22 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Simon Sebag Montefiore explains how his ancestor dealt with antisemitism; Vanessa Feltz says she is coming for Piers Morgan; Sophia Money-Coutts argues we should cut the price of stamps to save the Christmas card; and finally, Angus Colwell takes on the Cornish culinary mafia. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.
Have you read your copy of Dogue, yet? It’s become an annual project: Vogue’s dog issue. Instead of hungry, cross models in elaborate costumes and articles about the sartorial importance of the earlobe, it’s all dogs. A dog on the cover and dog ‘interviews’ alongside fashionable people talking about their dogs. Fittingly, the Dogue competition winner and cover star does look quite hungry. He’s a thin dog (of course) called Sir Spud who appears to be an Ibizan hound. Very Dogue, though, to have an Ibizan dog on the cover. Sir Spud was apparently named by Catholic nuns, would be voiced by Ian McKellen in a film about his life, is a Cancer ‘through and through’ and likes cashew nuts.
Readers with a nervous disposition should turn the page because I’m going to be sprinkling the C-word across the next few paragraphs. It’s still August and clearly much too early to be discussing Christmas, but a campaign has been launched that requires attention now. First, a quick quiz. How much is a first-class stamp? Bzzzzz, time’s up. It’s now £1.80, which means a book of six is more than a tenner. Madness. I’ve taken to queuing in my local post office and buying stamps only when I require them, one at a time. If you knew the queue there as intimately as I do, you would appreciate this is a major sacrifice.
Three women in my Tuesday weights class are getting married. While we squat and thrust and fling our kettlebells around, there’s non-stop talk of veils, decorations, modes of transport to the venue and whether anyone eats wedding cake these days. Men are allowed in this weights class but, oddly, none ever shows up. The major update from one of the brides this week was that the local register office had given permission for her dog to attend the ceremony. She duly bought ‘a little tux’ for Badger, so he could look the part. How do we feel about dogs at weddings?
Dennis refuses to step on to the scales at the vet. Perhaps he’s nervous about his holiday weight. The upshot is that I have to climb on the scales holding him, and then again without him, so the receptionist can work out the difference. It makes for quite a humiliating morning, shouting my weight across a crowded veterinary waiting room. A woman clutching an elderly cat looks determinedly at the floor. It’s our third trip to the vet in a week. Grass seed season is particularly bad this year, they say, on account of the heat, which has turned the seeds brittle and more likely to penetrate paws and ears. Local councils and their obsession with rewilding is also to blame, chunter some dog owners, since they’ve used this fashionable eco policy as an excuse not to mow.
‘No dog of mine will sleep on my bed,’ I swore, before Dennis came along. People who allowed dogs on their beds were feeble, I believed, not far removed from the sort of parent you overhear in restaurants saying: ‘Persephone, if you do that again Daddy’s going to get jolly cross.’ I’d be more disciplined. My dog would sleep in the kitchen, like any self-respecting normal dog. Dennis arrived, just ten weeks old, and on his first night was duly shut in the secondhand crate I’d bought on Facebook Marketplace for £20, from a woman who owned a mastiff called Hades. This crate was in my kitchen. Might my single status and attitude towards dogs on beds be somehow correlated, I hear you muse I went to bed and tried to ignore the pitiful mewling. Guess how long I lasted?
Two summers ago, when Dennis was a puppy, I went to the vet to get the 793 bits of paper (one-time entry only) now required to take a dog to Europe. ‘That’ll be £265, please,’ the receptionist told me. ‘What?’ I cried. ‘He could go to Eton for less!’ This didn’t seem to elicit much of a response from the receptionist (more of a Harrow woman, perhaps?), so I duly paid up and left.
Back in the day, Chelsea Flower Show was regarded as the beginning of the Season. Queen Alexandra opened the festivities in 1913, when it moved from the Embankment to its current location in SW3. It must have rained that day for there’s a terrific photo of her (dressed in black, so jolly) strolling beside several gentlemen in top hats, and all are carrying umbrellas. There was considerable grumbling about Chelsea this year, however – too crowded, too many shops, and it was sponsored by that nature-friendly marque, Range Rover. May I suggest a contemporary alternative to herald the start of summer? It’s Goodwoof. This is the two-day dog festival held in the leafy grounds of Goodwood every May.
I’ve been having trouble with my phone recently. I noticed it particularly while in France a few weeks ago. I’d flop on the sunbed with a book and then spend half an hour scrolling through ridiculous videos online. But then I do it at home, too – go to bed early thinking ‘Ooh good, nice early night with my book’. And then I see a video of a dog jumping into a swimming pool, or a chef cooking a Japanese omelette, or someone removing blackheads from their nose, or a clip of something that might be a cake but also might be a shoe, or someone else offering an improbable DIY tip involving a clothes hanger and a jar of honey, or a video of nail art, or of an influencer promising ‘THE ONLY RECIPE FOR BANG BANG CHICKEN YOU’LL EVER NEED’, and so on and so on.
44 min listen
The real Brexit betrayal: Starmer vs the workers‘This week Starmer fell… into the embrace of Ursula von der Leyen’ writes Michael Gove in our cover article this week. He writes that this week’s agreement with the EU perpetuates the failure to understand Brexit’s opportunities, and that Labour ‘doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t exist to make the lives of the fortunate more favourable’. Michael makes the argument that ‘the real Brexit betrayal’ is Labour’s failure to understand how Brexit can protect British jobs and industries and save our manufacturing sector. Historian of the Labour Party Dr Richard Johnson, a politics lecturer at Queen Mary University writes an accompanying piece arguing that Labour ‘needs to learn to love Brexit’.
There stands the bride. Perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect fake tan. She may not have slept the previous night or eaten for six months but, still, she’s beaming. And there behind her stand the bridesmaids. All 95 of them. ‘My sister-in-law asked how much weight I could drop because the dresses only went up to a size 12’ When Kathryn McGowan got married in County Down this month, she couldn’t decide which of her pals should have the honour of holding her train and checking she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. ‘It was quite stressful,’ she said of the dilemma, ‘and then one day the idea came to me.’ Instead of having the average number of bridesmaids (in the UK, this is three to five), she’d have 95 of them, aged between six and 40.
A couple of months ago, an invitation arrived. Would I like a room at the Savoy for the Baftas? I could attend the awards, guzzle champagne, walk the red carpet alongside Demi Moore and Ariana Grande and so on. Sadly, I replied, I was already booked up that weekend as a judge for a very different kind of competition: the World Marmalade Awards in Cumbria. This year marks the 20th anniversary of this event, held at a whopping Grade-I listed house just outside Penrith, surrounded by stone walls and sheep. Ahead of time, all judges were told to bring warm clothes, so I drove from London with a suitcase of jerseys. Upon arrival, I was shown to a room with a four-poster bed (given to the family by Queen Anne) but no heating. There didn’t seem to be central heating at all, in fact.
42 min listen
This week: the death of British industryIn the cover piece for the magazine, Matthew Lynn argues that Britain is in danger of entering a ‘zero-industrial society’. The country that gave the world the Industrial Revolution has presided over a steep decline in British manufacturing. He argues there are serious consequences: foreign ownership, poorer societies, a lack of innovation, and even national security concerns. Why has this happened? Who is to blame? And could Labour turn it around? Matthew joined the podcast, alongside the head of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Paul Nowak. (1:05) Next: the Pope takes on President TrumpThe Pope has nominated Cardinal Robert McElroy to be the new Archbishop of Washington.
47 min listen
This week: Having been found guilty of sexual assault, is Donald Trump still in the running for the White House? In his cover piece, Niall Ferguson says he could still defy gravity. He joins the podcast alongside Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest. (01:00) Also this week: Journalist Andrew Watts interviews the Reverend Canon Dr Jason Bray, the Bishop of St Asaph’s ‘deliverance minister’, or the Anglican priest charged with exorcising evil spirits. They both join the podcast. (17:50). And finally: Author and journalist Sophia Money-Coutts writes about the British women opting for Danish sperm donors to conceive. She joins us on the show, along with Annemette Arndal Lauritzen, CEO of the European Sperm Bank. (34:07).
‘Hello, my current occupation is police officer,’ says Dex in a thick Danish accent. ‘It seems very adventurous and exciting to do, and to make a difference for the people I meet out in the world.’ Dex is just over 13 stone, around six feet tall, has very fair skin and blue eyes. His favourite animal is the dog. Dex is also a Danish sperm donor, and I’m listening to the beginning of an 11-minute voice-recording on his profile. On the website of the European Sperm Bank, which bills itself as ‘Europe’s leading sperm bank’ and is based in Copenhagen, there are hundreds of profiles like Dex’s available to British women. Create a free profile and, in under a minute, you can scroll through smiling baby pictures of Danish men as if looking for a new party frock.
41 min listen
This week: Who's afraid of Keir Starmer? In his cover piece for the magazine, The Spectator's Editor Fraser Nelson says that without a Labour demon to point at the Tories stand little chance in the next election. He joins the podcast alongside journalist Paul Mason, to discuss why Keir Starmer is so hard to vilify (01:10). Also this week: In the magazine, The Spectator's newsletter editor Hannah Tomes exposes the social media campaign targeting young women, such as herself, to freeze and donate their eggs. She joins the podcast alongside Sophia Money-Coutts, host of the Freezing Time podcast, to consider whether it is right to market this as an altruistic undertaking (16:58).
28 min listen
Sophia Money-Coutts is former features editor at Tatler magazine, and now columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. Her new book, The Plus One, came out earlier this year. In this episode of Table Talk, Lara and Livvy talk to Sophia about how cheese fondue helped her get through her parents' divorce as a child, how an ex-boyfriend berated her poppadom manners, and the best way to juggle a clutch bag and canapés at writers' parties. Presented by Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts.
Marmalade’s had a rough old time of it lately. A recent report in the Telegraph declared it is dying out; that only oldies are buying it because millennials can’t handle ‘bits’ in spreads. Well, excuse me, but I direct you to this year’s World Marmalade Awards, held a few weeks ago in a big Georgian house called Dalemain just outside Penrith, which attracted nearly 2,000 homemade jars from around the globe. Big jars, little jars, jars decorated with glitter, sticky jars that had leaked in the post, jars with gingham hats. All laid out on trestle tables with individual, handwritten tasting notes from the WI judges underneath, marking each jar out of 20.
