The Spectator

Potholes could pave the way to victory for Reform ✍️ Sam Leith spectator.com/article/pothol…

AI is revolutionising mathematics ✍️ Ananyo Bhattacharya spectator.com/article/ai-is-…

Venezuela has become another American puppet state ✍️ Niko Vorobyov spectator.com/article/venezu…

Did European rule in Asia and Africa really make colonised people poorer? ✍️ Tirthankar Roy spectator.com/article/did-eu…

The martini is making a comeback ✍️ Ameer Kotecha spectator.com/article/the-ma…

In March, just before Artemis II rounded the far side of the Moon, the Transport Secretary had her own lunar encounter. Heidi Alexander claims that a ‘moon crater’-sized pothole forced her Mini off the road in Oxfordshire. She is far from alone. Pothole casualties in Britain rose from 270 in 2020 to 393 in 2024, including six dead. An RAC Europe survey found that 62 per cent of British drivers thought European roads are better maintained. Britain’s pothole problem is a story of government dysfunction. Local authorities seem unable to perform their basic duties; meanwhile, council tax continues to rise, bin collection becomes more infrequent and public spaces continue to deteriorate. Next Thursday’s local and regional elections are supposed to give voters the opportunity to change that story. ✍️ The Spectator Article | spectator.com/article/in-the…

Q. My husband has been appointed to a post in Wales and we as a family have moved here for the foreseeable future. My daughter, who is 15, is very happy at her day school but there is a pervasive culture of ‘tweakments’ there and I am worried the pressure to begin having Botox, fillers etc will be too strong for her to resist when it kicks in. We cannot afford to send her away to school. Help! How we can prevent her from ruining her lovely young looks? Article | spectator.com/article/dear-m…

If anyone needs proof that jihadism is for losers, they need only look at the case of Abdullah Albadri ✍️ Jonathan Sacerdoti spectator.com/article/the-ca…

Heidi Alexander said Polanski’s actions were ‘disgusting’, and commended the police officers who were armed only with their ‘courage and training’ ✍️ Joe Bedell-Brill spectator.com/article/sunday…

‘Sometimes, in the search for originality, the most obvious dishes are forgotten,’ says Elizabeth David, the doyenne of cookery, in her book French Provincial Cooking. I often think of this phrase when I’m writing about vintage cookery. So much of food (and food writing, and writing, and media, and life) is trend-driven. It’s all about novelty. I look at the handwritten list of my planned vintage recipes – ‘chocolate mousse, custard slice, beef olives???’ – and have to acknowledge that my particular wheelhouse is anything but original. I try, though, to hold David’s words close: those ‘obvious’ dishes are known for a reason. And their familiarity is part of their appeal. ✍️ Olivia Potts Recipe | spectator.com/article/the-ex…

‘Whippets are simply ducal,’ a grand friend pants at me in her drawing room when I ask her why she owns one. Certainly not a Regency duke, I mutter, looking at the fawn skeleton lying in wait on the brocade sofa. Because to me, whippets aren’t posh, just as Michael Heseltine isn’t fooling me all these years later. Rather, I find them sinister: the endless jutting ribs, the paper-thin coat, the incessant shaking. But I know I am not in good company. Whippets, the Ozempic-coded dog of our age, have been taken up by high society in their droves. You can’t move for magazine features detailing their storied owners: Robin Birley, of course, whose whippets eat breakfast at 5 Hertford St, or Rose, Lady Cholmondeley, who keeps hers whizzing around the Palladian porticos of Houghton Hall in Norfolk. ✍️ Arabella Byrne Article | spectator.com/article/what-y…

Farage is right that this is not easy territory. It is easy to get wrong, but it is also to his credit that he was willing to go there in the first place ✍️ Joe Shalam spectator.com/article/is-ref…

For the first time in its post-Soviet history, Russia has run out of workers ✍️ Alexander Kolyandr spectator.com/article/russia…

The Linehan saga has plainly frustrated Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley ✍️ Tom Beardsworth spectator.com/article/speech…

We are entering an era where the AI systems themselves are threats, not just humans ✍️ Andrea Miotti spectator.com/article/we-are…

The water bottle is the perfect modern accessory: faintly virtuous, mildly performative and entirely unnecessary ✍️ Sam Merullo spectator.com/article/we-nee…

If the SNP were truly good democrats would they not be more tolerant of the inclusive democracy they are already part of? ✍️ John Ferry spectator.com/article/how-to…

Westminster used to be a byword for clean streets. Under Labour that has all changed ✍️ Mary Dejevsky spectator.com/article/the-to…

John Cotton, the Labour leader of Birmingham city council, claimed that the 14-month dustmen’s strike was ‘within sight’ of an end. BBC undercover reporters found that cocaine, cannabis, laughing gas and prescription pills were on sale in mini-marts in four West Midlands towns; police arrested a man and a woman in Dudley. The explosion of a car outside the police station at Dunmurry on the outskirts of Belfast was being investigated as attempted murder. ✍️ The Spectator Article | spectator.com/article/portra…

The Rolling Stones’ resilience is hard to get one’s head around. In a world of fleeting cultural phenomena, they just keep going… and going… and going. Earlier this month, under the pseudonym ‘The Cockroaches’, the band released 1,000 copies of a vinyl-only single (their 124th in their 65th year of rocking) ahead of a new studio album which will come out this summer. The combined age of the three surviving principals Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood is 242. The band are so venerable that even jokes about their age are getting old: their ‘Steel Wheels’ tour was dubbed ‘Steel Wheelchairs’ back in… 1989. ✍️ Philip Patrick Article | spectator.com/article/how-th…