All the while, there have been a series of troubling events that demand extreme caution about Beijing. The British Steel debacle is only the latest.

Freddy Gray

Trump’s big gambles are paying off

‘I run the country and the world,’ said President Donald Trump last week. That’s not really an exaggeration. In our ever more mediatised age, Trump doesn’t just make the news. He is the news, win or lose. Why did Mark Carney triumph in the Canadian elections? A Trump backlash. What happened at the Pope’s funeral? Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky talked peace. Is the economy tanking? It’s the Trump, stupid. Younger Donald’s ambition was to be the world’s most famous man – to achieve, as his son-in-law Jared Kushner put it, ‘virtually 100 per cent name recognition’. He surpassed that years ago. His aspirations now are far bigger.

Thursday

Luke Daly-Groves

Why won’t Hitler conspiracies die?

Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who raised their arms in a final straight-armed salute. The enduring cultural and political relevance of Hitler’s death hardly needs restating. It gave us online parodies of the rant scene in the film Downfall and, of course, a wild range of conspiracy theories. I once hoped that my book Hitler’s Death: the Case Against Conspiracy might put an end to those.

Adam Frank

We should be excited about signs of alien life

Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found tentative evidence for a ‘biosignature’ embedded in the light from a distant planet. Scientists and non-scientists around the world tried to interpret the results. Was this it? Was this the moment when humanity could finally claim it had answered that ancient question: are we alone? As an astrophysicist involved in the search for life beyond Earth, I can tell you that the results were not that moment. But that doesn’t make them any less exciting.

Kenton Allen

Long live the long lunch!

I keep on my bedside table, where others might place religious texts, Keith Waterhouse’s seminal The Theory and Practice of Lunch. Waterhouse, that magnificent chronicler of Fleet Street’s liquid lunches and disappearing afternoons, understood what modern efficiency cultists cannot: that civilisation is measured not by what we produce but by how elegantly we pause. His gospel preaches that a proper lunch requires ‘two-and-a-half hours of quality time at a quality establishment’, a commandment I try to observe with monastic devotion at least twice a week. The book’s spine is cracked at the chapter entitled ‘The Lunch Bore’.

Arthur Mann

Middle-class parents are creating a new breed of brat

I recently reconnected with an old friend; I went to his house and met his children for the first time. One of them looked up from his screen as we entered the room, faintly curious about the intrusion. The other, with his back to us and his face obscured by a hoodie, didn’t bother. My friend announced their names as if that was sufficient introduction, but it felt weird that the children did not say hello and that one of them did not even show his face. Was something wrong with him? It was a bit creepy. Obviously I let it go. Maybe he was chronically shy or autistic, or facially disfigured. But the brother didn’t behave very differently, so probably not.

Owen Matthews

How Rome copes with the Conclave

Ordinary Romans, famous for their cheerful working-class familiarity, loved Pope Francis for his common touch. For the first time in living memory, they will have the opportunity of turning out on the streets to say their final farewells to a Pope, as Francis willed that he be buried in the papal basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline hill rather than in the vaults of St Peter’s. His will be the first papal burial procession to the Basilica since Clement IX’s in 1669. Unlike his predecessors, though, Francis insisted on plainness, economy and simplicity. His first arrival in the Vatican as Pope was by public bus. His departure, in a plain wooden coffin, is likely to be equally low-key and dignified. The mortal Pope dies, but the Eternal City lives. And, indeed, is reborn.

Henry Hill

Conservatives all over the Anglosphere are paying the price for Trump

It is the great good fortune of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be united by a common language, and a misfortune of even greater magnitude that they share that language with the United States. America is a very different country to the four Commonwealth realms sometimes brigaded together under the ugly acronym ‘Canzuk’. It has a different constitution, a different culture and a very different history. Where for many years the four were partners (if hardly equal partners) in the common project of the Empire, the United States was, from its foundation, a determined and eventually successful enemy of the same.

Damian Thompson

The extraordinary scale of the crisis facing the next pope

At 9.47 a.m. on Easter Monday we heard the words ‘con profondo dolore’ from a cardinal standing in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta. Two hours earlier, Pope Francis ‘è tornato alla casa del Padre’ – ‘had returned to the house of the Father’. Most people won’t have noticed a curious detail: the cardinal was speaking Italian with a pronounced Irish brogue. The incoming pope will face challenges that dwarf those that confronted any in living memory Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the papal ‘Camerlengo’, was born in a Dublin suburb. Or, as a tabloid put it: ‘Interim Pope is a bloke called Kevin from Dublin.’ That’s an exaggeration, but the Camerlengo does occupy centre stage when the See of Peter falls vacant. He confirms that the Pope is dead.

Melanie McDonagh

Pope Francis had his priorities right

After Pope Francis emerged from the Gemelli hospital in Rome last month, a reflection attributed to him a few years ago returned to circulation. It was on ‘hospital’. Some of it was the usual, about how it’s where like meets unlike (‘In intensive care you see a Jew taking care of a racist’ etc). Some seems like standard homely Francis: ‘This life will pass quickly, so do not waste it fighting with people… Do not worry too much about keeping the house spotless.’ And it ended: ‘Love more, forgive more, embrace more… And leave the rest in the hands of the Creator.’ That was the disconcerting thing about Francis. Everything eventually boiled down to the love of God. It’s why even sound criticism of him somehow misses the mark.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

‘Jordan Peterson is a sad and angry man’: an interview with Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has a new book out, a slim, thoughtful introduction to Christianity. But that’s not quite why I went to Cardiff to visit him. I went because, although I admire the superstar culture warriors of the right, there’s something Williams is witness to which they lack. Like many readers, I think Rowan Williams pretty loopy on most subjects – Brexit, Islam, immigration, the dreaded trans debate – but Rod Liddle always says that Rowan is a holy man, and Rod is right. We sit opposite each other drinking tea in his book-lined living room. The 104th Archbishop of Canterbury is looking amiable but confused. ‘The Spectator has been fairly ripe on some of my views in the past,’ he says.

Nigel Biggar

How I found Christianity

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So when, at the age of 12, I screwed up my courage and came out as a Christian, Dad put his hand on my shoulder – for the only time – and said: ‘It’s OK, son; it’s just a phase.’ Now, as my Christian phase approaches its seventh decade, I find myself looking back and wondering what had happened to me. What caused me to risk that first venture of exposed dissidence? There were mediating institutions and people, of course.

John Rutter

The world reveres British music

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs, no one has yet highlighted the importance of music as a British export. As a representative of our choral tradition, I was treated with something like the reverence that would be accorded to a Brazilian footballer or a Russian chess player. My host, the regional choral supremo, knew all about our British choirs. His CD collection was filled with British choral recordings and he had just hosted the Tallis Scholars for a packed-out concert.

Olivia Potts

Lamb is for life, not just for Easter

Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are falling out of love with lamb. Meat consumption in Britain is at its lowest level since records began, and according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), lamb has been in particular decline for the past 20 years. We may feel we are supporting the sheep-farming industry, but the truth is a little more complicated There are a number of reasons for this: some people are trying to eat less meat for environmental or ethical reasons, while others don’t enjoy the richer taste of lamb compared with other meats. Perhaps most importantly, after a long period of rising in price more drastically than other meats, the cost of lamb reached record highs last year.