Best of the Spectator

All the way south and west to sunny Exeter to meet three more finalists: Bower Collective, a subscription-based provider of a range of household and personal care products with reusable packaging; CCM Technologies, which creates ‘green’ fertiliser from sources such as wastewater and farmyard slurry; and Psychiatry-UK, which has taken psychiatric consulting online.  Our guest judges were Richard Co...

On this week's episode, Douglas Murray examines the left's tactics of victimhood in the wake of the Labour conference. (00:48) Then James Walton gives us his review of the new Bond film, No Time to Die . (08:34) And finally, Katy Balls talks about how the CO2 shortage could lead to a lack of her beloved Irn Bru. (11:30) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddy Gray speaks to The Spectator 's economics editor Kate Andrews about President Biden's Infrastructure Bill and the US debt ceiling.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As the UK faces a rising energy crisis with gas supplies in short supply, questions are arising of not just how we mitigate the problem in the short term but how we hedge against it in the long term? What role might nuclear energy play? What’s slowing down its development? Is it the technology? The funding? Or public attitudes towards nuclear energy. Can hearts and minds be swayed in its favour? K...

We were very nearly in Edinburgh Castle to meet our Scottish and Northern Ireland finalists: in the Contini restaurant next door to the Castle forecourt at the top of the tourist-filled Royal Mile.  Veteran judges Ian Ritchie — a prominent Scottish tech investor – and former Award winner Irene McAleese of See. Sense in Northern Ireland joined John Porteous of Charles Stanley to meet four finalists...

In this week’s episode: is Boris Johnson running on empty or is a weak opposition giving him the momentum he needs? Kate Andrews asks in her cover story this week if Boris Johnson’s government has run out of ideas – as well as petrol. Katy Balls also writes in the magazine that the opposition seems unable to take advantage of the government’s failures. Katy and Kate join William on the podcast to...

This year’s regional finals for The Spectator ’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards kicked off with a fascinating session in a private dining room of the boutique hotel One Aldwych. We managed to pack representatives of all 12 finalists (chosen from 90-plus entrants for the region round one table), plus guest judges Paul Abberley (CEO of our sponsor, Charles Stanley Wealth Managers) and former...

Chuck Palahniuk -- best known as the author of Fight Club -- has just announced that he's publishing his next novel not with a mainstream publisher but through the online subscription service Substack. He joins Sam Leith on this week's Book Club podcast to tell him why; and to talk about how 9/11 changed literature, why he never tires of making his audience feel sick, and how he thinks David Foste...

Grizelda is an award-winning cartoonist for publications including The Spectator , the New Statesman and Private Eye. She was Pocket Cartoonist of the Year in 2018. On the podcast, she tells Lara and Liv about her brother's infamous cooking, how she comes up with ideas for cartoons, and why she only knows four recipes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Katy Balls is joined by The Spectator 's associate editor Douglas Murray; the founder of Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis; former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers; former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott; economist Steve Keen; and a team of Spectator journalists. We discuss whether America, Britain and Australia can contain China, how Covid has changed economics, and Stephen Toope's time as vice-cha...

On this week's episode, Katy Balls gives us her thoughts on the importance of Keir Starmer’s performance this weekend at the Labour Party Conference. (00:54)  Then Nicola Christie raises the curtain on the exciting new wave of British musical theatre. (06:53) And finally, Hannah Tomes talks about why Facebook won’t let her post about the English waterway Cockshoot Dyke. (15:50) Presented by Sam Ho...

President Biden has spent the week meeting with foreign leaders including Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Now, the number of people starting to speculate about the state Joe Biden’s health is growing. Freddy Gray sits down with Amber Athey, the Washington Editor for The Spectator to discuss where the cracks are beginning to show and what this could mean for Kamala Harris. Hosted on Acast. See acast....

Sarah Rainsford was a BBC foreign correspondent stationed in Moscow for 20 years until August when the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) declared Rainsford a national security threat. They expelled her from Russia and gave her only three weeks to pack up her things, bring home her husband and their dog. On the podcast, Sarah goes back to her youth to share how she fell into learning Russian a...

In this week’s episode: can the new Aukus alliance contain China? In his cover piece this week, James Forsyth writes that the new Aukus pact has fixed the contours of the next 30 years of British foreign policy. Britain, he says, is no longer trying to stay neutral in the competition between America and China. On the podcast James is joined by Francis Pike, author of Empires at War: A Short Histor...

In this week's Book Club podcast Sam is joined by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a historian of psychoanalysis whose latest book is Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives . Mikkel has sifted through the archives to discover the real stories anonymised in the case studies on which Sigmund Freud based his theories, and the lives of the patients who submitted to analysis on the great man's original couch. What he...

For China, WWII started in 1937 with the Japanese invasion, two years before Hitler invaded Poland. Japan would occupy China until its surrender in 1945, in the process committing atrocities like the rape of Nanjing. This was the second Japanese invasion in fifty years.  Yet decades after the war, when I grew up in Nanjing, Japanese food was all the craze and it was Japanese anime that kids watche...

On this week's episode, Fraser Nelson starts by reading the leader. Britain has a labour shortage and our immigration system is a mess - why not have an amnesty for migrants without legal status? (01:00)  Michela Wrong is on next. She found herself in the sights of Rwandan President Paul Kagame after she wrote a book exposing the abuses of his regime. (07:05) Mark Mason reads his piece to finish t...

Say what you like about Pope Francis, but he's incapable of giving a boring in-flight interview. On Wednesday, coming back from Hungary and Slovakia, he was asked about the problem of pro-abortion Catholic politicians receiving Holy Communion. He immediately launched into a ferocious denunciation of abortion, describing it as homicide, saying there was no middle way and stating that support for ab...

In this week’s episode: is Brexit to blame for the rise in blue-collar wages? With labour shortages driving wages up, many have blamed Britain’s removal from the single market. However, this week in The Spectator , Matthew Lynn argues that shocks and price signals are how the free-market economy reorganises, and that we are experiencing a global trend just like America and Germany. Simon Jenkins,...

This week, Sam is joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst - whose latest book is The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World . On the podcast he speaks about how 1851 - the year of the Great Exhibition - served as a pivot in Dickens’s own life, and set him on the path to writing Bleak House . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ed Balls is an acclaimed broadcaster, writer, economist, professor and former politician who served as shadow chancellor from 2011 to 2015. On the podcast, he tells Lara and Liv about the importance of Sunday lunches growing up, his long history of making bespoke children's birthday cakes and the times he turned his campaign team into a makeshift kitchen staff. All this and more is documented in h...

On this week's episode, Christina Lamb reads her letter from Kabul about the situation on the ground under the new Taliban control (00:56). Simon Clarke makes the case for Covid boosters (06:19). And Hannah Moore talks about the horrors of so-called 'American' sweet shops in the West End (15:18). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's episode: why is the Prime Minister so desperate to support the assetocracy? In The Spectator ’s cover story this week, after Boris Johnson revealed his plan to pay for social care with a National Insurance increase, Fraser Nelson says there has been an inversion of the welfare state. It is right to ask the working poor to pay more taxes to help cover the social care of people who co...

Sam's guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Oliver Burkeman. His new book 4,000 Weeks offers some bracing reflections on time: how much we have of it, how best to use it, and why “time management” and productivity gurus have the whole thing upside down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are the Chinese religious? The government’s treatment of Christians and particularly Muslims have been under scrutiny in recent years. But these religious groups only form around 4 per cent of the Chinese population, according to national surveys. So what do the other 96pc believe in? The CCP is famously atheist, but that doesn’t mean the society is faithless. Even today, most Han families, includ...