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.

Paul Wood: will anyone be punished for Syria’s massacre of the innocents? ‘There has been a massacre of Alawites in Syria this past week,’ writes Paul Wood, and the killings ‘were perpetrated by the militias that put Syria’s new President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in power’. For some, the true face of the country’s new masters has been revealed. Whether the guilty men are punished will tell us what kind of country Syria has become since the fall of Assad’s dictatorship. Speaking to those on the ground, Wood reports of fathers who were shot in front of their families, victims made to howl like dogs as they crawled through piles of corpses, and of state security forces trying to prevent survivors from photographing or talking about what had happened. While al-Sharaa has ordered a committee of inquiry into the killings, these butchers were hardly strangers to him – they put him into power only three months ago. Wood argues that al-Sharaa must purge these men if he wants to continue to receive the benefit of the doubt from his stream of western visitors – or Syria’s brutalised population will discover that they have merely replaced one strongman leader with another.

 

Father Benedict Kiely: can Christianity survive in the Middle East? As an old Syrian phrase puts it: ‘First the Alawites, then the Christians.’ With the massacre of up to 3,000 people in recent weeks, the majority being innocent Alawite civilians, Syria’s Christians are terrified that they will be the next victims. As Father Benedict Kiely writes for this week’s Spectator, Christians have already been the targets of murder, kidnappings, intimidation and vandalism since the arrival of the country’s new Islamist government last December. ‘It may not be acceptable to say so,’ Kiely writes, ‘but under the undeniably brutal dictatorship of the Assad family… all religious minorities were protected.’ Christianity has deep roots in Syria – between the years 640 and 740, no fewer than six popes hailed from it – but ‘Middle Eastern Christians felt ignored and forgotten by… the West, as Islamic persecution has destroyed their churches’. ‘A tree cut off from its roots will not survive’, and as the Church commemorates the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, western Christians must remember the suffering of their eastern co-religionists.

 

Katy Balls: will Labour’s warring new factions swallow Starmer’s harsh medicine? ‘Labour MPs these days are experiencing whiplash,’ according to Katy Balls. Having railed against the Tories’ proposed welfare cuts while in opposition, Keir Starmer now plans to ram through £6 billion of his own. Yet Downing Street insists these cuts ‘are not a Tory tribute act’, but essential ‘in an uncertain world where security demands are changing’, and where ‘negligible economic growth and no public appetite for more tax rises’ means cuts ‘are the only option Starmer and his Chancellor have left’. But how will the Prime Minister’s army of Starmtroopers – elected on a promise to boost public spending – take their new orders? With each passing week, a new Labour caucus or WhatsApp group is formed – with some being more friendly to the government than others. Downing Street is confident that it can weather any future rebellion, but all eyes are on Ed Miliband and whether his clean power mission can survive Starmer’s new ruthlessness.

 

Lucy Dunn: the insidious creep of ‘physician associates’. ‘There is a war being waged in NHS hospitals,’ writes Lucy Dunn, between overstretched junior doctors in understaffed wards, and physician associates (PAs) – or as they are more disparagingly known, ‘noctors’. Since 2003, non-medical graduates have been able to enter hospital wards and GP practices by completing a two-year PA course. At first, there were only a few – ten years ago just 150 of them in England – but post-pandemic they have proliferated: under the last government NHS England tried to expand their numbers to 10,000. But while ‘there are areas where overworked doctors would be desperate for extra help’, Dunn highlights that there is ‘no future for a health service that sees PAs acting like doctors’. Better paid but far less well trained than junior doctors, ‘cases of medical mismanagement at the hands of physician associates are stacking up’, with the death in 2023 of a woman from a blood clot ‘after being misdiagnosed by a PA whom she assumed was a GP’. Pro-euthanasia MPs last month rejected an amendment to the assisted dying bill that would ensure fully qualified doctors would have to sign off applications – so PAs might soon be ‘deciding who lives and who dies’.

 

Mary Wakefield: the monster I love. ‘Why would anyone choose to love a psycho that dismembers songbirds, often torturing them in a casual way?’ asks Mary Wakefield in this week’s Spectator. She explains how she fell for George – ‘a large grey kitten with disproportionately big ears’. Previously, Wakefield didn’t like cats, ‘their reptilian stealth’, ‘the constant showing off of their puckered bums’, and their ‘disregard for the normal rules of mammal eye contact’. But since unexpectedly adopting the kitten from a neighbour, she has discovered that ‘cats are not normal animals, but… fur-coated viruses designed to manipulate the human brain’. Consider the speed and ease with which George has captured her husband, Dominic Cummings. Pre-George, ‘his usual monologue, reading the political news of the day, went like this: “Gah! Bastards. Clowns. Idiots”. But within a day of George’s arrival, that had switched to “Gah! Bastards. Clowns. Idiots… Oh, hello kitten! What a lovely kitten!”’. Often Wakefield finds the pair ‘staring solemnly and seriously into each other’s eyes’. It’s true love – or a sign of how the cat virus can infect even those who thought themselves immune.