Features

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Last ones standing: the leadership finalists on taxes, net zero and freedom of speech

After the last televised leadership debate was cancelled when Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak pulled out, we asked the remaining three candidates if they would come on SpectatorTV to face questions before Tory MPs’  final vote. (Since going to press the contenders will have been whittled down to two.) This is an edited transcript of their answers. Do you propose tax cuts? If so, how would you pay for them? PENNY MORDAUNT: On the current trajectory Rishi’s set us on, we are going to be one of the most uncompetitive nations in the OECD and that cannot be allowed to happen. We have to be able to compete. So there will need to be some changes. But exactly what – and when – is not the issue for this contest.

Aidan Hartley

What’s behind Africa’s love affair with country music?

Kenya Life in the poorest continent is so hard you get a lot of knowing laughs with the joke: ‘What happens when you play a country and western song backwards? Your wife comes home, your children suddenly respect you, you get sober and your dog wakes from the dead.’ In Kenya and other parts of Anglophone Africa, country and western music is a cultural obsession for both young and old. ‘We all relate to the problems they sing about,’ says Jeff Koinange, host of the wildly popular Smokin’ Country radio show on Kenya’s Hot 96 FM. ‘Four hungry children and a crop in the field – this is everyday life for us Africans.

Will Self

My debt to Boris Johnson

Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of the Express) for taking class As on the Prime Minister’s press plane, I sought to restore my reputation by giving an interview to a maverick young libertarian on the Telegraph. Boris Johnson wrote up our encounter favourably, along the classic out-of-Alexander-Pope-by-way-of-William-Rees-Mogg lines of ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ and ever since then I’ve found it hard to think altogether badly of him.

Leah McLaren

Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable magazine called the Literary Review of Canada. It was entitled ‘This Story is Mine’. After a preamble about feminism and #MeToo, she cuts to the chase: ‘In June 1964, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday I was raped by a man old enough to be my father.’ My mother then went on to tell her life story, or the story she understands to be her life. It’s a story I’d heard many times before, one she’d published other versions of in other places.

Freddy Gray

Is the world ready for another Trump presidency?

Is Donald Trump going to run in 2024? And if he does, will the world go even more completely crazy? These are questions that almost nobody wants to answer. Many of us are in denial. President Trump broke something in the global political psyche the first time round, which is why so many commentators struggle to admit the obvious: that, by the end of January 2025, Bad Orange Man could well be back in the White House, trolling the universe. The last, best hope of liberal sanity is that Trump will decide not to stand again. He is 76. He knows that running for the White House, and then being president, is one of the most stressful and exhausting things any human being can do. ‘He doesn’t want to end up like Biden,’ says a Republican operator who knows Trump well.

Gareth Roberts

The death of bad-taste humour

The recent heatwave inspired many people to bring out their stories of the summer of 1976. I have a memory of it which has nothing to do with the temperature, but which I think could be even more relevant to our times. It happened in the baking, crammed, nicotine-steeped ballroom of a holiday camp. I was eight. The campers were gathered for the night’s fun, provided by the camp’s resident comic. On the dot of 8 p.m. he told the audience it was time for the kiddies to head to bed. We were handed over to the care of a redcoat (about 20, unvetted, just some bloke – there is an entire vanished world in that) and led back en masse to our chalets. It felt so unfair. I could stay up for hours yet! I wasn’t a baby any more! Why was this happening?

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Blue murder: the knives are out in the Tory leadership fight

To Ronald Reagan, it was the 11th commandment: thou shalt never speak ill of a fellow conservative. Tories tend to observe the opposite rule: anyone ambitious enough to stand for party leadership needs to be targeted and weakened – ideally, destroyed. Attack dossiers will be drawn up, rumours concocted and poison darts blown. Fighting for leadership does not mean articulating a positive message or agenda nearly as much as it means trying to crush the other guy. And whoever can survive such attacks might – at a push – deserve the job. The Conservatives ought to be having a period of reflection.

Susan Hill

Home remedies are good for us – and the NHS

Today’s medical treatment for major ills is unrecognisable, in sophistication and efficacy, from anything available during the immediate post-war period. We all live longer, pain is far better controlled, and antibiotics save lives – though fewer than they once did because of the cavalier way they have been overused. I did not take any at all until I was 20, and that was penicillin prescribed by a dentist. My children were brought up on it. But I am not sure we are better off for minor conditions. Ambulances are demanded for what only needs a sticking plaster and it is estimated that more than half of those waiting five hours in A&E don’t need to be there at all.

Martin Rees

How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead

I’m old enough to have viewed the grainy TV images of the first Moon landings by Apollo 11 in 1969. I can never look at the Moon without recalling Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’. It seems even more heroic in retrospect, considering how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment. 20 July 1969 (NASA/AFP via Getty Images) Once the race to the Moon was won, there was no motivation for continuing with the space race and the gargantuan costs involved. No human since 1972 has travelled more than a few hundred miles from the Earth. Hundreds have ventured into space, but they have done no more than circle the Earth in low orbit.

Paul Wood

Is Biden ready to let MBS get away with murder?

President Joe Biden will have only himself to blame if he feels a little uncomfortable this week when he sits down with the man who runs Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed ‘Bone Saw’ bin Salman (MBS). After the CIA accused MBS of ordering the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi – dismembered with a bone saw – Biden said Saudi Arabia had ‘no redeeming social feature’ and should be made ‘a pariah’. This was a satisfying bit of moral posturing during a presidential election campaign, but costly now, in a world where Americans are paying $5 a gallon for gas and Russia is funding its war in Ukraine by selling oil at $100 a barrel. The US needs the Saudis to crank up production.

Leo McKinstry

The troubling rise of ‘apostrophe laws’

Two new measures, aimed at toughening the justice system, came into force last month. The first, known as Tony’s Law, enables the courts to impose a life sentence on anyone who causes or allows the death of a child or vulnerable adult in their care, while the maximum term for cruelty that leads to serious physical harm has been raised from ten to 14 years. The law’s title is a tribute to Tony Hudgell, a remarkably determined eight-year-old boy who, when he was a baby, was so badly abused by his parents, Jody Simpson and Tony Smith, that both his legs had to be amputated. Angry that these torturers were only sentenced to ten years each, the family who adopted Tony led the campaign for longer punishments and, partly due to Tony’s heroism, they achieved their goal.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Liz Truss on taking on Rishi and what she’ll do in No. 10

As cabinet members were lining up last week to tell Boris Johnson to resign, one major actor was absent from the drama. Liz Truss was in Indonesia at a G20 summit and missed the fun. She flew back the day after Johnson announced his resignation, knowing that if she makes it to the final stage of the leadership campaign, she has a very good chance of becoming the next prime minister. She is the longest-serving cabinet member, having been environment minister, Lord Chancellor, a treasury minister, trade secretary and now Foreign Secretary. To her admirers, she’s a ‘true blue’ Tory who can inspire a following with her brand of liberty-loving conservatism. She loves the party base, who in turn seem to love her.

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Why Rishi Sunak quit

On Tuesday, the last cabinet meeting with Sajid Javid as health secretary and Rishi Sunak as chancellor passed without any hint that either was about to resign. The ministers did not co-ordinate their resignations, but they had both been tipped over the edge by growing evidence that No. 10 had misled MPs by declaring Boris Johnson had no prior knowledge of Chris Pincher’s behaviour. Sunak had also grown tired of the Prime Minister’s economic ‘cake-ism’ – the fantasy of wanting both high spending and low taxes. The contradictions had become untenable. In that cabinet meeting, Johnson offered more cake. He was his usual ebullient self, promising a morale-raising speech to move on from recent woes. It was Michael Gove who confronted him.

James Forsyth

Boris is gone: the leadership contest now begins

In the end, the Prime Minister was damaged irreparably before he resigned on Thursday. The confidence vote wounded him. Then two by-election defeats revealed that people were voting tactically against the Tories. A party that tolerated Boris Johnson because he was a vote-winner now concluded he was an electoral liability: rebellions followed and then (finally) his resignation. But the Conservatives are stuck confronting a basic question: what next? The Tories are caught in a trap. One influential Tory MP who voted for Johnson in the no-confidence ballot told me, with a mixture of exhaustion and despair: ‘Please God, make it stop.’ That sums up the mood. The Tories had been hoping for some kind of divine intervention because they do not know what else to do.

Elisa Segrave

Why aren’t mistresses a secret any more?

I was shocked at a party recently when a woman I hardly know announced to me and another guest that she was the ‘mistress’ of a certain man in the room. I discussed it with my American friend in a local Italian afterwards. Holly took a robust view. ‘Since when does a mistress reveal herself publicly?’ she said, adding that the lover (married, we’d heard, to a third wife, not present that evening) should ‘kick the mistress to the kerb for not playing the role she signed up for’. She pointed out claims that George Bush Sr had a girlfriend, Jennifer Fitzgerald, for about 20 years who hardly anyone knew about. ‘Does a mistress nowadays even have her own “mistress” Instagram account?’ Holly wondered sarcastically.

Sean Thomas

An existential war: even wealthy émigrés are prepared to fight for Russia

If you’re wondering where all those urbane, clever, westernised Russian travellers have gone since the onset of the Ukrainian war – a war which has largely barred them from the West – I can tell you that at least two of them will be found in the tiny Armenian hamlet of Gnishik, high in the summery peaks of the Caucasus. I know this because I met them there last week. And what they told me – about Russia, the war, their lives since the war – was illuminating. This meeting wasn’t planned.

Hannah Lucinda Smith

Runaway inflation is proving costly for Turkey’s oil-wrestlers

Edirne, Turkey There is a distinctive sound that an oiled-up palm makes as it slaps against an oiled-up pair of leather shorts. Both squelchy and sharp, this noise rings around the Thracian town of Edirne each July as it hosts Turkey’s biggest oil-wrestling championship. As the name suggests, contenders are greased up with either olive, corn or sunflower oil before they start to fight. The competition begins with a languid ritual in which the wrestlers stomp around each other, touching the ground and themselves before commencing their tussle. The winner must then flip his opponent on to his back, often by reaching into his shorts and grabbing hold of a tag sewn into the lining. It may look like a novelty event put on for tourists, but oil-wrestling is centuries old.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The pernicious creep of the 20mph zone

‘Twenty is plenty’ say the passive-aggressive road signs as you drive very slowly through 20mph zones all over Britain. The slogan is accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a snail. Then you get a frowny-frowny-frowny electronic sign and you slow from 25 to 20 to make it turn into a smiley face. That’s how we’ve been softened up: with a cocktail of the sanctimonious and the kindergarten. As I crawl along the empty dual carriageway of Park Lane late in the evening, where the speed limit has been reduced from its previous 40mph to the now blanket central-London limit of 20, I hiss: ‘No, twenty is not plenty. Twenty is lente.’ It feels ludicrously slow: the trundle of a Dinky car, and an affront to common sense.

Sam Leith

Nick Bostrom: How can we be certain a machine isn’t conscious?

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off. Lemoine declared that what’s sometimes called ‘the singularity’ had arrived. The story was for the most part treated as entertainment. Lemoine’s sketchy military record and background as a ‘mystic Christian priest’ were excavated, jokes about HAL 9000 dusted off, and the whole thing more or less filed under ‘wacky’.

Thursday

Henry Kissinger and Andrew Roberts

‘There are three possible outcomes to this war’: Henry Kissinger interview

Andrew Roberts: Henry, at Davos, you said the dividing line between Russia and Ukraine should return to the status quo ante because pursuing the war beyond that point could turn it into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine but into a war against Russia itself. You came under a good deal of criticism for that, not least from Mr Zelensky. How is the world going to find a new equilibrium after this, however the war ends? Henry Kissinger: The purpose of the Davos statement was to point out that the issue of war aims needed to be faced before the momentum of war made it politically unmanageable. When Zelensky commented, he hadn’t read what I had said. In his most recent statements he has essentially accepted what I outlined in Davos.