Features

Wednesday

Samir Shah

How will Rishi Sunak’s Hinduism inform his premiership?

When Rishi Sunak was elected as an MP, he swore his oath of allegiance in the House of Commons on the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s most sacred texts. Many – if not most – people think that Hinduism is a religion of peace: an idea that’s taken root thanks to Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence. The truth is that the Bhagavad Gita is about war. The text consists of the dialogue between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna on the battlefield. Prince Arjuna is facing amoral and emotional dilemma. The battle is against his own kith and kin – many of whom would be sure to be killed. Arjuna asks Krishna whether he should renounce the war. Krishna’s counsel is unambiguous: Arjuna’s duty is to waste them. Arjuna wins the war, killing quite a few himself.

Julie Burchill

The myth of the jolly fat man

After last week’s revelation that James Corden was banned from a New York restaurant for being repeatedly horrible to staff, I’ve been considering the different way fat men and fat women are viewed. Fat men are invariably seen as jolly – who can imagine a thin Father Christmas? – despite the rollcall of porky evil, from Fatty Arbuckle, abuser of women, to Cyril Smith, abuser of boys. If they are well--connected drunks, fat men may also be called ‘bon viveurs’ whereas fat women are seen as ‘eating their feelings’ at best, being lazy and thick at worst.

Alexander Downer

The threat to Britain’s undersea cables

‘In the digital age of cloud computing, the idea that steel and plastic pipes are integral to our life seems anachronistic,’ wrote Rishi Sunak. ‘But our ability to transmit confidential information, to conduct financial transactions and to communicate internationally all depend upon a global network of physical cables lying under the sea.’ And what if those cables are cut? ‘The threat is nothing short of existential.’ Sunak wrote those words five years ago in a paper for the thinktank Policy Exchange. Last weekend, as he was running to become prime minister, he was proven right. The Shetland Islands lost phone and internet connections after the cable that links the islands to the mainland was severed.

Louise Perry

Why the next wave of feminism is conservative

At a recent dinner, an MP told me a story that reveals a great deal about the current state of feminism. One of her constituents had come to her surgery in some distress. She had children at a local primary school, she said, and had been alarmed to discover that the school’s sex education curriculum contained explicit details that she considered wildly inappropriate. She was aware of the prevailing culture in which adolescents – particularly girls – are sexualised at an ever younger age, and she did not want that for her own children. But parents are increasingly powerless in the face of progressive schools, and not having been to university, this woman felt anxious. She was intimidated by the prospect of speaking with her children’s headteacher.

Julian Jessop

Liz Truss: my part in her downfall

Now that the final curtain has fallen on Liz Truss’s brief and tumultuous premiership, it is time for reflection. A chance to set the record straight and also to own up to mistakes – especially for those of us who tried to advise her. What went wrong? Yes, the tipping point was Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. But three problems were by then already brewing. First, the leadership campaign over the summer had become very focused on tax cuts. Even Rishi Sunak ended up saying he would cut the basic rate of income tax from 20 per cent to 16 per cent by the end of the next parliament, while Jeremy Hunt (now Chancellor) would not settle for cancelling the planned increase in corporation tax to 25 per cent, but instead wanted it cut to 15 per cent.

James Forsyth

Is Rishi ready? Sunak’s first test will be getting through winter

It is the most remarkable turnaround in recent political history. On 5 September, Rishi Sunak lost the Tory leadership race to Liz Truss with 43 per cent of the vote. He was written off as another politician with a brilliant future behind him. Seven weeks later, the former Chancellor – whom, I should say, I have been friends with for many years – walked through the door of No. 10. His political resurrection was made possible by the economy. He spent the summer warning of the risk of slashing taxes without having a grip on inflation and controlling spending. When Truss followed through on her tax-cutting campaign pledges – adding a few more surprise tax cuts and an energy subsidy for good measure – the markets were spooked.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

How bad will the midterms be for the Democrats?

Towards the end of the summer, almost in a spirit of contrarianism, well-informed Americans started talking about President Joe Biden and the Democrats winning again. It had been a bad year, these pundits conceded, but Biden was suddenly on a ‘hot streak’ and, as the November midterms approached, the Democratic party finally had some political momentum. The President had passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they said, which addressed the most pressing issue facing voters. He’d also launched a bold initiative to forgive student debt for low- to middle-income earners. The Republicans, meanwhile, had frightened moderates with their pro-life extremism following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs Wade.

James Forsyth

The lady vanishes: the Truss agenda is dead

‘Governments don’t control markets,’ the new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, likes to say. But there are times when markets control governments. The market, or the fear of how the market might react, is now the driving force in British politics. It explains the dramatic developments of the past week and will determine the new Prime Minister’s fate. Last month’s ‘mini-Budget’ was doomed because it required that the government borrow £70 billion more than had been planned. This money would have to be raised in the gilts market, and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng assumed that the markets would be happy to continue to lend so much at such low rates. But they missed the fact that attitudes were changing.

Noel Malcolm

Will The Parthenon Project seize the Elgin Marbles?

Thirty-five years ago, the late Christopher Hitchens published a book about the Elgin Marbles. Unsurprisingly, it was a polemical work; he was passionately campaigning for the return of the sculptures to Athens. But that was not the reason why I wrote a scathing review of it for The Spectator. Parts of it were plagiarised, as I showed, from the classic book by William St Clair; and in some places Hitchens dealt with the awkward fact that the evidence did not fit his claims by abbreviating the quotations, filtering out the unwanted bits. Hitchens replied with a thunderously disdainful attack on me in the letters page. I said to the then editor, Charles Moore, that I feared that if I met Hitchens at a Spectator party he would punch me on the nose.

James Ball

Zuckerberg’s empire collapses

Mark Zuckerberg is in a lot of trouble. He has turned away from the slog of running Facebook to focus almost entirely on his ‘metaverse’, a vision of the internet where people enter interactive virtual spaces using virtual reality (VR) headsets. He has pledged investment of at least $10 billion a year for a decade, and investors have been told that profits will be lower for the next decade as a result. He saw the digital future once. Can he repeat the trick? Right now, it seems not. His company’s stock price has more than halved, wiping $600 billion off its market value. Shareholders are worried. Meta is to cut expenses by at least 10 per cent in the coming months, in part through redundancies. More cuts are expected.

Matt Ridley

What’s killing our birds?

If you are a bird, any kind of bird, the current pandemic of avian influenza rampaging through your kind is far more terrifying than anything the hairless apes on the ground below experienced in 2020 and 2021. Britain’s seabirds – guillemots, gannets, gulls, kittiwakes and skuas – have been hardest hit because they breed in dense colonies, facilitating infection. The death toll this summer among 2,600 sandwich tern chicks on Coquet island, off the Northumberland coast, approached 100 per cent. The worst may be only just beginning for the many thousands of geese, ducks and waders. They scatter across the Arctic tundra in summer and gather in dense flocks on estuaries and salt marshes around our shores in winter.

Lawrence Osborne

The strange inspiration of the Gobi desert

The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle Rodriguez and a group of her friends, courtesy of the Mongolian-American conservationist Jalsa Urubshurow. Driving out of Ulaanbaatar at dawn, we stopped at a market on the outskirts of the city to buy caviar, blinis and crates of Chinggis vodka for the 12-hour drive. Because I was not a follower of the Fast & Furious franchise, I had little idea who Michelle was, but every vendor in that tiny market knew her on sight. The place came to a standstill at 5 a.m. It was clear that the terrifyingly long reach of Hollywood extends even to the Gobi desert, where presumably pirated copies of the Fast & Furious movies light up a thousand gers on winter nights.

Charles Moore

The case against a stripped-back coronation

The last King Charles was crowned in 1661. Samuel Pepys attended the ceremony. He was captivated by ‘the sight of all these glorious things… sure never to see the like again in this world’. He later became so merry, he told his diary, that ‘my head began to turne and I to vomitt…Thus did the day end, with joy everywhere’. We live in a more decorous age, but I think Pepys imbibed the right spirit. The coming coronation of King Charles III should be joyful too. The paradox is that joy will not be achieved unless the ceremony is solemn and magnificent. Early signs give slight cause for concern. On Tuesday last week, the coronation was announced for 6 May, half the traditional time gap.

Kate Andrews

What will the Halloween Budget bring?

Liz Truss did not think that spending cuts would be a major part of her agenda. She and her first chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, were confident that markets, having lent Britain billions of pounds to cover the cost of the lockdowns, would be more than happy to do the same to transform the economy. Their argument was, as it turned out, calamitously wrong. The miscalculation cost Kwarteng his job and the Prime Minister her power. Truss’s new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has dismantled almost all of her plans. ‘Trussonomics’ has been snuffed out. This temporarily calmed the markets. But abandoning tax cuts – as painful as it was – will soon prove to have been the easier part of the job.

Wednesday

Harriet Sergeant

Why we must accept ethnicity matters in child grooming cases

A 24th man has just been charged with the rape of a 13-year-old girl more than ten years ago in Bradford. Twenty-four men. One 13-year-old girl. It takes some absorbing. The case will come to trial in due course, but it prompts reflection on other cases of historic sexual abuse against girls where the victims have been white, working-class, usually in care and very young. One girl admitted her first memory was of sexual abuse aged five. The perpetrators have often been men from the British Pakistani community living under a Labour-run council. It all happened a decade or more ago. Nothing to see here, we are told. Just some unsavoury historic sex crime. Let’s all move along. Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women also went back years.

Philip Patrick

Hard to swallow: the unjustified hype around Japanese food

Tokyo After 23 years in Japan, having tried everything from yatai (street food) to deep-fried globe fish in a kaiseki (traditional) restaurant, I have come to the conclusion that Japanese food is overrated. It is rarely less than perfectly presented, and it can be superb – but it can also be bland and homogenous. Part of the problem is that much of what delights the Japanese about their food is unrelated to its actual taste. If British food, in the bad old days at least, was simply fuel, Japanese food has always been, to some extent, art. A high-end Japanese meal is the equivalent of a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, with the colours, the choice of bowls, utensils, tablecloth, room, and tinkling water from a nearby stream, if available, part of the all-encompassing sensory experience.

Katy Balls

‘Election campaigns are like voodoo’: Fiona Hill breaks her silence

Not so long ago, Fiona Hill was the most powerful woman in Whitehall. She ran Downing Street with an iron grip for the first year of Theresa May’s premiership alongside her co-chief of staff Nick Timothy. Ministers bowed to their authority, civil servants feared them, Tory MPs complained of a power grab by a duo of unelected officials. As the former Labour MP Frank Field put it: ‘People know that Fiona is not someone you mess around with.’ But after the Tories fell short of a majority in the 2017 snap election, she and Timothy were forced to resign. Hill flew to America and disappeared from public life. We meet in The Spectator’s offices to record an episode of my podcast, Women with Balls. She is bright-eyed and dressed in a red two-piece suit.

Mark Mason

The beauty of a Wetherspoons pub

The J.D. does indeed come from J.D. ‘Boss’ Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard. But Tim Martin’s reason for ‘Wetherspoon’ is slightly different from the commonly told version. Yes, it was the surname of one of his schoolteachers in New Zealand. But Mr Wetherspoon didn’t tell Martin he would never amount to anything – rather he struggled to keep control of his class. And when Martin opened his first pub in Muswell Hill in 1979, he feared a similar problem. More than 40 years and nearly 900 pubs later, the fear seems ill-founded. Yes, the chain was in the news last week for its slow recovery from the pandemic, with Martin blaming the ‘drink at home’ culture acquired during lockdown.

Peter Hitchens

Make rail travel great again

Since I took the Golden Arrow to Paris and back in 1965, I have always thought of that train journey as one of the great joys of life. I cannot remember how many pre--tunnel trips to the City of Light I made, via Dover and Calais, Folkestone and Boulogne or (best of all) Newhaven and Dieppe. My great regret is that I never took the old Night Ferry, a special set of blue and gold sleeping cars designed to run on both French and British railways, on which you could (in theory at least) slumber your way between the two capitals – though perhaps not while it was actually being shunted on and off the boat.

Damian Reilly

Inside The Privileged Man, the support group for men who have it all

‘It’s like that whole #MeToo thing,’ says Esmond Baring, 44, scion of the famous banking family and founder of The Privileged Man, a support group for, er, privileged men. ‘Once you’ve realised you’re not alone, you can ask for help.’ Baring is rakishly handsome and talks with the zeal and articulacy of the true convert. He met co-founder Pete Hunt, 40, in 2011 on the island of Bali after he’d experienced a fairly vigorous nervous breakdown. Ten years later, both having left the corporate world to which they felt ill-suited, they established The Privileged Man.