Features

Thursday

Christopher Caldwell

In Europe, the centre will not hold 

For about five years, those longing for a centrist restoration have been declaring that the madness is on its way out and the sensibles are back. Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen: all of them were just temporary horrors. In Poland’s recent election, Donald Tusk was returned to power, with his whole entourage of Europhiles and progressive foundations. Europe can breathe once more. Or so the argument goes. But it’s becoming harder to make the case. Look around and we see Trump not only the runaway favourite for the Republican nomination but also on short odds for the presidency itself. Polls for the European parliament elections in June show Le Pen comfortably ahead in France. Giorgia Meloni is consolidating power in Italy.

Alison Kervin

Why I self-publish my books

Trying to publish a book used to be straightforward. You came up with an idea, spent months, if not years, writing it, then sent it off to an agent or publisher who rejected it by return. Life was simpler back then. We all knew where we were. Rejection wasn’t necessarily based on the quality of the work. Literature is a subjective business. Lord of the Flies earned William Golding 20 rejections. James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller suffered similar fates. Marcel Proust was rejected so many times that he decided to pay for publication himself. The much-repeated industry statistic is between 1 and 2 per cent of manuscripts are published. Those aren’t great odds. What do you do? I’ll tell you exactly what: publish it yourself.

Cindy Yu

Taiwan can’t escape China’s shadow

The Taiwanese rock band Mayday – ‘the Beatles of the Chinese-speaking world’ – are being investigated by the Chinese Communist party for the crime of lip syncing. Local authorities are combing through recordings of Mayday’s Shanghai concerts from November looking for evidence of ‘deceptive fake-singing’, as the CCP calls it, which has been illegal in China since 2009 (although the law is rarely enforced). Last month, an anonymous Taiwan-ese government source told Reuters that the investigation had been cooked up because the pop stars refused a request from Beijing to say something nice about China in the run-up to Taiwan’s election this Saturday. The band found itself at the centre of a row between the presidential hopefuls about Chinese interference.

Natasha Feroze

Would you sign a relationship contract?

What makes a relationship work? I look at the happiest, most stable couples I know and wonder what the trick is. Did they spot problems early on and talk them through? Do they simply accept each other’s flaws? We all have foibles; a relationship is simply a matter of deciding which ones we can live with. I came across a couple recently who had their own approach: a relationship contract. Americans Simone and Malcolm Collins are big names in the pro-natalist movement. They have made it their mission to convince people to take relationships more seriously, ideally with a view to having children. They are now married, but prior to doing so, they had in place their own contract.

Peter Frankopan

Why the West is worried about the Red Sea

Last night, the United States and United Kingdom launched a series of missile strikes on Houthi targets in the Yemen. The dramatic strikes are a response to the rise of piratical attacks by Houthis on ships going through the Red Sea. The west’s move risks further regional escalation, as the war in Gaza goes on and hostilities bubble all over Middle East, especially with Iran. But the West is particularly concerned about the Red Sea because it is that most thorny of geopolitical problems – a chokepoint. A chokepoint is a narrow stretch that connects two larger bodies of water.

James Heale

At-risk Tories are looking to board the green gravy train

Tory MPs are already war-gaming what follows the election. Defeat seems certain, but then what? There will be an almighty tussle in which up to 200 colleagues scramble for a handful of the same sort of jobs: consultancies, directorships and advisory gigs. In these Tory Hunger Games, the clever thing to do is to start taking the best jobs now. Chris Skidmore, for example, is not hanging about. His 14 years in parliament involved a three-month stint as interim energy minister, after which he wrote a book about net zero. The green job offers came thick and fast. He was made a professor of practice in net zero policy at Bath University and bagged two £80,000-a-year advisory gigs, all while collecting his full-time MP’s salary representing constituents in Kingswood.

Freddy Gray

Why Trump can’t be stopped

Donald Trump has dominated Republican politics for so long that it can be hard to remember the time when he did not. It’s easy to forget that at the beginning of 2016 he started the Republican primary process by losing the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz, his more conservative rival. ‘He stole it,’ Trump tweeted afterwards, graceful as ever in defeat. ‘The State of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent election on the basis that he cheated – a total fraud!’ Trump went on to stun the world, of course, by winning the Republican nomination, then the White House. American politics would never be the same again. Skip forward to 2024 and Trump is still grumbling about stolen elections. But he’s no longer the maverick Republican insurgent.

Amber Duke

Meet the women vying to be Trump’s running mate

‘Ibelieve President Trump will have a female vice-president,’ said Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon in a recent interview. He was echoing the thoughts of many of those close to the probable 2024 Republican nominee. Mr Trump himself has said that he likes ‘the concept’ of choosing a female VP. Happily for him, there is no shortage of Republican women auditioning for the role of best supporting actress. The second season of The Golden Bachelor is coming sooner than anticipated. Kari Lake, the former TV newscaster turned politician, won the Conservative Political Action Committee’s (CPAC) straw poll for the VP slot last spring. Lake demurred at the time, as she was in the midst of a legal challenge against her defeat in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race.

Thursday

Theo Hobson

The joy of middle-aged football

I can tell when my life’s going OK. My stray thoughts are not about what a loser I am but about what a terrible footballer I am. Why didn’t I shoot when I had that chance? Why did I pass to the opposition? And, oh dear, I wonder how Diego’s knee is? For almost a decade I’ve been playing football on Saturday mornings in a local park in London. For the first few years I was a fair-weather visitor, shy about it. I’m not much of a joiner and I don’t have much chat about the transfer window, so I felt awkward and almost stopped going. A couple of others were middle-aged and rusty like me, so they probably didn’t really want another old guy getting in the way. But I gradually felt that they didn’t mind me being there, that I was a valid part of the mix.

Wednesday

Svitlana Morenets

Ukrainians can’t trust Putin’s hollow promises

Ukraine’s parliament will soon vote on much-needed conscription regulations which would draft an extra half a million recruits into the army. The categories of eligible men will be expanded, the draft age will be lowered from 27 to 25, and any man caught attempting to evade it will face harsh sanctions or imprisonment. Volodymyr Zelensky has stopped talking about victory coming any time soon. His New Year’s message was grim: everyone must either fight or help through work. Ukrainians are braced for another year of war. But talk of ‘peace’ or ‘compromise’ is still seen as code for a surrender which would reward rather than punish Vladimir Putin’s atrocities, cede ground and give him the opportunity to come back for the rest later.

Owen Matthews

Putin’s ‘peace’ is a partitioned Ukraine

Is Vladimir Putin trying to end his war in Ukraine? According to recent reports, the Kremlin has launched a new ‘back-channel diplomacy’ to reach out to senior officials in the Joe Biden administration. Putin’s message: to signal that he could accept a ceasefire that freezes the fighting along current lines. Reactions to the story have been furious. Some Ukrainians, sheltering from Russia’s biggest-ever missile and drone assaults of the war over Christmas, saw it as evidence of a nefarious Washington insider plot to sell Kyiv down the river. President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Putin’s initiative as disingenuous, saying that he saw ‘no sign’ Russia genuinely wanted to negotiate. ‘We just see brazen willingness to kill,’ he told the New York Times.

Sinclair McKay

What progressives get wrong about Winston Churchill

Please be advised that the following article contains outdated racial representations and views some readers may find distressing. Only joking! Yet that always seems to be the unspoken line running through modern academia’s head whenever the subject of Winston Churchill is raised. This year sees the 150th anniversary of Churchill’s birth; it will also see cohorts of academics jostling to tell us just how horrifically racist, imperialist, sexist and probably transphobic he was. As though that could be a surprise. Yet what might genuinely surprise many now is to learn that in certain respects, Churchill was in the vanguard of the woke movement. He was a progressive pioneer.

Anshel Pfeffer

Has Iran lost control of its proxies?

During a press conference in Tehran at the end of last month, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesman Brigadier-General Ramezan Sharif claimed that ‘the Al-Aqsa Storm was one of the retaliations of the Axis of Resistance against the Zionists for the martyrdom of Qasem Soleimani’. It was an extraordinary statement. Iran had insisted that while it supported the Al-Aqsa Storm (what Hamas calls its 7 October attack), it wasn’t directly involved in its planning or execution. Israeli intelligence believes this to be true. Despite receiving significant Iranian weapons and training, Hamas had not informed Tehran in advance of its plans.

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.