Tabla de contenidos para 17 January 2026 en The Spectator

Are Jews safe in Britain? To even have to ask the question is extraordinary. But a recent survey has found that half of British Jews feel they do not have a long-term future in the UK and 61 per cent have considered leaving. Those figures are shocking, but not surprising. Since 7 October 2023, anti-Semitism in Britain has reached record levels. Violence against British Jews is more common than at any time since their readmission in the 1650s. The survey was conducted between the Heaton Park synagogue terrorist attack in October and the sentencing of Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein in December for plotting to open fire on a march against anti-Semitism. The disgrace of Craig Guildford, the chief constable of West Midlands Police, after he banned Maccabi Tel Aviv…

I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was travelling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilisation at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again, by which point he had abandoned all pretence of dignity. It felt fitting, then, that I should follow this holiday…

It is still unclear what will happen next in Iran. I fervently hope the current protests will cause the tyrants of Tehran to fall. It would be ideal if they were replaced by an order that allowed the population of 90 million to choose who governs them and build a country that reflects joy, hope and modernity rather than Ali Khamenei’s brutal Islamist fever dream. I also know how unlikely that is. Revolutions tend to produce disorder and repression, not order and freedom. After the failure of the Constitutional Revolution in 1911, there was a decade of chaos, fragmentation and insurgency in Iran until Reza Khan seized power and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. In 1979, his son was driven into exile by a revolution welcomed by progressives – including the…

1950s I Black as newsprint and round as bowler hatsTall chimneys puff away like cigarettes,Away, away... until the time that letsThem crumble or replaced by council flats. But smoke still tumbles from some chimney tops,A television set glows in a darkRoom lit by coal. How long will time let parkAn armchair by a fire until it stops? II But furniture is changing, too; brand newWith pine and plastic sitting in a roomAs pert as house plants that now people groomBeside the gleaming radiogram on view. Such is the exhibitionistic timeFor car and fridge, the glossy record sleeveAnd frozen food: a land of make-believeConsigned make-do-and-mend to nursery rhyme.…

What is the limit of Ukrainian civilians’ endurance? In nearly four years of relentless war, Ukraine’s people have faced summary executions, ‘drone safaris’ where unmanned aerial vehicles hunt people down city streets and constant bombardment of cities by swarms of drones and missiles. This winter their remarkable resilience faces its severest test yet as Russian forces reach a tipping point in their systematic attempt to knock out the country’s energy infrastructure. In each of the past three winters, Vladimir Putin has attempted to render Ukraine’s cities uninhabitable by plunging them into darkness and cold, without success. But this time it looks like the Kremlin’s campaign to weaponise winter may be succeeding. With temperatures in Ukraine falling to -16°C, Russian forces are trying to knock out as many citywide heating systems…

Between 1999 and 2004, Sarah Mullally, the current Bishop of London, was director of patient experience for NHS England. One complaint dominated the feedback she received from inpatients: everyone hated the undignified hospital gowns that gaped open at the back. Mullally identified this as an issue that could be addressed easily and cheaply. Later on, the designer Ben de Lisi even worked with the Design Council to develop a better gown with side fastenings. Yet if you are unfortunate enough to have to stay in hospital today, you will almost certainly find that you are offered the old draughty gown. It turns out that in an organisation as large and complex as the NHS, with dispersed decision-making and obstinate staff, change is not as simple as identifying a problem and…

After three hours of parsing American case law, for once I share Donald Trump’s exasperation. See, many a naif, including yours truly three hours ago, would have thought the Democrats’ ‘sanctuary cities’ unconstitutional. A sanctuary city, for those unaware, instructs its local police force to cease all co-operation with federal immigration agents. I had thought that the constitution included a supremacy clause, which dictates that federal law overrules local law, just as rock crushes scissors in the hand game. For sub-jurisdictions to offer refuge from big meanie federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the aptly cold-hearted sounding ICE) should not, legally, be possible. It’s possible. The work-around is the 10th Amendment’s ‘anti-commandeering doctrine’, which prevents the feds from directly telling local and state law enforcement what to do. While state and…

No EU turn Sir: Before Dr Brian Mathew’s letter on ‘How to restore prosperity’ appeared (10 January), the FT printed an article making it clear that Britain’s powerful financial services industry would not be included in the government’s much-vaunted ‘reset’ with the EU. It quoted figures from the City saying that this was ‘the last thing they wanted’ and explaining they were doing much better outside EU regulation. The article contained a reported comment from the government to the effect that they had taken note of the City’s views and that financial services would not now be included in their cherished initiative. It may be worth recalling here that Ed Davey was vociferous in predicting the City’s swift demise once we left the EU, but in fact it has gone…

Departure(s)by Julian BarnesJonathan Cape, £18.99, pp. 176 Departure(s), whose publication coincides with Julian Barnes’s 80th birthday, will be his last book, a thank you and goodbye to his readers. Barnes has blood cancer, but the condition is manageable and not terminal; when he dies, it will be with, and not of, the disease. Or rather, as he puts it: ‘I, in dying, shall have killed my cancer! Barnes 1, Cancer 0 – result!’ Otherwise he is in good nick and still master and commander of his narratives. He is bowing out because his body of work is complete: his 18 novels and two memoirs – or, depending on how Departure(s) is categorised, his 17 novels and three memoirs – form a perfect whole. It is a canny move to write…

Dirtbag Dreams: A History of Mountain, Ultra and Trail Runningby Carl Morris Manchester University Press, £20, pp. 312 ‘We continue to grapple as a species,’ writes Carl Morris, ‘with a knotty philosophical divide between anthropocentric and biocentric approaches to the natural world. Our bodies are both transcendent – seemingly beyond nature and capable of rationalised enhancement – but also immanent – that is within nature and therefore subject to the same frailties and limitations.’ What is he addressing? Space travel? Diving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench without oxygen? Not quite. He is talking about the process of human locomotion. He is talking about running. Stay with me. Books about running can be as dull as a ten-mile road race in the Illinois flatlands, and I say that as…

Prince: Sign O’The Timesby John McKieBlink Publishing, £30, pp. 544 In June 1993, the Artist Who’d Just Decided He Didn’t Want to be Called Prince Any More handed his passport to his long-suffering tour manager Skip Johnson and told him to get the name on it changed to the squiggly symbol with which he’d decided to rebrand himself. It is ironic that he felt ‘oppressed’ by a name bestowed on him by others while insisting on renaming most of his colleagues and lovers. The passport incident is one of the more comical demands listed in the exhausting catalogue of employee grievances that make up John McKie’s sprawling biography of Minnesota’s own Prince Rogers Nelson, the virtuosic visionary who died, aged 57, of an accidental Fentanyl overdose in 2016. A former…

The Night Manager: Series 2BBC1 The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse. Now the cat’s out of the bag in all the papers, though, I might as well acknowledge that Laurie…

The woman in the queue behind us in the supermarket glared angrily as my mother tried and failed to tap her credit card. We had tapped it in the chemist successfully, but she must have been on her last tap, again, and now she was out of taps. I felt my chest tightening. Here we go. My mother started arguing about why her card should be working, and when I got my card out, she said: ‘No, don’t be silly! I’m getting this!’ People who judge your way of dealing with a situation like this rarely watch or listen properly to what is going on A few years on from a vague diagnosis of some sort of vascular dementia to do with blood flow to the brain, she has no…

British chess has lost an inspiring figure. Grandmaster Jonathan Hawkins, two-time British champion, author and coach, died on 22 December at just 42 years old after battling a neuroendocrine carcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer. Hawkins’s achievements in chess are remarkable for answering a perennial question: can adult improvers really aspire to significant progress? As a young adult, his rating was that of an average club player and, living in northeast England, he had limited access to strong competition or coaching. But his dedicated study over more than eight years was transformative, as set out in his acclaimed 2012 book, Amateur to IM [International Master]. With lucid explanations, the book expounds on a clear credo: ‘I am convinced a careful study of the endgame sparked the biggest leap forward in…

Mickey Down, who writes this week’s Diary on p7, is the co-creator of the HBO TV show Industry, whose fourth season is now on BBC One. John Jenkins condemns Britain’s cowardice over Iran in this week’s cover story on p10. He is a former ambassador to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Burma. Charlie Gammell wonders on p12 what would succeed the Iranian regime. He is a historian and former diplomat at the Foreign Office’s Middle East department. Andrew Graystone looks at the new Archbishop of Canterbury on p21. He is the author of Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the Cult of Iwerne Camps. Christa D’Souza asks on p48 why women are expected to cut their hair as they get older. She is a contributor to Vogue and the Daily…

At a Christmas party I witnessed a showdown between two Labour movers and shakers, one a devoted Starmerite, the other an unrepentant Blairite, over whether the Prime Minister can turn things around. They didn’t agree on much – Keir Starmer’s vision or lack of it, Europe, immigration, you name it. When I commented to another leading figure in the party that Blairites, with the exception of Jonathan Powell (now running foreign policy) and Alastair Campbell (whose podcast has moved him leftwards), seem to have lost faith in this government, this former minister said: ‘Of course they have, because this is the second term of Gordon Brown.’ Among Brownites, it is customary to bemoan the short tenure of their hero and blame his lack of success on Tony Blair’s refusal to…

Predictions ageing poorly is an occupational hazard for journalists and commentators. But few have gone as sour as those made by Roger Cooper in this magazine, in February 1979, days after the last Shah of Iran had fled. In a piece titled ‘Is Khomeini the leader for Iran?’, Cooper speculated that ‘the prospect… of an Iranian Islamic republic… must surely be more alluring to all but the most stubborn defenders of an ancient regime’. The Ayatollah, he suggested, offered Iranians ‘the chance to resume their true national and cultural identity’. No suggestion was made of imminent death squads, mass imprisonments or looming theocratic repression and economic hardship. Cooper can be forgiven for failing to realise just how miserable the Islamic Republic would be. At the time, western commentators, most prominently…

I’m not sure when my libido first began to decline. It was probably during the pandemic, so it went unnoticed – like much else. Given that I was stuck indoors, newly divorced, in a one-bed flat, with no garden, and only allowed out to walk for one hour a day in the driving sleet, I didn’t really clock that I wasn’t getting a lot of action. My main concern was not committing suicide through love-grief and loneliness. Also, I cooked several new turbot recipes. Then the tides of plague retreated and that is when I realised. Something in me had changed: and it was the ‘dogs of lust’, as John Betjeman called them in ‘Senex’, his fine poem about age and desire. The dogs no longer barked, loudly, 24/7, driving…

I think it was Zadie Smith who I first heard point out that race is in America what class is in Britain: the conversation underneath every conversation. When I first heard that remark I slightly baulked. Not least because one had rather hoped that class would be less of a thing in Britain in the 21st century. I suppose it is, although you do still meet people who treat the English language as though it is a minefield in which one incorrect vowel will suddenly take them out. But if the class stuff still lingers in Britain, the good news is that we now have the American race obsession too. For anyone who hasn’t lived in America, it is hard to describe just how permeated race is into every conversation…

It was only recently that I fully appreciated how the books I read as a child formed me. A pregnant friend asked me about my parenting philosophy and I realised it amounted to ensuring my son would survive a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I never had the money of Veruca Salt’s daddy to indulge his every desire, but I came down hard on chewing gum, gorging on chocolate and, above all, staring at a screen. Despite my son’s complaints that I was acting like a father from Victorian times, it seemed to have worked, and, as the Oompa-Loompas predicted, not being glued to a screen encouraged him to become a reader, out of boredom if nothing else. If the house was quiet, too quiet, I would usually find…

Everyone who’s anyone in Oldham knows Irish Imy. Born Mohammed Imran Ali in Dublin in 1980 and raised in Werneth in south-west Oldham, Imy is the borough’s recurring bad guy. He’s done time for assault, trafficking heroin and being the getaway driver for the murderer Dale Cregan, who shot three people and blew up their bodies with grenades in 2012. Naturally, Imy now wants to be a politician. He’s standing in this year’s local elections as an independent, promising to ‘Make Werneth Great Again’. His campaign is not regarded as insane. He may win. Imy is capitalising on the sense that this Greater Manchester borough is corrupt. People in Oldham say the local elections are rigged and believe that council seats are handed out through the South Asian biradari clan…

The phrase ‘trumped-up charges’ dates from the 18th century, I learn, and derives from the Old French tromper, to deceive. It has certainly acquired new resonance with the threat of criminal indictment against US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, somehow relating to the cost of Fed building renovations. The President says this Department of Justice action has nowt to do with him, but it’s plainly another exercise of what some commentators are calling ‘the Maduro option’: sod constitutional niceties, just drag your opponent into the dock. For all his foreign-policy fireworks, Donald Trump knows November’s US midterm elections will largely be driven by domestic cost-of-living concerns. He has castigated Powell for not cutting interest rates faster to boost the economy and make mortgages cheaper, while Powell has stuck rigorously to…

A Shell-Shocked Nation: Britain Between the Warsby Alwyn TurnerProfile Books, £25, pp. 384 However many times one absorbs the brevity of the interlude between the first catastrophic worldwide conflict of the 20th century and the next, it was the not-knowingness of that timetable that allowed society to cope. In the 20 years between world wars that shattered several generations, Britain’s full emotional recovery was never really accomplished. But with his eye for the political and the cultural, for the game-changing and the deliciously absurd, for comedy and for tragedy, Alwyn Turner demonstrates the irrepressible optimism of humanity, whatever the circumstances: ‘Highbrows and lowbrows [lived] cheek by jowl, rubbing along with politicians, priests and pressmen.’ Relentlessly twisting the kaleidoscope, Turner finds a stunned nation navigating what became an increasingly turbulent pause.…

Bob Dylan: Things Have Changedby Ron Rosenbaum Melville House, £25, pp. 320 Ron Rosenbaum is a man of galactic learning. Theology, neuroscience, American history, psychology, Shakespeare, cosmology, ‘all of Dickens’, nuclear weapons, quantum theory, iron ore – nothing escapes his hungry eye. Except, perhaps, Bob Dylan. Which is unfortunate, given that he’s written a book about him. What is it about Dylan that sends writers mad? Christopher Ricks’s usual mellifluousness succumbs to a pun-overdose; Clinton Heylin’s blindingly completist biographies are as impenetrable as their subject; Sean Wilentz lurches from the unlikely to the banal. With Things Have Changed, Ron Rosenbaum, the de facto ‘Dylan correspondent’ for the Village Voice in the early 1970s, proves that even ‘being there’ confers no immunity. As the conductor of the longest interview Dylan has…

Serviceby John Tottenham Tuskar Rock, £14.99, pp. 336 A friendly admonition for the thwarted or struggling writer in your life: that tempting little job at the local bookshop might not be the best way to keep the show on the road until the Muse comes through. Would-be actors who take a front-of-house gig at the National Theatre aren’t constantly buttonholed by strangers raving about how brilliant Andrew Scott’s Hamlet was. Plus, of course, their more successful contemporaries will generally be elsewhere of an evening, doing shows of their own. But imagine slinking out of your modest lodgings, your dreams of what John Tottenham calls ‘actualisation’ left simmering behind you, to spend eight hours wrangling a roomful of people who want nothing more than to chat about – and pay money…

Sevenby Joanna KavennaFaber, £16.99, pp. 272 Joanna Kavenna is very serious about games. Her novels have a certain playful quality, even her debut Inglorious, where the humour and allusions are Mitteleuropean. More markedly ludic are her Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy about quantum physics, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and the Philip K. Dickish tech-dystopia of Zed. In Seven, however, it’s not just the style but the subject. As if to make clear that games are neither childish nor mere distractions, there is a pointed reference to Johan Huizinga’s study Homo Ludens¸ published on the eve of the second world war. The narrator here is working for a formidable philosopher in Oslo, whose current project is entitled ‘Thinking outside the Box about Thinking outside the Box’. (‘I’m serious,’ the narrator archly…

La traviataRoyal Opera House, until 17 February National Youth Orchestra of Great BritainWarwick Arts Centre First opera of the year, first night back in London, and the jolly old metrop was already springing surprises. A hulking pink Rolls-Royce was parked on Bow Street – a real oaf of a car, the lumpish nepo-baby of a Humvee and Lady Penelope’s Fab 1. And as we stood outside the Royal Opera House, cooling off from Act Two of La traviata, a large fox came jogging out of Broad Court and urinated against the front tyre before sauntering off in the direction of Aldwych. Pure magic. You should never take the capital for granted, just as you should never assume that a mid-season revival of a standard repertoire opera in a 32-year old…

How It All Played OutApple, Spotify and other platforms What does it mean to be a ‘good’ sports presenter? Really, it should mean nothing. They aren’t important. They should have a sense of perspective, a sense of remembering that they are peripheral to the most popular consumer product and human activity that we have come up with. Of course, it doesn’t work like that. Look at Gary Lineker. The BBC paid him £1.3 million to ask Danny Murphy things like ‘Bournemouth look to have run out of steam a little bit?’ for 75 minutes a week. Such is our infatuation with sport that we end up really caring about who asks this kind of question. That person gets to be the highest-paid broadcaster in the country. We inhale sports commentary…

What is the literal cut-off point for women having very long hair (and by ‘long’ I mean where it almost goes into the lavatory bowl)? Is it the age of 30? Forty? Fifty? Try 65 – the age I am now. If this strikes you as grossly inappropriate, in theory I’m with you. The unspoken rule is that the older you get the shorter your hair should be. Nobody I know within ten or even 20 years of me has hair as long as mine. What can I say? As with wearing inappropriately coloured nail varnish, it is just another small act of defiance women d’un certain âge can employ to remind this cruel world that we do actually still exist. My hair has been this length for so long…

After the 43°C heat of the day in Juba, sundown brings a merciful reprieve. My dearest friend Ken pours me a dram of Glen Deveron, without ice or water, and I realise it’s going to be a long evening with the man from Midlothian. In Juba, it turns out, one can find the finest single malt whiskies, thanks to intrepid Eritreans who run the local grog shops. After a couple of glasses, our conversation goes back to the time we were together in the same burning heat some years back, in the border town of Bentiu, planning our logistics for a journey north into the Nuba mountains. I had hired Ken as a fixer on the TV film I was making with a producer named Danny. In Bentiu, Ken explained…

Competition 3432 invited you to submit a passage containing some AI-style ‘hallucinations’ (it would be just as anthropomorphic to call them lies). These are false assertions delivered in a perky tone, often with a smidgeon of flattery, in an answer that may contain enough correct information to give the user misplaced confidence. The yield was small but amusing and several entries managed to capture AI’s encouraging tone; the winners of the £25 John Lewis vouchers are below. ‘An apple a day’ refers to a mobile phone or computer invented by Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity in 1666 when a phone fell on his head. The fall of the apple, which is never far from the Tree of Knowledge, was recorded by the Beatles, a British pop group, in 1999. The…

Liz Kendall, the Technology Secretary, stood up in the Commons on Monday and thundered against Elon Musk, saying the government would take urgent measures to hold him to account. The reason for her broadside is that Grok, the AI chatbot owned by Musk and now integrated into X, has been misbehaving. In the past few weeks, it has granted users’ requests to create sexualised images of women and children, causing something close to meltdown among the Musk-hating chattering classes. In the Lords, scarcely a day passes without Labour’s favourite bogeyman being wheeled out to be pelted with verbal brickbats. But how exactly does Kendall propose to rein Musk in? Sharing nudified pictures of children and non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of adults on social media is already prohibited by the Online…

Q. I went to a supper party and sat beside a man who seemed rather pleased with himself. He never once asked me a question about myself, but proceeded to tell me about his children. They seemed to all be super-successful in their fields… hedge-fund manager, top lawyer, etc. The problem was that he had seven, and I found it hard to keep concentrating. Luckily, by the time he was about to tell me about number five, we had to turn for the next course. Mary, what should I have done to have made the conversation less one-sided? – Name and address withheld A. You might have halted his flow by enthusing: ‘I’m so glad you’re daring to tell me all this.’ Pause. ‘You see, I too have a hugely…

There are different ways to approach the tyranny of Dry January. One is to drink in secret. Another is to indulge only on feast days. Personally I have always refused to make January a miserable and puritan month, which means finding excellent red wine to transition from Christmas exuberance to the long, drawn-out evenings of the new year. And so the quest to find the perfect January red begins. It should not be too expensive, but nor should it be a false economy. After the excesses of December, value is key. Readers are forgiven for pursuing a bargain in the January sales – we have all done it. But the truth is many discounted offerings represent exactly the kind of wines one should not be drinking. They are the rejects,…

‘They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,’ said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. The Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer. ‘Language has moved on and changed,’ the government says, since 1970, when legislation was drafted. One problem is having to keep changing terminology. No one, even my husband, should be called a cripple. No one should be called handicapped. Now no one should be called disabled, but rather a person with a disability. These changes are paralleled in the languages of our neighbours. The Paris Métro had seats reserved for mutilés de guerre. The term was replaced by personnes handicapées. Now these are…

Returning from Pakistan on Monday, I sat at my desk and looked out at the pouring rain while the latest news explained that 30,000 homes in our part of Sussex and neighbouring Kent are ‘still without water’. Then I opened the pile of post. A letter from South East Water, the culprit in the case, enclosed a note which began: ‘From 1 April 2025, the amount you’ll pay for drinking water will go up.’ Since we are now in January 2026, I assume they either misprinted the date, or accidentally stuck in last year’s explanatory letter. Anyway, the increase is real enough – £655.23 was due in July 2025; £875.11 is due from this month. Pakistan is a ‘developing country’ and has many associated problems (we experienced frequent power cuts),…

‘Help is on the way,’ promised Donald Trump to the people of Iran defying the Islamic Republic. In the same social media post, the US President, characteristically light on detail, also urged Iranian protestors to take over the institutions of the Islamic Republic (presumably by force) and to keep a note of the names and numbers of their oppressors for retribution’s sake. Whatever these words presage – be it air strikes on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij facilities, or cyberattacks on Iran’s intelligence agencies, to blind the regime as the regime has blinded protestors by shutting down the internet – it remains to be seen if such an intervention will tip the balance in favour of the regime, the protestors, or simply chaos. Iran is a proud nation…

A Labour MP was prevented from visiting a school in his constituency because the teaching unions and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign do not like the fact that he believes Israel should have a right to exist. The MP in question is Damien Egan, who represents Bristol North East and who is vice-chairman of the Labour Friends of Israel caucus – or, as it is almost certainly referred to within the party, Labour Friends of Genocide. We haven’t heard from Egan just yet – perhaps he is less cross about it than I am, or simply doesn’t want to make a fuss. The school in question is the Bristol Brunel Academy, the principal of which is a woman called Jen Cusack who should, of course, be sacked. We know of this…

For someone who likes to present the general public with the idea that he doesn’t have a personality, Sir Keir ‘I don’t dream’ Starmer has actually provided plenty of insight into who he really is. From his occasional flashes of fury when thwarted in the Commons to his chronic lack of authenticity when out bothering voters, a picture emerges of a man who doesn’t much like the ‘people’ side of politics. Perhaps the most revealing example was when, in opposition, he unhesitatingly told Emily Maitlis that he preferred Davos over Westminster. By his own revealed preferences and statements, Starmer is an aspirant technocrat, not an enthusiastic democrat. This preference partly explains the Prime Minister’s success. For all his failings, Jeremy Corbyn was a man of the Labour party’s wider membership.…

One rather hopes the assisted dying bill will be talked out in the House of Lords. We have no say on matters of government policy, sovereignty, international law (and much else). But this bill is far too controversial, and personally significant, for MPs alone to adjudge. We need a touch of democratic Athens, whose citizens determined all political and legal outcomes. Citizen arbitration was used to settle most cases. Take Neaira. Not an Athenian, she had been trafficked from birth, but saving what money she earned, she eventually bought her freedom, with help from a large sum donated by the Athenian Phrynion. But she tired of him touting her around high-class orgies, took what she reckoned she was entitled to, and walked out. She resettled in Athens with one Stephanos,…

Net freedoms The government was pressed to ban X over charges that Elon Musk’s AI app Grok is being used to ‘undress’ women and children. Kemi Badenoch said the Tories would copy Australia in banning under-16s from social media. What are the most extreme countries for regulating the internet and social media – using a combined score including political sites, pornography and virtual private networks (VPNs), from the most laissez-faire at 1 to the most restrictive at 12? Category 1: Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Estonia, Switzerland Category 2: Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Dominican Republic, Finland, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Iceland, Moldova, Mongolia, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden Category 11: Iraq, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Turkmenistan Category 12: China, Iran, North Korea Pothole pariahs Which are the best, and worst, authorities…

The Effingers: A Berlin Sagaby Gabriele Tergit, translated by Sophie DuvernoyPushkin Press, £20, pp. 864 Sometimes the term ‘lost masterpiece’ proves to be little more than a publisher’s puff. At other times, however, a long-buried book that is dug up, dusted down and branded a classic is worthy of the accolade. That applies to Gabriele Tergit’s The Effingers. Originally published – and then promptly overlooked – in the author’s native Germany in 1951 and recently rediscovered and reappraised there, the novel, a vivid chronicle of German Jewish life over the course of 70 years, now appears in English for the first time. Opening in 1878, Tergit charts the progress of siblings Paul and Karl Effinger as they leave their provincial hometown in the south of Germany to make their fortunes…

Inside us is a dark room whereour shame gets tired of waiting.At first we don’t admit it’s there,we don’t do introspection.The trouble starts with dating:so many men prioritisesome quirky predilection,some body shape or size. My own turn-on, I hesitateto say, is more unusual.It freaks dates out on any datethat plays out in the bedroom.It leads to blank refusal.I need to hear my partner talk,filling up all my headroom,all night about their work. Tirades about tight deadlines takemy heart to higher regions.Team conflicts nudge me wide awake,spreadsheets float me to heaven.I’m thrilled by tech bug legions.Work stress, once needed, now expired,retreats to age’s haven,a treat now I’m retired.…

Zach Bryan: With Heaven On TopBelting Bronco/Warner There would, on the surface, appear to be little common ground between the wife of stuffy old Malcolm Muggeridge and the latest bard of blue-collar America. Yet the unlikely ascendancy of Zach Bryan brings to mind Kitty Muggeridge’s killer putdown of David Frost as the superstar who ‘rose without a trace’. You may be surprised to learn that Bryan, a 29-year-old US Navy veteran from Oklahoma, will headline two concerts later this year at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, as well as perform to 60,000 people each night in Edinburgh and Liverpool. He now ranks alongside Bon Jovi and Bruno Mars as a gold-star draw on the 2026 summer show circuit. Bryan has never had a top 10 single or album in the UK, he…

For this trip, I’ve had to divulge my social media handles, blood group, shoe size etc, and have therefore assumed the brace position for being ‘processed’ into the US, not least because I was once, under Joe Biden, incarcerated in a side room at JFK for having an apple in my hand luggage. Though, I might add, it was even worse under Bill Clinton. My baby boy was placed in a detention centre on arrival at Dulles when we relocated to Washington, D.C. Oliver, aged six months, was travelling separately from us with a British nanny who’d overstayed on a visa a decade before, and we didn’t know where he was for 24 hours. This time, though, the Newark airport customs and border protection officers in epaulettes and sunglasses show…

So, you’re on the water wagon? Well, bully for you. Nobody likes a show-off. Actually, erm, I was on it too but, with Mrs Ray away and nobody to keep an eye on me, I fell off in week one with something of a thump (well, something of a thumping hangover, as it turned out). I clambered back on smartish, though, and don’t think anyone missed me. Please don’t say anything. My missus would take a very dim view of such a thing. Very dim. Anyway, whether on or off the wagon, we must fill the gaps left by bloody Christmas, and this is where this bin end offer with FromVineyardsDirect comes in, with wines really to savour at cracking prices. Indeed, FVD’s Mark Cronshaw tells me that more than…

I was recently shown an AI analysis of long-term trends in the public’s attitude to government. The AI had been designed to look at changing attitudes to brands, but its creator had been curious to see what it revealed if the brand in question was The State. It was remarkably insightful. ‘New behavioural data reveals a structural shift: The State has moved from episodic authority to ambient friction.’ And ‘modern governments are, on the whole, stable – but increasingly so for structural rather than relational reasons. Stability is maintained through procedure… and compulsion, not persuasion… Authority now operates in an environment that never turns off – and never waits’. You might call this the speed-camera approach to regulation: continuous, pervasive and unresponsive. In the old days, you could drive into…