Society

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Should the BBC be mocking Ronaldo’s tears?

Portugal squeezed through to the Euros quarter finals last night after a penalty shoot-out victory against plucky Slovenia. Or perhaps I should say Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal squeezed through, as whatever Roberto Martinez’s team does and however much or little their 39-year-old talisman contributes, the story always seems to be about him. The Beeb used to be fair-minded and respectful, even of the game’s rascals This time it was a tale of two penalties – one missed in normal time and one scored in the shootout. A flood of tears from Ronaldo followed the former and made it seem as if the living legend was having an on-field breakdown – though

Vazha Tavberidze

Georgia’s Euros run gave the nation some respite

If you had told me a month ago that Georgia would make it into the play-offs, defeating Portugal on the way, I’d have called you mad – which, much like in English, isn’t a word in Georgian that necessarily carries a negative connotation. Over these last two weeks, especially after the historic 2-0 win against Portugal, we Georgians all went a little bit mad. With Georgia being the cradle of wine (we invented it), it’s perhaps unsurprising that copious amounts were consumed. Come Sunday, however, after the utter demolition inflicted by a ruthless and vastly superior Spanish team, the mood was somewhat subdued. Georgians are like that. We believe we

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Why does Japan want to build a 300-mile conveyor belt?

In a move that sounds like something out of the new Francis Ford Coppola film Megalopolis, the Japanese government has announced that it will build a 300-mile conveyer belt for trade to link Tokyo and Osaka. The ‘Auto-flow Road’ which is projected to be the first of many such arteries linking Japan, will consist of conveyer belts either in tunnels beneath major roads or on tracks alongside the hard shoulder, or perhaps even both.  The image of the country as a super-efficient high tech deadline meeting superpower probably no longer Pallets holding up to ton of cargo each will be transported on the constantly moving treadmill. The scheme, the brainchild of boffins at

Debbie Hayton

Why Labour keeps floundering on the trans toilet question

Labour politicians who cannot give straight answers on sex and gender will need to get their thinking caps on, assuming they find themselves in charge on Friday morning. The ‘what is a woman?’ question was just the start. The debate that has now moved on to toilets – and Labour needs to come up with some answers and fast. Last week Bridget Phillipson was put on the spot; yesterday it was Jonathan Ashworth; today it was Keir Starmer. For a journalist, this is easy meat. The warm up is optional, ‘Do you think that women have a right to single-sex spaces, and will you uphold the Equality Act that protects the single-sex exceptions?’ Who is going to

Today

Edward Howell

Will North Korea send troops to Ukraine?

When dealing with North Korea, it’s important not just to look at what the regime says about its present and future policies. Arguably more important is what the regime doesn’t say. Sometimes we might need to read between the lines.  The two meetings between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin within the space of a year indicate that the pair’s bromance is more than just for show. Russia’s relations with North Korea look to be on an upward trajectory after the signing of a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ between Kim and Putin. The mutual defence pact, where each side agreed to assist the other in the event of any external aggression,

Yesterday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Walsingham and the musical grief of the Reformation

21 min listen

The other day I received a press release about an intriguing album of keyboard music by 16th- and early 17th-century composers, three Englishman and a Dutchman, played on the modern piano by Mishka Rushdie Momen, one of this country’s most gifted and intellectually curious young concert pianists. It’s called Reformation, and before I’d heard a note of the music – which is performed with thrilling exuberance and subtlety – I knew I wanted to interview Ms Rushdie Momen.  That’s because Hyperion had included with the press release a strikingly perceptive essay by the pianist putting this ostensibly secular keyboard music in the context of what she rightly calls the ‘vandalism’ of

Jawad Iqbal

Can Gareth Southgate’s luck last?

Watching England play in Euro 24 in Germany really is some form of exquisite torture. There is nothing about this team or this manager that inspires confidence but they continue to defy the sceptics. They are now through to the quarter-finals of the tournament after beating Slovakia in the last-16 knockout tie in Gelsenkirchen. They may not deserve to be there, but frankly who cares? A win is a win. England played poorly all game and didn’t have a single shot on target in the match – until the very last minute of injury time when Jude Bellingham scored a spectacular overhead kick. A moment of brilliance from a player who has lacked consistency

Sunday

Patrick West

How to tell the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia

With England playing Slovakia in the Euros later today, there’s absolutely no excuse this time for Anglophones to confuse this country with that other European nation of a similar name. That’s because England’s previous opponents in the tournament were indeed Slovenia. This confusion has bedevilled the two countries The confusion between the two nations is common, and emerged after they both became independent states in the early-1990s. Yet for each country, achieving autonomy was one thing; achieving international recognition was quite another. As Michael Palin in his 2007 book New Europe observed upon arriving Slovakia, a few years after its velvet divorce from the Czechs: ‘Its sense of identity can’t have been

Saturday

David Shipley

How prison changed Julian Assange – and me

Julian Assange was a changed man when he walked free from Belmarsh prison in south London this week. The Wikileaks founder’s appearance was radically different from when he was arrested outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2019. It was a striking example of what prison can do to a person. The images of Assange – whose relief at being free was palpable – made me revisit my own time behind bars and what it did to me. Even the looming prospect of being locked up – the eighteen months from charge to sentencing had been very hard – changed me beyond recognition. I went back to my own photos

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Why is the C of E selling off Dick Whittington’s burial place?

The Church of England is flogging off Dick Whittington. No, this isn’t an innuendo or a twist from a pantomime, but reality. The burial place of the mayor and cat enthusiast, St Michael Paternoster Royal, is being sold off as an office. The people behind this act are the Diocese of London, who bought you the Martin Sargeant scandal, which saw a church official jailed for five years after he managed to defraud the London Diocesan Fund of £5 million undetected. The Diocese of London is now a byword for the worst excesses of the culture which is slowly killing the Church The Diocese of London is now, in Church

Friday

Jim Lawley

There’s one place in Spain that hasn’t turned against tourists

Would you like to spend the winter in Benidorm? I guess it depends on the alternatives, but I wasn’t surprised recently to hear of a couple, both in their late-sixties, from Wolverhampton who spend January and February in the Spanish town. They’re not alone; last year over a million Brits chose Benidorm as a holiday destination.   Is success turning into excess? The locals in some tourist hotspots certainly seem to think so It’s not just the Brits and Benidorm; tourism is booming throughout Spain. In 1954, when Spain began promoting package holidays, there were only one million foreign tourists. Last year there were 85 million and the forecast for 2024 is for

Thursday

Andrew Tettenborn

Unesco’s Stonehenge threat isn’t worth taking seriously

If you gaze south from the sarsens of Stonehenge, your view at present is of a constant crocodile of cars and caravans grinding along the nearby A303 en route to the West Country. Unfortunately the government’s plans to improve matters by burying the road in a neat two-mile tunnel, already badly delayed by activist lawfare, now face another obstacle. The problem is that Stonehenge is a Unesco world heritage site – and the UN functionaries that run Unesco do not approve. Indeed they disapprove so much that the Unesco World Heritage Committee last week recommended that unless it was stopped, Stonehenge should be added to its official list of heritage in danger.

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The trouble with David Tennant

Most people have a soft spot for the first ‘X’ film they legitimately saw as an alleged ‘adult’; mine was Magic, the 1978 film by Richard Attenborough, starring Anthony Hopkins as a mild-mannered ventriloquist who becomes possessed by the spirit of his verbally vicious dummy, leading to awful consequences when a steaming hot and sex-starved Ann-Margret happens by. The creepy plot of Magic came to mind when I saw a clip of the actor David Tennant’s astonishing outburst of spite directed at the Tory MP Kemi Badenoch while he was picking up a prize at something called ‘the British LGBT Awards’: What Tennant said was mind-bogglingly stupid ‘If I’m honest, I’m

The Spectator

Letters: the courts are not trying to subvert parliament

Judge not Sir: The claim by Ross Clark (‘Keir’s law’, 22 June) that the left can achieve what it wants by relying, in part, on ‘judicial activism’ is uninformed and misleading. I can assure Mr Clark and those who might share his sentiments that the courts are, in general, at pains to respect the separation of powers and the will of parliament. A cursory consideration of recent decisions from the Supreme Court would have revealed this. For example, in a judgment handed down in April, Lord Sales (delivering the unanimous judgment of that court) reaffirmed the already well-established principle that ‘in the field of social welfare policy, courts should normally be

The Spectator

Who was our most popular PM? 

Close encounters The last time a parliamentary election in Britain was tied was in 1886 in Ashton-under-Lyne, when Liberal and Conservative candidates both won 3,049 votes. As was the practice at the time, the returning officer was allowed a casting vote, and he opted for the Conservative, John Addison. If it happens again (which won’t be in Ashton-under-Lyne, where Angela Rayner has a majority of 4,263) the outcome will be decided by random means such as drawing straws – as happened in a 2017 Northumberland council election.  – The closest margin in modern times was in North East Fife in 2017 when the SNP candidate Stephen Gethins won by two

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Tory men are letting down women

Some of my good male friends, Tories, are sick of terfs. I can see it in their shifty eyes, in the way they won’t quite look at me when terfy issues creep into conversation, but stare gloomily at the skirting board. Terf stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and terfs are women who insist that you can’t change your biological sex, and that the whole notion that some humans are born in the wrong body is not only daft, but catastrophic for our culture and our children. It could soon be a criminal act to try to talk a gay boy out of castrating himself It’s been a half-decade since

Yascha Mounk

The youth vote is turning right

Young people are supposed to drink a ton, have a lot of sex, hang out with their friends at every opportunity and vote for the left. Today’s young don’t live up to the stereotype. According to polls, they are one of the most responsible generations on record. Across the West, the share of young adults who binge-drink or who are sexually active has fallen to a new low. Teenagers spend far less time hanging out with their friends than their parents or grandparents did. They even seem to be defying political expectations – though their recent drift to the right has, in its own way, succeeded just as well in

Peter Jones

What British voters could learn from the Romans

When the forthcoming election result is announced, the triumphant party will presumably proclaim: ‘The British people have spoken!’ That will come as quite a surprise to the British people, because all they will have done is crossed a box approving a farrago of implausible policies or reforms in matters over which they have had no say whatsoever. The Roman plebeians were more hands-on. Early Roman history is a complete mish-mash, much clearly invented well after the event. But it might have gone something like this: kings ruled Rome from 753 bc to 509 bc; they were advised by a senate of select tribal members called ‘patricians’; an assembly was set

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

David Tennant’s pride and prejudice

As all non-bigoted readers will know, this is the holy and most ancient month of Pride. The time of year when – like our ancestors of yore – we bedeck our banks, supermarkets and public buildings with the latest variant of the rainbow flag. For a while now, the flag has kept coming with added details, such as circles, triangles, squares and other ways to provoke epilepsy, all because some people felt the old ‘inclusive’ flag was not inclusive enough. Each year something happens that confirms the entire thing has got wildly out of hand So it had these extra bits added to celebrate everyone from gay men to asexuals

Prue Leith

My garden decor advice for Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson has three lifesize, carved wooden elephants in his garden, given to him by his wife for his 60th birthday. But here’s a warning for them both, for when they return from Sardinia to join their elephants again: garden sculptures are horribly addictive. Once you have one, you want more – and most of the good ones are ridiculously expensive unless, like my husband and me, you improvise. My husband John, who used to be a fashion designer and manufacturer, has taken to making iron sculptures, although he’s too modest to call himself a sculptor. I draw stuff, he says, and Sked (Malcolm Sked, the local blacksmith) makes them.

Toby Young Toby Young

The joy of my new allotment

I was pleasantly surprised when I got an email from the Acton Gardening Association last October telling me that a plot had become available at the Bromyard allotments. I had put my name down so long ago, I’d completely forgotten. I asked if I could come and see the plot before making up my mind, and got a bit of a shock. It was strewn with weeds and discarded plastic and had what looked like a fly tip at one end. There were no crops apart from some potatoes and spring onions. I could see at a glance it would be a lot of work to get it into a

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

You shouldn’t be afraid of steak tartare

Whenever I think of steak tartare, I can’t help but remember a heartbreaking passage in Nigel Slater’s memoir Toast. Slater, working at a French restaurant in a Midlands hotel as a young man, is desperate to try the steak Diane. He books a table there for himself and a date. In a moment of madness, he accidentally orders the steak tartare instead. Expecting a rich, cream-spiked, butter-fried, brandy-flambéed steak, he is first surprised, and then horrified when a waiter begins chopping up raw meat alongside him. ‘I felt cold, then hot, then cold again. The little egg yolks seemed to be looking up at me, laughing. Then everyone was laughing.’

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Is Southgate making it up as he goes along?

Say what you like about Gary Lineker, and plenty do, but he’s a terrific presenter and when he’s not running it, Match of the Day dials down a notch. If he wants to bang on about the language of Suella Braverman and 1930s Germany, well it’s a free country – though elsewhere you might find his lachrymose response to the Gaza war somewhat tiresome. When Lineker decided to ramp up his cosy, own-brand T-shirt style by using his podcast to call the England team’s (admittedly lacklustre) performance against Denmark ‘shit’, doubtless the bevvied-up boyos at the Croydon fan zone would have downed a few more pints in appreciation. He might