Mary Wakefield is commissioning editor of The Spectator.
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On this week’s special Christmas edition of Spectator Out Loud – part one: James Heale wonders if Keir Starmer will really have a happy new year; Gyles Brandreth discusses Her Majesty The Queen’s love of reading, and reveals which books Her Majesty has personally recommended to give this Christmas; Avi Loeb explains why a comet could be a spaceship;
I grew up in the 1980s but in many ways it was more like the 1880s. We lived with my grandmother on the Northumbrian coast and the routine of our days echoed the routines of her youth, perhaps her mother’s and grandmother’s, too. We were like an elephant family in an African game park, following
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: William Atkinson reveals his teenage brush with a micropenis; Andreas Roth bemoans the dumbing down of German education; Philip Womack wonders how the hyphen turned political; Mary Wakefield questions the latest AI horror story – digitising dead relatives; and, Muriel Zagha celebrates Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! Produced
Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing advert I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai
Here’s a question for you to contemplate, this Remembrance Day: If you found yourself in the chaos of a terrorist attack, or if your child was kidnapped, who would you most like to come to the rescue? My particular hope is that the Prime Minister and his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, consider this question, because
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A year on from his presidential election victory, what lessons can Britain learn from Trump II? Tim Shipman writes this week’s cover piece from Washington D.C., considering where Keir Starmer can ‘go big’ like President Trump. Both leaders face crunch elections next year, but who has momentum behind them? There is also the question of
I learnt not to intervene on a late summer’s afternoon nine years ago. My son was still a baby and I was pushing him in his pram across a busy road in a responsible way, only after the green ‘walk’ man had lit up. I was about halfway over when a boy of about 14
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Luke Coppen looks at a new musical subgenre of Roman Catholic black metal; Mary Wakefield celebrates cartoonist Michael Heath as he turns 90 – meaning he has drawn for the Spectator for 75 years; looking to Venezuela, Daniel McCarthy warns Trump about the perils of regime change; Michael Simmons
When I joined The Spectator, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-storey Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media
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The Spectator’s cover story this week looks at ‘the fear’ gripping Jewish people amidst rising antisemitism. Reflecting on last week’s attack in Manchester, Douglas Murray says that ‘no-one in the Jewish community was surprised’ – a damning inditement on Britain today. How do we tackle religious intolerance? And is there room for nuance in the
Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the
Those of us trapped in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s low traffic neighbourhood scheme are now obedient, resigned. We expect a car journey of under a mile to take 40 minutes. We don’t hope for anything more. On Sunday, around five o’clock, my son and I stuck fast in Dalston Lane, but as we settled down to
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale reports on the battle for the north; Robert Hardman provides his royal notebook; who’s really in charge of China, asks Francis Pike; Henrietta Harding goes on Ozempic safari; and, Mary Wakefield explains how to raise a patriot. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.
‘Good news for patriots,’ said one of our most celebrated national newspapers this week: ‘Your numbers are likely to swell.’ This was on the editorial page, where the opinions of the paper are laid out, and it referred to a poll conducted by ‘More in Common’ which had found, to everyone’s surprise, that British teenagers
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First: an economic reckoning is looming ‘Britain’s numbers… don’t add up’, says economics editor Michael Simmons. We are ‘an ageing population with too few taxpayers’. ‘If the picture looks bad now,’ he warns, ‘the next few years will be disastrous.’ Governments have consistently spent more than they raised; Britain’s debt costs ‘are the worst in
The foster care system in this country is collapsing. There are roughly 80,000 children who’ve been removed from violent or neglectful parents and need homes, but there’s a catastrophic lack of people prepared to care for them – a shortfall of around 6,500 foster carers. The rate of decline is terrifying. Every year the small
I’ve seen signs of life in the Conservative party – unlikely I know, but true. I had thought it a dead thing, dripping its life-blood slowly into Reform. But ten days ago I saw on YouTube a speech that a Tory MP gave in the House of Commons and… I don’t know. I felt hope.
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Mark Mason reminisces about old English bank notes (00:33), Philip Patrick wonders whether AI will replace politicians in Japan (04:04), Matthew Parris wonders why you would ever trust a travel writer (10:34) and Mary Wakefield looks at the weird world of cults (17:42).
Every week brings a new revelation about the Zizians: the craziest, saddest cult in recent American history. Eight deaths have been linked to them so far, including 80-year-old Curtis Lind, stabbed with a samurai sword, US border patrol agent David Maland, shot by the roadside in Vermont, and the elderly parents of another member, shot
It’s disorienting but satisfying that Labour now accepts that Asian grooming gangs exist. Some of my left-identified friends are even beginning to share the outrage – over Qari Abdul Rauf, for instance, one of the nastiest of the Rochdale rapists, who still lives in Rochdale a decade after the first steps to deport him were
