Culture

Given our seamy obsession with serial killers, real and fictional, one would expect the crimes of Stephen Port to have made more of a mark on the national psyche. Port was convicted in November of the rape and murder of four young men in Barking, east London over a 15-month period. His modus operandi was cold and calculating: He would contact men on gay hook-up sites and incapacitate them with 'date rape drug’ GHB, before sexually assaulting and murdering them. A further seven men were drugged and/or raped but lived. Port is serving a whole-life sentence; he will die in prison. What makes these crimes particularly shocking is that the Metropolitan Police apparently had multiple chances to stop them and failed each and every time.

What would you do if naked pictures emerged of a celebrity you liked? Or one you didn’t? What about a slew of emails that were meant to be private that were hacked and then leaked into the public domain? Would you turn away from them, tutting. Or might you be tempted to read them? Would your inclination to read them increase if you liked the person, or if you really disliked them? We seem confused about all of this at the moment. The leak of David Beckham’s emails has condensed the confusion. Most of us believe that private communications should be private. Most of us believe that people’s private communications should not be hacked. And yet whenever they are hacked and then released we cannot help but crawl over the results. Perhaps we should pause.

The news about the machete man in the Louvre broke just as my Eurostar was approaching Paris. Was this just a one-off, or were there more terrorist attacks to come? In the Gare du Nord that lunchtime, the atmosphere was humdrum. Armed policemen passed by like ghosts, unseen and unnoticed. For Parisians, these incidents have become a normal part of daily life. I figured the Louvre would still be cordoned off, so I headed for the Musée d'Orsay. If the Louvre attack was part of a co-ordinated assault on the cultural institutions of the French capital, the Musée d'Orsay would be another prime target. Would the museum be closed, as a precaution? Would the visitors stay away? Neither. People were queueing to get in, tourists and locals. The mood in the queue was laid back.

Matthew Parris’s article about the madness of the Brexiteers has caused much interest on social media, as did Alex Massie’s article along the same lines on Friday. I’ve been amused to see this described by some as a evidence of mutiny on HMS Brexit. A magazine’s star writers attacking each other with some passion, and sparing no weapon in the process. What’s going on? Simple: the same thing that has been going on since The Spectator was first published 189 years ago. We have no party line on Brexit, or anything else.

There are lots of problems with Warhammer fans. Bad haircuts, terrible dress sense, to name just two. These aren’t even stereotypes; as a little girl I went to the Games Workshop multiple times with my brothers, so have first-hand experience. Still, I feel strangely defensive over Warhammer because it has been the victim of a vicious smear campaign. PETA has launched the most bemusing of attacks on the brand after spotting that some of its characters wear fur clothing. The Viking-style 'space wolves' have caused particular offence. I should emphasise at this stage that the fur isn’t actually real.

We've been filling in our son's school application form this week. Below his name, date of birth and gender - which I'm horrified to see only has two options, despite the form clearly stating that it is indeed 2017 - is 'ethnicity'. I suppose I'm meant to put 'White British' although I dislike the phrase. Nine-times out of ten when I see the W-word used in the media it's as an insult or gripe, usually followed by 'privilege' or - shudder -'feminist'. Of course, there's another term we could use instead: English. According to the Guardian: 'English patriotism is on the rise at the expense of a sense of British identity, with voters in England increasingly likely to describe themselves as solely English, according to research.

On the wall behind my desk hangs a picture of Alexander Chancellor when he was editing The Spectator, with cigarette and telephone in one hand and looking very much the hero that all of us in the magazine have long regarded him. His death, announced earlier on this morning, is awful news: we have lost not just a columnist but the godfather of the magazine. Some editors improve their publications, others aren’t so lucky - but Alexander saved The Spectator. The magazine as we know it today – its tone, its mix, its success – is his. Before he took over, sales were tanking. We were the only publication to support Brexit in the 1975 referendum (other than the Morning Star); an admirable position but one that had become something of an obsession.

At the risk of coming across all Holden Caulfield, this is a seriously phony age. Everywhere you look there are people objecting to things they think other people have said or would like them to have said. This past Saturday provided a fine example when in Washington and various other Western capitals some people decided that a fine response to the Trump administration is to pretend that it is ‘anti-women’ in some way. Various politicians, Guardian journalists and others without lives walked around for a day tilting furiously at this imaginary enemy. Some took their daughters with them, as though it is a good idea to inebriate the next generation with the same cocktail of phantoms and lies.

Ella Mills, née Woodward - aka 'Deliciously Ella' - was on Radio 4 this morning discussing 'clean eating'. Many will know her as one of the main advocates of this fashionable nutritional advice, even though she now says she doesn't like to use the phrase 'clean'. Her best-selling book suggested that food could be used as medicine and could help cure illness. In August 2015, Isabel Hardman and I looked at the cult of clean eating in The Spectator. It had all the elements of a classic cult - devotees, a life-changing, inspirational message, a distinct lack of evidence to back up any of it - and now, it seems, even its most prominent priestesses are starting to repent. Mills's book became one the fastest-selling debut cookbooks of all time.

Many mad things are happening on campuses. Fancy-dress parties are banned lest the costumes offend minority groups. Saucy pop songs are forbidden lest they turn male students into marauding sex machines. Controversial speakers are No Platformed. But perhaps the worst thing is the rekindling of the racial imagination, the return of judging people by race. Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day in the US, a day when Americans, and many non-Americans too, celebrate the man who most famously said people should ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’. Also yesterday, it was reported that the student union at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London thinks white professors aren’t capable of teaching black students.

Your average milkman has more wealth than the world's poorest 100 million people. Doesn’t that show how unfair the world is? Or given that the poorest 100 million will have negative assets, doesn’t it just show how easily statistics can be manipulated for Oxfam press releases? They’re at it again today: the same story, every January. “Almost half of the world's wealth is owned by just 1% of the world's population” it said in 2014. It has done variants on that theme ever year, each time selling it as a new "big" story. All the time peddling the impression that inequality is getting worse, that the rich are engorging themselves at the expense of the poorest.