Features

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

In defence of forgiveness

It is often the small constants in the culture that give the game away. Much of the news today is not about anything significant, but rather a sort of lower gossip. Every day, some new scandal bubbles along. Someone is found to have said something once, often a long time ago. The culprit is shamed and condemned. Take the case of Frank Hester, a donor who has given an estimated £10 million to the Conservative party. Few had heard of him until recently. Then it was reported that at a meeting at his company headquarters in 2019, Hester said that Diane Abbott MP made him ‘just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot’. Cack-handed, and unfunny, this comment was an easy one to condemn.

Candida Crewe

The utter horror of UHT milk

On a trip to Italy via Paris last month, my travelling companion and I went to the Gare de Lyon at sparrows to catch a train to Rome. We badly wanted coffee. I came to coffee late in life and am infantile and uncool in my love of frothy buckets of what is effectively a hot coffee milkshake. It is almost all about the milk, preferably whole and organic but, at the very least, fresh. So it was that Starbucks – which uses conventional milk in the UK – twinklingand open in the middle of the freezing station, made the heart lift. I recognised in my childhood that the French did everything better than us except for two things: loos and milk I took one sip and nearly spat it out. That inimitable taste and stench of UHT, or ultra-high temperature processed milk, made me heave.

Justin Brierley

A Christian revival is under way in Britain

Tom Holland recently invited me to attend a service of Evensong with him at London’s oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great. Holland, who co-hosts the phenomenally popular The Rest is History podcast, has been a regular congregant for a few years. He began attending while researching Dominion, his bestselling book which outlined the way the 1st-century Christian revolution has irrevocably shaped the 21st-century West’s moral imagination. It also recounts how Holland, a secular liberal westerner who had lost any vestige of faith by his teenage years, came to realise he was still essentially Christian in terms of his beliefs about human rights, equality and freedom. Christianity is not just a useful lifeboat for stranded intellectuals.

Harry Mount

Could I find love at the British Museum?

Mirabile dictu, as we Latin lovers like to say. In other words, wonderful news! Attractive women have fallen for ancient Rome – and for classicists. Well, that’s what the British Museum thought when it cooked up its advertising campaign for its new show, Legion: Life in the Roman Army, about Roman legionaries. The Museum put up a controversial social media post, promoting the exhibition as an opportunity for single women to find single men. I spotted a lissom blonde in green T-shirt and tie-dye trousers. We fell in step as we approached the gift shop The post read: ‘Girlies, if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign to go to the British Museum’s new exhibition, Life in the Roman Army, and walk around looking confused. You’re welcome x.

Yascha Mounk

Why the British think differently from Americans

When I first started teaching undergraduates at Harvard, the grading system the university employed struck me as very odd. Even ambitious students at top colleges in the United States see it as their job to answer any essay question in the most thorough and reasonable way. They regurgitate the dominant view in scholarly literature in a competent manner. If they pull this off without making major errors, they fully expect to get an A. And with grade inflation rampant in the Ivy League, they usually do. This attitude has had a significant influence on American public life. If you read an opinion piece in the New York Times or the Washington Post, its basic thesis is often utterly unsurprising.

Thursday

Geoff Hill

The disruptive comeback of Jacob Zuma

Johannesburg For a decade to 1973, Jacob Zuma – or JZ as he is known – was an inmate of Robben Island, the infamous prison built on a 1,300-acre slab of rock four miles off the South African coast. A fellow inmate was Nelson Mandela, also inside for treason. Both went on to become presidents of South Africa; but whereas Mandela had the Robben Island prison shut down and turned into a national monument, JZ, who has once again set his sights on high office, now wants it re-opened. In 2018 Zuma was removed from office by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), accused of theft and embezzlement. It’s bizarre that he has now made a return to politics in the run-up to the May presidential election, but so far his brand of patriotic populism has once more proved appealing.

Matt McDonald

Inside America’s stand against TikTok

Washington, DC Earlier this month, the video app TikTok started sending urgent push notifications to its 170 million American users. ‘Congress is planning a total ban of TikTok,’ it said. ‘Speak up now.’ The company called on TikTokers to defend their ‘constitutional right to free expression’ and provided a handy link so that ‘businesses, creators and artists’ could all contact their representatives directly and urge them to vote down the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. An army of angsty teens was activated but the effort backfired.

David Mitchell

Japan shows up Britain’s impoverished councils

I’m halfway through a stay in Japan, the land of the free public toilet. City squares, riverside walks, bus interchanges in the middle of nowhere – chances are there’s one waiting. The grubbiest are old but clean enough. The cleanest are like operating theatres. I think of days in British cities where you have to draw up a dot-to-dot itinerary taking in that Starbucks (customers only); that department store (if it hasn’t closed down); that museum (entry £5). And I’m a guy: we have it easy, I know. Why is public provision for this basic bodily function so dismal across the UK? I keep hearing this vicious rumour it’s because councils no longer have the money to maintain on ‘discretionary spending items’ like evacuating bodily waste.

Sam McPhail

Johan Cruyff, ‘total football’ and the birth of the modern game

The greatest rivalry in football for the past decade is coming to an end. Managers Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola clashed in 30 games across Germany and England, but neither came out decisively on top (their final meeting was a 1-1 draw earlier this month). In May, Klopp will leave Liverpool for good. It’s a shame that two of the best managers of all time may never face each other again, because their rivalry has raised the calibre of the sport so spectacularly. Klopp and Guardiola tinkered relentlessly with their squads, tweaking formations, positions and playing styles in order to best one another.

Gavin Mortimer

Could Jordan Bardella be France’s next PM?

Dixmont, Yonne In Britain, France’s National Front is synonymous with the Le Pen family. Jean-Marie founded the right-wing party in 1972 and his daughter Marine replaced him as its leader in 2011. In France, however, the National Rally – as it was rebranded in 2018 – is increasingly the party of Jordan Bardella. The 28-year-old was elected its president in November 2022. The party members had a straight choice: Bardella, a working-class youngster from northern Paris, or the veteran Louis Aliot, the 53-year-old mayor of Perpignan who had joined the party before Bardella was born and who was for many years in a relationship with Marine Le Pen.

Lloyd Evans

Directors shouldn’t meddle with Shakespeare

A strip club, a prison, a mental asylum, a Great War field hospital, an addiction clinic, a Napoleonic palace. These are the typical locations for a modern production of Shakespeare, whose interpreters seem to agree that any setting is better than the one chosen by the playwright. The assumption today is that the Bard needs help from directors who can see where he went wrong and know how to get his ideas across with greater force and clarity. Aside from the Greek tragedians, no other playwright attracts this sort of condescending vandalism. If a director were to set The Cherry Orchard on a spaceship or in a Guyanese penal colony, he’d be asked to see a psychiatrist. If he did the same with The Tempest,he’d be given a grant from the local council.

Lucy Hunter Blackburn

Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act is fraught with danger

‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words… make me feel hated just for being me… make me scared to leave my house… make our lives a living hell… cause wounds that never heal. Hate hurts. If you witness a hate crime, report it.’ If you live in Scotland, you may have seen the ‘Hate Hurts’ adverts from the Scottish government. The government is worried about, as another police advert put it, the things Scots might say ‘to a neighbour, somebody on the street, on a night out [to a] security guy at the door’. If you lose your temper, then ‘before you know it, you’ve committed a hate crime’. Police in Scotland have just been given sweeping new powers to crack down on such crime.

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Private landowners make better conservationists

The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshal, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs on his estate in Sussex and about to go extinct. He decided to do something about it. Today the Peppering estate has around 300 pairs of partridges, as well as corn buntings, lapwings, rare butterflies, long lost cornfield flowers and other wildlife. Last year the duke brought curlew eggs south from the Pennines and hatched them off to try to re-establish the species on the South Downs.

Martin Vander Weyer

A toast to the Wine Society

Ask any group of consumers to name the UK’s most enduringly successful mutual enterprise and they will probably point to the Co-op or the Nationwide building society. But there’s a cognoscenti who will come up with a different answer: a business that operates from giant sheds beside a railway track at Stevenage. It is the Wine Society, now celebrating its 150th year. Back in 1874, a quantity of Portuguese wine lay in the cellars of the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, shipped there for an International Exhibition but overlooked and unsold.

Sean Thomas

The secret to taking ayahuasca

Antioquia, Colombia If you’ve ever wondered what happened to drug lord Pablo Escobar’s enormous cocaine and occasional execution palace, as featured in the Netflix series Narcos, I can tell you. These days – following the violent death of Escobar in 1993 and the consequent escape of his pet hippos from his private zoo – the estate is now a garish, plasticky, hippo-themed children’s waterpark called Hacienda Nápoles. I have just driven past it. I am deep in the Colombian province of Antioquia.

Sam Kiley

Why do South Africans still support the ANC?

Support for South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, has just fallen below 40 per cent, which makes it very likely that, come the May election, there’ll be a coalition government. I’m surprised that support for the ANC is as high as it is. Across South Africa, states run by the ANC are failing. Infrastructure has collapsed and unrepaired sewage systems mean the water is polluted and poisonous. Electrical systems are down and the railways and ports are often closed. Property prices in Cape Town soar as South Africans flee here from all across the rest of the country. Because South Africa’s rand has collapsed against the euro (and even post-Brexit sterling) everything’s a bargain.

Alasdair Palmer

The ECHR compromises British agents

How should the state fight terrorism? That is the question addressed by Jon Boutcher’s report ‘Operation Kenova: Northern Ireland Stakeknife Legacy Investigation’. The report was precipitated by the claims that the British Army had an agent at the heart of the IRA. ‘Stakeknife’ was head of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit and was responsible for questioning, torturing and executing people the IRA suspected of being British agents. Stakeknife was himself a British agent, passing on information about the IRA – its plans, strategy and tactics – to his controllers in the British Army. What was the British state doing employing such a person?

William Moore

Is the C of E about to say sorry for Christianity?

Is the Church of England going to apologise for Christianity? A report by something called the Oversight Group has declared that the Church should say sorry publicly, not just for profiting from the evils of slavery (through investment in the South Sea Company) but for ‘seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems’. And having apologised, it recommends the Church ‘reach beyond theological institutions’ and ‘enable all Africans to discover the varied belief systems and spiritual practices of their forbears and their efficacy’. What would such an apology say about the Ugandan Martyrs executed in the 1880s by King Mwanga II?

Katy Balls

Will the Red Wall revolt split the right?

On Monday night Tories gathered on the Terrace Pavilion at parliament for the 1922 Committee’s spring reception, to which every backbencher was invited. The crowd was small, largely made up of Rishi Sunak loyalists eating steak and chips and drinking sparkling wine. The Prime Minister chose not to give opening remarks and instead chatted to the MPs. According to one attendee, the atmosphere was jovial. But no one dared bring up the elephant in the room: Lee Anderson’s defection. Just hours earlier, the former deputy Tory party chairman held a press conference to announce he was defecting to the Reform party. Even before he started to speak, his former Tory colleagues took pre-emptive steps for his departure by removing him from their various WhatsApp groups.

Thursday

Harriet Sergeant

The criminal gangs behind the rise in shoplifting

‘She was dressing half of Brixton at one time.’ A former plumber from south London is recalling the pretty, well-groomed shoplifter of his youth. Expensively dressed, her favourite place to target was Selfridges. ‘I don’t know how she did it but she got everything. You put in an order and she’d get it. Those days I had silk boxer shorts to give away,’ he sighs. ‘But then her son got murdered and she died shortly after of a broken heart.’ Shoplifting is no longer a one-woman show. Light-fingered mothers have been replaced by organised criminals, trafficking children and teenage girls from eastern Europe to steal from British shops. Children are a key part of their strategy because they are too young to be charged.