Features

Thursday

Katy Balls

Labour’s new approach to China 

The Foreign Secretary David Lammy will touch down in Beijing next week to pay his respects. Next year, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is expected to do the same. We haven’t seen this level of deference to the Chinese Communist party since 2019. Back then, Philip Hammond heaped praise on his hosts. He endorsed their Belt and Road initiative – of Chinese-funded infrastructure spanning the globe – and promised British co-operation ‘as we harness the “Golden Era” of UK-China relations’. The calls from Tory China hawks to label Xi’s empire ‘a systemic threat’ hold little sway with the new regime That was the high-water mark of Anglo-Chinese collaboration. George Osborne and David Cameron had courted the Chinese hard.

Wednesday

Fiona Bruce

How I keep Question Time audiences under control

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love – or it’s supposed to be. William Penn, good Quaker that he was, wanted his city to be a place of religious and political tolerance; a haven for those who’d been persecuted for their beliefs. There are quotations inscribed on walls everywhere about the power of love, selflessness and charity. Given how vicious and divisive this presidential election is, the message seems lost on both parties. I flew out to Philly this week for a special Question Time episode, the first time the programme has been to the US since 2008. One of our panellists has had to pull out at the last minute, so the hunt is on to find a replacement. This is a usual problem for QT. I’m more worried about the studio audience, since they will be unfamiliar with the format.

Christopher Howse

An ode to lamplighting

I was growing impatient with a recent blog by Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, promising progress, universal prosperity, ‘a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics’ through artificial intelligence. I won’t go over that ground now, because I suddenly sat up at a passing remark he made: ‘Nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter.’ Stephen’s task for Paddington council was to cycle round with his ladder fixing street lamps on the blink I’m not so sure. I used to know a lamplighter and I miss his company. His name was Stephen Fothergill, and in the 1980s he was a welcome sight in the French pub in Dean Street, Soho, late in the evening.

Thursday

Niall Ferguson and Jay Mens

Israel’s Iron Prime Minister

At home, the left sees him as cynical, conniving and corrupt; while the right sees him as tired, weak and unambitious. Abroad, he is almost universally loathed and distrusted. And yet no one can deny his Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international. Modern history has produced only two figures who fit this description. The first is Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The second is Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For Bibi – his nickname and the title of his recent autobiography – read Bibismarck. Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for almost 14 of the past 15 years, not quite the 19 years Bismarck served as German chancellor.

Matt Ridley

How Ed Miliband plans to conjure electricity out of nothing

Electricity is magical stuff. From a couple of tiny holes in a wall comes an apparently endless supply of invisible, weightless, silent ether that turns instantly into light, heat, motion or information at your command. It is a metaphor for the modern economy: we use pure energy to create useful outcomes in the real world. We found out last week that Britain has now for the first time achieved top spot, among 25 nations, in terms of the price we pay for this supernatural ichor, for both domestic and industrial use. This is a disaster. Electricity prices have doubled in Britain since 2019. They are 46 per cent above the International Energy Agency’s median for industrial and 80 per cent above the median for domestic electricity.

Nigel Havers

Are you Beatles or Stones?

You find me in the south of France, holed up in that inn of near perfection called La Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence. I escape here twice a year and marvel at how little has changed since the 1950s, when it was Mecca for artists of all types, painters such as Chagall and Picasso (Matisse was an early fan between the wars) and stars of stage and screen, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, all looking breathtakingly cool, smoking of course. One can still catch a glimpse of the fabulous Dame Joan C and her husband Percy sipping ice cold glasses of rosé. It is a place where the living is easy but civilised – not something one can say about London these days. Oh London, what have we done to you? ‘To be tired of London…’ Hmm, sorry Dr J, but that is no longer true.

Fraser Nelson

Reflections on 15 years in the editor’s chair

In the late summer of 2009, Andrew Neil invited me to his villa in the Côte d’Azur but didn’t say why. I was mystified. I was then political editor of The Spectator and in eight years of working closely with Andrew, the then chairman, he’d never hinted that he saw me as an editor. I certainly didn’t see myself as one. I was just a writer who knew nothing about how magazines were made. I’d never written a headline and didn’t even have a desk in the office. I wouldn’t know where to start. We put a notice on our fridge asking staff to make sure that two bottles of Pol Roger were chilling at all times But when Andrew offered me the job, I heard myself saying yes. Did I think I was good enough? Not even close.

Paul Wood

Israel is reshaping the Middle East in its favour

Iran has fallen into the trap set by Israel. It has taken the bait after months of failing to respond to a series of devastating – and humiliating – attacks, which decapitated its Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, and killed the leader of Hamas in Tehran. But the regime may have self-immolated by firing missiles at Israel on Tuesday night, an attack meant to inflict real harm – which inevitably means an Israeli response. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may now get the war that some have accused him of wanting all along: a war to destroy the regime in Tehran, fought with American help. The hardliners on both sides are running things. The past week has shown there is no such thing as ‘escalating to de-escalate’ – only escalation.

Wednesday

Cindy Yu

China’s fear and loathing of the Japanese

Chinese nationalism is a mixture of self-pity and cultural arrogance Ten-year-old Shen Hangping was walking to school when he was stabbed. Japanese on his father’s side, Chinese on his mother’s, he was a pupil at the Japanese School in Shenzhen. There are only a small number of these expat schools across China, and they have recently become targets of Chinese nationalist anger. Shenzhen was the second such attack in three months. In June, a knife-wielding man tried to board a bus full of children attending the Japanese school in Suzhou. The Chinese bus attendant held him off: he killed her instead.

Lloyd Evans

Inside the Welsh village where English speakers aren’t welcome

On a Saturday morning, no life stirs. The village café is closed and the ancient church of St Beuno’s is locked and deserted. Beside the stone porch stands a dusty glass case that advertises church services and parish gatherings. Not a single event is scheduled. This is the peaceful village of Botwnnog (pronounced Bot-oon-awg) in the Llyn peninsula, north Wales, whose council recently rejected a plan to build 18 houses for rent. Few Welsh words have found their way into English, even though we inhabit the same island The language chosen by the council made headline news.

Thursday

Colin Brazier

The death of widowhood

There were many tributes paid to the Jersey aid worker Simon Boas when he died of throat cancer in July, aged 47. In writing and speaking about his terminal diagnosis with courage and humour, he was admired on the island and beyond. My mother-in-law, having spent years working with aid charities, lives on Jersey and knew Simon well. So I listened with interest earlier this month to an item about him on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The host, Emma Barnett, had spoken to Simon days before he died. Now she was about to interview his widow. Or, as she referred to Aurelie Boas, ‘his wife’. As editorial mistakes go, this may not seem especially grievous. It is certainly common.

Flora Watkins

It may be too late to save trail hunting

There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is that a combination of complacency, arrogance and the failure to get the public onside is what did for hunting. It’s not really fair: arguably, without the disaster of the Iraq war, Tony Blair may not have felt he needed to chuck a piece of legislation at his backbenchers, like a juicy bone to a pack of hungry hounds. The hunting ban never was about animal welfare, but class hatred, Dennis Skinner declaring that the bill was ‘for the miners’. The ban, Blair later admitted, was ‘one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret’.

Jonathan Miller

Why French students want English uniforms

Béziers, France The École Mairan in Béziers in southern France is a happy neighbourhood elementary school housed in a superb renovated 19th-century hôtel particulier. In the middle of the medieval city, surrounded by both great houses and humbler tenements, it is attended by 120 pupils aged six to 11. There are the children of Algerian and Moroccan immigrants and the children of distinguished Biterrois families, with a sprinkling of Spaniards, Italians, Ukrainians and one American. Mairan is one of four schools in Béziers, and 100 in France, where this autumn children have started wearing school uniforms. So I went to Béziers to have a look. ‘The children love their uniforms.

Owen Matthews

What does ‘victory’ for Ukraine look like?

This week in New York Volodymyr Zelensky will present Joe Biden with a ‘Victory Plan’ for Ukraine. But how to define what ‘victory’ actually means? A fundamental and fast-widening distance is opening up over that question between Zelensky and his western allies – as well as inside Ukraine itself. Zelensky insists that the bottom line of a Ukrainian victory remains ‘the occupation army [being] driven out by force or diplomatically, in such a way that the country preserves its true independence and is freed from occupation’. He has also rejected the idea of a ceasefire, saying that any ‘freezing of the war or any other manipulations… will simply postpone Russian aggression to a later stage’.

Paul Wood

Is Israel trying to drag America into a war with Iran?

The American general David Petraeus famously asked of the invasion of Iraq: ‘Tell me how this ends.’ That’s the question as Israeli bombs and missiles fall on Lebanon and the few missiles Hezbollah has sent in response are intercepted. Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ seems paralysed with indecision. Does Benjamin Netanyahu take this as a win, the vindication of the enormous chance he took by opening a new northern front? Or, like a gambler intoxicated by success at the tables, does he press on? More airstrikes, followed by an invasion of Lebanon… and then the bombers fly on to Iran?  Some Israelis commentators are already calling this the Third Lebanon War (after the wars of 1982-2000 and 2006).

Katy Balls

Who’s on top in the Tory leadership contest?

In recent years, the Conservative party conference has become something of an irrelevance. Often it is little more than a networking event, filled with dull speeches, all carefully stage-managed by No. 10. But next week’s gathering in Birmingham will be one of those rare Tory conferences that decide the party’s future. The leadership race has gone on for so long that the conference will be a political talent contest, with the four remaining leadership candidates – Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick – setting out their stalls. ‘We know each other’s lines so well now that we could imitate each other,’ says one leadership contestant. ‘There is definite growing regret that it’s taking so long,’ says a member of the shadow cabinet.

The Spectator

Why the Tories lost – by the Tory leadership candidates

As the four candidates prepare to make their pitch at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, we quizzed them about their ideas and ambitions. Why did the Tories lose the general election? JAMES CLEVERLY: We lost the ear of the British public. They stopped listening to us. We over-promised and under--delivered on a load of issues so our election promises were met with real cynicism. People had literally closed their ears – and minds – to our arguments. Even if we had had the best policy platform in the world, people weren’t willing to give us the time of day. If we make fewer promises but make sure that we deliver on all of those promises, we will regain trust. But that means being disciplined.

Thursday

Boris Johnson

It’s time to let Ukraine join Nato

Kyiv The young amputee had a question. We were sitting once again in the rehab centre in Kyiv, and I was looking at the same sort of injuries I saw last year: the missing limbs, the cranial scars, the withered hands and feet that no longer obeyed their owners’ commands. The difference was that Vladimir Putin’s carnage had been inflicted on a new group of Ukrainians – noticeably younger than last year’s victims, and now including a woman. Once again, I shook their hands (where possible) and put my arms around them, and did my best to be reassuring to all, including the young man on the bed, who had lost his left leg up to the hip. ‘When are you going to let us use the Storm Shadow?’ he asked – amid a general murmur of agreement.

Matthew Hall

A chillingly seductive glimpse of assisted dying

A few weeks ago, I was present when my aunt, a Canadian citizen born in the UK, chose to die through euthanasia, or as it is euphemistically called in Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAiD. Being British, I wasn’t familiar with the process. What I saw horrified me, but it was also chillingly seductive. My aunt was 72 and in the early stages of motor neurone disease. She had lost the use of one arm but though frail, was living independently and had perfect mental acuity. She was an artist who had worked in the theatre for 40 years designing beautiful and elaborate costumes. For several decades following her divorce she had lived determinedly alone and was not prepared to become an invalid. She made the decision to die freely and against the wishes of her family.

Adrian Pascu-Tulbure

The joy of hiring an old banger

There is always much to look forward to on a holiday with friends in France (the day one supermarket sweep, boules under plane trees, foie gras on demand); but, for me, one of the greatest joys is the hire car. That’s entirely due to my indulging in the niche pastime of driving around in the worst, most clapped out vehicle possible. You can do this quite easily in France using an Airbnb-style platform called Turo which allows you to go directly to the – usually bemused – owner and, for not very much money, drive off in whatever they have to offer you. And so it was that I found myself this summer burbling down vineyard-flanked routes départementales in a 32-year-old, one-litre Peugeot with paint flaking off and every panel dented.