Wine Club

Our merchant partners – Armit Wines, Brunswick Fine Wines, Corney & Barrow, FromVineyardsDirect, Mr Wheeler, Private Cellar and Yapp Bros – represent the cream of the UK’s independents and boast centuries of experience between them. They all have particular areas of expertise and stock wines that you would never be able to find on the supermarket shelves or local off-licence.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Jeremy Corbyn and the cynical tactics of the left

It is August, so perhaps it is inevitable that parts of the left are getting somewhat over-heated. But it can’t just be the weather. Take this segment from the bottom of a story in Sunday’s ‘Observer’ which was about something else (comments by Labour’s Deputy Leader on that party’s Leader): ‘[Tom] Watson’s intervention came as Corbyn was forced to “entirely disassociate” himself from an organisation whose website lists him as a member of its international advisory panel and which openly supported a prominent writer convicted of Holocaust denial.

Qanta Ahmed

As a Muslim woman, I’d like to thank Boris Johnson for calling out the niqab

As a Muslim woman observing Islam, I am fully supportive of Boris Johnson’s rejection of the niqab. And I wonder how many of the former Foreign Secretary’s critics understand my religion, what this form of dress represents and the subjugation it implies. To defend the niqab and to defend Muslim women are, I can assure you, two very different things indeed. Growing up Muslim in Britain, not once was I compelled to cover my hair. This changed when I moved to Saudi Arabia to practice medicine. Arriving in the Kingdom, by Saudi Arabia’s Sharia law, I could not go out into public without concealing my entire body, save face and hands, in a flowing, black abayya. This was my first experience of enforced veiling. And my last.

Thursday

Rupert Darwall

How Brexiteers can still save Brexit

Brexit hangs by a thread. The Chequers Plan has already failed. Public hostility and its one-sided nature mean that it cannot provide a durable basis for the UK's future relationship with the EU. Only eighteen months ago, the Prime Minister was saying that Britain could not possibly stay in the EU Single Market. It would mean "not leaving the EU at all." Yet this is precisely what the Chequers Plan does, with its acknowledgment that the Single Market is built on a balance of rights and obligations and its proposal for a new framework that "holds rights and obligations in a fair and different balance." Fair and different is not Brexit.

Josephine Bartosch

The limits of Stonewall’s tolerance

‘Acceptance without exception’ is the aspirational slogan emblazoned across the website, merchandise and literature of Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT charity. The problem is that there are exceptions. Those who are not accepted include those who refuse to believe that a person can change their sex simply by saying: ‘I identify as.’ The fractious nature of the LGBT alliance – and Stonewall's intolerance for dissenting voices within the community – is becoming increasingly clear. At this year's London Pride, a group of protestors from ‘Get the ‘L’ Out’ made their feelings known by marching to the front of the parade with banners, including one reading ‘Transactivism Erases Lesbians.

Douglas Murray

Elin Ersson’s ‘citizen-activism’ comes at a heavy price

Last week, a 22-year old Swede called Elin Ersson made headlines around the world for her ‘citizen-activism’. Learning that a failed asylum seeker from Afghanistan was to be deported from her country, she bought a seat on the plane that was due to take him part of the way back home (as far as Turkey). Once she was on board the plane Ersson refused to sit down. Filming the whole thing on her mobile phone (natch) Ms Ersson insisted that to send the failed asylum-seeker to his home country would be consigning him to ‘death’ because Afghanistan is ‘hell’. After about 15 minutes of this Ms Ersson got her way. The Afghan migrant was taken off the flight. Some passengers applauded. Ms Ersson cried.

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 4 August

Our Spectator Winemaker Lunches are extremely cheery affairs, held in the boardroom at 22 Old Queen Street. There are never more than 16 of us — a dozen or so readers plus the winemaker and your humble correspondent — and, during a cold, four-course Forman & Field lunch, we enjoy around six or seven different wines. Spittoons are scoffed at and consumption runs at an average and rather impressive one bottle per head, despite which I’m delighted to report that we’ve never run dry. We do sometimes resort to flicking the lights at meal’s end, though, just to remind readers they have homes to go to.

Thursday

Simon Marcus

Could this summer see a repeat of the 2011 riots?

The heatwave is on and reports of London's crime wave are widespread, with crime up dramatically in the last year: could a repeat of the 2011 riots be on the cards? Predicting riots is tricky but sometimes there are clues: the weather plays a part; and so too does the economy, community cohesion, social morals and other factors that can combine to lead to outbreaks of widespread disorder, just as they did seven years ago on the streets of the capital. Of course, 2011 wasn't the only time people intent on violence have taken to the streets of Britain in recent years.

Isabel Hardman

Forget the ‘Beatles’: here’s what happens to most British jihadi suspects

What happens to Brits who've returned from fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq? Most would expect that they'd immediately fall into the criminal justice system, and wouldn't then emerge for a very long time. Today it emerged that Home Secretary Sajid Javid had dropped Britain's blanket opposition to the death penalty so that two Isis fighters from the group dubbed the 'Beatles' could be sent to the US. But in most cases, the question isn't where someone will face justice, but whether they can face justice at all. We know that there are hundreds of people who have returned from fighting for Islamic State. But what is less well-known is what happens when these individuals get back to Britain.

Brendan O’Neill

Don’t blame the Tories for a Brexit ‘no deal’

Remember when leftists and liberals were against capitalists throwing their weight around in the political sphere? ‘Just because you’re filthy rich doesn’t mean you should have more clout than the rest of us’, they might say. No longer. Now they love it when the boss class tut-tuts about democracy and wonders out loud if we should just ignore the little people and shape politics so that it suits us, the moneyed and powerful. Consider the glee with which some leftish Remainers have lapped up Amazon’s dire warnings about a no-deal Brexit.

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

Who governs Britain?

There are moments that cut through the din of braggadocio, vindictive utopianism and arrant stupidity surrounding Brexit. Anna Soubry has provided one in an impertinence during yesterday's debate on the cross-border trade bill. She let into Jacob Rees-Mogg and his European Research Group (ERG) for coercing ministers to abandon much of the substance of the Chequers Brexit blueprint. Then, standing mere metres from the Treasury benches, she enquired: 'Who is in charge? Who is running Britain? Is it the Prime Minister or is it the Honourable Member for North East Somerset? I know where my money's sitting at the moment.' Before the crazy set in, an MP taunting the Prime Minister as a feckless weakling would bring the full nuclear hellfire of Number 10 raining down upon their head.

Alex Massie

Michael Gove’s Brexit regret is much too little, much too late

Not the least extraordinary thing about the campaign to leave the European Union is that it turns out no-one was in charge of it. Things just happened and decisions were just made without the oversight or knowledge of the most senior politicians whose support for the project was reckoned, with some reason, to be crucial to its essential success. If Boris Johnson gave the Leave campaign a popular - and populist - presence in the nation’s television studios, Michael Gove gave it a certain intellectual credibility amongst the - admittedly small - percentage of the electorate that worries about such things. And with good reason: Gove’s intelligence, if not always his judgement, has never been in doubt. He has been a reforming minister in every department in which he has served.

Douglas Murray

Does Teen Vogue understand what it means to be ‘literally a communist’?

If anyone wanted an encapsulation of the screwiness of our times just consider the following straight question being asked of an interview subject. ‘How does being a communist impact your view of the US presidency, whether it’s Obama or Trump?’ And then consider that this pleasant question was being asked by Teen Vogue. It was posed to a young woman called Ash Sarkar who writes for an obscure blog named Novara Media. Last week Sarkar had her 15 seconds of fame when she managed the impossible and appeared to out-arrogant Piers Morgan in a television shouting-match ostensibly about Donald Trump’s visit to the UK.

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 21 July

My old mate Jason Yapp was chirpier than ever when we met to taste his wines the other day. Never knowingly under-ebullient, Jas (despite the whisperings of a hangover) had an extra spring to his step having just bagged three gongs at the previous night’s International Wine Challenge, namely that of Rhône Specialist Wine Merchant of the Year and ditto for both the Loire and Languedoc-Roussillon. We tried some delicious wines together and these six were my favourites, all ideal for mid-summer sipping. The 2017 Domaine l’Ancienne Cure (1) is an organically farmed, un-oaked blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon from Bergerac, south west France.

Thursday

Nick Cohen

We don’t know where Brexiteers are going now. And neither do they

In happier days when Britain was not on the brink of disintegration, David Davis told me a story about the 19th century French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Little did I suspect that soon he would be living it. The Francophiles among you will recall the apocryphal tale of Ledru-Rollin enjoying his lunch at a Parisian café when a revolutionary crowd stormed past. Ledru-Rollin leapt from his seat and cried “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader." Where were they going? He did not know. What was his plan? He did not have one. True believers in Brexit are revolting, and not without cause.

Brendan O’Neill

The Remainers are in charge now

There has been a Remainer coup. Remainers now inhabit virtually all of the highest offices in the land. Overnight, adherents to this minority political viewpoint seized the final levers of political power. This is the one downside — and what a downside it is — to the belated outbreak of principle among the cabinet’s Brexiteers: their walking away has allowed Theresa May to further surround herself with fellow Remainers, and pretty much expel the Brexit outlook from her cabinet. The new foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, voted Remain. As did his replacement at the Department of Health, Matt Hancock. Hancock is a former acolyte of George Osborne, arch-Remainer and now chief media ridiculer of Brexit via his newspaper the Evening Standard.

Alex Massie

Theresa May’s weakness is a virtue

Something rather remarkable happened yesterday: Theresa May had a good day. This counts as news and is itself testament to the miserable time she has endured since she became Prime Minister. Some of this – much of it, in fact – was her own fault. Or at least her own responsibility. If she had called an election in September 2016 it seems likely she would have been rewarded with a handsome majority and, just as usefully, a thumping mandate for her own interpretation of Brexit. Delaying until June 2017, however, meant she missed her chance. By that stage the moment had passed. The election became another unwanted imposition.

Thursday

William Cook

Why Sebastian Kurz is Europe’s most important politician

Austria assumes the Presidency of the Council of the European Union this Sunday, and normally the response among rightminded Britons would be a resounding ‘Who Cares?’ Even before we voted Leave, this rotating six month stint was generally regarded with indifference. Now we’re on our way out, why should we be bothered whose turn it is in the EU chair? Well, the big difference this time around is that Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is rapidly emerging as Europe’s most influential politician. And for the EU, his spell in the hot seat could hardly have come at a more crucial time. Like Trump’s America and Brexit Britain, Europe is divided.

Rod Liddle

My World Cup plea to Putin

Here is a letter which I sent today to the Russian Embassy. Please keep your fingers crossed for me. To: His Excellency Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko Dear Mr Yakovenko, I hope you are well. As you are aware, the World Cup is in progress and both of our sides are doing unexpectedly well in what has been an exciting and extremely enjoyable tournament. You are probably also aware that should England, by some miracle, reach the final, no dignitaries from my country will be present, as would normally be the case. They have effectively boycotted the event. No Prime Minister, no member of the cabinet, no Royals – not even the really useless ones, such as Edward or that Kent woman. This is churlish and mean-spirited of my government and I feel a little ashamed.

Tom Goodenough

Raheem Sterling’s article is brilliant but did he actually write it?

England’s Raheem Sterling has underwhelmed so far at the World Cup. Off the pitch, however, he is winning new fans. The Manchester City winger’s essay blog, ‘It was all a dream’, tells the story of his father’s murder and his mother’s subsequent struggles to make ends meet. It’s brilliantly written, tugs at the heart strings and there’s a happy ending: Sterling, the ten-year-old boy who had to help his mother clean hotel toilets, now earns hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and is idolised by football fans the world over. Sterling isn’t the only footballer recently to have shown a previously unknown talent for writing.

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 7 July

My dear old alma mater Berry Bros & Rudd broke with Spectator Wine Club tradition recently by offering a six-bottle box rather than the more usual dozen bottles. It was such a hit with readers that they asked to do it again this week. Needless to say, the thirstier among you desperate for a full dozen can simply sign up for two cases. I strongly recommend that you do, since the wines — a delightfully eclectic selection — are first rate and, given that Berry’s are offering free delivery and have knocked a bit off here and there, there’s a saving of some £20 to be had on the normal RRP. The 2017 Gavi di Gavi, Bric Sassi (1) from Roberto Sarotto in Piedmont is a beautifully made, easy-drinking, single vineyard, 100 per cent Cortese.