Matthew Wilcox

It comes without warning. A black shape shearing out of the sky, a clap of wings like a sail breaking. The foal has no time to startle. Talons hit, the ground shakes, and in the next breath it is gone, dragged upward into the light. Rewilding is the countryside’s answer to cosplay This summer on South Uist, a Scottish island in the Outer Hebrides, crofter Donald John Cameron says he lost five Shetland pony foals from his hillside farm, each one vanishing between May and July. He believes they were carried off by white-tailed eagles, reintroduced to Scotland in the 1970s after the species had been hunted to extinction. The foals, he told STV News, were more than livestock: part of his agritourism business and family pets, named by his four-year-old daughter.

Another Banksy appeared this week, this time on the flank of the Grade I-listed Royal Courts of Justice in London. Naturally, the world’s news agencies leapt to attention. Not because of the image – a judge walloping a protester is the sort of wit you’d find on a novelty birthday card – but because the press can’t resist its favourite pantomime revolutionary. Within hours, it was boarded up and placed under guard. It was later scrubbed off the wall – a rare moment of good sense from the authorities. If only the same fate could befall the rest of Banksy's wretched oeuvre.

On paper, Charlbury is everything the Cotswolds is supposed to be. Stone cottages the colour of anaemic butter. Sash windows in a riot of Farrow & Ball sage. A train station that survived the Beeching cuts and gets you to London in an hour. 'People talk about the Chipping Norton set, but that disguises how rough parts of Chipping Norton and Witney can be.' It looks like the kind of place where nothing ever happens. And in many ways, it has worked hard to stay that way. While the setting – close to where US vice president JD Vance recently rented a manor house – may look like postcard England, locals say the reality, especially for those on the margins, is far more complicated. 'There are three Charlburys,' says the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie, the local vicar.

The Church of England’s abuse Redress Scheme was set up to help survivors of abuse, but a serious data breach last night led to the email addresses of dozens of survivors being unwittingly revealed. More than 180 people were openly copied into an email update about the project sent by a law firm tasked with administering the scheme. The Church of England has expressed 'profound concern' about what happened. These words offer little comfort to those caught up in this latest debacle. The Church of England has expressed 'profound concern' about what happened One survivor told The Spectator they had opened the message expecting long-awaited details on how the compensation programme would function.

Have you heard the one where the vice president of the United States and a lesbian former talk show host walk into a farm shop in Gloucestershire? No, it’s not the set-up to a joke – it’s just another Tuesday in the Cotswolds in 2025. The Cotswolds still looks like England – hedgerows, pubs selling Sunday roasts – but what it offers now is something different Ellen DeGeneres has confirmed that she’s staying put in the Cotswolds, where she’s been holed-up since the 2024 US presidential election. JD Vance – now vice president under Donald Trump – is also planning on spending part of the summer there too. Two Americans, worlds apart, wind up in the same tiny sliver of England. One wants to grow heritage carrots.