Louis Sarkozy, the son of the former President of France, says those who took part in the rioting and looting at the weekend have done more to boost Marine Le Pen's election chances than her own campaign staff, and that her strategy is to let France disintegrate.

Watch in full | youtu.be/Z44ZraRn35w @napsarkozy

In praise of Master and Commander

✍️ Madeline Grant

spectator.com/article/in-pra…

Old recipe books have a deceptive frankness to them, with their terse introductions, blunt instructions and dependence on store-cupboard staples like onion, flour, butter and milk. Even so, the typical modern cook will soon run into trouble.

Unless, of course, he or she knows take apart – cuts of meat, isn't afraid of lard, congealed fat or jelly, and can cope with fish in all its forms.

It's the loss of this latter set of skills, filleting in particular, that has coincided with the shrinking of our seafood horizons, recently published research suggests.

✍️ Zoe Strimpel

Article | spectator.com/article/the-br…

Most leaders of the most controversial powerful countries in the world today – Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and probably the men who really run Iran – are over 70.

Trump, 80, still desperate to be linked with ted bombings of Iran and his complicity in Russian attacks on Ukraine (‘Russia has been fine on Ukraine’), now wants to get together with Putin, 74, and Xi, 73, for a summit on denuclearisation.

✍️ Charles Moore

Article | spectator.com/article/trump-… | @CharlesHMoore

Andy Burnham, together with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham, appeared on a charity special of Channel 4's Gogglebox last night. The show began in 2013, but is still going, as all hit TV shows must in this benighted century.

The novelty of the format – watching viewers watch TV – rticipants inevitably started acting up for the cameras. It may be a false memory, but I'm sure I remember the show being more caustic, a bit sharper. It is now crushingly cosy and twee. So, perfect for our Andy then.

✍️ Gareth Roberts

Article | spectator.com/article/burnha… | @OldRoberts953

As the Chancellor puts the final touches to his first Budget, the warnings about unfilled black holes seem only to grow, along with the split between spending-cutters and tax-raisers on what to do about it. As an avowed spending-cutter, I nonetheless find myself with the t.

Let the owners, leasers and drivers of those monster cars progressively crowding my modest little hatchback off the road pay their way – and the bigger the tax penalty, the better.

✍️ Mary Dejevsky

Article | spectator.com/article/bring-…

Some statistics are not just illuminating, they are downright shocking. Here's one. At the University of Texas at Austin, one of America's top universities, only 300 students graduated with a major in the humanities.

That would be a big number if UT graduated 1,200 students, but bout 12,000. The percentage of humanities major is 0.025 percent.

It rounds to zero.

✍️ Charles Lipson

Article | spectator.com/article/anybod…

As Israel prepares for its election on October 27, the most consequential in decades, I find myself missing my late friend Khamis Abulafia. Khamis was a scion of the famous Jaffa Abulafia dynasty. The fifth child of his parents, he was named for the Arabic word for five.

The oking Clock Tower Square, is a local landmark – and a symbol of co-existence, closing each year for eight days on Passover, when Jews are forbidden from eating leavened bread. Khamis was a beloved figure in Jaffa, a bridge between its Arab and Jewish inhabitants.

✍️ Adam LeBor

Article | spectator.com/article/israel…

You need a better class of work, my boy.' My GP father's well-meaning but unhelpful reaction to my second redundancy, both of which occurred in 1989. I was barely 27; he had a job for life.

Four short years but a historical era earlier, I had sallied forth to the London Stock 985 as a graduate trainee with Laurie, Milbank & Co.

Convinced of the old boy network, without malice my erstwhile lecturer John Hutton, now Lord Hutton and former Labour defence secretary, gently ribbed, 'So Uncle Laurie came up trumps, then.' There was no Uncle Laurie.

✍️ Alastair Irvine

Article | spectator.com/article/rememb…

I've just been to the west of Ireland, perhaps the greenest place I have ever seen, and one of the most comprehensively stripped of nature too.

Driving north from Shannon, you pass mile after mile of luminous green, almost treeless fields, until the road rises onto the dramatic .

We were there to celebrate the marriage of my step-nephew (if such a thing exists) Isaac Ferry to beautiful conservationist Elizabeth Quartararo. The ceremony took place high above the Atlantic, at an ethereal spot beloved of Isaac's late mother, my sister-in-law Lucy Birley.

✍️ Ben Goldsmith

Article | spectator.com/article/the-my…

‘Oxford Street ought to be the finest thoroughfare in the world.’ To try and live up to that potential, it's going traffic-free tomorrow. This does not foreshadow the end of Western civilisation, nor another front in the Mayor of London's war on cars. It is just good business.
his article is not mine. It was written in 1879 by Charles Dickens Jr. We have had 150 years to think about it and now have the evidence base, growth agenda, and political leadership to make it happen.

✍️ Arthur Kay.

Article | spectator.com/article/pedest…

Rosie smiles when her nephew asks her if she's still swimming in the sea in October. It is, in fact, when she starts enjoying it again.

July and August are all very well, but her spot behind the harbour wall fills up with holidaymakers, annexing the rock where she likes to and jumping into the sea with their children, as if they were swimming for fun.

✍️ Anonymous

Article | spectator.com/article/the-wi…

Oxford Street is set to be pedestrianised on Monday. The change to what is often called the world’s longest shopping street is controversial and opposed by Westminster Council.

But London Mayor Sadiq Khan, having taken control of the area via the Oxford Street Development strianisation will revive its flagging fortunes and bring back the shoppers in the run-up to Christmas.

✍️ Alex Klaushofer

Article | spectator.com/article/pedest… | @alexklaushofer

It's a tabloid phrase you're unlikely to hear often on BBC News, but 'double-whammy' seems a fitting description of what BBC staff have faced in yet another week of editorial turmoil and fresh announcements of cuts.

The Telegraph's revelations that civil servants have been t the BBC, contributing to articles and blog posts misleadingly bylined as written by members of 'BBC News' and 'BBC Verify', have been met with irritation and bafflement.

✍️ Charlie Walsham

Article | spectator.com/article/inside…

Today the clocks change and today is St Crispin's Day, anniversary of the battles of Agincourt and Balaclava.

Legend says Crispin and Crispinian were twins, beheaded under Diocletian. Aristocratic Romans who supported themselves in exile as shoemakers, they are the patron saints addlers, and curriers.

The feast fell from observance long after the professions it celebrated had ceased to be common. But Shakespeare keeps it alive.

✍️ Druin Burch

Article | spectator.com/article/st-cri…

It's a tiny bit lazy, if you ask me. There's a growing market, as reported by a Sunday newspaper, for 'pre-trained' puppies.

These are puppies aged six months and upwards, which will arrive at your house with '100 per cent perfect recall', won't tug on the lead, won't chase ill lie quietly at your feet in a pub or restaurant. The only catch? One of these robo-puppies will set you back £15,000.

✍️ Sophia Money-Coutts

Article | spectator.com/article/buying…

Is demand for the water of life running dry? I've just returned from a trip to Islay in Scotland, which has more whisky distilleries per square mile than anywhere else in the UK, and several of its famous single malts are struggling.

Suntory, which owns Bowmore and Laphroaig, hat it was merging the staff of the two brands, with Bowmore ceasing production until the end of the year, and Laphroaig putting its planned expansion on hold.

✍️ Toby Young

Article | spectator.com/article/are-we… | @toadmeister

In the late 1980s, when I had rarely seen the inside of a high-end restaurant, I happened upon one local to me at the time, in Finsbury Park.

Jacques – a small, exquisite French gaff named after its chef and owner – was nestled between a newsagent and an ironmonger on a grotty
So very French was Jacques himself that he was once overheard (via a kitchen intercom) using the most offensive of four-letter words to describe the English, when someone had complained about the size of the dishes.

✍️ Julie Bindel

Article | spectator.com/article/end-th… | @bindelj

Sometimes, unexpectedly good news comes from nowhere. So it has proved with the happy tidings that the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square has been saved.

After a long and uncertain 21-month period in which it looked as if the cinema's lease might be prematurely curtailed her, the company has signed a new 25-year lease, sans break clause, with Zedwell PSQ Ltd, the building's owner.

✍️ Alexander Larman

Article | spectator.com/article/long-l… | @alexlarman

Russiagate was, famously, something of a damp squib. Donald Trump was never a secret Kremlin asset. Moscow did not internet-brainwash the American public into electing him.

It was mostly mad bunkum, which the desperate and deluded media pushed relentlessly for months just accept the idea that a brash, rude real-estate television tycoon was now their Commander in Chief.

But now, with the midterms upon us and a Democratic majority in Congress beckoning, we're about to have what could be a far more explosive sequel. My working title is Gulfgate: This Time It's Serious!

✍️ Freddy Gray

Article | spectator.com/article/brace-… | @Freddygray31

Penny for the thoughts of Ilhan Omar, the "Squad" member and Democratic Congresswoman for Minnesota's 5th district, who finds herself the object of affection for at least two of Donald Trump's government departments.

Omar said Wednesday that she plans to move out of her DC home, round two dozen Department of Homeland Security agents in the early hours of October 12.

Cockburn could retread the well-worn path about how Trump 2.0 was supposed to augur the end of "lawfare" and the weaponization of government, but he'll spare you.

✍️ Cockburn

Article | spectator.com/article/omar-f… | @Cockburn_DC