Features

Wednesday

Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith

How women became essential to the mafia’s survival

The Calabrian mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, were once something of a side-show compared with the more famous Sicilian mafia. Now they are the largest criminal organisation in Europe. Last month, European police arrested more than 130 ’Ndrangheta members in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Spain in a coordinated swoop codenamed ‘Eureka’. Almost all have been charged with drug-dealing, money-laundering or crimes of violence. The mafia wife never asks about her husband’s work any more than he would dare criticise her cooking The ’Ndrangheta traditionally specialised in kidnapping, operating in the inaccessible region of Aspromonte, the toe of Italy, for centuries out of reach of the forces of law and order.

Andrew Hunter Murray

Can cloning bring endangered species back from the brink?

This spring, San Diego Zoo’s Wildlife Alliance proudly announced the arrival of Trey, a newborn colt. Trey is a Przewalski’s horse – the last wild horse species on the planet, and one of the least pronounceable (say ‘zhuh-varl-skis’ and you’ll be close). It was another small conservation victory. But Trey is particularly unusual, because this little pony is a clone. Isn’t it too late for our battered ecosystems to start mucking around with cloning? Trey is genetically identical to Kuporovic, a stallion whose cells were cryonically preserved in 1980. He’s also a genetic twin of Kurt, the first ever cloned Przewalski’s horse, born in 2020. This is big news in the cloning world: until now, cloning has only produced one individual from an endangered species.

Michela Wrong

Is anywhere safe for Paul Kagame’s critics?

After weeks of travelling – first Paris, then Kinshasa – I was looking forward to my evening at L’Horloge du Sud in Brussels. Known for its poisson liboké (fish wrapped in banana leaf) and other African specialities, the restaurant is popular with the city’s African diaspora. I’d been invited by a Pan-African thinktank to discuss my book on Rwanda. It was not to be. The day before, I got a call from the Benin journalist due to chair the event. He sounded rattled. The restaurant owner, he said, had been receiving complaints from pro-government Rwandan groups in Brussels, along with threatening emails and anonymous calls from Rwanda itself.

Robert Tombs

The trouble with returning the Benin Bronzes

Once, museum curators saw their job as collecting, conserving and displaying to the public works of art or humbler objects that were beautiful, interesting and representative of a time and a place. Now many of them want to get rid of, or at least hide away, objects that they pronounce shameful. Cambridge University, under its present administrators, has been following the fashion. The Fitzwilliam Museum has taken down a painting by Stanley Spencer – ‘Love among the Nations’ – on the grounds that ‘Raised on the moral rightness of British imperial rule, Spencer imagines civilisation firmly in the West and savagery in its colonies’. So that’s you dealt with, Spencer.

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Red Rishi: the Prime Minister’s political makeover

What kind of conservative is Rishi Sunak? This time last year, there was a clear answer: he was a fiscal hawk who was worried about how much the government had to borrow to fund the Covid crisis. As chancellor, he was always fighting with the prime minister over high spending. When Sunak tried to raise the national insurance rate, he did so partly to send his party an important message: the borrowing and spending has to stop. Now Sunak is in No. 10 and Boris Johnson isn’t around to demand more spending. There has been a Budget and a list of priorities – and Sunak’s agenda is starting to emerge. It includes a tax burden not just higher than any time in the 1970s, but any time in postwar history. A record proportion of the workforce are paying the higher rate of tax.

Quentin Letts

The civil service’s exercise in navel-gazing

Are you happy in your work? In 37 years of journalism I don’t remember once being asked that question by my bosses. Nor did I expect to be. But in the civil service there is a bureaucratic machine to make sure employees are asked once a year if everything is all right, dearie. At unpublicised cost, the People Survey invites penpushers to complain. Guess what – they do. Three mandarins explained this time-consuming exercise to the Commons public administration select committee. They were: Alex Chisholm, the civil service’s chief operating officer; Fiona Ryland, ‘government chief people officer’; Dr Claudia Roscini, head of the civil service People Survey team. The survey covered 100 departments, 17,000 business units and 350,000 souls. It was ‘an extremely useful tool’.

Mary Wakefield

Dr Jean Twenge: Gen Z aren’t OK

There’s never been an older generation that didn’t complain about the younger one. Parents tut and fuss over errant youth. That’s the way of it. But in the end the kids come around. Swingers grow into Karens. The wild child pays his bills. But kids these days… they do seem different. It’s not just that we, the older generations, are worried about them, but that they’re desperately worried about themselves. And according to Dr Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who studies generational changes, we’re right to worry. Almost 30 per cent of American girls have clinical depression and it’s the same across the Anglosphere. The suicide rate for ten- to 24-year-olds has tripled.

Ian Williams

Gag order: China’s stand-up comedy crackdown

‘The Chinese Communist party is probably the funniest thing that exists,’ the dissident artist Ai Weiwei once told me, ‘but it doesn’t have a sense of humour.’ The brave band of comics in China’s fledgling stand-up comedy scene are discovering that poking fun at the grim-faced old men who run the country with an ever-tighter grip is a dangerous pursuit. Last month, at a comedy club in Beijing’s Dongcheng district, 31-year-old Li Haoshi mocked a military slogan coined by President Xi Jinping. Li said that ‘Forge exemplary conduct! Fight to win!’ reminded him of his two dogs chasing a squirrel. A clip of the show spread rapidly online.

Eva Gaida

My life as a meth addict

I’ve spent most of my adult life addicted to amphetamines, including crystal meth. I first tried speed when I was 17 at a techno party while visiting Germany. I had been struggling with my A-levels and always found school hard because I was constantly exhausted, sleeping for 12 hours a day and still falling asleep during lessons. I was depressed and sometimes felt like I didn’t want to live any more. Speed changed all that. For the first time ever, I was motivated, I could concentrate and I felt that I could deal with life. I went from failing school to becoming a straight-A student, and I honestly don’t think I would have graduated without speed. I took it like people drink coffee. On meth, you feel like you’re having an epiphany every minute.

Matthew Dennison

Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter

I spoke too soon. Beatrix Potter, I suggested in an afterword to my 2016 biography of the author and illustrator, had escaped the distortions of sexual and racial revisionism that now blight so many eminent and long-dead British writers. But no longer. Last week a specialist in postcolonial literature at a northern university accused Potter of failing to acknowledge her indebtedness to an oral storytelling tradition of enslaved Africans working on American plantations. Welcome, please, a new Potter for the 21st century: exploitative, colonialist, dishonest. Potter’s concealment, claims Dr Emily Zobel Marshall, ‘[feeds] into a damaging and recurring appropriation of Black cultural forms that continues today’. Blimey.

Melanie McDonagh

How Ireland lost its craic

So, which country is putting health warnings and calorie counts on bottles of alcohol for the benefit of its citizens? Nope, not Canada or New Zealand. But you’re getting warm… It’s Ireland, the country that gave us Guinness, Jameson, Bushmills and, for those who like that kind of thing, Baileys. That’s right: a health warning just like for cigarettes. But instead of rotting lungs, presumably there’ll be a lovely picture of a liver with cirrhosis. What effect will it have on me? None, dear reader, none. I drink to forget this sort of thing. But that’s the way Ireland is going (actually has gone) for a generation: not so much the nanny state as the Miss Trunchbull state, one that would swing you round by your pigtails.

Wednesday

Svitlana Morenets

Has Ukraine’s counter-offensive been overhyped?

The talk about a big spring counter-offensive has been beneficial for Ukraine. It has helped persuade western allies to donate arms, while unnerving Russia and offering hope to those longing for the conflict to end. The idea has been promoted by every Ukrainian official from the President downwards, but when hope turns to hype, there’s a problem – and Kyiv may soon end up paying the price for its own PR success. People are asking where the ‘big push’ is and Volodymyr Zelensky’s team is trying to manage expectations. They are speaking of whatever comes next as another stride in the ongoing war, rather than the final step to an inevitable victory. The trouble is, the high expectations of Ukraine’s allies may now turn into a liability.

Mark Galeotti

Ukraine’s next move: can Putin be outsmarted?

Has Ukraine’s much-heralded counter-offensive already begun? At the end of last month, defence minister Oleksy Reznikov promised that ‘as soon as there is God’s will, the weather and a decision by the commanders, we will do it’. The past few weeks have seen an upsurge in what the military describe as shaping operations, preparing the ground for battle, with attacks on Russian fuel and weapons depots and command centres. This week’s incursion by Ukraine’s anti-Kremlin Russian units over the border into the Belgorod region could also be an attempt to distract Moscow and make it disperse its forces away from likely lines of attack.

Freddy Gray

Can Trump’s opponents prove him wrong on Ukraine?

Boris Johnson, Britain’s most sought-after Churchill impersonator, visited Texas on Monday to urge a group of rich right-wing Americans to never, never, never give in to Vladimir Putin. ‘I just urge you all to stick with it,’ Agent Bojo told a private lunch of conservative politicians and donors in Dallas. ‘You are backing the right horse. Ukraine is going to win.’ Johnson wasn’t paid to speak at the lunch, though it’s worth noting that he only stopped over in Texas on the way to the SCALE Fintech conference in Las Vegas, where he is expected to receive a six-figure sum for talking about the future of innovation alongside Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US. Nobody said freedom was free.

Niru Ratnam

Why are my son’s teachers constantly on strike?

It is a bright Wednesday morning in May. My son, T, a Year 8 pupil, should be at school and I should be working, but instead we are playing tennis. We are also listening to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits because he’s supposed to be studying the play in class so I figure I can cover both PE and English literature in the next half an hour before we head home and I start the work I’m meant to be doing. For them academies are a Tory ruse designed to hand over control of schools to nasty capitalists My son isn’t ill and isn’t playing truant. His school, along with five others in Lewisham, south London, is in the middle of 13 days of strike action called by the National Education Union (NEU).

Gus Carter

The curious business of fertility

I’ve always wanted children. Friends sometimes tease me about my broodiness, apparently uncommon among single 29-year-old men. But unless I’ve accidentally knocked someone up in the past few months, I’m going to be an older parent than mine were by the time they had me. I suppose that’s normal. The average age at which couples start a family has risen consistently since the mid-1970s. I’m told not to worry: look at Mick Jagger, whose youngest child was born when he was 73. Men don’t suffer from the same biological restraints as women. One acquaintance insists rather admirably that she’s going to have children by 25, regardless of the consequences. She also insisted on smelling me to test my pheromones and, therefore, our compatibility.

The Spectator

Jeremy Clarke remembered: by Boris Johnson, Sophie Winkleman, Eric Idle and more

Boris Johnson    When Jeffrey Bernard died in 1997, it seemed possible that we would never again have a regular Low Life columnist in The Spectator – or no one half as good. We needed someone who could match Taki for appalling frankness, for saying the unsayable; but not about the denizens of Gstaad or New York nightclubs. Low Life meant the opposite milieu. We needed our man with the half-eaten packet of prawn cocktail flavour crisps and the monster hangover, our man in the pub lock-in, the ferret show, the debtors’ court, the A&E at 3 a.m. with the drunk guy going crackers. It had to be someone who knew how to argue with social workers. We needed a new literary Hogarth.

David Goodhart

The reactionary bohemian: Jeremy Clarke was one of a kind

A world without Jeremy Clarke is a glummer place. The author of this magazine’s Low Life column for 23 years, who died on Sunday morning, was a spirited writer of the old school. He loved a rollicking good time, a beautifully turned phrase, a good gossip, casting an observant eye over life’s absurdities, and England. He despised the hypocrisy of the progressive middle classes, big egos and TV boxsets. He had quirkily conservative views, but friends of all classes and races, a deep knowledge of an unusual range of subjects, including rural matters, and a cheerful modesty that belied his talent as a writer.

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

TV dramas like Welcome to Wrexham are spoiling sport

Wrexham had never seen anything like it: thousands of fans cheering their team as an open-top bus made its way through the city’s streets. On board, Wrexham’s footballers celebrated their side’s promotion back to the English football league. The club’s star owners, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, were there too – and with them, as usual, came the cameras. The rise of Wrexham has become the subject of a hit Disney+ documentary, Welcome to Wrexham. It’s a feel-good story about Ryan and Rob, two rich and handsome actors from the other side of the Atlantic, taking over a down-and-out club in a depressed industrial heartland and giving it hope. Wrexham is not the only football club to have let the cameras in.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Migration nation: Brexit has meant more immigration than ever

Manchester is desperate for workers. There are 40,000 jobs advertised in the city at the moment, at every pay grade. Ann Summers wants a stockroom assistant (£10.70 an hour), or you could invigilate exams at £14 an hour or post videos on TikTok for £20 an hour. Sellcheck Chemicals is offering up to £75,000 a year for a sales manager (‘No biology background needed, no previous experience necessary’). Even the army is offering trainee officers £34,000 after their first year. But ask any employer in the city what it’s like hiring and they’ll tell you: it’s a battle. What’s strange about this is the fact that though all these jobs are on offer, unemployed Mancunians don’t seem to want them.