Features

Wednesday

Justin Marozzi

Thanks to Trump, Tehran is winning

Among examples used to demonstrate the law of unintended consequences is the possibly apocryphal ‘cobra effect’. British colonial administrators in Delhi once offered a bounty for dead cobras to control the city’s snake population. Enterprising Indians immediately started breeding cobras. When the British cottoned on and cancelled the bounty, the breeders released the snakes, resulting in even more cobras. Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war with Iran may be having a similarly unwanted effect, only with a more dangerous cobra. Rather than removing a cornered regime, they have helped to strengthen it, elevating the influence of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at the expense of both the Supreme Leader and his top mullahs.

Charlie Methven

Might England just do it in the World Cup?

The World Cup has never been just a football tournament. Even if we don’t realise it at the time, it tends to reveal something about us. In Germany 2006, it was all about Baden-Baden and the WAGs: the shallowest point of that celebrity-obsessed age. For more romance and happier memories, go back to Italia 90. Pavarotti bellowing ‘Nessun dorma’, Gazza blubbing, Maradona weaving his magic, Roger Milla hip-wiggling the corner flag. Italia 90 was the last gasp of the old order: modestly paid players with mullets and perms; heaving terraces; the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia playing their last tournaments.

Elisabeth Dampier

‘Make Germany normal again’: an interview with Germany’s exiled spy chief

Hans-Georg Maassen is an unlikely dissident. In his trademark three-piece suits and small glasses, he looks more like a law professor. Indeed, that is what he studied, earning a doctorate on the legal status of asylum seekers in international law. This bourgeois exterior is the perfect cover for a man who was Germany’s top spy, charged with protecting the country from the far-right and Islamists. But now he is no longer under the quiet protection of the German state; he is its victim. He is under investigation from the agency he once led, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). Like George Smiley, Maassen is a remnant of an older and more powerful country, soldiering on in spite of the decline, trying to preserve what he can.

Christopher Howse

Norman Balon was much more than ‘London’s rudest landlord’

Norman Balon, who has died at the age of 99, missed the point when he defined himself as ‘London’s rudest landlord’. There, I think, he mingled self-publicity and self-defence. People didn’t go to the Coach and Horses, Soho, to be shouted at by him; they shouted at each other quite enough. Really he was the actor-manager of a twice-daily claustrophobic, drunken extemporisation in his pub which embodied bohemianism and self-destruction in the last two decades of the 20th century. Remember that 40 years ago the Coach was thick with cigarette smoke, that many customers were drunk daily, at lunchtime, and that no one was fearful of what they said. Things were not then as they are now. The Spectator contributed a lot to Norman’s decades of celebrity.

Thursday

Patrick Smith

Why I take frog poison

You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What you do not picture is a fourth-floor flat on an east London estate, a woman wafting sage around your head and the slow realisation that you have just handed over £150 to be – quite literally – poisoned. This is kambo. And at the lowest ebb of my late thirties, becalmed in a miasma of self-loathing and suffering from PTSD following a moped accident in Thailand, I had decided it was precisely what I needed. Made from the dried skin secretions of a giant monkey frog, it is also, as of last month, suspected of having killed its first Briton.

Wednesday

James Heale

Can Reform see off the threat from Restore?

Nigel Farage has always prided himself on being able to see off any threat from his right flank. But now a new force has emerged in the form of his ex-colleague Rupert Lowe. When the two Reform MPs fell out 15 months ago, friends shared memes of Farage’s past fallen rivals ascending to heaven. ‘Come and join us, Rupert!’ they exhorted. Instead, Lowe fought back, setting up his own party, Restore Britain. In the Makerfield by-election on 18 June, one poll puts Restore on 7 per cent– enough to stop Reform and hand the seat to Labour’s Andy Burnham. Restore’s strategy is simple: use Farage’s playbook against him. Like Farage, Lowe has put his faith in social media, building up a noisy following that can then be turned into a campaigning force.

Michael Simmons

True neoliberalism has never been tried

Friedrich Hayek once argued that if you put the word ‘social’ in front of a noun, the meaning was negated. Social justice wasn’t about due process; social democracies didn’t safeguard freedom. For those on the left, who can never have enough social-isms, there is a more toxic prefix. If you want to damn something, stick a ‘neo’ in front. Nothing is quite as wicked as a neoconservative, but coming dangerously close is a neoliberal. Liberals were once generally supposed to be the squishiest of centrists. But listen to the men and women making the weather in British politics now, and you’d imagine that neoliberals were the horsemen of the apocalypse. Andy Burnham has blamed ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ for the problems faced by workers in Makerfield, and indeed beyond.

Olenka Hamilton

Decluttering is the ultimate act of love

‘You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul for all eternity,’ I once said half-jokingly to my husband over a glass of wine. We were having one of our regular conversations about what he was going to do about his late uncle’s possessions, which had arrived at our house in lorry-loads about a year after we had married. ‘Why don’t you do half an hour of sorting every weekend? I will help you,’ I would suggest in reference to the multiple barns, basements and attics at our farm, which were now piled high with three generations’ worth of male hoarding. But with an increasing number of children in the house and no sense of urgency, progress was slow.

Lisa Haseldine

Russia won’t give up Armenia without a fight

Since January, Karapetyan, leader of the Strong Armenia party, has been unable to leave his hilltop mansion to campaign ahead of Armenia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday. Last year, he waded into a fight between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the country’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, leader of the Civil Contract party. His call for Pashinyan to stop pursuing clergymen critical of Pashinyan’s efforts to establish peace with neighbouring Azerbaijan was interpreted as a call to overthrow the government. Karapetyan was arrested, interrogated and spent six months in pre-trial detention before his sentence was commuted to house arrest. He denies the charge. How do you fight an election if you’re under house arrest?

Peter Frankopan

The real ‘Thucydides Trap’ Beijing and Washington must avoid

These are good times to be a scholar of the classical world. Last summer, Donald Trump issued an order that all federal architecture needed to be ‘beautiful’, noting that the Founding Fathers ‘wanted America’s public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue’. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had therefore ‘consciously modelled the most important buildings in Washington, D.C., on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome’. It was time to go back to these principles, said Trump. From now on ‘classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings’ in the District of Columbia.

Ruaridh Nicoll

Cuba is next on Trump’s hit list

It’s hot in Havana. The summer’s electrical storms have arrived, lighting up the sky, while down on the ground we’ve been without power for 16 hours, meaning no sleep. The four-month-old US oil blockade is biting, but Cuba’s government still refuses to bend the knee to Washington, so surveillance aircraft are circling. An aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, has arrived in the neighbourhood. We expect an attack at any moment. Donald Trump has made it clear that after Venezuela and Iran, Cuba is next on his list for decapitation. His administration wants a change of government and the economy opened up. Cuba’s 95-year-old ex-president Raul Castro has been indicted for murder, opening the way for an abduction like the one in Caracas in January.

Peter Pomerantsev

How Iran turned Trump’s propaganda against him

On 19 November 1941, King George and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Woburn Abbey, home of Britain’s covert propaganda war against the Nazis. Surrounded by a park full of rare monkeys, and among corridors bearing Old Masters, the King and Queen were presented with ‘Britain’s Secret Army’, a fleet of radio stations that broadcast subversive content deep into enemy territory. Sefton Delmer, who before the war had been a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, presented his new German station. While the officious BBC German Service was lecturing Germans about the virtues of democracy and the evils of fascism, Delmer was trying something different.

Wednesday

Michael Gove

The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians

I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope. He has produced the most powerful political document of the year, taking on the greatest challenge of our times. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, deals with the changes which will be wrought to all our lives by artificial intelligence in the months and years ahead. AI will transform our economies and societies massively and irrevocably; it will change what it means to be human; it may even mark the end of humanity itself. If it takes the Pope to alert us to this revolution then perhaps the Reformation wasn’t such a good idea after all.

William Atkinson

‘Do you know the local MP?’ ‘Aye, she runs the sauna’: my Shetland dispatch

The Shetland Islands The SNP have had better weeks. It’s strange to think that it was only this month that the party won a staggering fifth term in office, despite independence being no closer, and a record of failure on everything from education to drug deaths. Perhaps the most remarkable result for the SNP leader John Swinney was the election of Hannah Mary Goodlad in the Shetland Islands. Since 1950, this was the first time these islands had voted for someone other than the Liberals or Lib Dems. Goodlad triumphed after a vigorous campaign featuring windswept social media videos and three visits from Swinney; before her election, she ran an outdoor sauna business.

Owen Matthews

Is the West deserting Ukraine at precisely the wrong moment?

Moscow is coming under direct drone attack, the Russian economy is creaking, patriotic bloggers are ever more apocalyptic in their predictions of military disaster and evidence is piling up that Russia’s elites are becoming seriously disillusioned with the war and Vladimir Putin himself. Is this the moment for Britain to desert Ukraine by easing sanctions and refusing to commit more money to Kyiv’s military? Last week, the British government issued licences for the import of gasoline products from Russia refined in a third country. No. 10 also approved  licences for British companies to continue to service tankers carrying Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Julie Burchill

Your mocktail is pathetic

Mocktails. Even the name sounds dodgy. Who is this apparently innocuous canned drink mocking, pray? Probably you, if you’ve shelled out close to four quid for a can of artfully tinted water. Like much today, mocktails in tins make me want to cross my arms and make a ‘humph’ noise. When I was a girl, you drank alcohol from the age of 14 or – if you were on primitive antibiotics for VD, this being the sexed-up 1970s – you drank plain tonic with a twist, hoping that no one would spot the absence of gin and mock you as a milquetoast. In the 1980s, my American father-in-law introduced me to a cocktail without alcohol, the Shirley Temple. The contempt in the name was clear: composed of ginger beer, lime juice and grenadine, with a cherry on top, this was a drink for small children.

James Delingpole

Remembering my gloriously unfiltered father

Nothing can prepare you for the death of your father because, by definition, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. You have these ideas in your head about how it’s going to be: the children gathered at the bedside saying all the moving, important things that hitherto they’d held back; the fond paternal benison. But the reality, in my experience, is unlike the scenes in literature. My dad couldn’t wait to get rid of us. He was far too preoccupied with the intimate, difficult and very personal business of dying to indulge our let’s-pretend-everything’s-normal chit-chat. His last words to me – perhaps to anyone – were: ‘I’m feeling really buggered. Call me a nurse.

Matt Ridley

Save the curlew!

Unlike last year, when drought caused many curlews in the Durham dales to delay breeding, this has been a great spring for them. Last week, wherever I walked, anxious curlew parents were whinnying above me like aerial ponies. At one point I stepped carefully aside as a day-old chick, clumsy on its oversized blue legs, tried to hide in the cotton grass. The Pennines, North York moors and eastern Scotland are the world stronghold of the curlew, or ‘whaup’, a bird whose bubbling aria fills the sky over these moors in spring so fully that you cannot find a one-minute gap of silence between their songs in a typical April dawn (I’ve tried).

Michael Henderson

Who ruined the Southbank Centre?

Europe’s largest hub of the performing arts, which great musicians the world over once called home, is now a grim laboratory, obsessed with a ‘diversity’ that taints everything it touches. We hate, thought Keats, things that have ‘a palpable design upon us’. Under the direction of Misan Harriman, chairman of trustees, the Southbank Centre increasingly resembles a political boot camp, where slackers are herded for re-education. The Royal Festival Hall, its centre-piece, is a dump. Where there used to be a well-stocked bookshop and a place to buy records, there are now battalions of laptop-tapping students and scruffs of all ages, some plainly up to no good. And the transformation has been deliberate. ‘No snobs here’ is the message.

Damian Thompson

Weight-loss drugs killed my appetite for life

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as he explained in a recent interview, he was keen to try a GLP-1, one of those drugs that have revolutionised weight loss in the past five years. You can understand why he was curious. Ozempic or Mounjaro might appear to have nothing in common with artificial intelligence, but both phenomena have created a sensation that we’re entering an era of accelerating and uncontrollable change. Alas, he screwed it up. He had someone inject him with a megadose, puked all night and then lay in bed for days ‘staring at a white ceiling thinking nothing’, not only feeling no urge to eat but also no ‘desire for anything’.