03/09/2022
3 Sep 2022

Drama queens

3 Sep 2022

Drama queens

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Freddy GrayFreddy Gray
Drama queens: the return of Meghan and Harry

We’ve all spent months bracing ourselves for what our leaders assure us will be a dreadful winter. As the weather turns, we can look forward to ruinous energy bills, runaway inflation, collapsing health services, strikes, blackouts, more strikes, violent crime, and perhaps even – why not? – a nuclear war with Russia. As if that weren’t bad enough, Meghan and Harry are back, wafting over all the way from Montecito, California on billowy clouds of bonkers publicity, self-pity and self-help mumbo-jumbo.

Drama queens: the return of Meghan and Harry
Cosmo Landesman
Why your more successful friends will drop you

You might have noticed the numerous glowing pieces by friends of Salman Rushdie about their ‘brave’ and ‘brilliant’ friend. I too would like to write a glowing piece about my brave and brilliant friend Salman Rushdie, but there’s one little problem: I’m not a friend of his. In fact I don’t have any famous novelist friends. I used to. There was the occasional lunch with Nick Hornby and the odd debauched evening with Will Self.

Why your more successful friends will drop you
Keiron Pim
What young Ukrainians will learn from reading Joseph Roth

As Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues, Volodymyr Zelensky’s ministry of education has just announced changes to the national curriculum that include removing almost all the Russian authors on the foreign literature syllabus. In last week’s Spectator, Svitlana Morenets revealed the new names: we see Robert Burns, whose inclusion may be a nod to Britain’s support during the conflict. Then there is Joseph Roth, a master of German prose, whose writing about interwar Europe speaks to Ukraine’s modern upheavals.

What young Ukrainians will learn from reading Joseph Roth
Katy Balls
‘Those Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me’: Dominic Raab on Truss, Sunak and his own future

If Liz Truss is named prime minister next week, her administration will look rather different to the government of the past few years. Rishi Sunak has suggested he won’t accept any job offer. Michael Gove, a Sunak supporter, has pre-emptively ruled himself out. Other prominent backers are expected to join the pair on the backbenches – such as the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab. Truss’s allies say he deserves what’s coming his way for having likened her economic plans of immediate tax cuts to an ‘electoral suicide note’.

‘Those Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me’: Dominic Raab on Truss, Sunak and his own future
Andrew Sullivan
The pleasures of doing nothing

Doing nothing is glorious. It is one of life’s deepest pleasures and ultimate goals. Yesterday, I walked a couple of miles to a stretch of beach at the end of Cape Cod, where the tide sweeps in and out to create vast warm shallow pools of water surrounded by marshes. I brought a book, which was in fact a collection of Cicero’s essays on life and death and old age, but never opened it. I’d already started, and Cicero’s defence of getting old amounts to the idea that you can keep working productively until the day you drop dead, which was not exactly the theme I was after when I picked it up, but I left it in my knapsack for other reasons.

The pleasures of doing nothing
Kate Andrews
Trussonomics: a beginner’s guide

When polls started to show Liz Truss miles ahead of Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership contest, her team adopted a cautious campaign strategy. Why gamble on another interview with Nick Robinson when last time she had struggled to name a single economist who backed her economic plans? Eventually she landed on Professor Patrick Minford, an academic at Cardiff Business School and a bullish Brexiteer. Minford went on the record calling for interest rates to rise to 7 per cent, which Truss then had to defend and deflect.

Trussonomics: a beginner’s guide
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