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Could Farage be suspended? – Reform’s funding row explained | Coffee House

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Spectator Life

An intelligent mix of culture, food, style and property, plus where to go and what to see.

Long live the World Cup underdogs 

From Spectator Life

Football is fond of superlatives. Before this World Cup, column inches dwelt on its excess. Tickets were the priciest ever; there would be the most matches, the most teams, the most players. Amid the noise, many adopted that phrase favoured by Sunday League managers after a 9-0 drubbing: all we wanted was for football to be ‘the real winner’. Let the games begin.  We have been vindicated. The football has delivered and the hyperbole has quietened into background babble. But what could not have been expected was just how good it has been. Ahead of the tournament, naysayers implied it was already a damp squib. Fifa’s greed in expanding the number of participants to 48 from 32 would see each mismatch become a farce. England would sweep past DR Congo.

Spectator TV

Event

An evening with Rory Sutherland: The world according to the Wiki Man

  • Wednesday 29 July 2026, 7:00pm
  • Westminster, London
  • £27.50 - £57.50
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Magazine

This week's magazine

Dark Green money

The shady funding of net zero

Revealed: Ed Miliband and the shady funding of net zero

There is a problem with British politics. Dark money from abroad is being funnelled into our system. A complex web of interlocking charities, thinktanks, advocacy groups and campaign outfits is being bank-rolled to push a policy agenda onto the public that makes us poorer, puts us in hock to hostile powers and undermines working people. According to the left, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are puppets of such shadowy interests: Tufton Street thinktanks bankrolled by oil companies, Christian fundamentalists and perhaps even Russian money. These allegations are well-ventilated and have been exhaustively investigated. Most lead nowhere. Yet no similar scrutiny is applied to a far bigger lobbying effort – the concerted campaign to push a ruinous net-zero agenda.

Revealed: Ed Miliband and the shady funding of net zero

There is a problem with British politics. Dark money from abroad is being funnelled into our system. A complex web of interlocking charities, thinktanks, advocacy groups and campaign outfits is being bank-rolled to push a policy agenda onto the public that makes us poorer, puts us in hock to hostile powers and undermines working people. According to the left, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are puppets of such shadowy interests: Tufton Street thinktanks bankrolled by oil companies, Christian fundamentalists and perhaps even Russian money. These allegations are well-ventilated and have been exhaustively investigated. Most lead nowhere. Yet no similar scrutiny is applied to a far bigger lobbying effort – the concerted campaign to push a ruinous net-zero agenda.

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

The World Cup is evil

From the magazine

I tried to think, Pointless-style, of two of the countries least likely to be participating in the world kicky-ball nonsense. Then I burst into the sitting room to annoy Boy. ‘Quick! Quick! We’re missing Haiti vs Burkina Faso.’ He looked up contemptuously from the sofa. ‘Actually, Haiti are playing right now. Against Morocco. So that’s another of your comedy fails.’ Sixty years in I don’t think I’m ever going to get a handle on this football malarkey. I first realised I was different in my first week at boarding school. All the other eight-year-olds owned a football and knew how to play with it and had even been taken by their dads to matches. I was the one who knew the Latin name for the common wall lizard.

Podcasts

Cartoons

Matt Percival

‘‘It’s not fair – all my friends have mental health problems and I don’t.’’

Cartoon

Mark Wood

‘‘There’s nothing to fear but fear itself, and Ed Miliband as chancellor.’’

Cartoon

Thomas Munson

Britain wants you to binge drink

From Spectator Life