Features

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

‘Happy Friday!’: resist the tyranny of faux niceness

Five people I never met wished me a Happy Friday last Friday by email. You can pretty much be wished a happy anything nowadays, except perhaps Easter, since this assumes you share in the joy of the Resurrection. The London lights now say Happy Ramadan. Actually, if I were wished a Happy Lent it’d be the equivalent of telling me ‘Happy Abstinence’. The point is it is one more notch in the creeping commodification of goodwill, the conformity of niceness. Happy Friday is a way for strangers to introduce themselves on a note of cheer, since they’re trying to get you interested in an event or a product. But they don’t know you. It’s the assumption that you’re already friends that’s so galling.

Wednesday

James Heale

In bed together: The writers of HBO’s Industry on bankers and politicians

No TV show better encapsulates the nexus between money and power than Industry. The HBO drama sees investment bankers screwing, snorting and slogging their way to the top of English society. Now, in its fourth series, political intrigue is taking centre stage. Think House of Cards – but with more sex and better-remunerated hotties. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the co-writers of the show, explain when we chat that they wanted to ‘expand the canvas’ as Industry progressed. It initially focused on the ‘hermetically sealed’ world of the trading floor but has now expanded beyond. ‘Finance is linked to other spheres of influence,’ says Down. ‘Obviously finance and media have a transactional relationship. Finance and politics also have a transactional relationship.

Michael Simmons

‘It’s a Faustian pact’: Rachel Reeves is giving bankers what they want

The Epstein files lift the curtain on how power is exercised and influence traded by our financial elite. It is not a cheering sight. Business and economic gurus like the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers asking for dating advice from a convicted paedophile does not build confidence in the masters of the universe. Distasteful as these details are, the most telling insights into the predatory behaviour of the private-jet classes relate to how they exploit all of us, not just the vulnerable young women who catch their eye. Institutional logic does not explain Reeves’s love-in with the banks. They seem to have made a Faustian pact Peter Mandelson may blush at some of the personal details laid bare in his emails to Jeffrey Epstein.

John Power

Can Rupert Lowe stop Farage from becoming prime minister?

The crowded market place emerging on Britain’s right is bewildering. Nigel Farage and Reform UK appeared to have successfully colonised the space for positions more robust than those offered by the current Tory party. They have been ahead in the national opinion polls for months now. But the launch of Restore Britain, a new party founded by the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, suggests that Farage himself now faces a threat on his exposed flank. No party to the right of Farage has posed a substantive electoral threat since the British National Party virtually disappeared in 2015. But that could be about to change. Restore claims to have 90,000 members. Lowe has a significant social media presence and the backing of Elon Musk.

Angus Colwell

Strewth! Australian culture is taking over Britain

Catherine and Heathcliff. These are surely roles that every attractive British actor should aspire to. Why mope between auditions for years if you don’t think it could be your windswept hair decorating bus posters one day? So the British director Emerald Fennell’s casting of two Australians – Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie – to play these parts in ‘Wuthering Heights’ feels unfair. But her decision is canny. Elordi and Robbie are both gorgeous, of course, but they also come bearing a new type of cultural clout. Their perfect hair and facial symmetry are nothing compared with the quirkiness of their being Australian, the aesthetic that’s seducing young Brits most of all. The first clue was about five years ago, when many British men started looking ridiculous.

Ian Maxwell

My sister Ghislaine became a prop in the theatre of global online outrage

My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father Robert went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offences linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimised villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest of the former Prince Andrew shows how fully a newer system has taken hold: one in which guilt is first declared on the homepage and only later, if at all, tested in court. My sister became a digital-age Myra Hindley, a single face through which the internet could monetise disgust Old protections – the presumption of innocence, etc – become threadbare once a story enters the global content mill.

Paul Wood

Inside the daring plan to reclaim the Chagos Islands

Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle. And the silver fish between your feet dart past a net, despite not having seen one in 50 years. The jungle has grown over the old British colonial buildings, and the jungle is a harsh place. Four Chagos Islanders have been here more than a week, along with the man who brought them, Adam Holloway – former MP, ex-Guards officer, an adventurer seemingly from an earlier era. This is not, as the Foreign Office briefed journalists, ‘a political stunt’.

Owen Matthews

‘More than half our squad were executed’: Inside Russia’s rotten army

The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was Sir Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. Britons ‘must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life’, Starmer warned. Britain and Germany’s top military commanders delivered the same message in a recent article. Russia’s military posture ‘has shifted decisively westward’, wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton and General Carsten Breuer. Soon the Kremlin ‘may be emboldened to extend its aggression beyond Ukraine’. Really? According to much western coverage in mainstream and social media, the Russian army is crumbling, corrupt and inept.

Emma Chapman

How to listen for alien life

For more than 60 years, scientists have been on the stealthiest stakeout in history. Using state-of-the-art listening devices, they’ve tapped into thousands of homes, waiting patiently for their targets to reveal their presence, and ultimately been rewarded with silence. If this covert activity were occurring in our own country, one might have become impatient and simply walked up and knocked down the door. But the targets are not living in our country, or even on our planet or in our solar system. Our persons of interest are aliens. This is Seti: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, focused on life on planets orbiting other suns. So far, we’ve found no sign of them.

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

The real reason VAR has ruined football

The two main harms of government regulation, to be balanced against any benefits, are cost and delay. But there is another harm, rarer but lethal when it happens. Sometimes regulation perversely increases risk by lulling the regulated business or people into a false sense of safety. I had this thought last weekend as I watched a football match on television. My beloved Newcastle United beat Aston Villa in the FA Cup fourth round, but the match made headlines because of five bafflingly bad decisions taken by the referee and his linesmen: failing to award two clear penalties, failing to give a red card for a dangerous tackle and failing to spot two offsides that led to goals. Four of the five decisions went against my team but that is not my point.

Ross Clark

Just how bad are Nato’s armies?

Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is the other way around. Russia has the world’s second-strongest military, while France comes sixth, UK eighth, Italy tenth and Germany 12th. To put a few figures on it, Russia has 1.32 million active service personnel, 560 fighter aircraft and 3,941 tanks ready for deployment. For Britain, the corresponding figures are 141,000, 67 and 187; for France 264,000, 178 and 342; and Italy 165,000, 62 and 142.

Lisa Haseldine

‘J.D. Vance was right’: Is Europe finally waking up?

Munich, Germany The organisers of the Munich security conference weren’t subtle. A large statue of an elephant stood in one of the lobbies. The logo on all official documents was an elephant, this time with bits of countries printed on it. A poster for an exhibition celebrating the meeting’s 60th anniversary had an image of an elephant in a stately room. Everyone understood the meaning of the elephant in the room: it was America’s disregard for Europe. At last year’s meeting, J.D. Vance had declared the biggest threat to Europe was not from Russia or China but ‘from within’. Europe’s leaders were becoming tyrannical, the Vice President argued, arresting citizens for exercising their free speech.

Tim Shipman

The truth about Britain’s hollowed-out armed forces

When Keir Starmer was told his pledge to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament was not enough to fund his vision for the armed forces, as outlined in the strategic defence review (SDR), he put his head in his hands and snapped: ‘Why are you doing this to me? I thought this was costed!’ That striking image of a leader on the edge was widely talked about at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. Three senior defence figures relayed it to me. Remove the self-pity and it is still a telling insight. The SDR, drawn up by George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary, retired General Sir Richard Barrons and Fiona Hill, an adviser to both George W.

Andrew Watts

All aboard the last bus out of Mousehole

It was lucky that the bus was behind schedule – mainly because the driver had stepped out to take his own photograph for social media (#endofanera) – otherwise the young lad in the hoodie might have missed it. ‘Is this the last bus?’ he asked as he fumbled for change. ‘It’s the last bus from Mousehole Harbour, ever,’ the driver replied, before waving him on without paying. People rarely get as nostalgic about buses as they do about trains. Flanders and Swann wrote a song about the 1960s Beeching cuts. It pretty much consists of Michael Flanders reciting the names of closed rail stations to music – and it is an elegiac masterpiece. The only time I ever saw my father cry was when someone sang it at a village hall concert.

Ian Rankin

Who would Inspector Rebus support in the Scottish Premiership?

BBC Radio 4’s Today programme asks me to champion a favourite book and I choose Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It is a subversive piece of work, elegant on the surface but vicious at its core. It is about Edinburgh between the wars and the effect approaching adulthood has on a group of schoolgirls. But above all it is about the dangerous allure of charisma. Miss Brodie, maverick and fantasist that she is, holds the fate of her young charges in her hands, such is the power of her personality. Coincidentally, my Radio 4 stint had been preceded by an appearance on BBC Radio Scotland to discuss the recently deceased author Allan Massie – an essayist not unknown to this magazine.

Andrew Gilligan

Revealed: David Lammy’s curious relationship with Guyanese Big Oil

Better not tell Ed Miliband, but in spring 2022 his then shadow cabinet colleague, David Lammy, appears to have struck oil. For the first time, The Spectator can tell the story of how, while serving as Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Lammy was announced as the director of another country’s sovereign wealth fund – set up to (theoretically) channel newfound oil riches to its people, with a bit left over for the board. This was announced on 20 April 2022 in an official press release from the President of Guyana’s office about the Natural Resource Fund (NRF). The statement is still on the government website.

Rupert Hawksley

The gangs terrorising the countryside

Sergeant Rob Goacher was on patrol recently when the radio crackled with a tip-off. Two men were hare coursing – chasing and killing hares with greyhounds or lurchers – in the fields near Winterbourne Monkton, a small village in Wiltshire. When Goacher arrived, a silver Subaru with the exhaust hanging off edged out of a field and accelerated through the country lanes, hitting 60mph before reaching the M4. ‘The driver then suddenly decided to exit the motorway,’ says Goacher. ‘Over a verge, through a fence, and out through the farm. The field was full of cattle, which could have easily escaped onto the motorway. Then we’d be looking at a massive pile-up and fatalities.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

‘Authority is like virginity. Once it’s gone, it’s gone’: Inside Keir Starmer’s downfall

Years ago, Peter Mandelson shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney. Reminiscing about his involvement in Labour’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the ‘spray-paint election’. The manifesto was a ‘beautiful technicolour’ document but the tax-and-spend shibboleths of Old Labour remained, along with the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. ‘I spray-painted the old Ford Cortina,’ Mandelson told McSweeney, ‘but it was still a Cortina. Policy is at the heart of political communication.’ Only after the election – a second three-figure landslide defeat – did Labour launch a policy review, out of which New Labour emerged. Even then it took another decade to win power.

Tina Brown

How Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post

The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferrable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?

Max Jeffery

Apart from Mandelson, who is Labour’s biggest freebie lover?

Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and some clothes for his wife (total value: £6,000). Where Starmer has led, his MPs have followed – including those who now might hope to succeed him. Eleven other Labour MPs (and Ed Davey) accepted Taylor Swift tickets courtesy of football clubs and music companies. Seven cabinet members took money from Lord Alli. Few have not watched a football match from complimentary box seats.