Damian Reilly | The Spectator columnists & writers

For most little boys of my generation, and several before, the only man who could conceivably have beaten up their father was Superman. Which is why now discovering that Superman is sexually attracted to men is so brilliantly subversive. It’s like discovering Mount Everest is gay. Back in August, DC Comics artist Ethan van Sciver first broke the news that Superman was coming out, although then it sounded as if the plan was for him to be fully gay, and not just bi, during a YouTube livestream. ‘I guess Clark Kent is going bye bye,’ he said. ‘Superman is effectively gay everyone. He is gay.’ Now the first images have been released of the new Superman – Jonathan Kent – deeply French kissing his boyfriend Jay, of all things a journalist.

Dave Chappelle’s show is a rip-off

Towards what seemed like the halfway point of his show in London last night, Dave Chappelle announced to the crowd he was going to tell us something he was refusing to tell the media. He wanted us to know, he said while looking sadly at the floor, that his quarrel was not with the gay or the trans communities . No, no. Looking up and raising an index finger, he explained: 'I’m fighting a corporate agenda that needs to be addressed.' Thinking we still had another hour of the show to go, we cheered. ‘You fight those corporate vampires, Dave!’ we thought. He then let us know, whenever it was possible, that we should be kind to one another. Very shortly after that he raised his thumbs aloft and walked off stage: 45 minutes.

Emma Raducanu can save tennis

Something perfect at the death of summer: Emma Raducanu in full flight, smoking winners up the lines and progressing without dropping a set into the last eight of the US Open at the improbable age of 18. The very best, in tennis as in all sports, almost without exception, make it look beautiful – it’s why we can’t take our eyes off them (because beauty is an element-bending superpower). Raducanu makes playing tennis look beautiful. As she waits to receive serve, poised and utterly focused, it can appear as if she has arrived on court straight from the pages of a fashion magazine. There is an unmistakeable Hollywood quality, too, to the manner in which she is now realising her potential at Flushing Meadows, having flashed into the sport-watching world’s consciousness at Wimbledon.

Gareth Southgate doesn’t deserve a knighthood

It was some achievement of England's, frankly, not winning Euro 2020 given the players we had. As I sat down before kick off and began the customary cursing at the inexplicable omission once again of our best player, Jack Grealish, my wife tried to console me. The fact Gareth Southgate very clearly had no clue which was his best starting eleven was really a secret weapon, she said. It meant other managers couldn’t second guess him. Hmm, I thought. The relentless corporatisation of the England football team over the last two decades has been an exercise in eradicating flair – that quality most hated in boardrooms because it is unquantifiable. Putting charismatic Englishmen capable of doing something brilliant and unexpected in charge of the national team was certainly something we used to do – Sir Bobby Robson, Glenn Hoddle, Terry Venables, for example – but the practice came to a hard stop at the turn of the century with the end of Kevin Keegan’s tenure.

The Edition

Biden’s Rodeo: How were his first 100 days?

30 min listen

The Edition

Biden’s Rodeo: How were his first 100 days?

30 min listen

Joe Biden is approaching his first 100 days in office. How has he fared, and has he delivered on his promise to bring about a return to normalcy? (1:15) Plus, the proposed European Super League wasn’t super after all. The six English teams invited to join the league pulled out earlier this week, and the plans have now been shelved. But will it still happen eventually? (10:30) And finally, what’s it really like to live in a listed building? (19:30)With the Spectator's US editor Freddy Gray; our economics correspondent Kate Andrews; journalist Damian Reilly; veteran football reporter Julie Welch; Spectator contributor Hamish Scott; and Liz Fuller, a buildings at risk officer for Save Britain’s Heritage. Presented by Lara Prendergast.

How the Super League sabotaged itself

‘So you’re telling me they’re wetting the bed because we’re suggesting the same teams should compete in a competition in which the same teams always compete?’ It’s not hard to see how the owners of the European Super League clubs, the Americans particularly, might be confused by the splenetic reaction of English football fans to their proposal to update the annual Champions League megabucks jamboree – a tournament that at the sharp end has for decades featured pretty much exclusively the same teams. Instead of being able to point that out, now the wantaway billionaires must grovel and debase themselves. Liverpool owner John Henry has even released a video not unlike those hostages are sometimes forced to make by terrorists.

Football’s Super League critics are being hypocritical

Is it possible meaningfully to oppose the decision by Europe’s biggest football clubs to form an unaccountable, anti-democratic Super League if you voted to Remain? The obvious answer is that it’s not. Not that that will stop anyone. The proposed Super League is an almost exact sporting distillation of the issues that defined the European Union referendum: the continent’s financial power house football clubs are threatening to carve up immensely lucrative markets while simultaneously shutting down external competition irreversibly. A televised rant by Gary Neville – vocal remainer and stalwart of the Manchester United team that in 2000 infamously turned its back on the magic of the FA Cup in order to participate in the FIFA Club World Cup in Sao Paulo – has crystallised public opinion against the new competition: it’s 'disgusting' and 'disgraceful', he said.

The problem with Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’

He might now be one of the most powerful men in global media, but I find whenever I see a photograph of Nick Clegg, Orwell’s quote about everyone getting the face they deserve by 50 comes to mind. Now 54, the remnants of the boyish idealist are still just about there, but the eyes to me are ledgers of too much unhappy compromise – deadened, I always assume, by the principles he felt forced by David Cameron to sacrifice for personal advancement, and by the amazing decision to see out the remaining years of a career spent failing upwards as Mark Zuckerberg’s lavishly remunerated PR lickspittle. For a decade and more, Clegg positioned himself as the good guy of British politics – radiating sixth form actor star power at every opportunity.

What’s Bill Gates’ beef with flatulent cows?

'Fart for freedom, fart for liberty – and fart proudly', was how Benjamin Franklin put it shortly after founding the United States. It’s an injunction the cows of the developed world appear to have taken seriously: a strategy for liberation, executed brilliantly you have to say, that seems finally to have brought them to the brink of emancipation. Last week, billionaire and long-time committed burger eater Bill Gates became the latest champion of the cows’ cause (namely: please stop eating us). He said the time had come for inhabitants of all wealthy nations to cease enjoying beef and instead to make do with a synthetic substitute. According to him, it’s the only way to prevent civilisation ending in a cow-fart fireball apocalypse.

Will Dogecoin give Elon Musk the last laugh?

There’s something deeply pleasing for fans of cosmic jokes everywhere about the world’s richest man personally taking the time to sell you a pup. Or a pup-related crypto-currency, at least. In between lobbing rockets at the moon, singlehandedly revolutionising the car industry and raising a ten-month old child, Elon Musk has recently been using Twitter to talk up Dogecoin – a joke crypto started in 2013 by geeks for geeks in homage to an internet meme featuring a knowing-looking Shiba Inu dog. Still with me? Every few days, Musk posts a playful tweet referencing the coin to his 46 million followers. 'Dogecoin is the people’s crypto. No need to be a gigachad to own,' he tweeted last week (chad is nerd-speak for a potently attractive alpha male).

Harry and Meghan’s podcast of platitudes

Why is there not a single trans voice featured in Harry and Meghan’s first podcast? It’s a question that needs answering. The half-hour recording – the couple’s first since signing a $25 million deal with Spotify – sets out to explore the psychological impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on, as the Duchess herself puts it, ‘people from all walks of life’. Given this description, excluding the trans community from participating seems, at best, problematic – perhaps even sinister. Why leave trans people out in this most public of discourses? This editorial decision – a slap in the face for an already marginalised community – seems all the more surprising because of who has made it. While the rest of us have spent 2020 hunkering down and cursing the gods, Harry and Meghan have made no bones about aggressively pursuing woke dollar.

In defence of the BBC

I sometimes wonder if I’m the last person left in Britain who loves the BBC and thinks it represents brilliant value for money. Yes, there is much with which to be infuriated - like most Leavers, for example, I find watching Gary Lineker present Match of the Day about as enjoyable as I imagine Remainers would watching Nigel Farage do the same job. And yes, the Today programme segment earlier this week on the latest developments in telephone hold music was idiotic. But does the BBC really deserve, once again, to be threatened with licence fee reform? The argument against the BBC licence fee is that it is effectively a tax. It isn’t – you can opt-out – but even if it were it would be a good thing. Our taxes are rightly spent on services many of which as individuals we will never use.

Breaking the bank | Who’s afraid of bitcoin?

Sam Reed, 29, is co-founder and chief technology officer of the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange (BitMEX), the largest crypto trading platform, and the 26th-largest exchange of any type in the world. His story — of how he went from itinerant web developer to co-founder of what some have called the ‘Goldman Sachs of bitcoin’ — is both inspiring and a bit jealousy-inducing. Living, he says, a relatively quiet life in Hong Kong in 2014 after trying, and failing, to launch a series of internet start-ups (‘I was doing a ticketing start-up to compete with Ticketmaster, which is kind of a dumb thing to do’), he started giving workshops and presentations to aspiring web developers. One of these presentations changed his life.

Editor’s letter | Who’s afraid of bitcoin?

The straight dope

It’s not easy to get hold of Ángel Hernández, the legendary Mexican chemist who for a decade provided illicit performance-enhancing drugs to numerous athletes, including, he claims, all eight 100 metres finalists at the Beijing Olympics. It took me just over a year of trying. The FBI also struggled. The story goes that when they eventually caught up with him in 2005 he had been holed up in a hotel room in Texas, living under an assumed name for two years. Presented with numerous incriminating wire-tapped telephone conversations and bank statements as part of the investigation that eventually sent three-time Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones to prison, Hernández became a state witness in return for avoiding chokey.

Survival of the sneakiest

Could there be a better metaphor for the corruption that now pervades all top-level sport than the use of motors in professional cycling? It’s so perfectly shameless. If you’re going to cheat by finding illicit ways in which to enhance your performance, as virtually all sportspeople today are forced to do (we’ll come back to that), why mess about with half-measures? Find a motor and strap it on. Undying glory and unimaginable wealth are just the other side of that mountain. Open that throttle, baby! In December last year, Istvan ‘Stefano’ Varjas, a Hungarian engineer who claims to have invented the technology necessary to conceal a near-silent engine in a racing bicycle, gave an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes, in which he said he first sold his engines to an unnamed individual in 1998 for $2 million, agreeing to ten-year exclusivity and silence as part of the deal.

Stand up for Arsène

I had 20 good years supporting Manchester United but now I follow Arsenal, and I find the treatment of the magnificent Arsène Wenger by large sections of my fellow fans mystifying and depressing. I supported Manchester United because when Rupert Murdoch bought top-tier English football in the early 1990s and started marketing it aggressively at the middle classes — who, like me, had previously had no interest in the sport — United were the only logical choice. They played pulsating, swaggering football and often scored thrilling wins from seemingly impossible situations. The young men who made up the spine of the team had grown up together in a boys’ own story and — most importantly — they had a manager in Sir Alex Ferguson who was a high priest of romance.

Fighting chance

Middle age is OK by me. National Trust membership, a Waitrose loyalty card, lying on the sofa drinking red wine and yelling at the telly — since I turned 40, this stuff all just feels right. But by a mile, the best consolation of middle age I’ve found is the cagefighter Conor McGregor and living vicariously through his kicks, punches and verbal smackdowns. How dull my previous enthusiasms for cricket, tennis and football now seem by comparison with the heroic derring-do of this 28-year-old killing machine, a former plumber from Crumlin in Dublin. Damian Reilly is joined by Matt Christie, editor of Boxing News, to talk up McGregor's chances: It’s not just the sheer honesty of the sport he has mastered or the megawatt charisma he exudes every time he opens his mouth (sample quote: ‘Whoever said it’s tough at the top is talking absolute shite’).

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