Features

Thursday

Paul Wood

Can anything stop a full-scale conflict in the Middle East?

The fact that the Middle East stands on the brink of a catastrophic war can be explained by a scene from The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s preposterous but entertaining series on Netflix about aristocrats and sarf London drug-dealers. The dim eldest son of a duke is in trouble with a vicious gangster, who makes him dress up as a chicken and cluck and dance while the whole excruciating spectacle is filmed. Eventually the humiliation is too much for the aristo: he gets the family Purdey and blasts the gangster in the face – even though he knows that there will be terrible consequences.

Wednesday

Edmund West

How I learned to embrace my autism

I’m autistic, I teach autistic children and I care for autistic adults, but I never kid myself that we are better than other people. When I asked a fellow autistic man if he could name any famous autistic people, he replied: ‘Hitler and Einstein.’ I love his answer because it punctures the romanticism around autism. There are evil autistic people, as well as geniuses. Was Hitler autistic? We’ll never know for sure, but he showed several symptoms. People who met him found that once he started talking, he would not stop. He was also nocturnal, had an addictive personality and developed lifelong obsessions (in his case, racial purity). Around half of all the people referred to the anti-radicalisation programme Prevent are autistic males.

Thursday

David Whitehouse

Aliens exist? Prove it

At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio there is, it is rumoured, a secret underground room where a crashed alien spacecraft is kept. It’s warm to the touch, buzzing with a strange energy, an indication of technology light years ahead of ours. Meanwhile, over at Groom Lake Air Force Base in Nevada, otherwise known as Area 51, there are apparently more alien spaceships, some intact, as well as the preserved bodies of alien pilots. Is it true? Well, a recent survey indicated that half of the US population believed their government was covering up evidence of aliens. As someone involved in the scientific search for life in space, however, I put that down to poor journalism, a lack of critical thought and shallow scientific knowledge.

James MacMillan

The mystery of teaching composition

Summer study courses for young composers have been popular for a few generations. After the second world war, up-and-coming experimental composers started flocking to places like Darmstadt in Germany for the Internationale Ferienkursen für Neue Musik. Olivier Messiaen taught there in the late 1940s and 1950s, when among his students were Stockhausen and Boulez. Attending the 1980 course as an undergraduate, I benefitted from a lesson with Brian Ferneyhough and conversations with Wolfgang Rihm, who died last week and was described in one obituary as ‘the last great German composer’. In the US, the summer activities at places such as Tanglewood and Aspen have become part of the learning process for many young composers over the years.

Peter Krijgsman

Beware the bat police

My friend Andrew is angry. He has just had the bat people round to look at his building project in Swanage. There was no evidence of bats that they could find, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. A full survey would be required. In total the non-existent bats in our village hall cost the parish more than £2,500 I advised him to pay up and not dwell on the madness, but his ire reminded me of my own recent experience with the bat fuzz. From 2018 until this June, I chaired the committee responsible for refurbishing a village hall deep in rural Somerset. As law-abiding and nature-loving people, we followed our surveyor’s stern instruction and did all the bat-friendly things we needed to do before starting the work.

James Heale

Woody Johnson: What a second Trump term would mean for the UK

If Donald Trump does return to the White House, then another restoration could soon follow. Woody Johnson, a confidant of the president since the 1980s, served as his man in London from 2017 to 2021 and is now tipped for a second spell as ambassador. ‘What I know about President Trump is if he asks you to do something, you probably do it,’ Johnson says. ‘So, it depends on what he would want me to do, if anything. If he would want me to do something, of course I would consider it.’ When we meet at the Republican National Convention in the splendour of Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel, it is just five days after a would-be assassin’s bullet narrowly avoided killing Johnson’s old friend. ‘He’s got divine inspiration or divine help. That’s the only way that happened.

Jonathan Miller

The cult of Bedales

Another of my ageing Bedales school cohort has died and so there’s an ad hoc reunion in his honour at the pub in Steep, the bucolic village near Petersfield, scene of our youth, where we used to sneak out to smoke and drink when the teachers weren’t looking. Which they often weren’t. Bedales implanted itself here in deepest Hampshire in 1900, a pioneering co-educational boarding school, quickly patronised by British and European progressivist-bourgeois-bohemian-leftist artists, writers and intellectuals. It has been chi-chi ever since. Since the place was co-educational, plenty of sex education went on behind the bike sheds From its rustic origins, the school has grown and grown and now dominates the no longer quite so sleepy village.

Adrian Usher

Let prisoners phone home

‘A society is measured by the treatment of its prisoners,’ Winston Churchill said. Last year, in England and Wales, every three and a half days a prisoner killed themselves. What does this say about our society? Perhaps you think: why should we care – aren’t there better things to worry about than criminals committing suicide? But the suicide rate in prisons is actually, surprisingly, a measure of the safety of society at large, because those who kill themselves in their cells represent the tip of an iceberg of despair within the prison population. It’s an indication of just how desperate life inside is – and when prisoners are feeling desperate, you can be sure that, when they are released, they are far more likely to reoffend.

Katy Balls

Keir Starmer’s plans to soften Brexit

Anew political bromance is brewing on the continent. Keir Starmer has met Olaf Scholz, his German counterpart, three times since he entered Downing Street last month. Already the two men have found plenty in common. Both are social democrats, both are lawyers from similar backgrounds and both went through a socialist phase before selling themselves on competence. ‘Charisma is largely alien to them,’ said Der Spiegel after the two met recently at Blenheim Palace. ‘Perhaps this is why they like each other so much.’ Most importantly, Starmer and Scholz are both very keen for a new, closer relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Thursday

Paola Romero

Evita meets Thatcher: the woman fighting Venezuela’s autocracy

Maria Corina Machado is showing the world how opposition politicians can fight an autocrat. When President Nicolas Maduro tried to thwart her campaign by banning her from taking domestic flights, she drove between her rallies on a motorcycle. When he then banned her from running as a candidate in Venezuela’s presidential election, which takes place this Sunday, she found a retired diplomat to run as her proxy. Without even being on the ballot, she may bring down Maduro’s socialist regime. Machado mixes the crowd-pulling allure of Evita Peron with the politics of Margaret Thatcher Venezuela is used to left-wing populists whipping up crowds by railing against America, the rich and capitalism in general. Machado is their equal and opposite.

Max Jeffery

Olympics on steroids: the millionaire behind the Enhanced Games

Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. ‘Before Peter had kids, we’d go on these holidays around the world. Small group of us. Gay, tech, venture capital, founder-types,’ says D’Souza, an Australian businessman. ‘It’s quite a close-knit little community.’ Lately, because of the kids, they’ve partied at Thiel’s place, an $18 million compound on a man-made island off Miami’s turquoise coast. In December 2022, days before Thiel’s annual party, D’Souza came up with the idea of an ‘Enhanced Games’. The Olympics – but all the athletes dope. ‘That’s what I do over Christmas, when no one else is working,’ D’Souza says.

Hannah Moore

The rise of the ‘divorce influencer’

On Woman’s Hour recently, Anita Rani and her guests set out to celebrate the positive sides of a woman’s midlife. Forget the crisis: your forties and fifties could instead be a time for change, a refresh. You could take up a new hobby, they said, or a new exercise regime. Or you could get a divorce! What’s alarming is that this sort of discussion isn’t unusual. I regularly spot articles in newspapers and on social media that talk about divorce as if it’s just the latest wellness trend. They usually go like this: a middle-aged woman walks out on a long marriage and insists that she’s never been happier, that she’s free, that she’s ‘starting a new chapter’ in her life. She then demands through a rictus grin that you be happy for her.

Yascha Mounk

How supporting Trump became cool

For the past decade, the basic lines of conflict in American public life seemed clear. Donald Trump was pitted against the establishment, the ‘basket of deplorables’ who supported him against the elites. The reality was more complicated. Yes, plenty of rich and powerful Americans supported Trump and plenty of poorer Americans on the fringes of society were against him. But in a certain section of society the disdain for Trump was unequivocal. Among the country’s elite – at Harvard and Stanford, at Google and Goldman, near the beaches of the Hamptons and the mountains around Aspen – anyone who defied the anti-Trump consensus could expect swift consequences for their social standing. There have been constant melodramas over this form of social ostracism.

Damian Thompson

The plotting to find the next Pope

The Hollywood adaptation of Conclave, Robert Harris’s thriller about a conspiracy to rig a papal election, won’t be in cinemas until November. But judging by the trailer released last week, its starry cast, crafty plot and spectacular cinematography – jets of smoke scattering cardinals as an explosion shatters the Sistine Chapel – will instantly erase memories of The Two Popes, Netflix’s risible Oscar-nominated fantasy in which Benedict XVI secretly chooses Cardinal Bergoglio as his successor.

Kate Andrews

The curious rise of Kamala Harris

I’m struck just in your presence,’ a news anchor gushed to Kamala Harris in January. The Vice President beamed, nodding for her interviewer to continue. ‘You hear candidates suggesting that a vote for President Biden, because of his age, is a vote for you.’ The reporter paused: ‘And that is hurled as an insult.’ Harris explained that this is the price women pay for professional success – in her case, rising from first female attorney general in California to state senator to Vice President of the United States. ‘I love my job,’ Harris concluded, wrapping up the kind of hard-hitting interview the media tends to throw her way. Insult or not, the suggestion that a vote for Biden was a vote for Harris turned out to be true.

Freddy Gray

Does Donald fear Kamala?

On Monday, Donald J. Trump sent out an urgent campaign memo. ‘Joe Biden just dropped out of the race, and now, his replacement has just been announced,’ it said. ‘It’s me!’ How typically Donald. If Trump were worried about the sudden replacement of Biden with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, he’d never show it. He’s already busy pointing towards polls that suggest ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ is the least popular vice president in history. He’s calling her ‘Dumb as a rock’ and emphasising her abysmal performance as Biden’s ‘border tsar’. Trump’s campaign staff, meanwhile, are insisting that they knew all along Harris would at some point be the Democratic nominee and their attack lines are well-rehearsed.

Justin Marozzi

A visit to the world’s worst capital city

Nouakchott in Mauritania is often referred to as the ‘worst capital city in the world’. That may be a little harsh, but it is difficult to recommend it to Spectator readers as a must-visit destination. The heat is savage, the poverty endemic, corruption is off the scale and this west African country is one of the last on Earth where you can still find hereditary slavery. Which is why I’m here. Troubles begin on arrival. A succession of three police officers grill me in the airport. Why have I come to Nouakchott, who am I working for, who am I planning to meet, why, what are their telephone numbers, what am I going to talk to them about, where am I staying? They are flummoxed by the word ‘historian’.

Thursday

Adam Frank

Under pressure: what might life look like on another planet?

Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting Sun-like stars throughout the universe. This discovery ended 2,500 years of debate about whether worlds existed beyond our solar system, but it came with a shock. The most common kind of planet in the universe is the type of world that doesn’t exist in our small corner of the cosmos: what astronomers call ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Sub-Neptunes’, planets with much greater masses than ours and which could, in theory, sustain life. Astronomers concluded a little over a decade ago that every star in the night sky hosts a family of worlds. Importantly for the search for life, one in five of those stars will have a planet in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone (sometimes referred to as the ‘habitable zone’).

Sean Thomas

Keep Michelin men out of our hotels!

It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, what with the football, the election, the Ukraine war, the horrors of Gaza, the assassination attempt and the revelation that the most powerful human on the planet has the intellectual sharpness of a daffodil. But in the past few weeks, the world of travel has been roiled by a surprising innovation: Michelin stars for hotels. Though the stars are stylised as ‘keys’. This may not seem like big pommes de terre, but it is quite important. Because, if the concept takes off and hotels start striving for Michelin accolades, then we can expect the best and most ambitious to go the same way as Michelin-mad restaurants. And that will be bad. You could argue it shouldn’t be a problem, as hotels already have star ratings.

Svitlana Morenets

From the front line of the battle to save Kharkiv

Moonlight shines on the wings of the reconnaissance drone as it glides over the field. Within minutes, the Leleka – Ukrainian for ‘stork’ – crosses the border into Russia’s Belgorod region. The soldiers monitoring it wait in their car, hidden in the undergrowth. Soon the image on their laptop freezes: the Russians are jamming the signal. They manoeuvre the Leleka back and forth, eventually finding a gap in the enemy’s electronic defences. The drone is back in contact, sending footage of Russian roads and towns. The hunt for enemy troops begins. Some 30,000 Russian soldiers are amassed north of Vovchansk, a Ukrainian border town that was attacked two months ago.