From our UK edition
Could Rishi Sunak’s emergence as this nation’s greatest gaffe machine since Prince Philip come in time to endear him to the electorate? At this point in his campaign, you’d have to say it’s a tactic he might as well lean into. After all, one of the best things about being British is the manner in which virtually everything becomes a funny and heart-warming story if you give it enough time. Another day, another gaffe.
From our UK edition
It’s hard to think of anything Rishi Sunak could have done that would cause greater offence to the British sensibility. You do not, not if you’re the British prime minister, sack off the D-Day commemorations in Normandy to return home early under any circumstances – least of all in order to do an ITV interview on tax. It’s not just disrespectful to the fallen. His early exit suggests that this is all just a game for Sunak. It seems to send a message that he stands for precisely nothing – beyond being prime minister. Can you imagine Boris Johnson – whom Sunak knifed so expertly on his way to the top – doing the same thing? Of course not – it’s unthinkable.
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Tim Dillon is a comedian who not so long ago worked as a New York tour bus guide and subprime mortgage salesman. He started a podcast from his porch in 2016 and used it to talk about world events, what he and his lowlife friends were up to, and, frequently, to complain about how broke he was. ‘I understand fighting in Ukraine is tough. But have you ever defended Vladimir Putin at a dinner party in Malibu?’ Today, each episode of The Tim Dillon Show is downloaded more than a million times and subscriptions generate income in excess of $175,000 a month. In early April, he will perform at the Royal Albert Hall. He’s also considering a run for governor of California.
From our UK edition
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 amount of drugs will help you pass, dribble [or] shoot,’ he said – a statement that will presumably now come as a considerable shock to Juventus, France, and former Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba, who has just been handed a four year ban after being popped for use of synthetic testosterone.
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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 easy to be cynical about tennis. When in 2017 I interviewed legendary doping chemist Angel ‘Memo’ Hernandez – who during the nineties and 2000s was the world’s leading illicit sports chemist, providing undetectable super-stimulants to a wide range of household name athletes – he burst out laughing when I asked about doping in tennis.
From our UK edition
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 supporter Paul Mason. (01:00) Next up, Webb Keane, from the University of Michigan, and Scott Shapiro, from Yale, write in the magazine this week about the dawn of the godbots – you can now chat online to an artificial intelligence that pretends it’s god. Might people soon start outsourcing their ethics to a chatbot? We're joined by Webb and The Spectator’s commissioning editor Mary Wakefield.
From our UK edition
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 how she will last in her job to the end of the week. According to the Daily Telegraph, Rose sat next to Jack at a charity dinner the night before he published his story. At the time of writing, neither had responded to questions about what they'd discussed. Certainly, the Coutts dossier that Farage has managed to obtain after submitting a legal request seems to make a mockery of Jack's story.
From our UK edition
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 was about to receive a general anaesthetic. As soon as I came to, I learned it was the latter. In the following days, bedbound and near-delirious with pain and medication, I listened to hour after hour of Taylor Swift. I didn't want to hear anything else. I found her music, with its vast emotional depth and stunning lyrical dexterity, terrifically soothing.
From our UK edition
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 being caught – why not just be open about it?
From our UK edition
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 ended in the farce of disputed paparazzi car chase claims – and has given precisely no interviews. The couple's media empire also seems to be imploding. Spotify has axed their $20 million (£15.6 million) podcast deal, with senior exec Bill Simmons ungallantly labelling the pair ‘fucking grifters’.
From our UK edition
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 or listening, usually at close quarters, to homosexual men – fashionistas, darling – discussing their sex lives in great detail over the telephone. I wasn’t terribly worldly and I found the whole thing fascinating. Far more sophisticated than me was the other work experience boy, Lance, a skinny 17-year-old who was, as they say, as gay as Christmas.
From our UK edition
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 without experiencing a single violent urge. This wasn't the reaction I'd expected. Not at all. When he was on the telly, as he was improbably for four long years fronting the BBC's truly godawful The Mash Report, like much of the rest of the nation I found I could manage about ninety seconds of him before wanting to put my foot through the screen. Kumar, for my money, was easily the most irritating man in the British media.
From our UK edition
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, ‘my time is nearly up.’ The most powerful man at the BBC – and football’s most famous Gary – then seemed to anoint his successor by giving the nod to the endlessly anodyne former Tottenham and Newcastle midfielder Jermaine Jenas. ‘He’s probably drifting toward my role,’ Lineker told presumably astonished co-hosts Alan Shearer and Micah Richards. ‘He’s doing it really well, doing The One Show.
From our UK edition
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 will remember, in November 2021 went to hear in person from Holocaust survivor Ruth Barnett, 86, about her experience of being on the receiving end in Nazi Germany of what you'd probably have to say was on balance worse than anything you could possibly experience in or around a cricket ground.
From our UK edition
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 and Twitter should dominate the news agenda for several days. But the real story here is about what is often referred to as the culture war and who is winning it. We are finding out who's really in charge of the BBC. Is it we, the people who pay the licence fee on threat of imprisonment, and who are told the service is impartial when it is not?
From our UK edition
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 Facebook profile featuring me. The photo that accompanies the profile, which is named 'Damian Damian', is certainly of me, although Boris Johnson, who I was standing next to when it was taken, has been cropped out.
From our UK edition
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, hitting every wall in the apartment.' The late eighties were different to the times we currently inhabit, but it's worth noting that, when it was published, the biography didn't seem to do Tyson's career a great deal of harm. Before retiring in 2005, in fact, and notwithstanding a three-year stretch in prison for rape, Tyson would go on to fight 23 more times, raking in many millions of dollars in the process.
From our UK edition
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 spend on the site. My assumption had been that a Spectator-reading Twitter employee would eventually accept my brilliance – perhaps after reading something rude I'd written about Meghan Markle – and press the required button to make it happen. But when I finally accepted this wasn't likely, about two years ago, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I began filling out the website's online verification request form.
From our UK edition
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 to pot? In The Spectator this week Mike Adams says that US cannabis legislation has been a total failure, a view contested by Katya Kowalski, Head of Operations at drug policy think tank Voltface. They both join The Edition podcast to debate the way forward for cannabis legalisation (16:26).And finally: Should we pity privileged men? For our magazine Damian Reilly writes about The Privileged Man, the support group for men that have it all.
From our UK edition
‘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. He met co-founder Pete Hunt, 40, in 2011 on the island of Bali after he’d experienced a fairly vigorous nervous breakdown. Ten years later, both having left the corporate world to which they felt ill-suited, they established The Privileged Man.
