Features

Thursday

Hugh Schofield

Why is there no campaign to free novelist Boualem Sansal?

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government – and its cheerleaders on social media – and theanswer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind. Sansal, who is 80 and suffers from cancer, was arrested at Algiers airport on 16 November as he got off a plane from Paris. He has been in an Algiers prison ever since, with visits to hospital for treatment. His Parisian lawyer, François Zimeray, has still not been given a visa, so the charges are unclear.

Julian Glover

In the footsteps of Cecil Rhodes

In a scrubby paddock on the edge of Bulawayo, I walked up to a half-broken leatherwood tree growing in a tangle of old barbed wire. It looked no different to a million tough trees across Zimbabwe, the still-beautiful, still-friendly country which remains the most wonderful place in Africa. But this tree is exceptional: it is listed as a national monument. Beneath it, in October 1888, a concession was agreed which led Lobengula Khumalo, King of the Ndebele, to lose his lands to a consortium led by Cecil Rhodes. It’s disputed what Lobengula thought he was agreeing to when he made his mark on the treaty.

Michael Simmons

Is Britain funding organisations that wish us harm?

Frivolous state funding isn’t only going to chancers, the plain lucky and the devious, but also to those who would see Britain – and the West – come to harm. Just over a year ago, the National Secular Society (NSS) compiled a dossier for the Charity Commission which called for 44 charities that had ‘fuelled anti-Semitism and division’ and shown support for ‘Hamas and other anti-western actors’ to be investigated. In every case these organisations have kept their charitable status. The charities in the dossier have the stated purpose of ‘the advancement of religion for the public benefit’. In the NSS’s view, this is being used as cover for political agendas and extremist views – while the groups receive tax breaks and state funding.

Lisa Haseldine

How far-right might Germany go?

In the Thuringian city of Weimar, opposite the theatre where the National Assembly hashed out Germany’s constitution in 1918, stands the museum of the history of the Weimar Republic. ‘A spectre is rising in Europe – the spectre of populism,’ a plaque reads. ‘Forces long thought overcome seem to be returning to threaten the basis of democracy. The Weimar Republic and its neighbours knew the phenomenon only too well.’ It’s a warning that will be weighing on the mind of Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the man who will probably become Germany’s next chancellor. The federal election this Sunday is the culmination of a messy and fraught campaign.

Prue Leith

How to ski when you can’t ski

I was 30 when I first went skiing, and up for absolutely anything. I was a successful party caterer who had just opened my first restaurant. I had a food column for the Daily Mail, and I was about to open Leith’s cookery school. I was sporty, played tennis every Tuesday, rode polo ponies on Ham Common on Fridays and I loved to dance. I thought I could do anything. Why wouldn’t I make a skier? So when Harold Evans, renowned editor of the Sunday Times, was looking for journalists over 30 to report on learning to ski, I was a gung-ho volunteer. Harry had learnt to ski late, loved it, and as a result was on a mission to get everyone, however old, into the sport. Each of us was sent to a different resort, at different altitudes, and stayed in different accommodation.

Paul Wood

I was convinced by the cholesterol sceptics

It’s never a good thing when your cardiologist sounds alarmed on the phone. Come in tomorrow, he said: we’ll get you on the table. He wasn’t talking about cracking my chest, thank Christ, but threading a wire in through a vein to get a look at the heart, blow up a tiny balloon to stretch the artery, and maybe leave behind a metal tube or three. I wasn’t keen on that last part. Then I thought: serves me right. I should have avoided all those bacon sandwiches and steaks fried in butter. ‘The wages of sin is death.’ Probably should have taken the statins, too. But if you are, understandably, unwilling to take a fistful of pills every day for the rest of your life, there are some medical mavericks to confirm your decision.

Ian Williams

How China exploits the West’s climate anxiety

In the fight against climate change, China loves to present itself as the world’s White Knight. Armed with wind turbines and solar panels, EVs and batteries, it will rescue us from oblivion if only we would let it.  There’s no shortage of western politicians, academics and organisations who are happy to go along with the idea that China is an ally in the global green revolution. The argument, broadly put, is that whatever our differences on other things (trifles such as security, economics and human rights), surely we can agree on saving the planet. Rachel Reeves seemed to reach that conclusion when she returned from her visit to Beijing last month.

Michael Gove

Get real: the harsh lessons of our new world disorder

Sir Roger Scruton may not be the Prime Minister’s favourite author. Apparently Keir Starmer prefers Victoria Hislop. But as he prepares to travel to Washington next week, the PM could scarcely spend his time more wisely than burying his nose in The Uses of Pessimism – and the Dangers of False Hope, one of Scruton’s most powerful works. ‘Hope untempered by the evidence of history is a dangerous asset,’ says Scruton. ‘And one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.’ That is the correct, pessimistic, cast of mind with which to approach not just the war in Ukraine, and America’s ongoing commitment to Europe, but to international affairs overall.

Thursday

Flora Watkins

Smoking is sexy again

It’s a summer’s day in Suffolk, some time in 1992. My best friend Rebecca and I are both 14 and lying on our backs in a field. We have a packet of ten Silk Cut between us, and we are practising blowing smoke rings that will make us irresistible to boys. Everyone we fancy smokes: Slash, Kate Moss, half the Lower Sixth at the boys’ grammar school. It might be 40 years since Richard Doll and Austin Bradford-Hill made the link between smoking and lung cancer, but we don’t care. There’s Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise with his cowboy hat and a Marlboro Red. Johnny Depp – smoking in every sense – in just about everything. It is, durrrr, a truth universally acknowledged that pretty much anyone looks hotter with a cigarette.

Richard Brown

Britain’s shopfronts are a national embarrassment

A few weeks ago, a couple of men with ladders started work on a former bridal boutique at the end of my road. I’ve no idea how old the building is. Its pitched roof and intricate gable and the sort of pattern brickwork no one seems to bother with these days suggest it’s Victorian, but it could be older. Beneath the first-floor windows was a decorative cornice. Under that, between a pair of attractive corbels, was a slim wooden fascia upon which the name of the shop was painted in stencilled letters. The chaps with the ladders got rid of all that. They ripped out the timber and chucked it in a skip. The building houses an estate agent now – a flat aluminium fascia, double the size of the old one, informs you of the fact.

Andrew Kenny

The dark heart of South Africa’s Expropriation Act

Cape Town How damaging will South Africa’s Expropriation Act be? The legislation, which allows the state to seize private property without compensation, was signed late last month by President Cyril Ramaphosa. The act is consistent with the Marxist ideology of the South African Communist party, an ally of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). It’s claimed it will ‘redress the results of past racial discrimination’ and ‘undo the legacy of apartheid’ (among other platitudes). The reality, however, is that this legislation will likely do nothing to help the country’s majority black population who live in grinding poverty.

Matt Ridley

Will ‘The Seeker’ find the truth about the Covid lab leaks?

At the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, where ghosts of British nabobs look out over the racecourse, my neuroscientist wife spoke to an audience of businessmen in support of Robin Sengupta, a pioneering Newcastle neurosurgeon. He has founded a world-leading Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata where richer patients subsidise poorer ones. After a morning meeting doctors and patients, he showed us the land where an ambitious new medical school will soon emerge from the rice paddies and crayfish farms.

Lara Prendergast

The mysterious life of John R. Bradley

Working at The Spectator brings you into contact with intriguing people. One who stands out is John R. Bradley. He started writing for this magazine in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, having accurately predicted the Egyptian uprising three years earlier in his 2008 book Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs. If the West had assumed that democracy would follow the revolution, John believed otherwise, and instead suggested that Islamism would triumph across the Middle East. He quickly became an invaluable contributor to The Spectator. ‘The situation has developed almost exactly along the lines that John R. Bradley predicted,’ wrote Fraser Nelson in 2011. John’s knowledge of the Middle East was impressive.

Paul Wood

Does Trump deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

Donald Trump told reporters this week that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to free some of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. But, he went on, ‘they’ll never give it to me’. Trump’s chances of putting on white tie and tails in Oslo have receded to a distant speck with his plan to Make Gaza Great Again – by removing the Palestinians.  This proposal may have doomed the brittle ceasefire and jeopardised further hostage releases. It has made the prospect of a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel vanishingly small. It might also end up destabilising Jordan and Egypt. But the agent of chaos in the Oval Office is doubling down and no one, least of all Trump, knows how this will end.

Michael Simmons

How to stop the government splurging our cash

All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world--leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible. The British state makes the average drunken sailor look like a model of frugality. When William Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned notoriety for his pursuit of ‘candle end’ economies – no saving was too trivial if he could leave money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’.

Theodore Agnew

My impossible task as ‘minister for efficiency’

I am delighted that The Spectator is launching a campaign to highlight the grotesque levels of financial waste in government. Of course public sectors worldwide have always defaulted towards profligacy – but we are in different territory now. Our GDP per capita is declining: through immigration, the population is growing faster than the real economy is growing. We have no more capacity to borrow – we are already paying 25 per cent more than the Italian government for ten-year debt. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves love to talk bullishly about growth, but they don’t understand that taxing the productive sector more and more and discouraging employment through onerous new regulations will stifle the economy. That leaves public waste – £200 billion of unproductive spending.

Thursday

Elisabeth Dampier

‘Our side is significantly sexier’: an interview with Germany’s most controversial politician  

‘My knife is at your throat,’ says a Turkish barber, wielding a razor blade around Maximilian Krah’s face. Krah, one of the most controversial figures in Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, sits for a shave – and a grilling. The TikTok video of the conversation has racked up 2.8 million views. Does Krah hate foreigners, the bearded barber asks. No, but ‘eight million have come since 2013’, he says, and ‘too many don’t work and don’t want to work’. Does he hate Islam? Religion is good but ‘not as a reason to blow up people’. This isn’t quite what you’d expect from a member of the AfD but Krah is not your typical politician.

Kara Kennedy

MAGA Kids: How America’s youth went right

Washington, D.C. ‘What made you open a restaurant?’ I ask Bart Hutchins, the owner of Butterworth’s, a French-style bistro turned Republican hangout, frequented by the youthful wings of the Grand Old Party. It’s home to figures from the intellectual right such as Curtis Yarvin and darlings of New Right media including Natalie Winters, the increasingly slim White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. ‘Have you read Death in the Afternoon?’ Bart says. ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s by Hemingway.’ ‘I know.

Katharine Birbalsingh

What I learned from my meeting with the Education Secretary

Dear Secretary of State, thank you for meeting me and one of my deputies on Monday. You will have noticed in our meeting how disappointed we were with your responses to the questions teachers have about the government’s proposals. I assure you, we are not alone in that feeling. As teachers, we often hear politicians say how much they care about education. One of two things follows: either they turn out to be that rare politician who is truly interested in schools; or they are that all too common politician who simply wants to appear that way. Our meeting confirmed that you are firmly in the latter category. Politicians who truly want to raise standards for our most deprived communities would ordinarily be interested in hearing from the people who know best how to do it: teachers.

Alexander Raubo

Why young MAGA supporters are flocking to Remilia

The MAGA social scene was defined on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration by the Coronation Ball – perhaps the most exuberant celebration of the new ‘Golden Age’. The principal speaker was, unsurprisingly, Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first victory and the voice of the neo-reactionary core of the President’s movement. More surprising perhaps though was the Ball’s principal sponsor, Remilia Corporation, a conceptual art movement. It was as if a Reform UK rally were sponsored by the Turner Prize. After Bannon’s speech, a representative of Remilia, an artist operating behind the pseudonym L.B. Dobis, stood at the podium to speak about internet art and to outline Remilia’s plans to remake the world one meme at a time.