Features

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

Who really discovered DNA’s structure?

Tuesday 28 February marks the 70th anniversary of – in my view – the most important day in the history of science. On a fine Saturday morning with crocuses in flower along the Backs in Cambridge, two men saw something surprising and beautiful. The double helix structure of DNA instantly revealed why living things were different: a molecule carries self-copying messages from the past to the future, bearing instructions written in a four-letter alphabet about how to synthesise living bodies from food. In the Eagle pub that lunchtime, Francis Crick and James Watson announced to startled fellow drinkers that they had discovered the secret of life.

Isabel Hardman

The secular inquisition: why must Christian politicians defend their beliefs?

Edinburgh What did Kate Forbes’s supporters expect would happen? When the Scottish finance secretary and Scottish National party leadership candidate was asked whether she would have voted for the legalisation of gay marriage if she had been in the Scottish parliament at the time, she said that she wouldn’t, because as a devout Christian she believes marriage is between a man and a woman. She added that if she became first minister, she would not ‘row back on rights that already exist’. Being shocked at Kate Forbes’s views is like being shocked that a Catholic might agree with the Pope In response to her honest answer, several of her backers threw their hands up in horror and withdrew their support.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

After Sturgeon: what’s the future for Scotland – and the Union?

When news broke of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, the first reaction among Tory ministers was delight. For years, she had been one of their most formidable opponents and potent threats: perhaps the only politician capable of leading a Scottish independence campaign to victory. Without her, what would happen to the SNP? But then the elation faded. If nationalists’ votes are up for grabs, would they be more likely to go to Labour or the Tories? Sturgeon’s departure has consequences far beyond that of the SNP leadership. The UK’s whole political landscape could be about to change. In her resignation statement at Bute House, Sturgeon said she believed more than ever in the cause of independence but had come to see herself as an obstacle, not an enabler.

Jane Stannus

What Lenten fasting has in common with Tough Mudder

Ash Wednesday is upon us, and it is once again time to meditate on the unusually self-aware admission of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: ‘I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.’ It has until now been an exceptionally good season for beef. Grass-fed steak cut from organic Belgian Blues has featured – perhaps the best steak this writer has experienced, except for once in a restaurant with a yellow-painted cinderblock exterior somewhere off the shoulder of a Burgundian route départementale. Paper-thin sheets of Wagyu rolled into ridiculously expensive appetisers have not been lacking. Beef wellington encased in exquisitely gilded pastry and homemade liver pâté has been as glorious as a new Waterloo.

Bryan Appleyard

Paper dragons: is Chinese science all it’s cracked up to be?

At the tail end of last year, Chinese scientists claimed they had achieved something world-changing. In a widely circulated paper, the researchers said they had developed an algorithm run on a quantum computer that is able to break the best encryption that exists today. Modern encryption runs on mathematical problems which take the most powerful computers tens of thousands of years to crack. It has long been theoretically possible that quantum computers could one day be capable of cracking these codes in a practical timescale. If the Chinese claim is correct, then Xi Jinping now possesses a terrifying assault weapon in cyber warfare.  The paper, however, was greeted with derision by many in the West.

Stephen Daisley

Revealed: Aberdeen’s ‘curriculum decolonising’ plans

The Granite City is an unlikely front in the cultural revolution, but Aberdeen University is about to change that. A document from the institution’s education committee has been passed to me. Titled ‘Decolonising the Curriculum – Timelines and Approval Processes’, it sets out plans to ‘embed a bold, progressive and sustained programme of antiracist curricular reform’. All courses will be given three years to ‘decolonise’. Academics are required to ‘review their reading lists’ and provide ‘additional perspectives on the course subject’. New courses must explain ‘how the curriculum will address the principle of decolonisation’. This will be ‘a constant process… not a linear project with a definite end’.

Mariana Mazzucato and Rory Sutherland

How consultancy infantilises governments: Mariana Mazzucato and Rory Sutherland in conversation

Mariana Mazzucato is a professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London. She speaks to The Spectator’s Wiki Man, Rory Sutherland, about the book she has co-authored with Rosie Collington, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilises our Governments and Warps our Economies.  RORY SUTHERLAND: I’d like to start by congratulating you. The extraordinary growth in scale, wealth and influence of management consulting firms over the past 20 to 30 years is undoubtedly a phenomenon worthy of extensive investigation, particularly as it pertains to government contracts.

Andrew Stuttaford

The truth about UFOs

New York Even if Chinese spy balloons – or alien spacecraft scouting the planet ahead of their coming invasion – start being deployed more discreetly than they have been of late, there will still be more sightings than usual of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs: a new set of initials designed to help UFOs shed their dodgy past). The word has gone out that the stigma attached to military personnel who report UAPs has gone, and they appear to have responded: there were more reported UAP sightings between March 2021 and August 2022 than in the previous 17 years, including nearly 200 that remain unexplained.

Thursday

Toby Young

The true cost of Labour’s war on private schools

In a newspaper article five years ago, Michael Gove singled out the tax exemptions enjoyed by private schools thanks to their charitable status as one of the ‘burning injustices’ of our time. He took it for granted that scrapping these benefits would raise money and proposed spending it on children in care instead. ‘How can this be justified?’ he said of the exemptions. ‘I ask the question in genuine, honest inquiry.’ Answer came there none, and Keir Starmer has now said that private schools will be treated like any other commercial business if Labour wins the next election. Since that looks quite likely, I thought I’d take up Michael’s challenge and say why I think that’s a bad idea.

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Liz Truss vs the OBR

Liz Truss is on manoeuvres. She is spending lots of time where she is most comfortable, inside Westminster’s thinktanks, preaching her version of free-market economics. There are rumours she might assemble a new thinktank of her own, or work with an existing one, to set up an alternative to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth forecasts. The OBR was prevented from producing a forecast for the mini-Budget. Still, to Truss, it represents the naysayers, the UK’s economic ‘orthodoxy’ who tore apart her mini-Budget. An alternative forecast, she believes, could confront the gloomsters and doomsters and vindicate her belief that supply-side reforms – tax cuts, deregulation, privatisation – are needed to help economic growth. She wants to make the case for change.

Katy Balls

The haunting: Rishi Sunak can’t escape the ghosts of PMs past

When Rishi Sunak embarked on a reshuffle of his cabinet this week, he wanted to avoid the traditional scrum of cameras as MPs walked up to the No. 10 door. Instead, the Prime Minister called each minister to inform them of his shake-up of their Whitehall departments to create new ministries to reflect his priorities. It was typical of the Sunak premiership. Where his predecessors would go out of their way to court press attention, this PM prefers to be low key. Early on, No. 10 viewed it as a success that the World Cup dominated the front pages over politics. The hope among Team Sunak is that this quieter approach will be welcomed by a public worn down by Tory psychodrama. ‘Boris is in submarine mode,’ says one Tory MP.

Olivia Potts

The rise of the nursery spy app

Do you know what you were doing at 10.03 a.m. last Tuesday? Or what you had for breakfast three weeks ago? I don’t. You probably don’t either – unless you’re a spy, or you’re putting together an alibi for a murder. But like millions of parents, I know these things about my son. Not because I was there, but because I wasn’t. NurseryCam is supposed to be about peace of mind for the parent. It feels like a slippery slope My one-year-old goes to a local nursery three days a week. On those days, I know his every movement, bowel or otherwise. This is thanks to an app that parents are asked to download when their child enrols.

Fraser Nelson

Liz Truss: what really happened

The parable of Liz Truss is, by now, world famous. A free-market idealogue was elected leader by the radical wing of her party, then trashed the economy by enacting her deficit-financed tax cuts. She invoked Hayek and Thatcher and was cheered on by their admirers. But her mini-Budget terrified the market and she had to quit – after doubling everyone’s mortgage rates. In the end, it was not the experts she was rebelling against, but economic reality. She had applied 1980s economics to the 2020s and it had ended in disaster, for her and for her country. As prime minister, Truss was stunned by the potency of this narrative. Not only the IMF but Joe Biden weighed in to criticise her for reasons she considered demonstrable nonsense.

James Heale

Lee Anderson: ‘Capital punishment? 100% effective!’

Who is the worst man in Britain? According to the Daily Mirror, it’s the 56-year-old former coal miner and Tory MP Lee Anderson, who clinched the award a year ago after criticising England’s footballers for ‘taking the knee’. How did Anderson, who this week was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Tory party, respond to the accolade? ‘I immediately rang my parents to thank them for all their support. It’s the first time anyone from my family has been voted the worst man in Britain, so I tried to win it two years on the trot.’  Since his election in December 2019, Anderson has emerged as the pugnacious ambassador for the Red Wall intake of Conservative MPs.

Julius Strauss

Collecting the dead in Ukraine

Dovhenke, Ukraine The Russian soldier lay where he had fallen. His plastic combat belt and flak jacket were still intact, but his legs were splayed at an unnatural angle, and where his face and scalp had once been there was now only a skull with dark stains on it.   ‘The guys who died protecting our country need to go home to their mothers, fathers, daughters and sons’ Oleksiy, leader of the Black Tulip, a small team of Ukrainian men who collect bodies from the country’s eastern battlefields, gingerly tied a rope around the decaying corpse. ‘These bodies are sometimes booby-trapped,’ he said. ‘We have to be careful.’   We all walked 50 or 60 yards up the muddy track we had come down and crouched. Then Oleksiy, bending low, gave the rope a tug.

Hannah Moore

In defence of amateur sleuths

Two weeks have passed since Nicola Bulley went missing while walking the dog in her Lancashire village. The police say their working theory is that she fell into the river but that they are also ‘keeping an open mind’ and pursuing ‘many inquiries’. The head of the underwater team searching the Wyre for Ms Bulley says that in 20 years he has never seen so unusual a case. The police say they would like to speak to ‘as many members of the public as possible’ and yet have also called the level of online speculation ‘totally unacceptable’. But is public speculation really so wrong? There’s a big difference between hindering the police investigation, which is a crime, and generally being interested in Ms Bulley’s disappearance.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

One year on: how will the Ukraine war end?

In early October 2021 President Joe Biden, the CIA director William Burns and other top members of the US’s national security team gathered in the Oval Office to hear a disturbing briefing from US military chief General Mark Milley. ‘Extraordinary detailed’ intelligence gathered by western spy agencies suggested that Vladimir Putin might be planning to invade Ukraine. According to briefing notes that Milley shared with the Washington Post, the first and most fundamental problem facing Biden was how to ‘underwrite and enforce the rules-based international order’ against a country with extraordinary nuclear capability ‘without going to World War 3’. Milley offered four possible answers: ‘No. 1: Don’t have a kinetic conflict between the US military or Nato with Russia. No.

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine will not compromise

Among Ukrainians, there is little debate about how the war will end. The overwhelming consensus is that it cannot conclude until Russia has been fully repelled, and Ukraine’s borders are returned to the 1991 frontier when independence was declared after the Soviet Union collapsed. This means removing Russian troops from Crimea and the self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas region. Of course this is not an easy mission. But for Ukrainians, the alternative is unthinkable. The mass graves uncovered in Bucha have shown us what Russian occupation means. We have also seen, in the broken promises of the Minsk agreements, what any truce with Vladimir Putin is worth.

Neil Clark

In praise of greyhound racing

I feel strangely and disproportionately elated when Number 2 dog, Ballyblack Bess, powers home strongly to win the 20.03 race. It’s a Monday evening in January in the greyhound stadium in Blackbird Leys, Oxford. I only won £9 but I’m pleased I came because an evening at the dogs is still great old-fashioned fun. The punters love it, as do the dogs, so it’s devastating that the RSPCA has demanded it be banned. They’ve teamed up with two other leading charities, the Dogs Trust and the Blue Cross, to request that it’s phased out over a five-year period. But the RSPCA is – excuse the pun – barking up the wrong tree. The main objection to the sport was always about what happened to the dogs once their racing careers were over.

Rana Mitter

Japan’s plans for an anti-China alliance

As the world’s attention focused last month on whether to send tanks to Ukraine, Japan’s Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, was on a whistle-stop tour of the West. He held various meetings with G7 leaders, including Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden. His objective was clear: to create a new alliance that can counter China. Japan has been forming a ‘Quad’ with Australia, India and the US on naval manoeuvres  Japan adopted a ‘peace constitution’ in 1947 when it was occupied by the US, pledging that the country would never again wage war. For the past half a century, the military budget was capped at 1 per cent of GDP, and Japan sought to project its image abroad as a semi-disarmed economic giant, an Asian Germany of sorts. Now all this has changed.