Features Archives

Thursday

May 14, 2026

Is your wellness smoothie giving you cancer?

There’s a question I’ve started being asked at work. Given I’m a psychiatrist, it isn’t one I’d ever expected to hear: “Do I have cancer?” A young woman with anxiety wants to know whether the lump on her neck is sinister; she has been watching a great deal of TikTok. A man in his late thirties, in for a routine review, mentions in passing that his sister has been referred for a colonoscopy and wonders whether he should be too. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend leant across halfway through her low-alcohol natural wine and asked me, in a small voice, whether it was true her generation was getting cancer in their thirties. Yes, I said, perhaps a little too bluntly. She looked rather panicked for the rest of her evening.

The Spectator

Which animals are older than David Attenborough?

Travel sickness Three people were reported to have died in an outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship returning to Europe from Antarctica. How likely are you to fall ill with an infectious disease on a cruise? A European study that analyzed US data on 760 cruises between 2010 and 2013 found an overall illness rate of 2.81 cases per 10,000 traveler-days, while 97% of cases involved norovirus. The rate of outbreaks was highest on ships which had a home port in Cuba or Egypt and lowest on ships with a home port in France, Greece, Italy or the UK. Local difficulties Does a governing party ever do well in local elections?

Douglas Murray

Things can always get worse

I have spent the past week marveling at the behavior of our commentating class. They seem to have whipped themselves back into that familiar frenzy which must lead, inexorably, to the Prime Minister stepping down. “He has to go”; “The most incompetent prime minister of my lifetime”; “Things can’t go on like this” – these were the general sentiments revolving around Keir Starmer even before his party’s thumping in the May 7 local elections. The problem is that some of us have a longish memory. So when people say the Starmer government is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind. Have these people forgotten Theresa May?

Rod Liddle

The unstoppable rise of stupidity

Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy (i.e. freethinking) and a vaulting fictional imagination. Where, today, would you find the J.G. Ballards, the David Storeys, the Anthony Burgesses? In the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile, I suspect.

Charles Moore

Keir Starmer is downplaying the Islamist threat to Jews

At the anti-Semitism “summit” in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word “Islamists.” But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: “We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.” Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognize that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leaves Jews alone.

James Heale

Nigel Farage’s plan to win over the left

The loudest man in politics knows when to keep his silence. Nigel Farage held his tongue as Keir Starmer’s premiership floundered. Aside from a few PFLs – proper f***ing lunches – to celebrate the local election results, the Reform UK leader was already looking to the next challenge. Like a shark, Farage keeps moving forward, into new waters, hungry for more. One ally sums up his approach to politics in a single word: “Momentum.” For the past few months, Farage has had one goal: destroying the Tories. The figure “1,453” was the total of gains proudly pumped out on Reform’s Instagram. For Farage, May 7 was the political equivalent of the fall of Constantinople – the point when the Conservatives ceased to be a national party.

Paul Wood

The incredible case of Dr. Gorka

One of P.G. Wodehouse’s best-known characters, after Jeeves and Wooster, is Roderick Spode: fascist leader and secret purveyor of fine ladies’ undergarments. Spode is the head of the “Black Shorts” – all the black shirts having been taken – a bombastic, merciless bully and quivering tower of self-regard, magnificent in his absurdity. Spode was introduced to us in 1938, yet he lives still. Today, he is none other than President Trump’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council, Dr. Sebastian Gorka. The British accent, the booming voice…Spode/Gorka was speaking to journalists the other day when he called critics of the Iran war “testicularly challenged.

Tim Shipman and Noa Hoffman

Inside the farcical coup against Keir Starmer

It is an old adage of leadership contests that “if you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss” – but no one expected the starting gun to be fired at Charles III. At the exact time when the monarch was reading the King’s Speech to Parliament on May 13, allies of Wes Streeting, the health secretary, put a bomb under proceedings by making it clear that he is set to challenge Keir Starmer. “Yes, it’s inevitable,” one says. Streeting resigned the following day. The timing horrified MPs even on Streeting’s wing of the party. A cabinet minister declared: “Having failed with his kamikaze coup, Wes has now undermined every single one of his colleagues and disrespected the King.

Wednesday

May 13, 2026

Geoffrey Cain

Will Trump and Xi get what they want?

Donald Trump flew to Beijing this week and wants three things when he sits down with China’s President Xi Jinping: a tariff truce that survives his own courts, Chinese pressure on Iran to end the war that never seems to end and a photograph that makes him look victorious. Xi has problems of his own. But he has watched four American presidencies from Zhongnanhai, the walled compound beside the Forbidden City where the Communist party leadership rules, and he knows the value of silence when his counterpart is talking himself into trouble. Trump’s approval rating is the lowest of his second term. What Xi wants from this meeting with Trump is recognition: two great powers, two systems, meeting as equals Trump has obliged Xi noisily.

Thursday

May 7, 2026

Owen Matthews

Russians no longer believe Putin’s war propaganda

A year ago, Russia marked the May 9 Victory Day celebration with a spectacular display of fireworks that lit up the Moscow sky. This year the fireworks have again been spectacular – but this time they have been caused by long-range Ukrainian attack drones slamming into refineries, pumping stations and factories deep inside Russia. In the Black Sea port of Tuapse, fireballs of burning gasoline 15 stories high erupted over the local oil refinery, while rivers of burning fuel ran down the city’s streets. Firefighters took three days to extinguish the inferno, which created a plume of smoke so high it was filmed by skiers from the slopes of the Caucasus mountains more than 60 miles away.

Tuesday

May 5, 2026

Rod Liddle

Voters get the politicians they deserve – so Britain should get ready for PM Polanski

It is a truism that in a democracy the voters get the government they deserve – and so we should probably not complain too much if our next prime minister is a snaggle-toothed halfwit who presents to voters an infantile diorama drawn from fairy tales in which dancing is more important than manufacturing, people can be whatever they want to be, the military should be abolished and everyone will be happy except for the Jews, who are to be hounded and vilified and attacked. Zack Polanski’s Greens are the embodiment of what the American writer Rob K. Henderson called “luxury beliefs,” which are beliefs in the main based upon fictions – and they are soaring in the polls.

John Fund

It’s the corruption, stupid!

There’s been a change of mood across the country – and not one that is favorable to the GOP. Last November, the prediction markets gave Republicans a 70 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Now their odds have deteriorated. It looks likely that the Democrats will win both the chambers – so what’s happened? The latest polls all tell the same story. The economy is no longer Trump’s superpower. Of those polled by Fox News, three- quarters rate the economy negatively, with 70 percent feeling it’s getting worse. Voters now trust Democrats on the economy more than Republicans for the first time since May 2010. Trump’s weakness on the economy brings with it another growing danger for him.

Sunday

May 3, 2026

Ben Clerkin

Inside the Killhouse: where Ukraine’s revolutionary military robots are developed

The Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle rolled up to a small bunker hidden in a thicket in Kharkiv oblast then stopped. Another remote-controlled vehicle had just detonated its 66lbs of explosives at the Russian bunker’s entrance, which was still smoldering. And before that a kamikaze drone had dived inside and exploded. The operator was about to detonate his explosives when two Russian soldiers pushed a sign through the bunker’s shattered roof saying they were surrendering. They were directed to Ukrainian lines by a drone and taken into custody as POWs. So ended the world’s first fully robotic assault on an enemy position. The remotely operated vehicle in this attack is called a Targan (“cockroach” in Ukrainian) and looks like a miniature flatbed without the cab.

Friday

May 1, 2026

Andrew Gilligan

March of the Greenshirts: Polanski’s party are Britain’s real racists

“Back us to stop the far right,” say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St. Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many “Zionists Jews,” and that Donald Trump is “owned by Jews.” Not even the Z-word, that last one. Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: “Long live the Resistance.” If it is a Hamas headband, this may actually be a criminal offense.

Mary Wakefield

Shameless Britain: we are a nation of shoplifters

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay for his appeal rising steadily. In part, the fuss is a measure of sympathy. Sean worked at Morrisons for 29 years and was liked by the people of Aldridge. He was sacked, say Morrisons, because they have a “deter, don’t detain” policy – though what Morrisons think could possibly have deterred this thief, given his long list of previous convictions, is anyone’s guess. But the feeling for Sean isn’t just a swell of support for one man; it’s also a symptom of wider frustration.

Charles Moore

Olly Robbins’s next move

This session of parliament is due to end between April 29 and May 6. Now the government is desperate for an Order in Council to kill it off by 9 a.m. on the 29th to avoid another painful Prime Minister’s Questions. The parliament that reassembles for the King’s Speech on May 13 could hardly, in theory, look more like what Sir Keir Starmer wants. His party has the largest overall majority since 2001. He will have jettisoned all hereditary peers.

Tim Shipman

Is Britain ready for Chancellor Ed Miliband?

When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Peter Mandelson affair, a senior Labour figure remarked: “What really did we learn from all this? That Keir made a bad decision, wants someone else to blame and didn’t really know what was going on in his own government. Fancy that!” The fact that 14 Labour MPs voted to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee (the body which forced Boris Johnson from the political stage) – and a total of 53 recorded no vote in his defense – is far from a ringing endorsement of his leadership. But the significance of the Mandelson hearings has been misunderstood.

Max Jeffery

The new age of transgender rage

It’s a year since the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that gender means biological sex – and not much has changed. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is advising the government on how to apply the judgment to law, has spent a long while drafting guidance. But last week, word arrived that Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, wants the EHRC to “tone down” its advice, leading to further delays. Why the holdup? My guess is that it has something to do with a new era we are entering. An era of “TRANS RAGE.” That’s not my expression. It’s from Bash Back, a recently formed anonymous collective going after people and organizations it believes frustrate the transgender experience.

Thomas Steventon

My miracle match against the Vatican’s cricket team

Many have come to Rome seeking spiritual guidance: Thomas à Becket, Lord Byron, Lionel Richie. I came for a different purpose: to defend a papal cricket trophy. I am not Catholic. And, until last year, I had never played cricket before. It all started, as many great British stories do, with a pub: the Three Stags in Kennington. My friend Tom had invited me to what he described as a “Cricket Club Party.” As I headed upstairs, the barman’s quizzical look when I mentioned I was there for “the party” should have given me cause for concern. As I came in through the doors, I was greeted by what appeared to be the end of a Sunday lunch and a collection of six individuals for whom the collective age would have been a record-setting Test score.

Natalie Livingstone

The unlikely link between Nuremberg and The Devil Wears Prada

In the aftermath of Péter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orbán’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism: Minden csoda három napig tart, as the saying goes. Every miracle lasts three days. Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of World War Two and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials.