Features

Wednesday

Max Jeffery

Gen Z’s surprising nostalgia for the old high street

Dave and Lynne are remembering the good old days when kids had their baths in galvanised tubs in front of the fire. ‘No inhibition,’ says Dave. ‘Straight with your clothes off. Straight in there. Mum’ll throw a bucket of water over you. Wash yourself. Another bucket of water.’ Dave manages the E. Langston hardware shop, but it isn’t a real business. Not anymore. Some years ago, its premises were transposed from Piper’s Row in Wolverhampton to the Black Country Living Museum. Its life is happier here. There’s not much left on Piper’s Row today: an off licence, a bus stop, a cheap hotel. The Black Country Living Museum was founded in 1978 to teach people about life during the Industrial Revolution.

Gus Carter

Who really runs Manchester?

‘It’s basically a dictatorship,’ one insider tells me. If you want to build anything in Britain’s second city, you have to get permission from the so-called ‘Manchester mafia’. These are the officials who have overseen the city’s extraordinary redevelopment. The number of towers in Manchester has increased sevenfold since Andy Burnham became mayor in 2017. You might assume that Burnham is the boss of this mafia family. But you’d be wrong. ‘He just appears at the meetings and says, “Yes, yes, that’s fine”,’ explains a source. ‘His political involvement is minimal,’ confirms Andrew Teacher, a real estate adviser who’s worked in the city. ‘The ship was motoring along well before he arrived.’ The vast redevelopment had almost nothing to do with Burnham.

Damian Thompson

Is there any route back for the Society of St Pius X?

As any Catholic master of ceremonies will tell you, it takes only the tiniest sartorial mishap to lend a Python-esque flavour to moments of the utmost solemnity. On 1 July the rebel traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX) created four new bishops in defiance of Pope Leo XIV during a five-hour open-air Latin Mass in a Swiss alpine meadow. The consecrating prelates wore dark-red velvet chasubles over scarlet-and-gold dalmatics with matching gloves. They descended from their thrones bearing sacred chrism. Afterwards the new bishops stood in a row, mitres perched on their heads for the first time. Liberal bishops wear stumpy headgear.

Tali Fraser

The real story of Manchesterism isn’t the one Andy Burnham is telling

‘Manchesterism,’ Andy Burnham declared in his Makerfield by-election campaign video, ‘is the end of neoliberalism.’ The path to power, he believes, lies in the Mancunian Way. Not the ring road that sits atop Manchester’s actual Downing Street, but his record as mayor of Britain’s ‘second city’ – and the idea that it proves his philosophy of unlocking growth and productivity for the whole country. Yet the Mancunian Way is littered with potholes. Manchesterism is not new. It did not begin with Burnham, nor with any Labour figure in Manchester. The name is borrowed – stolen, really – from the free-trade Manchester Liberalism of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who fought price-fixing, tariffs and protectionism in the 19th century.

Charlie Methven

What’s the point of Eton?

If the Battle of Waterloo was won on Eton’s playing fields – as Wellington allegedly said – might Xi Jinping’s 21st-century ambitions for China end up being pushed there too? A picture of the list of next year’s King’s Scholars, currently doing the rounds of Old Etonians, shows that of 14 places awarded for September 2026, ten are going to pupils with Chinese names. ‘Yet another nail in the coffin,’ grumbled the OE who sent me the picture the other day. The scholarships were established by Henry VI for ‘poor, scholarly boys’ in his kingdom. These days, with the upper-middle-class English increasingly priced out of paying the £65,000-a-year fees, they are more sought after than ever – and bitterly resented when they go elsewhere.

Wednesday

Charlie Baker

Make weddings short again 

As every single one of my friends – and their spouses – is a tasteful soul, it goes without saying that every wedding I have ever attended has been the last word in elegance. You do hear things, though. Of Balham-based chartered accountants behaving like Victorian land magnates by renting stately homes for their nuptials. Of multi-venue events in five-star resorts by the lapping shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Of women having to buy, rent and borrow ten dresses for the summer that makes up wedding season. I could go on. So I am not surprised to read that one in three people is now turning down wedding invitations because they’ve become so expensive.

Lara Brown

The fuss over gay conversion therapy is a charade

Politicians love banning things. Even if the threats they worry about don’t actually exist. In February 2019, amid Conservative defections and the slow death of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, Conservative MP Bill Wiggin decided that the most pressing task for parliament was banning the consumption of dog meat. Not meat for dogs, but meat made out of dogs. And no, you are right, you don’t get it at the deli counter at Waitrose. Or indeed anywhere in the UK. Wiggin was honest enough to admit there was no actual evidence that dog meat was being eaten in the UK. And he acknowledged that it was already illegal to sell dog meat for human consumption. But that, he told the House, shouldn’t stop us from ‘setting an example to the world’.

John Power and William Atkinson

Revealed: Ed Miliband and the shady funding of net zero

There is a problem with British politics. Dark money from abroad is being funnelled into our system. A complex web of interlocking charities, thinktanks, advocacy groups and campaign outfits is being bank-rolled to push a policy agenda onto the public that makes us poorer, puts us in hock to hostile powers and undermines working people. According to the left, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are puppets of such shadowy interests: Tufton Street thinktanks bankrolled by oil companies, Christian fundamentalists and perhaps even Russian money. These allegations are well-ventilated and have been exhaustively investigated. Most lead nowhere. Yet no similar scrutiny is applied to a far bigger lobbying effort – the concerted campaign to push a ruinous net-zero agenda.

Max Jeffery

The truth about how the British Empire is taught in schools

William Dalrymple says that children ‘don’t learn’ about the British Empire at school. It is an ‘elephant in the room’, he claimed on the Green party leader Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics podcast last week. This isn’t true. I learnt about the Empire at school. Studying A-level history a decade ago, we spent a year covering the Raj. The Indian Mutiny, 1857. The Amritsar Massacre, 1919. On viciously cold mornings, my teacher, Ms Pearmain, would open the windows and say that boys’ brains were slowed by comfort. It kept her lessons in my head. It would have taken Dalrymple a few seconds to do some research and realise his error. In schools which follow the national curriculum, lessons about the British Empire are prescribed by the government.

Gavin Mortimer

Why is Giorgia Meloni courting Emmanuel Macron?

Emmanuel Macron has lost a friend in Keir Starmer. The French President paid tribute to the outgoing British Prime Minister last week, describing him as a man of ‘dignity, decency and courage’. When one door closes another one opens, and while Starmer was organising the removal vans, Macron was welcoming Giorgia Meloni to the Côte d’Azur. Last week’s Franco-Italian summit was the first of its kind since 2020; Meloni was elected prime minister two years later. For Macron, she posed a threat to European ‘values’ because her party had its roots in postwar fascism Her victory did not go down well with Macron and his centrist government.

Patrick Kidd

How to rescue English cricket

There was always something of John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot about Ben Stokes, ever eager for a flamboyant rescue mission in his own particular, as Lancelot puts it, idiom. Leave no chandelier unswung, no buckle unswashed. He would charge in, gung-holier than thou, and work out the damage later. ‘When I’m in this idiom, I sort of get carried away,’ Lancelot apologises after massacring all the guests at a wedding.  At times, it was glorious. But often, increasingly so in the second half of his England captaincy, ghastly. ‘Incredible highs and pretty low lows’ was Stokes’s own assessment – and we will always be grateful for the highs. But as England rebuild, they need to consider the manner of those lows and how many were self-inflicted.

Owen Matthews

Putin has lost touch with reality

As dark clouds of burning oil billow like thunderheads on the skyline of Moscow and black rain falls across the capital, why does Vladimir Putin fail to see that something fundamental is changing in the dynamic of his war? Why, when Donald Trump effectively agreed to hand over every inch of the Ukrainian territory Russia has captured and offered the Kremlin an easy off-ramp studded with juicy business deals, did Putin refuse? And why, for that matter, did the Russian President choose to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the first place? One answer is that Tsar Vladimir is mad, so blinded by his imperialist ambitions that he deliberately chooses to ignore the reality of a crashing economy, half a million dead fellow countrymen and a war that is obviously unwinnable.

Andrew Sabisky

Britain will need China to survive the AI revolution

Professional players of Texas hold ’em, the most popular variant of poker, go to great lengths to play a balanced, unexploitable strategy. They mix value bets and bluffs in every single hand. The bluffs are not usually to make money. They are there to stop other players adjusting profitably to the game. If another player over-folds to avoid losing to your value bets, only then do your bluffs go from break-even to hugely profitable. Against strong opponents, a balanced strategy is essential. National strategy likewise should strive for balance, particularly from the perspective of a weaker country.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Can Burnham resist the siren call of the left?

Power, when it is gained and lost, is transferred in stages: the actual, the visual and the constitutional. The latter took place on Tuesday evening when the prime minister presumptive sent a letter to Antonia Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary, requesting that she commence access talks with his team. Keir Starmer had already given permission for them to proceed, but the propriety and ethics team in the Cabinet Office had told Romeo she could not initiate proceedings. Andy Burnham had to ask first. To all intents and purposes, he is already the vessel from which power flows. At the same time, it became clear that James Purnell, the former Blairite cabinet minister, will lead the transition team and stay on to become chief of staff in 10 Downing Street.

Paul Wood

The Iran war is Trump’s Suez crisis

Clarissa Eden famously declared that ‘in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room’. Does Melania Trump feel the same about the Strait of Hormuz? Or perhaps Donald will be reminded of the strait every time he hits one over the water at Bedminster. He ought to be. The Iran war will define his presidency. It is his legacy – just not in the way he imagined. In 1956, a British prime minister discovered that we were no longer a great power. It was an end to illusions. We liked to think we had the best navy in the world, but that was irrelevant to whether we could keep a canal in Egypt.

Michael Gove

Can I save Britain from war with Russia?

I t won’t be much of a consolation to Keir Starmer but I too was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of being prime minister. Fortunately for the country, I was only playing the role in a fictional coalition cabinet assembled by Sky TV to wargame the consequences of a Russian attack on the UK. My turn as make-believe premier began with unwarranted overconfidence, moved to fumbling crisis after crisis and ended with me almost alone in a bunker wondering how disaster had come so quickly. So very different from the real world. My cabinet colleagues – Nicola Sturgeon, Penny Mordaunt, Harriet Harman, Jim Murphy and Sayeeda Warsi – all gave a good account of themselves.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Long holidays are the worst

‘Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?’ a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire valley. Another French friend messaged me last week from Montreal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from a fortnight in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts. ‘I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,’ she texted.

Gus Carter

The Spectator’s role in the birth of America

The Spectator was there at the founding of America. George Washington had six copies of the original 18th-century Spectator at his Mount Vernon estate and read them often. He shared with Joseph Addison, The Spectator’s co-publisher, an interest in how to educate ideal citizens: men and women with wit and grit. Young Washington read The Spectator in the hope of bettering himself, too. Both of his older half-brothers had been educated in England and he wished also for the manners and polish of an English gentleman. For the pioneering, self-improving men who would go on to create an independent America, the 18th-century Spectator was both an education and a guide. ‘I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it,’ wrote Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography.

Henry Jeffreys

The secret to dressing exceptionally well

As I scribble these words on a train to London, I’m wearing a lightweight Italian wool suit, a shirt from Gieves & Hawkes, a silk spotty tie and a pair of Church’s suede brogues. You might mistake me for a prosperous Neapolitan gentleman of a certain age. But in fact, I’m a charity-shop dandy – my outfit came to less than £60. That’s less than a pair of new trainers for my teenage daughter. I’m particularly pleased with the shoes, which I picked up locally for £30. A new pair would set you back £700. If you’re not too grand to buy secondhand, it’s actually far easier and cheaper for men to dress smartly than to be slovenly. I learned this important fact in my early twenties.

Melissa Kite

The real reason for the Dartmoor pony cull

Try as I might, I cannot think of an animal welfare issue that is more misunderstood than the survival of Dartmoor ponies. Every maddening misconception about land management and every un-intended consequence of animal rights sentimentality is encapsulated in the sad reality of why the ponies will be culled in greater numbers than ever from this autumn, because the government has messed up the issue even more than usual. The latest disaster to befall Dartmoor is the conflating of ponies with sheep and cattle by Natural England to produce a total number of grazing animals allowed on Dartmoor.