Features

Wednesday

Silkie Carlo

Has your local shop blacklisted you?

Britain’s obsession with surveillance is reaching new heights. Several of the UK’s largest retailers have quietly installed facial recognition checkpoints on their doorways and inside their shops. It means that automated identity checks are taking place on our high streets without customers even being aware of it. You won’t be informed if your photo is taken and added to a watchlist, and no police report is required The cameras look like any other CCTV cameras, except they take a biometric scan of every customer’s face, like at a passport e-gate. The facial recognition scans are then compared against a private database run by the software company Facewatch.

Thursday

Charlie Falconer and Charles Moore

‘Not all suffering can be relieved’: A debate on assisted dying

As Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill comes before the Commons, the former justice secretary Lord Falconer (who introduced a similar bill to the Lords) and The Spectator’s chairman Lord Moore debate assisted dying. ‘When people talk about the moral overreach of the state, they are blind to the fact the state is already there’ CHARLIE FALCONER: The law has effectively broken down. If you assist anybody to take their own life, you’re immediately guilty of an offence, irrespective of motive, and you can be sent to prison for a maximum of 14 years. Even the authorities no longer think that’s enforceable.

Tom Baldwin

Does anyone know what Keir Starmer is thinking?

Even at the best of times, Keir Starmer has remained tantalisingly out of reach for those who crave simple definitions. Before the election, he consistently defied demands to set out a big vision or draw straight dividing lines. He’s always more comfortable with ambiguity and complexity. As he liked to say during the final days of the campaign, ‘There’s always a “but” with me somewhere.’ Now, of course, he really isn’t having the best of times. All those ‘buts’ are piling up. The ill-disciplined briefing battle within his team appeared to elevate office politics above real politics. The Treasury decision to means-test pensioners’ winter fuel allowances was inept. Most damaging of all were the expensive freebies which smouldered on for almost a month.

James Heale

Inside the race for the Chancellor of Oxford

What do we mean these days when we talk about the British ‘establishment’? When Henry Fairlie coined the term in 1955 – in The Spectator, of course – he defined it as ‘the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’. A lot has changed in the past 70 years. The influence of the monarchy has diminished, the class system no longer holds sway, party politics is almost unrecognisable. Yet the idea of the establishment retains its powerful allure and, in the election of the next chancellor of Oxford University, we see how much it still matters to Britain’s 21st-century elite.

Rupert Harrison

Rachel Reeves has backed herself into a corner on the Budget

As a championship chess player, Rachel Reeves must know that the first few moves can be some of the most important of the game. In preparing her Budget, she appears to be starting her tenure as Chancellor from a position of strength. Her background in the Bank of England gives her institutional credibility, and the size of Labour’s majority means she faces little opposition in the Commons. But the truth is that her room for manoeuvre has been dramatically limited by decisions she has already made. Unforced early errors, as well as an election strategy that prematurely took options off the table, have left her with only a handful of choices, fewer of which are palatable.

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

Meloni’s migration strategy is working – and the rest of Europe is watching

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister, has this week achieved what the Tories failed so fatally to do with their doomed Rwanda scheme. Thanks to her determination and charm, Italy has become the first European nation to successfully offshore illegal migrants to a non-EU country. However bogus the claims of migrants, once they’re in the EU it’s virtually impossible to deport them  Under Meloni’s scheme, migrants picked up by Italian naval and coastguard vessels from small boats in the Sicilian Channel will be ferried directly to Albania, 750 miles away. They will not set foot in Italy. It is potentially a game-changer, particularly as voter fury across Europe forces politicians to do something to stop illegal migrants.

Mark Nayler

Meet England’s octogenarian matador

It’s a sunny October morning at a bull-breeding ranch north of Seville, and 82-year-old Frank Evans is preparing to step into the ring. Born in Salford, Evans is one of the few British men ever to become a professional bullfighter, or torero. There is something of the retired rock star about him. He is dressed in the traditional matador’s outfit of black trousers, white shirt and red-and-black waistcoat. Although a little frail, he is toned. His thinning hair is dyed brown but still reaches his shoulders. ‘There are a million people in the local cemetery who’d love to have my eye problem’ Evans and I are here for a tienta – a practice session in a private bullring, in which young cows and bulls are assessed for breeding.

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s Nato fantasy

Ukraine’s President Zelensky was in Downing Street last week – as well as Paris, Rome, Berlin and Dubrovnik – asking for Nato membership. In every city, he heard the same ‘not yet’ as he’d received in Washington last month. Some of Kyiv’s western allies believe membership is the only way to guarantee Ukraine’s independence. Russia has never attacked a Nato country, because of the Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one is an attack against all. Therefore, Ukraine will never be safe from Russia unless it joins. The US government wants to avoid the war that Ukrainian membership would oblige it to fight But there’s a fundamental flaw to this logic: Ukraine cannot join Nato in the foreseeable future.

Jonathan Maitland

The mystery of Huw Edwards’s missing phone

The best thing about being a playwright? The satisfaction of creativity. The worst? Press-night parties attended by friends, industry people and celebs. Playwright Terry Johnson says he knows writers who find such occasions so hellish they’ve been put off writing plays altogether. The problem is the corrosive, deeply unsettling belief that everyone is lying to you. Everyone knows the rules: on press night, say something nice, even if it was a giant turkey. No negatives. That’s the critic’s job. But writers know this, so never believe any compliment, ever, even if the person paying it is telling the truth. The only time a writer can be sure of something is when they hear the dreaded words ‘You did it again!’ or ‘What an achievement!

Thursday

Max Jeffery

Meeting the Chagos islanders of Crawley

Departing Gatwick train station, with nine minutes till Crawley, I tried to get in the head of a Chagossian. In 2002, Tony Blair gave everyone from the Chagos Islands British citizenship, permitting 10,000 Chagossians to live wherever they liked in the UK. About 3,500 have chosen Crawley. And what a weird thing to do. They took a 6,000-mile Air Mauritius flight to Gatwick airport to start a new life, then settled just a mile from the runway. Why so close? I was visiting Crawley to meet these people I didn’t understand, to find out what they made of our government handing over their islands to Mauritius. On the train I clicked through a few Facebook groups and found a man named Maxwell Evenor who said he was around to talk.

Marcus Walker

Why C of E bishops are so bland

Nolo episcopari. These were the words a person was expected to say on being offered an episcopal see. It basically translates as ‘Don’t bishop me!’ and goes back to at least St Ambrose, who so wanted to avoid being made a bishop that he skipped town. The Church of England has worked itself into a new position, Nemo episcopari: nobody will be bishoped. In the past year, the process for appointing new bishops to Ely and Carlisle fell apart as the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) decided not to appoint any of the shortlisted candidates. This has created a sense of crisis in the Church, and an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops was held after a report was hastily drafted by the Bishop of London.

Alexander Downer

Britain’s foreign policy is increasingly feeble

For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, it’s heartbreaking to watch the western countries fail to defend the interests of liberal democracy. The free world is being challenged on three fronts, by Russia, Iran and China, all of whom threaten the international order established so painstakingly after the second world war. The West should be standing up for its values, yet even Britain, the great bastion of democracy, the country that heroically held out alone in 1940-41, seems to have lost the will to fight. The fact that the government has transferred sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is symptomatic of a country that no longer has geopolitical perspective. Britain is obsessed with its own shame over its imperial history – and has been for quite some time.

Emily Rhodes

The ladies who punch

Double jab, right, hook body, duck, right… Right, left, right, upper, four hooks… Ten straight punches… And ten more… Twenty roundhouse kicks… Now the other leg… When I tell people that I’ve started kickboxing, they tend to think they’ve misheard. It’s true I’m not who one might think of as a typical fighter. I’ve spent my life working with books and now along with the books I juggle three kids and a dog. The closest I usually get to fighting is when I drag my whippet away from a scuffle in the park, or get elbowed out of the way in the school bake-sale scrum.

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.