Hannah Tomes

Hannah Tomes

Hannah Tomes is US production editor at The Spectator.

Sunday

Hannah Tomes

Japan, the land of the rising wine industry

Travel to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, and I imagine one of the last things you’d expect to find is a Frenchman making wine. But tucked away in Hakodate, Etienne de Montille, a ninth-generation winemaker from the 300-year-old Domaine de Montille in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune, is challenging preconceptions about Japanese wine. The de Montille family has been synonymous with Burgundy for centuries, but Etienne decided in 2016 to try something different, setting up vineyards in both Hokkaido and Santa Barbara, California.  ‘I was touched by what I saw,’ Etienne told the Japan Times last year.

Tuesday

Hannah Tomes

Best of Notes on…

29 min listen

The Best of Notes on... gathers the funniest, sharpest and most wonderfully random pieces from The Spectator’s beloved miscellany column. For more than a decade, these short, sharp essays have uncovered the intrigue in the everyday and the delight in digression. To purchase the book, go to spectator.co.uk/shop On this special episode of Spectator Out Loud, you can hear from: William Moore on jeans; Laura Freeman on Brits in Paris; Justin Marozzi on boxer shorts; Mark Mason on coming second; Michael Simmons on doner kebabs; Fergus Butler-Gallie on Friday the 13th; Hannah Tomes on rude place names; and, Margaret Mitchell on lobsters. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons, with an introduction from William Moore.

Sunday

Hannah Tomes

The remote Spanish wine region that rivals Rioja

A.E. Housman once wrote that the English villages of Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun ‘are the quietest places under the sun’. He’s almost right. I grew up in Clunton and the only place I’ve felt a deeper sense of quiet is Escaladei, a village high up in the mountainous Priorat region of Spain, which is home to the Cellers de Scala Dei vineyard. Getting there from Barcelona isn’t for the faint of heart, as the roads weave erratically along the hillsides. Driving there, I gripped the steering wheel tightly and drowned out my fears with music from a local reggaeton station. Once safely at the vineyard, Roger, our guide, impressed on us the importance of two things in Priorat: Garnacha and monks.

Sunday

Hannah Tomes

The Judgment of Berkshire

Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. California won both categories. Odette Khan, a well-known critic, reportedly demanded her scorecard back so news of her grave error wouldn’t reach the papers.

Thursday

Hannah Tomes

Netanyahu: Hamas is backtracking on ceasefire

Benjamin Netanyahu has this morning accused Hamas of trying to backtrack on the six-week ceasefire and hostage release that was agreed yesterday. The Israeli Prime Minister’s office released a statement saying that Hamas objected to part of the deal that would give Israel the power to veto the release of certain prisoners, and that negotiators had been instructed to hold firm on the agreed terms. The statement also said Hamas was trying to ‘extort last-minute concessions’ – a claim the group denies. An Israeli cabinet vote on the deal, which was expected to take place later today, has been delayed ‘until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all of the agreement’.

Tuesday

Hannah Tomes

Wales has a new First Minister. Her honeymoon won’t last long

Eluned Morgan has this morning been voted in as the new Welsh First Minister – the first woman ever to hold the position. The Labour member for Mid and West Wales was unopposed for the nomination within her party and won 28 votes out of a possible 60. The Conservatives’ Andrew RT Davies got 15 votes; Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth 12. She confirmed Huw Irranca-Davies as her deputy, adding: ‘They used to say behind every successful man is a woman: on this occasion, there will be an impressive man behind a woman.

Tuesday

Hannah Tomes

My old friend went viral for all the wrong reasons

Last week, an old acquaintance went viral. Charles Withers had, according to his pregnant wife, disappeared around a year ago, leaving her to bring up one young child alone with another on the way. The pretty Massachusetts blonde posted a plea for information on Facebook. It was, she wrote, surprisingly difficult to divorce someone who refused to return your calls.  In an age of near-constant surveillance, how does it feel when the choice to disappear is taken from you? Not long after the story surfaced, I received a message from a friend. ‘Do you remember Charlie Withers?’ he asked. I did. He had been part of our wider social circle, one of the boys at the neighbouring school.

Saturday

Thursday

Hannah Tomes

Devastating: Almeida Theatre’s King Lear reviewed

Yaël Farber’s production of King Lear at the Almeida Theatre is imbued with an undercurrent of tension that feels as if it’s constantly on the edge of exploding into violence. It’s not her first crack at Shakespeare – in 2001 she adapted Julius Caesar, and she directed Hamlet at the Gate in Dublin in 2018 and Macbeth at the Almeida in 2021 – but I’d be willing to bet it’s her most virulent. Danny Sapani’s Lear flies into a terrifying rage, scattering microphones across the stage The opening scene – a swanky press conference that could have been lifted straight from an episode of Succession – neatly sets the tone of the snippy relationships.

Saturday

Hannah Tomes

The Scottish government’s bizarre egg donor drive

A bright pink box fills my screen; soon it’s filled with blue cartoon sperm swimming towards a large, wobbling egg, where they congregate to spell the word ‘joy’. Alongside it is a message, which reads: ‘By becoming an egg or sperm donor, you could give the joy of starting a family to more than 200 people in Scotland, who need help becoming a family.’ It’s accompanied with the hashtag ‘JoyLoveHope’.  I’m looking at a digital advert, part of a series rolled out across radio and the internet in Scotland from 2021 until last year, where it culminated in National Fertility Week. Advertising for egg donors (and sperm donors) is a common – if ethically questionable – practice, and many private clinics do it. But this advert is different.

Friday

Hannah Tomes

What the UN court’s genocide verdict means for Israel

The International Court of Justice has handed down a preliminary ruling instructing Israel to prevent a genocide from happening in Gaza. Judge Donoghue, speaking at the court in The Hague, said the country must take ‘all measures within its power’ to prevent acts that breach the genocide convention and must ensure ‘with immediate effect’ that none of its soldiers are involved in any acts which contravene it. Israel was also ordered to take immediate action to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The convention defines genocide as acts committed ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’.

Wednesday

Hannah Tomes

Comedy of the blackest kind: Boy Parts, at Soho Theatre, reviewed

There’s something mesmerising about watching a good mimic. And Aimée Kelly, who plays fetish photographer Irina Sturges in Soho Theatre’s Boy Parts, is a very good mimic. Across the 80 minutes of this one-woman performance, she inhabits the bodies of dozens of characters, each a carbon copy of the worst kind of person: oleaginous city bankers; shrill, hysterical twenty-something women; ‘Andrew Tate-core’ men. An unnamed boy ends up as nothing more than a severed head Her sneering representations of these characters instruct us to see them (whether we want to or not) as Irina does: pathetic and deeply undesirable. It’s uncomfortable.

Monday

Hannah Tomes

Teenage boy arrested after teacher stabbed

A teenage boy is being questioned on suspicion of attempted murder after a male teacher was stabbed at a Gloucestershire secondary school this morning. The teacher was attacked in a corridor and suffered a single wound, Gloucestershire Police assistant chief constable Richard Ocone said at a press conference this afternoon. The teacher is in a stable condition. The suspect was arrested at around 11 a.m. – two hours after the attack – by firearms officers in Stoke Orchard, around five miles from the school. Ocone added that the motivation is unclear – but it is not thought to be terror-related.

Sunday

Hannah Tomes

Could the Tories still scrape through in the Selby by-election?

‘Absent’ seems to be the word that most often springs to mind for voters in Selby and Ainsty when asked about their former MP, Nigel Adams. Back in my home constituency, one of the most common complaints is that he was a Westminster politician who didn’t care about the area; a Boris Johnson loyalist who hitched his wagon to the former PM – and came undone by association.  Adams resigned on 10 June – a day after Johnson – in a row over his removal from the peerages list by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Selby is one of three by-elections Rishi Sunak will face on 20 July. Two more could follow courtesy of Nadine Dorries (if she ever formally quits) and Chris Pincher, after his recommended eight-week suspension from parliament.

Wednesday

Hannah Tomes

Is Margaret Thatcher ultimately to blame for the current social housing crisis?

By the time she was 25, the journalist and broadcaster Kieran Yates had lived in almost as many houses. Having rented for more than a decade, I feel her pain. I’ve lived in flats that made me physically unwell (mould has a lot to answer for) and survived housemates whose approach to kitchen hygiene made every day a salmonella minefield. I would visit a former boyfriend whose bedroom was, essentially, a glorified crawl space in a cold artists’ warehouse. He was 6ft 6in and couldn’t even kneel up in it, but, aged 24, I thought it was cool. Now I see it for what it was: an indictment of London’s rental market, embodied in grey concrete and exposed piping.

Tuesday

Hannah Tomes

Britain ‘ready to assist’ in search for missing submarine

Britain is ‘ready to provide assistance’ to the rescuers searching for Titan, the submarine which lost contact while on an exploratory visit to the Titanic, a spokesman for Rishi Sunak said this afternoon. The rescuers are facing a race against time as the craft runs out of oxygen. The expedition left for the site of the shipwreck – around 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland – on Friday. The dive started on Sunday morning, and the submarine lost contact with the Polar Prince, the surface vessel, an hour and three-quarters after the descent started. It has been missing ever since. British adventurer Hamish Harding is one of those thought to be on board, along with Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, who are both British citizens too.

Wednesday

Hannah Tomes

Carla Foster needs compassion, not punishment for her abortion

In May 2020, two months into the pandemic, Carla Foster, a 44-year-old mother-of-three took pills at home to trigger an abortion. The foetus – a girl – was between 32 and 34 weeks old; a viable age for survival outside of the womb. On Monday, the mother was jailed for 28 months (with half of the sentence to be served on licence).  After the judgment was handed down, abortion campaign groups, women’s rights activists and a host of MPs immediately rushed to share their outrage at the decision.

Tuesday

Hannah Tomes

Rishi Sunak is pulling the rug out from under renters

Rishi Sunak is having a busy week. After announcing his crackdown on anti-social behaviour over the weekend, he set out a slew of new promises yesterday to ban laughing gas, increase fines for littering and give police powers to ‘move on’ what he deems ‘nuisance’ beggars.  Among them was a proposal that would allow landlords to evict tenants with just two weeks’ notice if they are disruptive to neighbours through noise, drug use or damage to property. This would apply to all new private rental tenancies.

Saturday

Hannah Tomes

Cindy Yu, Leah McLaren and Hannah Tomes

15 min listen

This week: Cindy Yu discusses Britain’s invisible East Asians (00:51), Leah McLaren discloses the truth about single motherhood (06:02), and Hannah Tomes reads her notes on dining alone (12:08).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

Thursday

Hannah Tomes

The art of eating alone

To some, the phrase ‘table for one, please’ is among the saddest in the English language. Perhaps this isn’t a surprise; the concept of social dining for pleasure dates back to Ancient Greece. There, meals would be served at all-male gatherings on low tables so the guests could recline while eating (a recipe for heartburn, but luxurious nonetheless). Then would come the symposium, the section of the evening dedicated to drinking. Although we mix the two a little more fluidly now, the concept is much the same: sharing a meal and drinks with others is an enjoyable thing to do, so people do it. As such, eating alone has long held a kind of stigma. But I relish the time with my own thoughts, especially in a city as relentless as London.