The Spectator

The Spectator was established in 1828, and is the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language. The Spectator’s taste for controversy, however, remains undiminished. There is no party line to which The Spectator’s writers are bound - originality of thought and elegance of expression are the sole editorial constraints.

The trial issue contains a “Thought Crime Special” with articles from Melanie Phillips, “I think, therefore I’m guilty”; Christopher Booker writes about “Scientists in hiding; the demonisation of academics who question the consensus”; Alan Rusbridger explores “How to stifle the press” and how England’s libel laws make it easy.

UK politics come under scrutiny from James Forsyth, Brendan O’Neill ponders if teenagers could ever be “Drunk and orderly”; while Tom Hollander writes his diary and James Delingpole says eat local organic food if you like, but don’t kid yourself that it’s ‘green’. 

The Spectator’s regular arts coverage includes books, theatre, opera, cinema and exhibitions.

Michael Simmons: Britain’s super-rich are fleeing the country. Keir Starmer worries about who is coming into Britain, but Michael Simmons thinks he should have ‘sleepless nights’ about those leaving. Since 2016, nearly 30,000 millionaires have left – ‘an outflow unmatched in the developed world’. Tax changes have made Britain a ‘hostile environment’ for the wealthy, yet we are ‘dangerously dependent’ on our highest earners: the top 0.01 per cent pay 6 per cent of all income tax. If one leaves, replacing them requires ‘1,300 average taxpayers’. Their chief reason for escaping? The abolition of non-dom status. The Treasury ignored warnings from wealth managers and ‘catastrophically misunderstood the maths’. Official estimates suggested scrapping protections would raise £400 million. Now forecasts suggest it will cost billions. If the exodus is ‘half as bad’ as those he has spoken to think, Simmons warns, a 2p hike to income tax looms. The Treasury was wrong to think squeezing the rich wouldn’t have consequences.

 

Michael Gove: ‘There’s a moment of reckoning to come’ – Shabana Mahmood on grooming gangs, AI and the oath she swore on the Quran. As an ex-Lord Chancellor himself, Michael Gove is ‘predisposed to sympathise’ with Shabana Mahmood. ‘It’s the most glamorous and least attractive job in the cabinet,’ he writes. Her ‘biggest duty’ is stopping the prison system from ‘being permanently on the brink of collapse’ – a ‘solemn oath’ that the cabinet’s only Muslim ‘has taken on her holy book’. She sees life as ‘a test from God’ and is in public life to prove ‘she’s worthy of it’. To tackle the courts backlog, she is ready to restrict the right to trial by jury and wants to use AI to manage community services: ‘the eyes of the state can always be on you, checking your behaviour’. Mahmood’s belief in ‘championing the cause of victims’ also gives her ‘a particular perspective on the grooming gangs scandal’. The outstanding question, she suggests, is ‘why so many people maybe looked the other way’ and she thinks ‘there’s still a moment of reckoning to come’. Her political heroines are Benazir Bhutto and Margaret Thatcher – Iron Ladies both.

 

James Heale: the ‘Tinkerbell Tories’. The traditional rule that after some time in opposition the pendulum swings back to the Tories ‘no longer holds true’, according to James Heale. Polls suggest the party could, in future, be reduced to two dozen seats. Kemi Badenoch hoped her first year would be used for rebuilding, but Reform’s rise ‘necessitates a rethink’. ‘After 30 years of fighting Nigel Farage, the Tories still lack a coherent strategy’ – and Labour and Reform both have an incentive to deny Badenoch publicity. Five-year strategies matter little if MPs doubt she’ll last. Her allies hint at a reshuffle, while Labour aides crow that half the cabinet ‘has no opposition’. More policy announcements are expected, with a move towards backing an ECHR exit. But Badenoch risks leading the ‘Tinkerbell Tories’ – a ‘party which ceases to exist when no one believes in it any more’.

 

Damian Thompson: Leo XIV’s papacy is off to a surprisingly promising start. Before Pope Leo XIV’s election, Damian Thompson has been told, ‘traditionalist Catholics were so worried about interference from evil spirits that... they arranged for a priest to conduct’ a ‘minor exorcism’ outside the Vatican. That reflects ‘the depth of the wounds’ inflicted by Pope Francis. Leo had a low profile – ‘not exactly a household name, even in the Vatican’, as one Roman source puts it – and faced ‘allegations of mishandling two sex-abuse scandals’. When he was elected, liberals professed relief that Francis’s ‘reforming legacy’ would be preserved; traditionalists despaired at his tweets attacking Donald Trump’s border policies. But a week later, the former are queasy that the Pope opposes ‘the gay lifestyle’ and the latter ‘are expressing puzzled delight’ at his use of Latin, an uncompromising focus on Jesus Christ and a passionate belief in the Church’s unique truth. ‘Is it too much to hope,’ Thompson asks, ‘that, at least on a metaphorical level, the exorcism was successful?’

 

Max Jeffery: the search for the parents of three abandoned babies. ‘Elsa had been alive less than an hour and her umbilical cord was still attached’ when she was wrapped in a towel, put in a Boots bag and abandoned under a rose bush on the coldest night of last year. She was not the first baby left like this, Max Jeffery writes: two others were found in 2017 and 2019. All three were black; DNA tests prove they had the same parents. Since they were found near to each other, police reckon the mother lives locally. But she may not want to be found – or could be being held captive. Joining police making door-to-door inquiries, Jeffery had the sense that the exercise could be ‘futile’, since so many people in the area don’t know their neighbours. This lack of community is, partly, to do with culture and language, due to the mix of nationalities in the area.