Features

Wednesday

Colin Brazier

Farming is fighting its own culture wars

I have come late to farming. There was no epiphany, no eureka moment watching Clarkson’s Farm. The blame lies partly with my neighbour, who’s my running partner and a fellow Pony Club Dad. He’s an agronomist and would enliven our jogs along country lanes with talk of crop rotations. In the end, that other form of muck-raking – journalism – provided the shove I needed. After 24 years at Sky TV, I joined the first presenter line-up (of many) at GB News. I went in the hope of a fresh start at an exciting new channel, only to be thrown out of it when my ratings failed to pass muster. So, at 55, I am a student again. Or, as those who find themselves at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester prefer, an ‘agri’ at ‘siren’.

Katy Balls

Darren Jones: ‘Labour will reform, not splurge’

This time next year, Darren Jones could very well be deciding how your tax money is spent. As shadow chief Treasury secretary, his days are spent having difficult discussions with would-be Labour ministers and explaining that it would be hard for them to spend any more than the Tories already are. If Labour wants to change Britain, the party will have to rely on reform rather than cash. This message would be a theme of Keir Starmer’s government, in which it is assumed Jones would be a key player. In his office, Jones, who is 37, has a framed front page proclaiming Labour’s 1997 election victory. Next to it hangs a picture of the Bristol council house he grew up in.

Edward Stawiarski

Aleksandr Dugin: ‘I see no reason why we should not use nuclear weapons’

Is the invasion of Ukraine a holy war? If that is how Vladimir Putin sees it, it might have something to do with the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin, a former anti-communist who is touted by some to be the Russian President’s favourite philosopher. He is described as a Rasputin-style mystic, a comparison which is aided by his thick beard. For him, Ukraine is a proxy war against the ‘satanism’ of the West. While the level of his influence on Putin is disputed, there is no question that this unapologetic supporter of the Ukrainian invasion has had a major impact in Russian intellectual and political circles and has gained a growing audience in China, the Middle East, Latin America and the developing world.

Thursday

Louise Perry

Alexa, do you love me?

My husband and I got a Peloton bike for the usual reasons: because we were time-poor, money-rich and feeling fat. And we kept using it for the usual reason: because we wanted to please the gorgeous ghosts in the machine. The American fitness brand Peloton employs some of the most beautiful, athletic and charismatic people ever to have lived. Their job is not actually to teach an effective class to the viewers at home on their stationary bikes, or to make their users healthier and slimmer (I have accomplished neither). Rather, it is to give an impression of warmth and intimacy while staring at a silent camera lens in an empty room. My favourite coaches (since you asked) are Tumi, Ally, Emma and Denis, the last of whom has a particularly passionate following among older ladies.

Kendall Jenner

How to make an Old Fashioned, by Kendall Jenner

This Old Fashioned is my go-to for the holiday season. The rich and complex flavour of the tequila pairs so well with bitters and orange. It’s made to be savoured and is a classic Old Fashioned with a twist. I made this cocktail with my mom over the summer for National Tequila Day. It has become one of our favourites ever since. Ingredients 75 ml 818 Tequila Añejo 1 sugar cube 2 dashes of Angostura bitters A splash of water A twist of orange peel 1 cocktail cherry Preparation Add bitters, water and sugar to glass. Muddle to make a paste. Add ice cube and tequila. Garnish with a cocktail cherry and orange peel. Enjoy!

Katy Balls

‘I am working night and day’: Rishi Sunak on Jilly Cooper, immigration – and his plan for the next election

This Christmas, Rishi Sunak will be reading Tackle!, Jilly Cooper’s new bonkbuster. Cooper sent the Prime Minister a signed copy after she discovered – through The Spectator – that he is a fan. Tackle! is about an equestrian-turned-football manager who inspires a ragtag team to unexpected victory. ‘If you want to score, you’ve got to be a player,’ declares the cover. ‘It is literally on my bedside table,’ says Sunak when we meet in his office in 10 Downing Street. ‘This is the first year in a long time that I have actually read some fiction,’ he says. ‘I read these lovely books, which is good escapism for me.

Charles Moore

The literary canon of P.G. Wodehouse

When T.S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, it was seen as a masterpiece of modernism. It was, but it was also a work steeped in cultural tradition. This was made apparent in the ‘Notes on The Waste Land’ with which Eliot supplemented his poem. In them, he glossed its literary echoes – the Upanishads, Dante, Chaucer, Mallory, Shakespeare, etc. Another master of the modern who came to his greatest flourishing between the world wars was P.G. Wodehouse. Though seven years older than Eliot, Wodehouse first achieved real fame at much the same time, after the publication of The Inimitable Jeeves in 1923. Like Eliot’s, his work’s modernity, making such innovative use of the main literary traditions of the West, would have been unimaginable in the 19th century.

Ian Williams

‘This is a massacre of thoughts’: the exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on his cancellation

This should have been a busy holiday period for the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. His exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery was due to open last month and others were planned in New York, Paris and Berlin. They have all now been cancelled because Ai himself has been cancelled – not by the Chinese Communist party this time, but by the ‘free’ West. Weiwei had posted on X (formerly Twitter) his thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war. However, his comments appeared to more generally attack Jewish influence and power. He wrote: ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world. Financially, culturally, and in terms of media influence, the Jewish community has had a significant presence in the United States.

Brian Cox

Black holes are changing our understanding of everything

One thing upon which my friend Jeremy Clarke and I always agreed is the value of seeing the world from different points of view. In that sense we partially agreed on everything. This essential skill needs to be learned, and I assert that nature is a wonderful teacher. Perhaps the most surprising and bamboozling example can be found in the study of black holes.   Here are two apparently contradictory properties of black holes. When viewed from the outside, time stops on the event horizon – the boundary that marks the black hole’s edge, beyond which light cannot escape – and anyone attempting to cross into the interior would be seen frozen there forever.

Grayson Perry

I’m a Tory trapped in a Labour voter’s body

I’ve been on tour around the UK with my stage show about identity called A Show All About You. In Edinburgh it coincided with the last weekend of my retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy. I dropped in for an hour and sat on a bench so people could come and sit next to me to chat. Someone said on viewing my exhibition, which deals with many social issues, that they could not tell which way I vote. This pleased me. In my stage show I talk a lot about the tense relationship between our conscious intellect and our embodied intuition. I describe myself as a Tory voter trapped in a Labour voter’s body. I also talk about the dangers of ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, then I ask the audience if they would support proportional representation.

Yascha Mounk

The case for photo-bombing

A few months ago, I visited Angkor Wat, the majestic temple in present-day Cambodia that once stood at the centre of a vast empire. As the five towers of the palace came into view, I was, despite the intense heat, fully immersed in the beauty of the place. I imagined how excited a visitor from a faraway land in the 12th century, full of anticipation for a meeting at court, would have felt arriving at what was then the largest settlement on Earth. And like that imaginary visitor, I felt propelled forward, impatient to cross the moat that separated me from the edifice, to get a closer look. At that moment, I heard a confident American voice. ‘Excuse me,’ the man shouted, as he crouched on the floor, phone in hand. ‘I’m taking a picture.

Nigel Kennedy

Did England lose its mind in the pandemic?

My dog Sonny broke my finger earlier this year. He’s a Chart Polski, which translates as ‘Polish sighthound’, and he’s one of about 700 in the world. I was trying to stop him from going after a deer. Even with a muzzle, he could’ve felled it. Chart Polskis hurl themselves in front of the deer’s legs to trip it with their impossibly strong necks. On this occasion, Sonny, who I named after the boxer Sonny Liston, pulled me down a mountain. Because of my broken finger, I came up with a new temporary playing technique. I figured that if the jazz great Django Reinhardt could play guitar with two fingers, then I could have a go on the violin with three. I played a couple of gigs in Germany and no one noticed the difference.

Laurie Graham

The hell of putting on a Christmas play

In July, when I was asked to confect ‘another Christmas entertainment’ for my community, I viewed such a distant elephant with equanimity. Like memories of the pain of childbirth, the nightmares of amateur dramatics soon fade. Besides, I’d done this many times and survived to tell the tale. All I needed was to reassemble last year’s cast and then write something for them to perform. A piece of cake.  By October I was seeing things differently. The steepness of the gradient we had to climb was becoming all too clear. Amateur dramatics are held together by string and paperclips. There are no understudies Very few of this year’s cast are seasoned performers.

Ben Schott

Where are all the proper members’ clubs?

‘How would you like your hair cut?’ ‘In silence.’ So goes the ancient joke. My answer, however, is ‘at home’. You see, this week marks the 15th anniversary of having my hair cut in my Highgate flat by the great Jane Davies, peripatetic barber to London’s loucher gentry. (Just as Jeeves is not a butler, so Jane is not a hairdresser.) In 1970, Jane left her Cromwell Road convent and, with scissors in hand, descended to a smoke-filled basement on Sloane Street. Here Vidal Sassoon had established a speakeasy barbershop for men who wanted their locks left groovily long. Some 15 years later, Jane went freelance, but rather than open a salon or hire a chair, she visited her clients at home.

Quentin Letts

48 ways the Tories could win

Conservative strategists gawp at their end-of-year opinion-poll ratings like European space officials watching another Ariane rocket plop into the ocean off French Guiana. Fret not! To misquote Emperor Hirohito, electoral fortunes may have developed not necessarily to their advantage, but extinction could yet be averted by adopting the following measures: Be more cheerful and stop Rishi doing his ‘your cat just died’ voice. Scrap the government car service and tell ministers to take National Express coaches or hitchhike. Give National Express coach drivers a small pourboire as compensation for having to accept these difficult new passengers. Short, sharp Bill to remove the last hereditary peers from the Lords. Bishops to be given the heave-ho, too.

Catriona Olding

Remembering Jeremy Clarke through his books

On a hot afternoon in October, I joined a lunch party. By the time I arrived, the company was on coffee and liqueurs. A pretty woman in her seventies mentioned an academic friend who was downsizing and how the prospect of getting rid of thousands of books had upset him so much he sought help from a counsellor. The counsellor had said: ‘But they’re only books.’ My husband, Jeremy Clarke, wrote the Low Life column in this magazine for 23 years until his death in May. In one of his columns, he wrote about how, after the sale of his mother’s house in Devon (where he’d lived for 30 years), he sent two Mercedes Sprinter van loads of stuff, mostly books, here to Provence. Seventy boxes arrived, containing around 2,500 volumes.

James MacMillan

I’ll never take culture for granted again

‘Has this been the happiest year of my life?’ I found myself asking recently. It has certainly been topped with the arrival of a third granddaughter last month. (My first, little Sara Maria, died a few years ago.) The birth of Rosie Elisabeth has taken our joy to cosmic levels, but 2023 has been a succession of delights, mainly connected to the concerts I’ve been able to conduct around the globe, from St Louis to Tallinn. After the evils of lockdown, many of us worried that musical life would never return. But it has. I will never, ever take cultural life for granted again. One highlight this year was the culmination of a huge project at my festival in East Ayrshire, the Cumnock Tryst.

Paul Dacre

My advice for King Charles, my ‘twin’

Truly, Harry, who is engaged in a preposterous legal contretemps with the Mail, is his mother’s son. While the Prince is filling his boots by turning his self-pity into an industry, his mother, I would argue, invented the art of victimhood – that insidious, debilitating, very modern malaise. The irony is that, unlike Harry, whose hatred for the Mail is almost as great as that for his father and brother, Diana was rather fond of us. She assiduously read the paper and so did her friends. In the vicious post-separation propaganda wars between Charles and her (‘She’s nuts, you know, old boy’), the Mail, whose target audience has always been up-market women, unashamedly took Diana’s side.

Julie Burchill

Why I’m bored of National Treasures

Here they come, see them run, twinkling away like a bunch of irritatingly flashing fairy lights, the milk of human kindness curdling on their breath and dollar signs in their beady little eyes. I’m referring to the National Treasures, wheeled out every Christmas as we huddle around the television. A quick list of those who come immediately to mind – though other NTs are available, if the price is right – are Ant, Attenborough, Balding, Beard (Mary), Carr (Alan), Coles (Richard), Colman (Olivia), Church, Dec, Dench, French, Fry, Izzard, Lineker, Margolyes, Norton, Oliver (Jamie), Osman, Peake, Perry (Grayson), Robinson (Tony), Rosen (Michael), Sayle, Staunton, Thompson (Emma), Toksvig.

Leila Sansour

This Christmas in Bethlehem will be the saddest yet

I am on my way to Bethlehem, which is where I come from and where I tend to spend Christmas. When I visit from London, I am given strict instructions to bring with me a generous amount of cheddar cheese, a good whisky and, as unlikely as it sounds, Yorkshire tea. I have made it into a local tradition and there is no one else but me to supply the tea in the quantities required. Normally, my biggest concern is trying to find enough space in my suitcase for all these supplies. I so wish this was my main concern this time round. Since the start of Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza, life in Bethlehem has been turned upside down. The place has known sad Christmases but this one will be unlike any other.