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.

Lara Brown: battle for the books. ‘A new divide has opened in Britain’s classrooms,’ writes Lara Brown in this week’s cover piece – ‘between children still taught by teachers using whiteboards, pen and paper and those being instructed by an avatar on a screen.’ The ‘great Educational Technology revolution’ has gripped our schools: around 960,000 UK pupils now use an individual device in nearly every lesson and teachers have ‘faced huge pressure’ to move reading online. One parent was reprimanded for buying her daughter physical copies of set books instead of making her use Sparx Reader versions. Other homework use apps like Monster Math that ‘gamify learning’. Sophie Winkleman tells Brown children do their best work for human teachers they respect – it ‘is a far more powerful motivator than any AI-generated “aid”, however “personalised”’. EdTech companies have ‘almost universally failed to provide any evidence that they contribute to durable learning gains’. Only 7 per cent have ever run a randomised controlled trial, and one trial of GraphoGame Rime, a phonics game, found it set pupils back by a month. Some are pushing back. Katharine Birbalsingh is proud that at Michaela Community School ‘we only have one computer room – and we don’t use it’, while Eton and several state primaries are restricting EdTech. This is a ‘battle for the books’ between ‘two types of education: one which cultivates the human mind and one which keeps it occupied’.

Tim Shipman: Burnham’s foot-in-mouth syndrome. Andy Burnham ‘appears to have little interest’ in foreign policy, political editor Tim Shipman writes, ‘leaving the details to Ed Miliband’. The German government ‘privately signalled displeasure’ at Miliband’s decision to sanction Israeli products from the West Bank, he writes – and one security source says: ‘This all started because Burnham doesn’t give a flying fuck about foreign policy.’ Shipman reveals a Foreign Office memo warned sanctions would be ‘very difficult to enact’ as there is no legal distinction between products and services from Israel proper and the Palestinian territories, but the government went ahead. ‘What are we going to do?’ asks one source. ‘Phone up the Israelis and ask them which companies to sanction?’ The sanctions have ‘materially damaged relations with the US’ and ‘could in turn trigger America’s anti-BDS laws’, which theoretically might mean Britain being sanctioned by the Americans in return. Friends of Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser who opposed sanctions, tell Shipman they expect him to leave government in the coming months. On Brexit, senior sources believe Burnham wants to rejoin the EU: ‘He wants to go back,’ one Labour insider says. But the consensus in the cabinet is that this would be untenable without another referendum. And those who have read the Russia report on interference in the Brexit vote, including classified and unpublished annexes, tell Shipman there is no evidence Russian meddling influenced the referendum result.

James Heale: an interview with Andrew Griffith. Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith tells James Heale of his ‘superpower’: his contacts book. ‘They’re part of my sources of information as to what’s going on in the economy,’ the former Sky chief operating officer and Just Eat chairman says: ‘It’s rare for somebody who has stalked the boardrooms of British companies to now be in Westminster.’ His relationship with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is such that ‘we can finish each other’s sentences’, as the pair speak almost every day, including weekends. He reveals that as chancellor, he would bring back the tradition of drinking when delivering the Budget – his favourite Sussex sparkling wine. The shadow chancellor resents Labour ministers ‘falsely’ comparing the UK with the G7 group of nations – ‘a contest to be the tallest dwarf’ – and bleakly notes how Britain’s borrowing costs are now higher than each of the PIGS: Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. ‘We are at the bottom of the sty in terms of our borrowing costs,’ he says, ‘and as a patriot that pains me.’ In his spare time Griffith is reading 1873 by Liaquat Ahamed, about the Viennese stock market collapse that triggered the first global financial crash.

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s diary. Jacob Rees-Mogg reveals his ‘romantic nature’ in the Spectator diary; every year he takes his wife ‘on a “luxury mini break” either to Birmingham or Manchester’, which ‘always seems to coincide with the Tory party conference’. The Rees-Moggs recently dropped off their eldest son, Peter, at Oriel College: ‘I feel I have given him every possible disadvantage in entering the hallowed halls of woke academia: my name, my politics and my own old school. None is fashionable in universities.’ He questions why hotels use duvets: ‘I hate duvets, which are the devil’s own work. They ought to be piled up and burnt.’ He did not hate, however, being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, whom Rees-Mogg writes was ‘both personable and intelligent’ to meet: ‘I enjoyed our conversation before and after filming as well as the interview itself. His views may be rather wild, but I never mind robust debate. I am sure he does it for clicks.’ Rees-Mogg does have a suggestion for Carlson – ‘what the Americans call a “shock jock”’ – and that is ‘to employ a researcher to tell him the size of the UK and Russian economies’.

Louis Sarkozy: we cannot trust our AI overlords. ‘We know only the tip of the iceberg,’ warns Louis Sarkozy of AI. The writer, son of the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, argues ‘the worst-case scenario’ – a superintelligence that kills us all – is ‘an entirely plausible hypothesis’. More worrying still is the future which ‘its promoters present to us as desirable’ including ‘the disappearance of everything that made our species what it is, up to, perhaps, the abolition of death’. Who holds the key? The tech bros: ‘Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and their kind. It is they, these skinny-fat, slimy creatures, barely out of their shells, who have their finger on the nuclear button.’ AI has already broken ‘the pact of trust between writer and reader’: in France, there is a row over whether Thélyson Orélien’s acclaimed novel was written entirely by AI. But Sarkozy argues he can see ‘another way’: ‘an international effort to pool humanity’s resources’ involving China and America, with observers placed inside AI companies to hold their owners to account. That, he says, is ‘a path forward that does not involve teetering on the edge of oblivion’.