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For an astonishing length of time the attitude of football authorities to the prospect of widespread doping at the sport’s highest levels seemed best summed up in a 2017 tweet by the often spectacularly dim-seeming Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker. ‘Doping is not really an issue in football. Doping doesn’t help players play better. No
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Is it more remarkable that Romanian two-time Grand Slam tennis champion Simona Halep took performance enhancing drugs, or that she was caught? I ask only because the sport’s authorities seem to catch vanishingly few dopers, which surely means either they’re very bad at it, or elite players rarely cheat to win enormous sums of money. Certainly, it’s
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36 min listen
In this week’s cover story, The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls writes about Labour’s new paymasters – Keir Starmer’s party now receives more money from private donors than it does from trade unions. What do the new donors want, and what does Starmer want from them? Katy joins Will and Lara alongside the writer and Labour
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The plot is thickening. If it turns out NatWest CEO Alison Rose was the source for BBC business editor Simon Jack’s scoop that private bank Coutts, part of the NatWest Group, rejected Nigel Farage as a customer not because of his political views but for a supposed lack of funds, then it’s hard to see
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I recently underwent a surgical procedure that according to the surgeon who performed it would cause either no discomfort at all or result in ‘exceptional pain’ for at least two weeks. No way to tell until I was on the operating table, apparently. She said this matter-of-factly, as if discussing bus routes, just as I
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If like me you’re convinced a lot of professional sportspeople are doped to the gills, perhaps you’re excited by the launch of the Enhanced Games – a proposed rival to the Olympic Games in which competitors will be encouraged to take as many performance-enhancing drugs as they can get into their bloodstream. After all, if so many are already juicing – and, crucially, not
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Has there ever been a more brutally effective piece of social satire than the South Park episode that mocked Harry and Meghan? Since it aired in mid-February, the Duchess of Sussex, previously a seemingly ubiquitous and unstoppable cultural phenomenon, has effectively withdrawn from public life. She’s made just one formal appearance – at an awards show, which
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In the mid-90s when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate I did work experience at the now defunct The Face magazine. They put me in what they called the fashion cupboard. Looking back on it now, I recall I spent a hot fortnight in August either hoiking large volumes of clothing around London for various photoshoots
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Nish Kumar’s grandiosely titled podcast Pod Save the UK isn’t anything like as annoying as you’d expect. Yes, his speaking voice – a high-pitched nasal gurgle – can grate a little, especially when punctuated, as it is often and loudly, with a laugh that is very obviously insincere. But I listened to the full hour
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Just when you thought you couldn’t handle any more depressing news, Gary Lineker has started dropping hints that his days in the Match of the Day presenter’s chair may be drawing to an end. I know. It really puts things into perspective. ‘I’m ancient,’ Lineker said, Aslan-like, on the latest Match of the Day podcast,
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It’s perhaps still too early to tell if the Jewish and Muslim communities, here in Britain and indeed throughout the world, were brought closer by the actions of the former Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq. How refreshing it is to see the quaint concept of proof being demanded before a man’s life is ruined Rafiq, you
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The high-profile political activist Gary Lineker will not present Match of the Day tonight after he likened the rhetoric of the government to 1930s Germany. Several pundits and commentators are boycotting the show, while the BBC has also been forced to pull from air Football Focus, Final Score and Fighting Talk. Many people are professing themselves baffled that this story about a football presenter
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Is Facebook’s scheme, announced over the weekend, to encourage its three billion users to pay $12 (£10) a month to have their accounts verified really just a form of corporate extortion? I ask only because last year someone – I strongly suspect a deranged Novak Djokovic fan – took the time to create a fake
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Mike Tyson is said once to have claimed the best punch he’d ever thrown was one he landed on actress and model Robin Givens, when she was his wife. ‘Man, I’ll never forget that punch’, his biographer quoted him as saying in 1988. ‘She really offended me and I went bam, and she flew backward,
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I’ve just given Elon Musk $8 a month to get a blue tick by my name on Twitter. The fact I haven’t been able to secure one of these ticks on merit like so many other nonentities has been a source of near-constant irritation for the past half decade, particularly given how much time I
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39 min listen
This week: In his cover piece for the magazine Owen Matthews writes about the power struggle at the heart of Russia. He is joined by Jade McGlynn, specialist in Russian Studies at the Monterey Initiative, to discuss whether Putin might be running out of time (01:00). Also on the podcast: Has America’s pot policy gone
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‘It’s like that whole #MeToo thing,’ says Esmond Baring, 44, scion of the famous banking family and founder of The Privileged Man, a support group for, er, privileged men. ‘Once you’ve realised you’re not alone, you can ask for help.’ Baring is rakishly handsome and talks with the zeal and articulacy of the true convert.
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Meghan Markle, if she was minded to, could easily corner the erotic ASMR market – that weird bit of the internet in which women breathily relate fictitious experiences with their mouths too close to the microphone for the gratification of lonely nerds everywhere.It’s impossible to listen to her latest self-glorifying venture into podcasting, Archetypes (get
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After manspreading Boris, is the UK ready for mansplaining Rishi? At last night’s BBC leadership debate, during which the Chancellor appeared for large sections unable to stop himself leaping ungallantly down Liz Truss’ throat whenever she tried to speak, it seemed this is what we will get if the Tory membership decides he’s their man.
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Watching the Channel 4 leadership debate last night was thoroughly depressing. If only Boris Johnson’s premiership hadn’t ended in the way it did – a surreal version of the famous butterfly effect where one man gropes another in the Carlton Club and the leader of a nuclear power gets the boot. Without Boris there seems
