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Spectator TV Presents

How the Pope shames our politicians – and could Restore threaten Reform UK? With Freddy Gray, Damian Thompson & Max Pemberton

Writers

Spectator Life

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

The Wedding Celebrant

From Spectator Life

If you google ‘Wedding celebrants, Surrey’, the fourth name to come up is ‘Lynda Bassette: With You for All Life’s Special Moments’. Farnham-based but willing to travel across the UK and abroad, Lynda also does funerals and baby naming ceremonies, so ‘the full wrap-around care’, as she calls it. But weddings are her favourite. Though divorced herself, she’s always been a true romantic at heart. ‘I’m in love with love!’ she tells her couples when they first get in touch.   She’s struggling to get her name more prominent on Google. It’s proving hard in a county where every other woman wanting a life-change seems to be completing the online celebrancy course and setting up as a sole practitioner.

Spectator TV

Event

Tim Shipman Meets the Party Leaders: Nick Clegg

  • Monday 20 July 2026, 7:00pm
  • Westminster, London
  • £27.50 - £57.50
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Magazine

This week's magazine

Deus vs Machina

The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians

The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians

I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope. He has produced the most powerful political document of the year, taking on the greatest challenge of our times. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, deals with the changes which will be wrought to all our lives by artificial intelligence in the months and years ahead. AI will transform our economies and societies massively and irrevocably; it will change what it means to be human; it may even mark the end of humanity itself. If it takes the Pope to alert us to this revolution then perhaps the Reformation wasn’t such a good idea after all.

The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians

I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope. He has produced the most powerful political document of the year, taking on the greatest challenge of our times. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, deals with the changes which will be wrought to all our lives by artificial intelligence in the months and years ahead. AI will transform our economies and societies massively and irrevocably; it will change what it means to be human; it may even mark the end of humanity itself. If it takes the Pope to alert us to this revolution then perhaps the Reformation wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Culture

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

Gentleman Jack is Northern Ballet’s finest work

From the magazine

Northern Ballet commits itself almost exclusively to dance as a storytelling medium, and its weakness historically has been to home in on surefire box-office titles such as A Streetcar named Desire, The Great Gatsby and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which lose more than they gain by being deprived of their words. But adapting the source of the popular BBC television series Gentleman Jack proves inspired: the result must rank as one of the best things the company has ever done. Anne Lister was a real figure, a moneyed gentlewoman in early 19th-century Yorkshire whose masculine demeanour, dress and behaviour gave rise to the moniker Gentleman Jack.

Podcasts

Cartoons

Grizelda

‘‘Oh no! Not another politician!’’

Cartoon