Features

Wednesday

Kenneth Hite

Trigger warning: how it feels to get shot

I got shot in the leg last week. I live in Chicago, in the Hyde Park neighbourhood, which traditionally doesn’t see a lot of shootings. Hyde Park surrounds the University of Chicago and the University Police Department is the third-largest armed force in Illinois. Hyde Park is where Barack Obama lived (about six blocks from me) before he had to take a job out of town. Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle lives on my street. She controls about half of the patronage for the Chicago political machine, including jobs with the sheriff’s department. I’ve walked all over Hyde Park at all hours for 30 years, un-shot the entire time. But at 3.10 a.m. on Friday, I was walking home from a late-night writing session at a colleague’s apartment a block from my house.

Petronella Wyatt

In defence of Camilla

This week, the Duke of Sussex, self-proclaimed feminist and Lochinvar of Montecito, launched an unprovoked attack on a 75-year-old woman. In an irony that will no doubt escape him, Harry accused his stepmother, Camilla of being ‘dangerous’ and a ‘villain’. The Queen Consort, he said, in a series of television interviews, began a ‘campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown’, and briefed journalist friends in an attempt to ‘rehabilitate her image’. Harry has proved he does not possess a laser-like intelligence but even he might have thought twice before attacking a divorced woman for trying to marry a prince. Consider the howls if anyone accused Meghan of ‘campaigning’ to marry into the royal family.

Owen Matthews

Wasted energy: Putin’s plan to freeze Europe has failed

The Kremlin propaganda channel RT recently produced a festive video message for its overseas audiences. Somewhere in ‘Europe, Christmas 2021’ a happy family gathers in a cosy, Ikea-furnished house. A young girl cradles her present: an adorable hamster. Fast forward to Christmas 2022: the family huddles, freezing, under a blanket in a room illuminated only by the feeble glow of fairy lights powered by a tiny generator hooked up to the hamster’s exercise wheel. By Christmas 2023 the luckless Europeans, starving and shivering, celebrate with a thin soup made of… you got it. ‘Merry anti-Russian Christmas!’ trolls the final caption. ‘If your media doesn’t tell you where this is all going, RT is available via VPN.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Theo Hobson

The truth about Martin Luther King

Why does the United States seem to be falling apart? The ideal that used to bring Americans together seems to have failed in some way. ‘Liberty and justice for all’ is the best summary. Sure, it was always a frail creed, and interpretations of it differed, but still. It semi-worked. The creed failed in a very paradoxical way. It was voiced too well, too purely. Its greatest articulator was Dr Martin Luther King, who is commemorated with a US national holiday celebrated on Monday. (Ronald Reagan signed Martin Luther King Day into law in 1983, in less sectarian times.) The problem, of course, was that Dr King was black. Half of white America found this hard to take: that the incarnation of the national ideal did not look like them.

Thursday

Tanith Carey

The rise and fall of agony aunts

What better barometer of the nation’s psyche could there be than the questions in an agony aunt’s postbag – and the answers they receive? ‘My transgender brother is furious over my choice of baby name’, ‘My Remainer husband is refusing to get a new passport’ and ‘My leftie wife is condescending and annoying’ are just a few of the timely examples from one recent broadsheet column. These days, many responses to such dilemmas are variations on ‘Live your truth’ (in other words, do and say whatever makes you happy) – which may go some way towards explaining why agony aunts are no longer the essential reading they once were.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Six more years: how long can Biden go on?

The presidency of the United States is hard work, everybody knows that. It’s also a pretty sweet gig for should-be retirees. The 80-year-old Joe Biden and First Lady Jill just spent six days holidaying on St Croix in the Caribbean. Biden’s critics have been quick to point out that he has so far spent some 260 of his 715 days in office on vacation. That’s more than even the famously self-indulgent septuagenarian Donald Trump spent chillaxing at his estate in Florida. Who knew that leading the free world could be a part-time job? And with so much downtime, plus such power and perks, why would any proud gerontocrat quit? Bidenologists all make the same point: he spent five decades trying to be president, so why stop now?

Svitlana Morenets

Return to Ukraine: will I recognise my own country?

‘You are safe here,’ says a sign at the railway station in Przemysl, less than ten miles from the Ukrainian border. The city was one of the first in Poland to open its doors to those fleeing the war – but I’m travelling through it in the opposite direction. Last year, I was one of 152,000 Ukrainian refugees to end up in Britain. Now, I’m going home to see my family again, flying to Poland, then taking the train to Lviv. At least, that was my plan. At the station, I learn that Russian missiles have delayed the train. Six hours later, I’m told it may not arrive at all. So Plan B: take a taxi as close as possible to the pedestrian border and then trudge the final mile or so through the snow. As I walk, I wonder what I’ll see on the other side. Will I recognise my own country?

Patrick Burke

The intellectual legacy of Pope Benedict XVI

For reasons too complex to go into, while completing a doctorate in the German College in Rome in the 1990s, I shared breakfast with the then Cardinal Ratzinger every Thursday morning for nearly three years. Those breakfasts were often initially awkward because, although the Cardinal was always gracious, he had no ‘small chat’ at all and was fairly hopeless at making casual conversation. Ratzinger was a painfully shy man who did not find socialising easy. At those breakfasts, therefore, I would engage him in theology – at which point he would come alive. I was writing a thesis on the great German theologian Karl Rahner, with whom Ratzinger had taught, and so it was easy to draw him into theological conversation about Rahnerian themes.

Stuart Ritchie

How worried should we be about falling sperm counts?

Here’s a jolly thought to start the year: humanity is on its way to extinction due to a drastic decline in sperm counts. Men’s reproductive health is in such a parlous state that it won’t be long until nobody can conceive a child unassisted. That, anyway, is the argument that’s become a perennial: every year or so – most recently just at the end of 2022 – a new sperm-counting study emerges and reignites the fears that we’re biologically condemned to extinction. How anxious should we be? Here’s the story so far. In 1992, a seminal study was published in the British Medical Journal that claimed to show ‘evidence for decreasing quality of semen during [the] past 50 years’.

James Heale

Simon Clarke: What the PM can learn from Liz Truss

After Liz Truss’s spectacular fall from power, it was hard to find Tories who were happy to admit to having supported her. ‘Trussonomics’ became a punchline. Most of her plans were scrapped, including, this week, her childcare proposals. But among the wreckage of the Truss experiment, there is one survivor who is willing to defend its principles, loudly and publicly. And now he’s waging a lonely fight on the backbenches. ‘If the leadership dramas have taught us anything, it is that a battle for the soul of the Tory party is under way’ Simon Clarke had little profile when he was a Treasury minister under Boris Johnson, but as Truss’s levelling up secretary he was one of the most vocal advocates of her ideas.

Mark Galeotti

The age of AI diplomacy 

We’ve long known that computers can beat us at chess, so does it matter if they have started to beat us at more verbal and collaborative games such as Diplomacy? It certainly does, and suggests a future in which artificial intelligence may begin to play a growing role in the whole spectrum of international affairs, from crafting communiqués to solving disputes and analysing intelligence briefings. Diplomacy, a strategic board game that was a favourite of both Henry Kissinger and John F. Kennedy, is set in Europe before the first world war. The objective is to gain control of at least half the board by negotiating alliances via private one-to-one conversations. There are no binding agreements, so players can misrepresent their plans and double-deal.

Thursday

Sean Thomas

Antarctica: the best journey in the world

If there is one minor pitfall of being a travel writer, it is this. Whenever you tell a bunch of people what you do, invariably someone will ask: ‘Where’s the best place you’ve ever been?’ I struggled to answer until I got on a special new boat called the Greg Mortimer, operated by a Australian tour company called Aurora – and headed for Antarctica. We sailed south out of Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego, and crossed the Drake Passage. After three days I saw my first Antarctic iceberg. I’d observed icebergs before, in Iceland and Greenland, so I knew already that they could be striking, poetic, impressive. But this was on a grander scale entirely. It looked like an aircraft carrier made out of ethereal blue crystal.

Monday

Henry Kissinger

How to avoid another world war

Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. He was the US Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and was one of the most powerful and influential people of the 20th and 21st century. He wrote the following piece for The Spectator for our Christmas issue last year. The first world war was a kind of cultural suicide that destroyed Europe’s eminence. Europe’s leaders sleepwalked – in the phrase of historian Christopher Clark – into a conflict which none of them would have entered had they foreseen the world at war’s end in 1918. In the previous decades, they had expressed their rivalries by creating two sets of alliances whose strategies had become linked by their respective schedules for mobilisation.

Katy Balls

The polite radical: Rishi Sunak on economic repair, migrants and faith

After Rishi Sunak lost the summer Tory leadership contest, he started on Plan B: to be selected for the Kirby Sigston cricket team in his Yorkshire constituency. He had hoped to play for the club when he was first elected as an MP seven years ago, but politics got in the way. Suddenly with more time on his hands, he began to enquire about this ‘friendly, sociable and inclusive’ team – only to find out that its inclusivity had its limits. ‘They told me that I shouldn’t assume I could make the starting XI, because they’d won their league for two years in a row. They said I might have to go and play for the next village down.’ Sunak started practising, but did not in the end try out.

Sophie Winkleman

The uncomplaining bravery of the senior royals

I had my first in-person audition since the Covid era began last week. What a thrill finally to be in a room with the casting director, director and producer rather than the lockdown-triggered misery of self-taping. Actors generally fall into two categories: those who rather like watching themselves and those who would rather be boiled in oil. For the latter category, the self-tape is a unique form of torture. From quickly finding someone, anyone, to read the other lines (most recently a well-meaning neighbour who put so much into her off-camera performance that she needed a gin and a therapy session afterwards) to trawling through the takes while trying not to look at one’s face or hear one’s voice – it’s just gruesome. So hurrah to meeting in person again.

Owen Matthews

Voices in the wilderness: Russia’s exiled media

Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there was a narrow but clearly defined space for Russia’s opposition media. The fearlessly anti-Kremlin Novaya Gazeta – whose editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year – was not only tolerated but funded by a regime-friendly oligarch at the behest of the deputy head of Putin’s presidential administration Sergei Kiriyenko. Radio station Ekho Moskvy was owned by Gazprom media but regularly aired scathing criticisms of the regime. And the independent Dozhd TV (‘TV Rain’, motto: The Optimistic Channel) continued to broadcast online from increasingly cramped Moscow offices as advertisers and landlords were pressured to pull their support.

Christopher Howse

Handel’s Messiah is as much a Christmas tradition as pantomime

It was 9.45 p.m. and yellow light beamed from the church windows into the rainy night. As I opened the door the last bars of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ reverberated from the chancel. This was a rehearsal by the London Docklands Singers. ‘Everyone knows the “Hallelujah Chorus”,’ said the conductor, Andrew Campling. ‘It’s in the DNA of the public.’ In his 33 years’ conducting he has put on Handel’s Messiah ten or 12 times.  He can’t help laughing at the judgment of the librettist of Messiah, Charles Jennens, who in 1743 wrote of Handel in a letter: ‘His Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great haste, tho’ he said he would be a year about it, & make it the best of his Compositions.

Tom Holland and Robert Harris

Tom Holland and Robert Harris on eco-radicals and why monarchy matters

TOM HOLLAND: Here’s something I always wonder when I read one of your books. You’ve written novels set in the present, you’ve even written a novel set in the future, but overwhelmingly your fiction is set in past periods, spanning ancient Rome up to the second world war. What is it about the past that appeals most to you as a novelist? The mirror that it holds up to the present or the sense of difference from the way we see the world? ROBERT HARRIS: I’ve always been very interested in history. Really, but for the accident of having an English teacher who pushed me towards studying English, I would probably have studied history and indeed thought of changing halfway through my course in Cambridge. But it would have meant doing four years. So I didn’t.

Bari Weiss

My new life as a boss – and a mother

A few weeks ago I was 40,000ft in the air with Nellie, my wife, and our newborn daughter on our first cross-country flight when the latter decided to test the technological limits of her Pampers Pure Protection Size 2. I was bent over in the aisle, blocking traffic, sweating, wrangling her out of her soiled onesie, when I realised that in our attempt to pack for several weeks on the opposite coast we had made the rookie mistake of forgetting to put a change of clothes in our nappy bag. So there we were, having woken up at 3 a.m. for this flight. We had a half-dozen hats and tiny fleece socks and every conceivable gadget (portable white noise machine; baby ear muffs) yet not a scrap of fabric to dress our child in.

Melanie McDonagh

Quentin Blake’s long history with The Spectator

The Christmas present that comes with this article is an original artwork by Britain’s greatest living illustrator, Quentin Blake. By happy chance, this Friday – 16 December – is also his 90th birthday. Hip hip hooray! It is not the first illustration he has drawn for this magazine, which is why it’s very apt that he depicts an old Quentin speaking to a younger version of himself. From 1959, when he created one of the first illustrated Spectator front pages, through the 1960s, and occasionally after that, he has produced enticing Spectator covers to illustrate either the content or the season, including eight Christmas issues. His first Spectator cover was the issue of 29 May 1959.