The Spectator Australia

“I don’t agree with the Chief Rabbi.” Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband responds to Ephraim Mirvis’ comments that it’s “a dark day for British Jews” following the announcement of UK sanctions against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. pic.twitter.com/0Ea9j0iMFx — BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) September 9, 2026 Red Ed Miliband graced the airwaves this morning to inform the Chief Rabbi that he is wrong about the impact of UK sanctions on Israeli settlements.

Farewell, then, Monty Don, the Gardener’s World presenter who didn’t seem to like gardeners very much. By gardener, I don’t really mean the kind of people who watch the programme Don has fronted for the past 23 years, and is now retiring from, much to the sadness of his many fans. The BBC’s flagship gardening show is aimed at amateurs, and for many of them, Monty is a national treasure and his garden at Longmeadow is the stuff of dreams. I’m not quite so sure.

Laid out in the British Museum like a ruler, the Bayeux Tapestry tells its story with relentless, graphic mastery. Harold sails to Normandy and back. He breaks his promise to support William’s claim to the English throne. The Norman duke invades England. Trees are hewed into ships. Weapons are loaded. Armies meet near Hastings. Horses circle, then gallop, then fall (the artistry in those horses!). Men are massacred. King Harold dies. And so… The tapestry’s last bit is missing.

Samuel Thawley’s essay in these pages this week did something Australian economic writing almost never does. It located the pain. Not in a national average, where pain goes to die, but in cohorts and in postcodes: Blaxland, Watson, Fowler, and McMahon in Sydney’s south-west, Bradfield and Menzies on the leafy side, the late 20s and early 30s where the renter share keeps climbing. His formulation is the one worth keeping. A tide changes governments. A channel breeds insurgencies.

A couple of weekends ago, I was reminded of my recent trip to London by Bernard Salt’s article in The Australian. Writing from Amsterdam, Bernard was struck by something that he hadn’t really noticed before: Europeans are just not as risk-averse as Australians. In his article he mentions trams running fast through crowded streets, uneven cobbled footpaths, smoking in outdoor cafes, fireworks in the hands of ordinary people, and bikes being ridden without helmets.

The triumphant unveiling of Byron’s statue in Hyde Park today marks the end of 200 years of dithering about his significance. When he died in 1824, campaigning for Greek independence, he was the toast of Europe – far better known than the other romantic poets. He was just 36. But to say that Byron’s legacy has been contested since would be an understatement.

In our late democratic culture, where rights come cheap and easy, one could be forgiven for thinking our freedoms work like toggle switches. Political leaders like to promote the idea that as times get tough, we can shut off a few freedoms here and there, as if, when times get easier, we can simply flick a few back on. This week, the ‘off’ switch is flickering again, as the Albanese government threatens to entrench its censorship regime by tightening laws governing social media content.

When the Earth shakes – climate reparations fall out. That may be the eventual lesson of the Nepal flood that took place in August 2026 and left thousands either dead or missing. It was a tragedy. An earthquake dislodged part of a glacier which crashed into a river, temporarily blocking it, before a torrent of water was forced through the steep and narrow ravines, washing away settlements cuddled up against the river. Sad, but an inevitable consequence of the area’s geography.

The last Beefeater restaurants are closing their doors tomorrow after Whitbread, the owner of Premier Inn and once one of Britain’s biggest restaurant companies, announced that it was shutting 197 of its standalone restaurants and pubs. Beefeater’s end marks a sad end for a restaurant that, in the nineties, was serving 19 million meals a year. A 1997 menu change was an event “more significant than” a launch by Terence Conran or Marco Pierre White, according to the Independent.

Since July 2024, British policy towards Israel and the wider Middle East has increasingly substituted declaratory positioning for strategy. Ceasefires, recognition, sanctions, settlement pressure, humanitarian access and preservation of the two-state formula have progressively been elevated into objectives in themselves, without sufficient attention to the security and political conditions required to make any of them durable.