Mary Wakefield

Our society is bristling with social stigmas, we’re told, even in the progressive West, even in London. Life is so horribly stigmatised that celebrities are increasingly keen to raise awareness not of diseases or disabilities, but of the stigma that’s said to surround them. So: less campaigning for cancer research, more for breaking the stigma

I’m used to waiting for the Catholic church to make sense. I’m a convert to Catholicism, and Catholic ideas sometimes take a while to become clear. I start from a position of suspicious distaste, but if I sit tight, I’ve found, the strangest things come right. It’s in this spirit of patient confusion that, since

A few weeks ago, more than 2,000 employees of Apple Inc. signed a petition that led to the sacking of a clever and capable tech engineer, Antonio García Martínez. García Martínez was fired for sexism — not because he behaved badly towards any women, but because of a passage in a book he wrote five

Towards the end of April, my mum sent me a letter. She doesn’t write as a rule — we speak on the phone — but this time she sent something. It’s hard to explain the effect her handwriting had on me after so many months of being apart. It was as if she was there,

Some time around 2006 my then flatmate, a filmmaker, had a good idea: why not make a programme of reverse anthropology? Instead of going to the jungle with some square-jawed presenter to marvel at the natives, he decided to bring the natives here, to England, to see what they made of us. The islanders who

As we creep back into the open, as the Covid wards empty and the mental health clinics fill up, how are we going to tell what’s driven people crazy: lockdown, or what seems to have been a favourite lockdown hobby — smoking weed? Last week Sadiq Khan, London’s goblin mayor, announced that if re-elected he’ll

It sometimes seems as if Professor Tim Spector, of King’s College London, was conjured up especially to be a walking, talking rebuke to Public Health England. Where PHE has been lumbering, slow to respond to the fast-moving virus, Spector has been nimble, quick to see opportunity and adapt. This time last year, as Boris was

For most London-based politicians, there’s a threat that’s worse than Covid. You’ll begin to notice it as we ease out of lockdown. It’s not the Brazilian variant that keeps them awake at night, or collapsing hospitals. Nope. What really worries them is the thought of cars. Watch them pale as they mutter the words ‘car-led

For more than 20 years, I’ve been raging away at pointless rules. When my blood’s up, there’s not a foam-flecked Tory backbencher that can hold a candle to me. My friends blanch when I start on again about risk aversion in the C of E, dogs banned from beaches, the pond-weed creep of health and safety. I

I miss daydreaming. It’s a small problem to have in a pandemic, but it nags at me. Laptop, cooker, home-school, broom. ‘Mum, Mum, Mumma, Mum… You’re not looking, Mum. You have to look!’ The gap between things seems to have disappeared. There’s no time to drift and wander. I look at my phone too much,

There’s something creepy about the way we call Donald Trump fans a cult, then watch them hungrily, hoping they’ll do something colourful, though not actually threatening — like self-immolate, perhaps. Lockdown is boring and we’ve watched everything on Netflix. So, MSNBC and chill. But not all MAGA fans are cultish, and not all political cults

Merlin (or Merlina), the cleverest and most sociable of the Tower of London ravens is missing. It’s a bad omen — if the ravens leave the Tower, the city is said to be doomed. But it’s saddest for London’s Ravenmaster Chris Skaife who Merlina had pretty much chosen as her mate. I met Chris and

Justin Welby is having a holiday and people are unhappy about it. He plans, in May, to take a three-month break and the general consensus is that this is not what Jesus would have done in a time of plague. Yes, Christ did frequently retreat to pray, but he only once spent more than a

It took me several weeks, after returning to the Spectator office, to work out what was missing. It wasn’t the people — though Westminster is a zombie town these days, and even Pret A Manger, once hectic as a trading floor, is calm. I like the calm. What’s missing, I realised as I walked past

I have become allergic to ‘cute’, bad-tempered biddy that I am. Cuteness and the requirement to be cute have spread like pondweed across children’s TV and out into the adult internet. Cute culture is a way of worshipping youth — cute characters by definition have babyish features: big heads and eyes, fat cheeks and clumsy

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on