On this episode, Richard Dawkins explains how to convert an atheist like him to a Christian (00:37), Lisa Haseldine says the German army is in a dire state (05:53), Douglas Murray looks at the return of the Trump show (12:44), Cindy Yu reviews a Chinese intelligence officers account of life under the CCP (20:14), and Mary Wakefield wonders if it’s wrong to track her child (25:14).
On the podcast: gangsterism or government? The Covid Inquiry has moved to Scotland and, in his cover story for the magazine, our editor Fraser Nelson looks at the many revelations uncovered by Jamie Dawson KC. Fraser describes how civil servants were enlisted into what he calls an ‘SNP secret state’ and how SNP corruption is threatening devolution. Joining us to discuss is the Coffee House Scots team: Times columnist Iain Macwhirter, The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons and The Spectator’...
On this week’s Book Club my guest is the writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, whose new book is On Giving Up . He tells me how literature relates to psychoanalysis, why censorship makes life possible, and what Freud got wrong.
Freddy Gray is joined in New Hampshire by Ben Domenech, editor at large of Spectator World. On the podcast they discuss the pro-Trump establishment of the Republican party; how the Republican cohort have changed since the Obama election and what issues Trump can identify that appeal to voters.
Today, the US and China are at loggerheads. There’s renewed talk of a Cold War as Washington finds various ways to cut China out of key supply chains and to block China’s economic development in areas like semiconductors and renewables. There’s trade, of course, but the imbalance in that (some $370 billion in 2022) tilts in China’s favour and only serves as another source of ammunition for America’s Sinosceptics. China, on the other hand, is also decoupling in its own way, moving fast to cut its...
Julie Bindel speaks Bob Jensen who is an academic and writer based in Toronto. Bob has authored several papers on the damaging and exploitative effects of the porn industry. On the podcast, Julie and Bob's feminist critique of pornography; why they have both become disillusioned by the left and how Bob got cancelled when he weighed into the gender wars.
For this special Americano podcast, Freddy Gray is in New Hampshire with the Spectator US team, Matt McDonald and Zach Christenson covering the chilly primaries. Are both Ron De Santis and Nikki Haley's defeat a foregone conclusion?
This week: Spectator editor Fraser Nelson on why the Emirati ownership of the magazine matters (00:30), Robert Hardman on the time the King could have poisoned Rishi Sunak (06:24) and Michael Simmons on why sobriety isn't worth it (13:02).
Theo Clarke is Conservative MP for Stafford. She is the Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Kenya and sits on the International Development Select Committee. Before being elected she set up and sold her business and then went on to be Chief Executive of an international development charity backed by Bill Gates. Theo got involved in politics after the election expenses scandal and stood in Bristol East in 2015 and 2017. She currently Chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Birth Trauma and recent...
This week: The Spectator’s cover story looks at how Britain is sobering up, forgoing alcohol in favour of alcohol free alternatives. In his piece, Henry Jeffreys – author of Empire of Booze – attacks the vice of sobriety and argues that the abstinence of young Britons will have a detrimental impact on the drinks industry and British culture. He joins the podcast alongside Camilla Tominey, associate editor of the Telegraph and a teetotaler. (01:27) Also this week: could Mongolia be the next geopo...
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Rebecca Boyle to talk about her new book Our Moon: A Human History . She tells me how we know that the moon is more than just an inert lump of rock in the sky and how the whole of human life – and civilisation – may depend on it.
Alexandra Collier is a Melbourne-based writer who has written for theatre, screen and print. She is a MacDowell fellow and a recipient of the RE Ross Trust playwrites' award. Her memoir Inconceivable , about her journey to becoming a solo Mum by choice, is out now. On the podcast she tells Lara and Liv why restaurants are inherently theatrical places, discusses her experience with IVF, and explains that it takes a village to raise a child. Photo credit: Karin Locke....
Just before Christmas, the Vatican's new doctrinal chief Cardinal Victor ‘Tucho’ Fernandez unveiled a new style of blessing designed to make gay couples feel at home in church without changing the Church's teaching on marriage. The Argentinian Tucho has for years been Pope Francis's protégé – but for how much longer? The new gay blessings, supposedly blessing the couple but not their union, have been decisively rejected by all the Catholic bishops of Africa, forcing Francis to backtrack and say ...
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.
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.
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 running mate. Also this week: the old trope is that there is nothing more ex than an ex prime minister...
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 pogroms to Paris; and then had to contend with the rise of a new and still more dangerous antisemitism u...
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 Spectator is hiring! We are looking for a new producer to join our broadcast team working across our ...
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 relations? How have demographics, economic competition and recent international conflicts affected the ...
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 campaign.
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.
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 hiring! We are looking for a new producer to join our broadcast team working across our suite of podcasts...
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 partition of Ukraine. Owen joins the podcast alongside The Spectator’s Svitlana Morenets who gives her ...
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 million people. But fierce arguments continue to this day over whether the 'Holodomor' was a natural disa...
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 perfect’ carbonara, and why food is a such a great character device for novelists....
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 many of the agonies of his adolescence and young manhood. What is it to be a man? Are we doomed to l...
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 later ran the Conservative group before leading the Council itself. In 2017 she joined the General London...
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 Camus is the original centrist Dad, and why David Miliband’s victory speech is perhaps one of the best ...
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 ‘truth’, which creates an orthodoxy where diversity of opinion is not welcomed. Science is meant to be o...
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 packet custard, and tells Liv and Lara why Le Gavroche is closing.
