Best of the Spectator

Julie Bindel speaks to Michael Conroy who teaches boys against rape, domestic violence and porn use. Michael set up Men At Work – an organisation that looks at 'macho culture', the different ways boys are brought up to fight, and in some cases become abusive towards women and girls.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: Cindy Yu reads her piece ahead of the Taiwanese elections (00:54), Mary Wakefield discusses the US opioid crisis which she fears has come to the UK (07:13), and Natasha Feroze tells us about the rise of relationship contracts (13:26).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: can anyone stop Trump?  The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Guy takes a look at Trump's ‘second coming’ in his cover story. He says that despite Trump’s legal troubles, he is almost certain to receive the Republican nomination. Freddy joins the podcast alongside Amber Duke, who also writes in the magazine this week about the brides of trump: the women hoping to receive the nod as his r...

The Book Club will return next week! In the meantime we are revisiting Sam’s conversation from 2020 with Hadley Freeman whose book House of Glass tells the story of 20th century jewry through the hidden history of her own family. The four Glahs siblings — one of them the writer’s grandmother — grew up in a Polish shtetl just a few miles from what was to become Auschwitz. They fled the postwar pogr...

Freddy Gray is joined by pollster James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners. They speak about the upcoming Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and whether Trump’s opponents have any chance of beating him. They also discuss the impact of Trump’s trials, and JL Partners’ viral word cloud which both Biden and Trump have been attempting to use to their advantage. (Photo credit: JL Partners) The S...

India is the fifth largest economy in the world, and now has a population larger than China’s. It’s no surprise, then, that officials in Washington often see India as a powerful non-western bulwark to growing Chinese power. On this episode of Chinese Whispers, Cindy Yu look’s at where China and India’s rivalry comes from. How much have long-lasting skirmishes on the China-Indian border damaged rel...

Julie Bindel speaks to law academic, Michael Foran who is based at the University of Glasgow. Michael played a key role campaigning against Nicola Sturgeon who attempted to push through the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) – a bill allowing self identifying females into women's spaces. Michael wrote a legal paper to explain how the GRA could be in breach of equality laws – and bring down Sturgeon's ca...

This week: Svitlana Morenets explains why Ukrainians can't trust Putin's hollow promises (00:57), James Heale reads his politics column on Rishi's January blues (05:42), and Theo Hobson describes the joys of middle-aged football (10:54).  Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the first Americano episode of 2024, Freddy Gray is joined by Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars to discuss Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard University. On the podcast Freddy and Peter discuss Gay's accusations of plagiarism; how the row has became wrapped up in racism, and what this means for the future of affirmative action in America. The Spectator is hirin...

On the podcast: In his new year’s address this year Vladimir Putin made no mention of the war in Ukraine – despite missile strikes over the Christmas period – and now Owen Matthews reports in The Spectator this week rumours that Putin could be looking to broker a land-for-peace deal. Unfortunately – Owen says – this deal would mean freezing the conflict along its current lines and the de facto par...

The Book Club is taking a brief Christmas break, so we have gone back through the archives to spotlight some of our favourite episodes. This week we are revisiting Sam's conversation from 2017 with the Pulitzer Prize winning historian (and former Spectator deputy editor) Anne Applebaum about her devastating new book Red Famine . The early 1930s in Ukraine saw a famine that killed around five milli...

Philip Hensher is a novelist and regular contributor to The Spectator’s books pages. His books cover a variety of subjects and often deal with important historical change, such as the fall of the Berlin wall and the war in Afghanistan. His most recent novel is To Battersea Park .  On the podcast, he discusses how he developed an affection for offal as a small child, the secret to an ‘austerely per...

The Book Club is taking a brief Christmas break, so we have gone back through the archives to spotlight some of our favourite episodes. This week we are revisiting Sam's conversation from 2017 with Robert Webb. His moving and funny book How Not To Be A Boy turns the material of a memoir into a heartfelt polemic about what he calls 'The Trick': the gender expectations that he identifies as causing...

Susan Hall is a born and bred Londoner running for one of the most important jobs in the city. After leaving school at 18 she had dreams of being a mechanic and struggled to get into technical college. She was later a business owner, running a beauty salon and hairdressing business.    Susan has been involved in politics for almost twenty years. Starting out first as a Councillor in Harrow, she la...

The Book Club is taking a brief Christmas break, so we have gone back through the archives to spotlight some of our favourite episodes. This week we are revisiting Sam's conversation from 2017 with Philip Collins, former speech writer to Tony Blair, about his book When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape The World and Why We Need Them. He takes Sam through the history of rhetoric, how Cam...

Freedom of speech is one of the fundamental tenets of a liberal democracy, and yet threats to freedom of speech today don’t so much come from authoritarians abroad as they do from within. The idea of ‘no-platforming’ those you disagree with, or ‘cancelling’ them, has taken root in all forms of public debate, and increasingly so in science. The word ‘science’ can today often be a shorthand for ‘tru...

Michel Roux Jr. is an English-French chef and is the chef patron of Le Gavroche, the first restaurant in the UK to received one, two and then three Michelin stars. Earlier this year it was announced that Le Gavroche will close its doors in January.  On the podcast, he recalls how his father would hand churn vanilla ice cream, reveals his fondness for both traditional French custard and English pac...

On this week's episode, Peter Hitchens remembers a Christmas in Bucharest, Lionel Shriver says people don't care about Ukraine anymore, Ed West wonders if you can ‘meme’ yourself into believing in God, Mary Wellesley reads her ‘Notes On’ St Nicholas, and Melissa Kite says she had to move to Ireland to escape the EU‘s rules. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to this festive episode of the Edition podcast, where we will be taking you through the pages of The Spectator’s special Christmas triple issue.  Up first: What a year in politics it has been. 2023 has seen scandals, sackings, arrests and the return of some familiar faces. It’s easy to forget that at the start of the year Nicola Sturgeon was still leader of the SNP! To make sense of it all...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the food historian Pen Vogler, author of the new Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain. Pen tells me how crises have affected British food culture from the age of enclosures onwards, how rows over free school meals are nothing new, and why the Christmas pudding tells the story of Empire. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor...

Taiwan goes to the polls in just over a month. This is an election that could have wide repercussions, given the island’s status as a potential flashpoint in the coming years. The incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, is coming to the end of two elected terms, meaning that she cannot run again. Her party’s chosen successor is William Lai – Lai Ching-te – who is the current vice president. For most of...

This week: James Heale reads his politics column on Sunak's migration minefield (00:55), Michael Simmons says that Scotland's 'progressive' teaching methods have badly backfired (05:53), and Mary Wakefield asks: why can't I pray in Westminster Abbey? (11:40) Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jacqui Smith was born in Malvern, where she joined the Labour party aged 16. After graduating from Oxford, Jacqui moved to London and worked briefly as a parliamentary researcher but trained to be a teacher and became head of economics. The temptation to electoral politics eventually pulled her back. Having failed the first time, Jacqui became the MP for Redditch in 1997 – labeled one of ‘Blair’s...

In her cover piece for the magazine this week, The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls writes that whilst Keir Starmer’s accession seems certain, his agenda is less so. She tries to piece together what a Labour government would look like and which areas they will chose to prioritise. Katy joins the podcast alongside Paul Mason, the journalist who is seeking a Labour seat at the next election....

How should we think of the 26 million people in the UK living with a long-term health condition? Under the current system, only a handful of long-term conditions are prioritised. This leads to a huge strain on NHS resources and capacity later down the road, as long-term health conditions comprise 50 per cent of all GP appointments and 70 per cent hospital bed days. What's more, 2.5 million working...