The Spectator

Four ambulances were set on fire in Golders Green in the early hours of the morning yesterday. They were not police vehicles or abandoned cars but emergency vehicles belonging to a Jewish volunteer ambulance service, parked near a synagogue and deliberately targeted. What is changing is not just the frequency of these incidents, but the atmosphere around them. ✍️ Maia Roston Article | spectator.com/article/the-go…

On today's Coffee House Shots podcast: Britain’s response to the conflict in Iran is dominating Westminster – but is Keir Starmer really keeping the country out of war? @JAHeale | @Simmons__ | @IsabelHardman spectator.com/podcast/should…

The BBC is in the headlines again – for all the wrong reasons. A TV drama on the fall of Huw Edwards, the corporation’s disgraced former chief news presenter, is due to start tonight. Rather than keep shtum, Edwards has lashed out at Channel 5 for failing to ‘check with me the truth’, thus ensuring even more bad publicity for the BBC. Yet instead of donning sackcloth and ashes in an effort to atone for its many flaws and follies, the BBC is doubling down on its sins by appointing a new director general who offers more of the same. ✍️ Nigel Jones Article | spectator.com/article/matt-b…

There is a particular kind of weariness that settles over you when watching anti-West radical activists on tour. It is the predictability of watching chic revolutionaries attempting to cosplay as ‘resistance fighters’ or Che Guevara, while maintaining their strictly non-negotiable requirement for a good air con system, functioning minibar and high thread Egyptian cotton bed linen. ✍️ Liz Walsh Article | spectator.com/article/the-ri…

When a synagogue is firebombed or a Jewish school is targeted in Europe, the instinct is to reach for a familiar explanation: the rising tide of anti-Semitism, the radicalised lone wolf, the unhinged fringe. That explanation is no longer adequate. What is unfolding now in the UK and across Europe is not a spontaneous eruption of hatred. It seems now to be a coordinated campaign by Iran designed to make Jewish life feel existentially unsafe. ✍️ Joe Truzman Article | spectator.com/article/who-ar…

@Jo_Coburn @JAHeale Watch The Edition in full youtube.com/watch?v=kdmg2E…

Does Nigel Farage really want to be Prime Minister? @Jo_Coburn | @JAHeale

Between Thursday and Sunday just gone, wind’s capacity factor averaged 13 per cent. The corresponding loss in generation compared to the same period a week previously was the same as switching off all of Britain’s nuclear power stations and cutting the undersea interconnectors to the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and France. The weather did this. Not Putin, corrupt petrostates, or greedy gas companies. Not the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, either. Calm winds can befall us any time because the atmosphere is indifferent to geopolitics. Relying on wind turbines to power a modern economy is self-imposed energy insecurity. ✍️ Tim Gregory Article | spectator.com/article/wind-p…

Watch Coffee House in full youtube.com/watch?v=NtP-Km…

Reform hopes to swallow the Tory vote at the 2029 election – ‘As long as Nigel is ahead of Badenoch,’ an adviser notes, ‘the Tory vote will disintegrate overnight.’ Tim Shipman and James Heale explain why Reform only need to lead the Conservatives by one point in the polls to persuade wavering Tories to switch their vote. @ShippersUnbound | @JAHeale

Less than 48 hours after issuing a 48-hour ultimatum for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its energy infrastructure, Donald Trump stepped back and granted the country a reprieve of five days – a now familiar pattern in Trump’s online diplomacy. In doing so, he dropped what can only be described as a different kind of bomb: an all-caps public declaration that negotiations with Tehran were already underway. No detail was given. Only the assertion that talks were ‘good and productive’. ✍️ Jonathan Sacerdoti Article | spectator.com/article/will-t…

'I don’t want to raise levels of public anxiety.’ Believe it or not, these words came out of the mouth of Sir Keir Starmer. If they were true, one would expect him to announce he was off to live as a hermit in the Hebrides, rather than continue to chair meetings of COBRA. Yes, in the midst of the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the Prime Minister was answering questions from the liaison committee, mostly made up by his own MPs. ✍️ Madeline Grant Article | spectator.com/article/i-dont…

Barbarossa. Pearl Harbor. Swindon? Surprise attacks can, in a moment, change the course of history, the destiny of a nation and the future of a leader. After it was revealed this weekend that the Iranians have developed missiles capable of reaching the United Kingdom – and reportedly attempted to hit the UK-US military base on the Chagos islands – we should be more worried than ever about the possibility of a British Pearl Harbor style attack. ✍️ Mark Piesing Article | spectator.com/article/are-we…

On the Americano podcast: Steven Crowder, host of Louder with Crowder joins Freddy Gray to discuss the warring factions in the podcast world, worsened since Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Also, the global leftwing alliance promoting communism in Cuba, whether Trump was wrong to attack Iran, and why Mark Carney kowtowed to China. @Freddygray31 | @scrowder spectator.com/podcast/postca…

This weekend, two statues were installed on the White House grounds. On the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building stands a statue of Christopher Columbus. On the south side is “Freedom’s Charge,” a life-size portrayal by Chas Fagan of two soldiers in the Continental Army, one with a rifle, the other with a billowing Bunker Hill flag. In ordinary times, the temporary placement of such tokens of America history at the White House might pass without comment. These are not ordinary times. On the contrary, America is just now emerging from a destructive frenzy of woke self-loathing and iconoclasm. ✍️ Roger Kimball Article | spectator.com/article/trump-…

Have markets and governments horribly underestimated the fallout from the Iran war, or is it the doomsters who have got it horribly wrong? President Trump’s announcement has rather caught the world off guard. This morning, he posted on Truth social saying that he is seeking a negotiated settlement with Iran and has postponed his planned attacks on energy infrastructure. ✍️ Ross Clark Article | spectator.com/article/trump-…

Jenkin wanted to know why Britain was ‘not on a war footing’ and where the much-delayed defence investment plan was. Starmer told him that ‘we are finalising the investment plan’, and was accused of ‘enormous complacency’. The Prime Minister immediately snapped: 'Well, this smacks of the fact that for years there was underinvestment by the last government, and the stripping out, the hollowing out of our armed forces, copyright Ben Wallace, who was the defence secretary.' ✍️ Isabel Hardman Article | spectator.com/article/has-st…

Cigars are an extreme niche. Each item is a complex and deep expression of the centuries-old craft of the particular roller who hand-made it; its taste and aroma an expression of the soil, the weather and the leaves from which it comes. In other words, they have a terroir every bit as much as that glass of wine or that tumbler of whisky. ✍️ Josh Sims Article | spectator.com/article/a-ciga…

If you tweeted about a particular snooker referee being the ex-boyfriend of one of the women in The Human League, and a friend of yours replied with ‘Don’t cue want me baby?’, how would you react? Would you groan, sneer and dismiss the pun as the lowest form of wit? Or would you – like me – laugh out loud and feel a surge of joy at the beauty of the wordplay? If the latter, come and stand with me in defence of puns. Not in a ‘guilty pleasure’ way, either, but as a proud statement that puns are wonderful and important. ✍️ Mark Mason Article | spectator.com/article/the-pu…

When you think about Simpson’s in the Strand (never Simpson’s on the Strand), it is impossible to consider the 198-year-old restaurant without remembering its literary antecedents. P.G. Wodehouse praised it as ‘a restful temple of food’ in his 1910 novel Psmith in the City. It has popped up in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Howards End and, when that epitome of thespian Britishness David Niven wished, in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, to speak wistfully about a golden idyll to a dying friend, Simpson’s was the idyll he chose. ✍️ Alexander Larman Article | spectator.com/article/can-lo…