United kingdom

Monday

Alexander Larman

Getting ready for Queen Camilla

From our US edition

"The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen." This isn’t quite the announcement that will be made when Elizabeth II finally dies; the crown will be passed onto Prince Charles. But the Queen’s public statement over the weekend that the Duchess of Cornwall will become Queen Consort, and will therefore be referred to as Queen Camilla, is a remarkable vote of confidence. It suggests she believes in her daughter-in-law’s ability to offer a stable, successful public face to the monarchy that has been disrupted so dramatically by the antics of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew in recent years. The Duchess’s public standing has been carefully managed over the decades, thanks in part to the PR expert Mark Bolland, who served as Charles’ Deputy Private Secretary from 1997 to 2002.

camilla

Friday

John Fund

Is Boris Britain’s answer to Arnold?

From our US edition

As the political stage that Boris Johnson stands on continues to shrink and become more unstable, I am reminded of how much his career resembles that of another larger-than-life celebrity. Last month, Arnold Schwarzenegger rolled his large black Yukon SUV over a red Prius in Los Angeles. The former California governor was uninjured, but the other driver suffered serious injuries and was hospitalized. Law enforcement sources told TMZ that "they believe the accident was Arnold's fault." They think Arnold made an illegal left turn at an intersection. There’s no word if he will be charged. The incident got me to thinking how both Boris and Arnold have a history of ignoring rules and creating mayhem around them.

boris arnie

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

To save the Union, ignore Gordon Brown

As he blasts his way through the remaining support beams of the UK constitution, Gordon Brown is doing more to deliver Scottish independence than the SNP. The former Prime Minister is reportedly poised to recommend that Labour adopt ‘devo max’ as a policy, which would see the SNP-run Scottish parliament handed yet another tranche of powers. Only defence and foreign policy would remain in the hands of Westminster: everything else would be at the whim of Nicola Sturgeon. The theory is that by increasing the powers of Holyrood, the Scots' appetite for independence will be sated. But is no evidence for this, and 23 years of evidence against it.

Sunday

Dominic Green

Antony Blinken’s soundtrack to failure

From our US edition

Antony Blinken, the secretary of state and first guitarist, has broken with the tired protocols of the past, faced the complexities of the multipolar twenty-first century world, and issued a Spotify playlist. This may be a better way of reaching new audiences than bombing them. But shouldn’t public figures be judged on their records, not their record collections? “The thread that runs throughout my life is probably music,” Blinken told Rolling Stone last year as he meditated his mixtape. Hitler would probably have said the same about painting had Rolling Stone been around to profile the Viennese amateur who was turning the art world upside down.

Friday

Alexander Larman

What’s wrong with Queen Elizabeth?

From our US edition

Is Queen Elizabeth II unwell? Rumors have been circulating through the British and American media for over two weeks, and the British public are worried. First came the ninety-five-year-old’s unprecedented use of a walking stick public. Then came an overnight hospital stay, which royal retainers tried to cover up. And now she has canceled her appearance at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on her doctors’ orders, and will be sending a recorded video message instead. Buckingham Palace has released a photograph showing the queen in her usual good spirits. Yet the frailty of the recently-widowed queen and her Glasgow no-show send a worrying message. Queen Elizabeth is dedicated to her duty.

queen elizabeth ii

Monday

Timothy Jacobson

In defense of the English original sandwich

From our US edition

Hannah Moore’s June Spectator piece on sandwiches made me hungry. Then it made me think. Ms Moore makes a sound distinction between modern Britain’s plastic-boxed, triangular ‘sandwich’ and the custom-made, piled-high, endlessly imitated, seldom-matched product of a good New York or Chicago delicatessen. Why, one wonders, do the Brits put up with it? Landing in countless foreign ports over the years, for business or pleasure, I’ve always wondered, pretty much before wondering about anything else, ‘What’s the food like?’ Almost always, I’ve liked what it was like. In the age of real borders and undiluted ethnicities, food was a powerful expression of locality.

sandwiches
waugh
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Why we should venerate Evelyn Waugh

From our US edition

Evelyn Waugh is popularly known today as a comic author, despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited, made famous by the eponymous 1981 television series, is certainly not a comedy. Not everyone agrees. Years ago, a well-read friend of mine remarked to me that he was not fond of Waugh’s work. When I asked why, he replied, ‘Because I don’t think he’s that funny.’ I answered that the way to appreciate the exquisite wit of Evelyn Waugh is to approach him in the expectation of something other than humor, in which case the absurd incongruities, outrageous juxtapositions and ludicrous extremes that occur throughout the novels are in fact supremely funny. Waugh never set out to write comedic stories in the manner of P.G.

scotland
Benjamin Riley

Scotland by sleeper

From our US edition

Traveling internationally these days is a bit like how Dicky Umfraville, a character in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, describes aging: being punished for a crime one hasn’t committed. After taking my pre-departure COVID test, alerting the British government to my whereabouts for the next week (no small undertaking given I’d be in a different bed every night), and proving all this plus my vaccination status to the British Airways check-in desk at JFK, I finally settled in my seat and supplemented my mandatory mouth-muzzle with an eye mask as though bound for Gitmo, not Heathrow. An hour into the flight, the woman in front of me started bawling: a panic attack brought on by mild turbulence.

Sunday

Matt Purple

Why European criticism of the US Afghanistan pullout is so refreshing

From our US edition

You actually can spell ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ without ‘America’, as it turns out. You can also, however, spell ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ without, say, ‘European Union commissioner Ursula von der Leyen’. And right now, that seems like the more pressing of these two anagrammatical bombshells. Both the United States and Europe have spent the last week reprising what by now ought to be played-to-death roles. America made another clumsy move in the Middle East without cluing in our Nato allies, and the Europeans complain about it into the roar of a C-130 engine.

european
art
Laura Freeman

The art of politics: what ministers hang on their walls

From our US edition

If I am ever appointed to one of Britain’s Great Offices of State — stranger things have happened to Spectator hacks — the first thing I’d do is furnish my office. A raid on the Government Art Collection is a perk of being a minister, and better than the car and the driver. A few Hogarth engravings, a set of David Jones’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ etchings, Cedric Morris’s ‘Irises and Tulips’, Edward Bawden’s ‘The Coal Exchange’...I’d have liked to nab Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Flower Piece’, if only Carrie, the new Mrs Boris, hadn’t got there first. A Freedom of Information request from The Spectator has lifted the little red velvet curtains on which works of art ministers have got from the vaults.

Tuesday

Joanna Rossiter

The Isles of Scilly, a botanist’s paradise

From our US edition

'You can get away from everything,’ said Harold Wilson of the Isles of Scilly, ‘not only in distance but also in time’. During the parliamentary recess, Wilson would frequently catch the sleeper from Paddington to Penzance before making the notoriously choppy crossing to Britain’s most westerly archipelago. There he would unwind in his cottage on St Mary’s. This family of five islands 28 miles off the nose of Land’s End has always enjoyed a somewhat secretive coterie of admirers — Jude Law and Michael Morpurgo to name but two. Deserted beaches with a Caribbean palette are surely part of the draw, as are hedgerows festooned with wild garlic, pink bells and exotic aeoniums.

scilly

Monday

Dominic Green

Football is more than a religion to the English

From our US edition

London All is fair in love and war, and nothing is fair in sport. England rode their luck to their first final in a European Championship in London on Sunday night. They scored a stylish goal in the second minute, too — but then their luck ran out. Italy, always the favorites, regained control of the game. They equalized with only 23 minutes of normal time to run, forced a penalty shootout, and won. You make your own luck. England had the host nation’s home advantage. They had an off-pitch assist from their fans, too. For weeks the words 'Football’s coming home’ have echoed around this green and pleasant, small and crowded land. England’s game rose as the tournament progressed, until an entire nation waited on tenterhooks for Sunday night. For what?

football

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Carrie and Jill: the real summit

From our US edition

All eyes today are on…Carrie and Jill, as the remainder of the G7 summit is effortlessly overshadowed by the leaders’ spouses. The First Lady of the US is having tea today with Carrie Johnson — this being Cornwall, it will be a cream tea, with scones. This is pretty well obligatory when you visit Cornwall. Mrs Johnson is not actually first lady of the UK, since no such role exists, and the only First Lady is the Queen, but irritatingly the British media have adopted the Americanism, so stand by for headlines along the lines of 'First Ladies Meet’. Thank goodness, then, the British prime minister got round to marrying his girlfriend just last Saturday, before the summit — in fact, one wonders whether the nuptials were timed precisely to avoid any awkwardness.

carrie

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Bath time

From our US edition

In the center of Bath a giant obelisk sits in the middle of a little park called Queen’s Square. Standing in the park on a cool but sunny February morning, I realize that despite passing it on countless occasions in the 22 years I lived in the city — from playing bowls on the grass as a child to sheltering behind it to smoke cigarettes as a teenager — I have no idea what it is doing there. A black metal sign informs me that it was erected in 1738 by the Bathonian dandy Beau Nash in honor of Frederick, Prince of Wales. I wonder what Frederick thought about being presented with an obelisk. The sky is darkening. In the 10 minutes I have been sitting there, waiting for a friend with parking troubles, the place has been almost empty. Bath is a tourist town — or at least it was.

Bath

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

Should we blame America?

From our US edition

Americans might be unaware, but a great deal of right-leaning discourse in Europe holds the United States responsible for the outbreak or inflammation of their culture wars. In France, Emmanuel Macron has spoken disparagingly of 'certain social science theories imported entirely from the US' which are 'based on a different history, which is not ours’. His education minister was more explicit, castigating an 'intellectual matrix coming from American universities...which wants to essentialize communities and identities’. In the UK, meanwhile, in a column mischievously titled 'It’s All America’s Fault’, the English commentator Ed West blamed the US for the spread of 'social justice’ trends across Britain.

macron europe blame

Monday

Andy Ngo

Bristol is Britain’s Portland

From our US edition

Last night, Bristol’s city center erupted in violence as far-left rioters smashed up the police station, assaulted police — breaking some officers’ bones — and set vehicles on fire. The scenes of violence and arson were familiar to me. It looked like any night out of Portland, Oregon, where I’m from. Since May 2020, Black Lives Matter-antifa rioters have regularly carried out similar organized acts of carnage targeting courthouses and police stations. [caption id="attachment_23906" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Several police vehicles were destroyed in Bristol (Ben Crocket)[/caption] Some of the rioters in Bristol last night were dressed in black bloc as they set dumpsters on fire to block streets and used barricades as battering rams to attack police.

bristol

Thursday

They/Them

The spies who cancel us

From our US edition

A regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. Eat your heart out Edward Snowden — Wokeyleaks has a mole inside the British security establishment. It turns out that the people whose job it is to protect the UK are spending most of their time protecting employees from ‘harmful language’.

spies

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

Brexit Britain should help vaccinate Ireland

I’m worried about Ireland. My family’s homeland is being ravaged by Covid-19. It now has the highest infection rate in the world, according to the expert Covid-watchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US. Ireland’s seven-day rolling average is an eye-watering 1,394 Covid cases per million people. That is way ahead of the UK (810 per million), the US (653 per million) and Germany (248 per million). It has been a sudden and startling decline. Back at the start of December, following a six-week lockdown, Ireland had the lowest infection rate in the European Union. Now it has the highest in the world. Many of the newest infections — around 45 per cent — are of the new variant that was first identified in the south east of England.

Wednesday

Michael R. Auslin

Biden should embrace Britain’s new Indo-Pacific strategy

From our US edition

While final negotiations on the UK’s relationship with the EU continue to drag, No. 10 is moving rapidly to expand Britain’s role in the Indo-Pacific, returning ‘east of Suez’ after a half-century absence. Tied to this goal, Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled a modest, yet real, increase in Britain’s defense spending last month, totaling some $21.25 billion and pledging to once again make Great Britain the foremost naval power in Europe. Johnson’s budget announcement sets the stage for implementation of London’s long-awaited ‘Integrated Review’, which is touted as the most significant strategic reassessment of the UK’s diplomatic and security policies since the end of the Cold War.

indo-pacific

Monday

The Gladwin Brothers

Beef Wellington: a winter luxury that’s worth the effort

From our US edition

The world as we know it may be in disarray thanks to the pandemic, but the British countryside continues its seasonal cycle unabated. Gregory Gladwin’s heritage-breed Sussex cows can sense the winter on its way and frankly they are not that keen on the torrential autumn rains. Instead of disappearing into the further grazing fields they cluster by the yard gates mooing for attention. Barns have been lined with straw in preparation: within the next 10 days our two herds will be brought into their respective sheds, ready for a cozy winter of shared bodily warmth and of course carving the next generation. There is no conclusive proof that Beef Wellington was created in honor of the first Duke of Wellington. Arthur Wellesley.

beef wellington