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.

The many crises awaiting the next pope. Francis, writes Damian Thompson this week, ‘was a charismatic pope loved by most of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics’. But few of them ‘grasp the scale of the crisis in the Church’ – and even fewer are aware how much worse it was made by the pontiff. ‘The next Vicar of Christ, liberal or conservative’ faces ‘challenges that dwarf those that confronted any incoming pope in living memory’ – doctrinal confusion, fragmented structures of government and a financial abyss. Under Francis, secular and canonical laws were bent so often by Vatican powerbrokers that, as one insider put it to Thompson, the place ‘turned into the Wild West’. Francis cannot be blamed for financial crises, sexual scandals or theological conflicts that stretch back decades – but it is ‘a grave sadness’ that all these problems ‘worsened under this pontificate’. ‘Dealing with this fallout will be the responsibility of the next Supreme Pontiff’ – but it is a burden that many might decline.

 

On the edge of their seats. It is an irony of Brexit, writes James Heale, that since Britain left the EU, ‘our politics has become more European’. ‘Welcome to the age of five-party politics,’ says one candidate. Within Reform UK, aides are circulating copies of Blue Ocean Strategy – a book which underpinned the Five Star party’s success in the 2018 Italian elections. ‘Victories in 300 or so wards and the Runcorn by-election would make Reform the big winner of May 2025.’ Continental-style politics means a resurgence on the left, with the Greens, Lib Dems and Gaza independents all looking to gain from the unwinding of Keir Starmer’s 2024 coalition. Previous Labour governments could count on state spending. But with Rachel Reeves now the most unpopular major politician in Britain, answers to Labour’s ails are far from obvious. The government faces a grim summer: ‘Strife, strikes, no growth and an array of parties on offer.’ As a Tory aide puts it to James: ‘At least Italy has the weather.’

 

Conservatives all over the Anglosphere are paying the price for Trump. ‘It is the great good fortune,’ according to Henry Hill, ‘of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be united by a common language.’ But it is ‘a misfortune of even greater magnitude that they share that language with the United States’. ‘For Conservatives who tend to dream of one united Anglosphere… it can sometimes be uncomfortable to recognise that America is the problem child in the family.’ However, Donald Trump’s return to the White House should ‘serve as a powerful reminder not only that our interests are not always aligned but that America First can often mean Anglo Conservatives are the big losers’. Canada’s Conservative party and Australia’s Liberals, both previously close to victory, are now on the back foot following Trump’s return, driven by the aversion of both countries’ voters to the President. Yet ‘however much the dawn of this second Trumpian age might be hurting the electoral prospects of the right across the Canzuk nations in the short term’, it will be worth it if Canzuk countries finally realise the US is a false friend.

 

Why won’t Hitler conspiracies die? Luke Daly-Groves had hoped that his book, Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy, ‘might put an end’ to the ‘wild range of conspiracy theories’ surrounding the Führer’s demise. Yet ‘there are still fascinating mysteries that surround Hitler’s death’. Even 80 years later, ‘historians still can’t say for certain precisely how Hitler died’. This is because of ‘the messy state of the forensic evidence’ – and behind that mess lies the Russians. After the initial investigation was botched, Stalin began suggesting Hitler was alive ‘to keep the inadequacies of the Soviet investigation to himself’. Fortunately, Britain was sufficiently sceptical that we launched an investigation of our own, under historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Today, despite ‘the regrettable state of the forensic evidence, we do know Hitler shot himself’, courtesy of charred teeth recovered from the Führerbunker. Even if Russian perfidy makes further DNA tests unlikely, solving this mystery can be considered a British triumph, of which we can be proud, as ‘the destruction of Nazi barbarism’ that Hitler’s death represented.

 

The ghastliness of the AI ghouls. ‘I’m not sure it’s possible’, according to Mary Wakefield, ‘to make a horror movie more sinister than the chirpy four-minute film on YouTube purporting to be an “interview” with the late Lily Parr.’ A chain-smoking, 6ft, Lancastrian, lesbian pre-war footballer, Parr has been resurrected via an AI avatar. But what the AI’s creators have summoned is ‘a ghoul, a flimsy echo of Parr, infused with the spirit of Gen Z’, lacking the original’s character. ‘Is it legal,’ Wakefield asks, ‘to bring people back from the dead, twist their personalities to suit your purposes, and make them parrot 21st-century platitudes’?  With a growing number of generative AIs of historical figures, Wakefield worries that ‘overworked and underpaid’ teachers deploying an AI Winston Churchill or William Shakespeare will leave children with a flawed impression of history and no incentive to correct it. AI, Wakefield concludes, is ‘an insult to life – and in the case of historical AIs, an insult to the dead too.’