Features

Friday

Martin Rees

Space won’t offer an escape from Earth’s problems

Because I have the title Astronomer Royal, I’m often asked: ‘Did you do horoscopes for the Queen?’ Sadly, the answer’s ‘no’. I’m just an astronomer, not an astrologer. Scientists are poor forecasters – almost as poor as economists. But I fear I’ve become typecast as a doomster because I predict a bumpy ride through the next few decades.  We’re deep in the ‘anthropocene’. Humans are so numerous and so demanding of energy and resources that our collective footprint is changing the world’s climate, and despoiling the natural environment.

The Spectator

A Spectator Christmas poll: What gives you hope?

Volodymyr Zelensky   Volodymyr Zelensky makes a surprise visit to the liberated city Kherson, 14 November 2022 (Getty Images) I am inspired by the Ukrainian people – a courageous, creative and strong people who united in one moment against the brutal and unjust Russian aggression. All Ukrainians today are warriors – those on the front line, volunteers, journalists, IT specialists, doctors, teachers, absolutely everyone. These are strong and courageous people who are fighting for their homeland, their country and their lives. And nothing can break them. Not bombs, not rocket strikes, not the lack of electricity, water and heat in their homes, nor other types of Russian terror. This nation delights and inspires me and gives me confidence in the victory of Ukraine.

Sam Leith

‘Loss is a thing that we become’: Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a distance. You can draw them in one line… They’ve got to be godlike. It’s all an invention. But it happened early on for me.’ On the handful of occasions over the years that I’ve seen Cave from a distance, he has been just that sort of figure – one a deft cartoonist would draw with one line: ski-jump nose, Sesame Street eyebrows and a swept-back bob of jet-black hair like Wednesday Addams after Uncle Fester chopped off her pigtails for a prank.

Andrew Watts

There’s nothing romantic about mistletoe

The line of trees beside the road into Tenbury Wells are bare of leaves at the beginning of December. But on their spindly branches are huge clumps of mistletoe, weighing them down like muffs on the skinny arms of dowagers. Most of the country’s mistletoe grows in a small area of England – Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, the counties around the Malvern Hills – but no one is quite sure why; it may be the number of orchards (mistletoe grows well on apple trees) or the climate of cold winters and warm summers.

Rory Sutherland and Slavoj Žižek

‘Universities shouldn’t be safe spaces’: Rory Sutherland and Slavoj Žižek on cancel culture, futurism and Hollywood Marxism 

Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural theorist. Rory Sutherland is The Spectator’s Wiki Man. We arranged for them to have a chat. They spoke for more than four hours about identity politics, Elon Musk, Hollywood, free speech and more. Introductions & ‘luxury beliefs’ Rory Sutherland: I’m recording this on a Meta Portal moving camera, which no one seems to have bought, because I assume nobody wants Mark Zuckerberg spying on them in their living room. I don’t mind though: no one wants to spy on an overweight 57-year-old advertising executive. Slavoj Žižek: I know what you mean. Perhaps we should do this interview naked from the waist down! By the way, Rory, I like that your bookshelves are completely empty.

Juliet Nicolson

My memories of Raymond Briggs

I really loved Raymond Briggs. I first met him in 1976, before his mega-fame had arrived. I was working in the publicity department of Raymond’s publishers, Hamish Hamilton, and every so often he would trundle a wheelie suitcase into the office containing the painted boards of artwork for his latest cartoon story. His visits were a joy because he was so funny, but also tricky because unlike every other author under our promotional care, Raymond considered the less media attention he received to be the better. He referred to us as ‘blooming publicity women’ and we had to beg him to agree to talk to eager interviewers, and to submit to the scrutiny of TV and radio chat shows. The broadcaster Chris Evans, for example, was dismissed as ‘that ginger-haired git’.

Wednesday

Jenny McCartney

Don’t expect a united Ireland any time soon

A hundred years since the founding of the Irish state – on 6 December 1922 – how likely or desirable is the prospect of Irish unity? The recent electoral success of Sinn Fein suggested to many – particularly in the US – that the idea’s momentum is now unstoppable. Of course it’s being egged on by Sinn Fein itself, whose New York Times advertisements in March proclaimed that Irish unity would be in the best interests of ‘citizens abroad and the wider diaspora’. Extensive polling for the Irish Times this week, however, paints a much more complex, contradictory picture of opinion at home. Before stocking up on celebratory green beer, the Irish-American diaspora might well be advised to read it.

Freddy Gray

The Windsors are warring over their womenfolk

Wouldn’t it be amusing to see an actual fly-on-the-wall job about Netflix’s new Harry & Meghan documentary? Imagine the scenes behind-the-scenes. The Duchess rehearses her crying face in consultation with her make-up specialist. The Duke glares at himself in a mirror. ‘I had to protect my family,’ he repeats over and over as he fingers his apricot beard. The lighting team try to coax along the impossibly capricious royals only to suffer their own nervous breakdowns after Meghan accuses them of disregarding her mental health. Or maybe that’s not the entertainment people want. Television these days is all about ‘structured reality’ – or rubbish glossed up as revelation. It’s up to you, the viewer, to decide how much you can be bothered to disbelieve.

Tina Brown

The Sussexes’ ‘extinction burst’ is coming

From the point of view of New York City, where I live, everything is going Meghan and Harry’s way. News items about their folly vs the worthy Waleses are a standard trope of the US home page of the Daily Mail, but they are the wrong side of America’s zeitgeist. True, no one could have expected a weaponised lady-in-waiting to sink the strenuous efforts to update the House of Windsor brand, but it is also true that to anyone with a modicum of PR smarts, the where-are-you-really-from flap involving Lady Susan Hussey – a Cretaceous-era courtier often glimpsed beneath a flower-pot hat riding beside the late Queen in the car to church – was a debacle waiting to happen.

Isabel Oakeshott

The truth about Matt Hancock

Matt Hancock and I have almost nothing in common. For starters I’m terrified of spiders and hopelessly squeamish. I physically retched as I watched him eating unmentionables in the Australian jungle. Far more importantly, we fundamentally disagree over his handling of the pandemic. The passage of time has not left me any less angry about lockdowns. My blood still boils when I think of the unnecessary suffering: the broken homes and broken businesses; the lost last moments with loved ones; the missed cancers and operations; a generation of children scarred forever.

Katy Balls

Rachel Reeves: ‘Attack is the best form of defence’

‘Attack is the best form of defence,’ declares Rachel Reeves, sitting in a block purple dress in her office in parliament. The shadow chancellor is discussing what lessons for politics she learnt from chess. She was the British girls’ champion at the age of 14. ‘Thinking ahead. Trying to think what your opponent might do – and how you would respond to that. I was a very aggressive chess player: attack, attack, attack. All the time!’ She has kept such tactics since she entered politics, having previously been an economist at the Bank of England.

Paul Wood

Is Iran at a turning point?

Mashhad is Iran’s holiest city; it has the country’s most important shrine. It’s not the place for an Iranian woman to walk around without a hijab. But in September, Katayoun began leaving hers at home, going out with her head uncovered to join the daily protests against the country’s theocratic regime. A policeman struck her with his baton. She didn’t care. Katayoun is, necessarily, an assumed name. She is 35, an accountant, but also a member of an opposition group. She had joined the other ‘uprisings’, in 2009, in 2017 and in 2019, but she tells me: ‘This uprising is very different. People’s fear of the regime has fallen away.’ ‘This uprising is very different.

James Heale

Inside Team Truss’s tussle for titles

In the final hours of the Liz Truss regime, a key question was obsessing advisers: who would get a seat in the House of Lords? Her inner circle was divided as to whether, after just 49 days in office, such privileges were even appropriate. As a few aides tried to convince Truss that honours would be a mistake, her chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, was adamant a select few would become the lords and ladies of tomorrow. A prime minister determined to appoint a peer will almost always get his man As a former prime minister, Truss has the right to put forward a list of ‘resignation honours’. The jury is still out as to whether she will choose to do so.

Thursday

Nicholas Lezard

How to avoid paying London’s Ulez charge

It’s getting hard to escape low emission zones. In Birmingham, Oxford and Bristol – and pretty soon the whole of London – unless your vehicle is squeaky clean, you are going to have to pay every day that you drive. London--based readers probably know by now of Transport for London’s plans to expand its £12.50-a-day Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) to every single borough, from Hayes to Hornchurch, Cheshunt to Caterham, and with a sticky-out bit which I think has been deliberately designed to include Chessington World of Adventures. For many, this is an outrage. The Conservative MP for Carshalton and Wallington, Elliot Colburn, has described himself as ‘very, very angry’, calling the expansion a ‘disgusting move’.

Neil Clark

The enduring appeal of ’Allo ’Allo!

If you think your life is stressful it’s good to reflect on what poor René Artois went through each week in ’Allo ’Allo!, the 1980s BBC sitcom set during the German occupation of France. RAF pilots hidden in his mother-in-law’s cupboard upstairs, German officers in the café downstairs, Herr Otto Flick of the Gestapo likely to limp in at any moment – and all the time trying to serve drinks and juggle a sex life that would have exhausted even Errol Flynn. ‘I have to be nice to the Germans, they are my customers, they are winning the war, so if I am not nice to them they will shoot me,’ René would say. ‘I have to be nice to the Resistance, otherwise they will shoot me for being nice to the Germans.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The new vandals: how museums turned on their own collections

This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.  What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests and curiosities. Today the collection is still there, although the heads are not.

Lucy Dunn

Why not let pharmacists prescribe medication?

It started as a small red shadow on my nose that gradually began to spread as the inflammation took hold. Soon the lesion was painful. A golden crust appeared and my suspicions were confirmed: impetigo. Impetigo is an incredibly infectious skin condition – and if left untreated, it can scar. Topical antibiotics – fucidin ointment – work a treat, but I had just moved to London and had no GP in the city. I wasn’t too worried, though. The importance of the ‘multidisciplinary team’ had been branded on to my brain from day one of medical school and so I called my nearest Boots. ‘I have impetigo,’ I told them, ‘and I’m looking for fucidin.’ I was to come in and ask for the pharmacist, they said. So I did exactly that.

Freddy Gray

Is Kanye West really out to derail Trump? 

American conservatives like to say that the way to stop Donald Trump in 2024 is to hit him from the right. Compared with his own political movement, they argue, Trump has always been something of a squish when it comes to issues such as Covid vaccines, gay marriage, criminal justice, or border control. He never did build that wall – not properly, anyway. Any candidate wanting to take down the father of Trumpism should therefore keep pointing out that Daddy had four years in the White House and never lived up to the hype. Take note, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Joe Wallen

The Taliban and Isis are in a battle for control

Kabul An insurgency has once again started in Afghanistan – and this time, the Taliban is the target. Since the Americans left Kabul last year, high-profile Taliban figures have been the victims of 220 remote explosive and suicide attacks, one of which took place the day before I arrived in the capital in October. A suicide bomber somehow managed to strike in a mosque inside Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry, which is responsible for security and law enforcement in the country. It was the type of attack that should have been impossible to carry out. Four people were killed and two dozen wounded. They were the latest victims of a war between the Taliban and Isis. Isis and the Taliban both follow variations of jihadist Sunni Islam, but they are ideological enemies.

Jade McGlynn

Women trouble: soldiers’ wives and mothers are turning on Putin

The women of Voronezh are very busy these days. Across the Russian city, aunties are busy sewing boots and winter clothing. Relatives are busy crowdfunding for night goggles and drones. Wives are busy demonstrating outside military bases. Mothers are busy making preparations to travel 150 miles southwest where they will cross the border into Ukraine to find and bring home the broken bodies of their abandoned sons.  The wives and mothers of Voronezh are not alone in their efforts, or in their demands that the authorities return their underequipped and undertrained men. In neighbouring Kursk region, relatives of mobiks (men called up for mobilisation to Ukraine in September) staged a protest on the Russian--Ukrainian border.