Features

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Andy Burnham’s centrist act isn’t fooling anyone

When Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood arrived in Downing Street on Monday afternoon, the image of political rivals arm in arm symbolised a new government of differing views taking shape. It might have been more awkward. As they neared the door of No. 10 and the waiting television cameras, Miliband turned to Mahmood and asked: ‘Should we turn around for a photo together?’ Mahmood gave the idea short shrift: ‘We’re not getting married, Ed!’ But in a sense Labour is seeking a new relationship with the British public and everyone around Andy Burnham is alive to the importance of images, symbols and vibes. As Wes Streeting, the new Defence Secretary, put it in cabinet on Tuesday: ‘We have a second chance to make a first impression with the voters.

Melissa Kite

The dark truth about dating apps and AI

If you want to know what the ninth circle of Hell is like, join a dating site. I didn’t want to join a dating site, for I am happily ensconced, but I joined one in the interests of research because something very dark is going on in the world of dating apps, and it has something to do with two bugbears of mine: safeguarding and AI. If you could mate two monsters of modern life to produce a deranged creature capable of devouring human rights, then those two monsters would be safeguarding and AI. Recently, I began to notice a deluge of complaints on online forums from people protesting their innocence after being banned from dating apps for no apparent reason.

Peter Hitchens

What Ukraine doesn’t want you to know about the Nord Stream pipeline

If you want to start a myth, make it a good one. Look at Odysseus. Imagine if the old liar had come home stony broke, a decade late, and told his wife: ‘Sorry, Penny, I got drunk, the ship was repossessed and the crew deserted, I gambled away all my money and I’ve spent the last ten years working in bars to pay my passage home.’ The tale would not have endured. Penelope would probably have kicked him out and married one of the suitors. It’s more or less the same with the unmysterious sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. There’s a perfectly good, prosaic, obvious explanation. The giant undersea tube was able to supply cheap Russian gas to Germany, something the US government has disliked for decades.

Sam McPhail

Could the fat jabs wreck your pension?

Fat jabs are perhaps the largest development in healthcare since statins. Weight-loss drugs – or GLP-1s, as they’re properly known – will reduce the number of people having heart attacks, developing diabetes or getting cancer, and will generally let people live longer. With a population that’s two-thirds overweight or obese, it’s no surprise that already three million British adults are on the jabs. That’s twice as many as last year and the number is expected to double again by the end of 2027, according to consultants at PwC. Reinsurers such as Swiss Re say that weight-loss drugs could decrease all-cause UK mortality by as much as 5 per cent over the next 20 years. A health miracle, then.

Michael Simmons

The madness of crowds is keeping markets afloat

‘I’m done with Trump,’ fumed a normally MAGA-supportive retail trader as he watched an investment that was particularly Hormuz-sensitive collapse. But, perhaps surprisingly, his frustration at the war is not shared more widely by stock pickers. Despite the geopolitical turmoil of the war in Iran, equities (shares in listed companies) have been on an upward romp for the past year. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, the Standard and Poor’s 500 index is up 25 per cent. Stock markets almost everywhere have been hitting record high after record high. It doesn’t make much sense. This hasn’t been a good year for the world economy. The constant closing and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices skyward.

Philip Hensher

Don’t fall for the deodorant con

As summers grow hotter, the one thing that self-appointed experts seem absolutely agreed upon is the need for a blast of chemicals to cover up the merest possibility of anything resembling the smell of a warm body. One Mariah G. Humbert, an American etiquette dictator, was asked by the Guardian about this and insisted: ‘Deodorant is absolutely necessary. The way you care for yourself and your hygiene is a form of self-respect, but also respect for the people you work with. It’s the same socially.’ Of course you should use deodorant! It’s vital to hygiene! It’s like wiping your bum!

Tali Fraser

Why some small tradesmen are turning to bartering

Holly, a 25-year-old sign writer and muralist, recently spent a couple of days staying in a shepherd’s hut an hour from her home. She didn’t pay for it – well, not in the way you or I would. The owner had a gypsy caravan with doors that needed painting. Holly could do the job. An agreement was struck, no money changed hands, and both sides walked away feeling they’d got a fair deal. Holly is one of a growing number of small tradesmen who have quietly decided to opt out of the traditional cash economy – or at least keep one foot outside it. She has been ‘paid’ in chiropractor sessions, pizza and someone cutting her grass. When she painted the Christmas windows of her local café, the owner told her to pop in for a free lunch ‘for the next ten goes’.

Iona Bain

How to make your children rich

‘I was gifted a Premium Bond of £1 for my first birthday from my grandma,’ says Janice. ‘That was in 1970 and I have never won a thing.’ If I had a penny for every time I heard this kind of comment, I’d be a darned sight richer than Janice. She is one of many people I’ve spoken to since I started reporting on the shocking administrative failures at National Savings & Investments. Around 34,000 families have been unable to trace their loved ones’ accounts after their deaths. The total amount owed comes to £367 million. The scandal prompted NS&I’s chief executive, Dax Harkins, to resign and the pensions minister, Torsten Bell, to make a contrite statement in the Commons.

James Dixon

We should all find the time to smoke

The old pipe smoker has become a bit of a figure of fun, an idiosyncratic oddity whom the young find ridiculous, if they notice him at all. This makes me rather sad because to me he’s a little bit heroic. Picture him sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree, the sun shining beyond, carefully filling his bowl, tamping the tobacco down with his thumb, before striking a match and coaxing the first few curls of bluish smoke into the afternoon air. It’s a ritual free from any sense of hurry and one from which we could all learn. Indeed, hurrying would defeat the point of pipe smoking. The ritual itself, slow and steady, is part of the pleasure.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Andy Burnham can’t afford to please everyone

Andy Burnham thinks his critics need a new joke about him. The old one about a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walking into a bar (‘Hello, Mr Burnham,’ says the barman) is about to be eclipsed. On Monday, it won’t be a barman offering good wishes – it will be the Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romeo, when Burnham walks into No. 10 as Britain’s 59th prime minister. Before that, on Friday, Burnham will accept the leadership of the Labour party, unopposed, at the headquarters of the Trades Union Congress. The speech he will give is still being worked on, but Burnham is ‘holding the pen himself’, aides say.

Jon Harvey

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a triumph

Incredible stories, otherworldly creatures, false identities, a cavalcade of trickery: the original Odyssey is packed with everything you could want from a big-screen blockbuster. And like all great stories, it’s more than just a fantasy adventure. It’s about survival, marriage, truth, what it means to be a man and much more. It’s also roughly 2,700 years old, and by picking it for his latest movie, Sir Christopher Nolan has definitively proved that the old ones are the best. But why, really, has he decided to go Greek? Screenwriters have always been suckers for a good ‘coming home’ story. It was such a popular genre in ancient times that the Greeks even coined a name for it: ‘nostos’.

John Power

Social media has saved comedy

In 2022, a 16-year-old called Kane Parsons began to post a web series called ‘Backrooms’ on his YouTube channel, drawing inspiration from a famous 4chan meme. That year, the film studio A24 contacted him and began production on a full-length feature film of the same name, which was released in May. The film has grossed $350 million worldwide and Kane, who turned 21 last month, is the youngest director ever to have a film open at number one in the North American box office. Social media, for all its apparent flaws, has created a new meritocracy in the world of entertainment Parsons’s stunning success has started a race in Hollywood to scout for talent in the online world.

Matt Ridley

Turtle doves and the myth of rewilding

In the latest success story for reintroducing species to the British countryside, turtle doves, reared in captivity and released at three locations in Somerset and Devon last year, have returned to breed. Turtle doves have steeply declined in numbers, hanging on in the south and east of the country, but this scheme opens a new front in the battle to save the species as a British summer visitor. In May 2025, 244 captive-bred turtle doves were set free across three sites. Like others of their species, they spent the winter in Africa but a handful found their way back to south-west England this summer. Reintroductions like this are now all the rage among conservationists because it is a policy that can have spectacular results.

Margaret Mitchell

Are you enjoying a ‘nun girl summer’?

The nuns were wrapping up their night prayer when I entered the chapel at Tyburn Convent. I couldn’t see them but heard their soft voices singing the last phrases of the ‘Salve Regina’: ‘O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.’ Across the road in Hyde Park, an outdoor concert heaved. What was I doing, spending my Friday night here instead? I had come to see if the rumours of a ‘nun girl summer’, as it’s being called on TikTok, were true. Earlier this year, a video of two nuns discussing their ultimate frisbee skills went viral: ‘Sister, you are so good at that!’ ‘Sister Miriam, you also are!

Tali Fraser

The Welsh government’s mad decolonisation plans

A teenager in Wales might want to play video games, hang out with their friends or even, dare I suggest it, read a book. The Welsh government, however, would prefer they put on a headset and confront their ‘unconscious bias’. It has created a £1.2 million metaverse, the ‘world’s first anti-racist virtual world’, to teach Welsh teens about their ‘white privilege’. But this is only one element of an official commitment to end racism by 2030. Not today, not yesterday, but a specific year in the future. The idea for an Anti-racist Wales Action Plan – ArWAP – was born following fervour around the Black Lives Matter movement, and an official plan followed in 2022.

Michael Simmons

Shut up about your disability

Britain is crippled. More of us than ever before are disabled. One in four, at the last count. But it is a statistic so obviously at odds with reality that anyone with working eyesight should question it. Instead, it has been adopted as fact by government, doctors, charities and benefits assessors. This mass collapse in health – nearly four million more people describing themselves as disabled in the past decade – is driven, we are told, by genuinely worsening mental health and a surge in diagnoses of conditions such as ADHD and autism. So vast is the problem that a government review last week found the sickness-welfare system ‘not fit for purpose’.

Wednesday

John Power

Inside Labour’s plot to sideline alternative media

Labour came to power in 2024 with five stated missions: to improve economic growth, the NHS, street safety, clean energy and the distribution of opportunity. If Keir Starmer had been honest about his plans, he would have pledged just one – restricting access to social media. This is the goal the government has pursued obsessively. Starmer turned to it as his premiership collapsed around him, imposing a social media ban for under-16s. As Andy Burnham seizes the reins, he will have to grapple with divisions in his party over defence and welfare – but his MPs remain united in their crusade against so-called online harms.

Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings: ‘There’s going to be an all-out attempt to decapitate Farage’

In January, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, joined The Spectator’s Quite right! podcast. This week, Nigel Farage suggested that ‘perhaps Dominic Cummings was right… when he said Whitehall will break the law to stop Reform winning power’. Cummings was one of the first to predict what troubles lay ahead for Reform. You can read his edited remarks here. Think about what the old system will do to stop Nigel Farage getting in. It’s not going to be politics as usual. Keir Starmer has already signalled this, when he says that he can live with the Tories winning, but he can’t live with Farage winning. The people around Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Donald Trump.

Tim Shipman

Will Nigel Farage’s big gamble pay off?

When Reform high command gathered in the boardroom of their Millbank headquarters last Tuesday, the meeting was supposed to be to select candidates in their 120 most winnable seats and choose dozens of campaign managers. It went on for six hours, as party chiefs instead addressed a growing sense of unease that the great momentum of 2025 has been lost. A source familiar with the discussions reveals that Chris Bruni-Lowe, pollster and message man, has been concerned for months that Reform needs to do something big to ‘take back control’. ‘Chris challenged people, saying things aren’t working the way they need to,’ the source says.

Robert Hardman

Prince Harry’s holiday from hell

Has grace-and-favour accommodation now fallen from grace – and favour, too? In recent days, we have learned that both our head of state and our (likely) head of government are giving up the free homes that come with the job. The King has said he will not live at Buckingham Palace once major refurbishment works are completed next year. His heir has let it be known that he won’t live there either. The monarch is very happy living at Clarence House, just as his mother was when she became Queen in 1952. Back then, Winston Churchill formally advised the Sovereign that she had to move into the Palace. No modern prime minister would dream of telling the Sovereign where to sleep, least of all one who plans to follow his example. Andy Burnham has said that he will not live at No.