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.

Tim Shipman: is the government prepared for the changes that AI is about to wreak? Is there any area of public policy that Keir Starmer has got right, Tim Shipman asks in this week’s cover piece. ‘Where very little is working, AI is a bright spot,’ says a former government adviser. Morgan McSweeney is an AI zealot, telling friends that technology will make ‘the least productive person more productive by 2030 than the most productive person now’. But in the race to exploit the technology, Britain ‘is being left behind’. The roadblock is Ed Miliband, who ‘does not like AI’ because its energy demands are ‘extremely inconvenient and annoying for net zero’, a colleague says. The one area where Britain does lead the world is AI safety, says Shipman. A former adviser suggests Starmer should give ‘a global AI role’ to Rishi Sunak – his predecessor. ‘Fail to act,’ Shipman warns, ‘and it won’t just be Starmer who has blown it, but Britain.’

Piers Morgan: what Trump told me on my hospital bed. Piers Morgan has spent the past fortnight in the grip of pain and boredom after fracturing his femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement. What to do with his shattered bone? When James Blunt’s father lost his fingers to a lawnmower, the singer ‘buried them and held a wake’. Blunt suggested they could do something similar with Morgan’s old hip – and he volunteered ‘to do the music’. Morgan decided his ‘poor old joint had suffered enough’ and had it incinerated instead. An old friend of the First Lady, Morgan enjoyed the film Melania, and texted Donald Trump to offer his congratulations. He replied immediately: ‘The World needed a big dose of Glamour.’ Minutes later the President rang to say Morgan is ‘the toughest critic’ he knows, so his words ‘will mean a lot’ to his wife. Trump proposed a round of golf – not out of kindness, he insists, but because he likes the idea of taking Morgan’s money.

Charles Moore: why did Mandelson ask Epstein if he’d read my column? Last week, Charles Moore discovered his name appears in the Epstein files no fewer than 40 times. Happily, every instance was a duplicate of one email from Peter Mandelson to Epstein in November 2009: ‘Did you read Charles Moore in yesterday [sic] D Telegraph?’ he asked. Epstein didn’t answer. At the time, ‘Lord Mandelson was riding high’. But Moore had discovered the then business secretary had spent a shooting weekend with the Rothschild family. Also there were Cherie Blair and Said Gaddafi, shot dead this week, the son of the Libyan dictator ‘responsible for the biggest terrorist atrocity ever committed against British citizens’ – Lockerbie. Moore suggested that Mandelson’s daring feats of ‘social mountaineering’ were his Achilles’ heel. Like Epstein, he ‘felt invincible’. The newly released emails show Epstein suggesting that a lack of sex had turned Mandelson’s mind to foie gras – but Mandelson reassures him that ‘the cure’ was en route from Shanghai. ‘Are you being disgusting?’ the convicted sex offender asked him.

Nick Carter: our armed forces are hollow. ‘When you’re the chief of the defence staff,’ notes Nick Carter, ‘it’s never a good sign if your phone rings on a Sunday evening.’ In 2021 Carter was told the chancellor had just signed off on cuts that would have made Britain’s military ‘the equivalent of Belgium’s with nuclear weapons’. Carter barged into Downing Street and persuaded Boris Johnson to ‘avert potential disaster’ – but the episode was ‘a momentary blip’ in the ‘long decline of the UK’s defence capability’. Carter doubts we could field ‘more than 10,000 combat troops’, while our air force is ‘a tenth of what we had during the Cold War’. We must ‘fix the baseline’, or we will fail to meet our Nato obligations. But we must also ‘modernise defence at a time of frenzied progress in AI and quantum computing’. Britain should use ‘our strengths in innovation and advanced industrial capacity to leapfrog ahead rather than trying to play catch-up’.

James Heale: Labour’s cliff edge. The Gorton and Denton by-election ‘is a proper three-horse race’, one canvasser tells James Heale. Both the Greens and Reform are keen in a historic Labour seat. ‘I don’t think there is anyone I hate more in politics than [Zack Polanski],’ says one pro-Starmer MP. Countering the optimism of the Greens is hard for Labour: ‘It’s like kicking a puppy.’ But Polanski might have missed a trick in picking 34-year-old plumber Hannah Spencer in a seat that is a third Muslim: ‘They needed a raving Gaza lunatic,’ says one rival. For Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate, a split vote is the best hope. ‘They’re trying to pathologise me for changing my views,’ the academic-turned-TV-host tells Heale. Reform have reconvened their four-man campaign team from their Runcorn win last year, while one veteran jokes that the party’s canvassers are younger than his car. But Andy Burnham haunts the race. The neighbouring MPs are Lucy Powell and Angela Rayner; if this seat falls, the attention of Labour MPs will turn to another race: who succeeds Keir Starmer.