The Edition: Tory wars, the reality of trail hunting & is Sally Rooney-mania over?
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
That’s the question Katy Balls asks in the magazine this week as she looks ahead to the Conservative Party conference. Each Tory hopeful will be pitching for the support of MPs and the party faithful ahead of the next round of voting. Who’s got the most to lose, and could there be some sneaky tactics behind the scenes? Katy joins the podcast to discuss, alongside Conservative peer Ruth Porter, who ran Liz Truss’s leadership campaign in 2022. We also include an excerpt from the hustings that Katy conducted with each of the candidates earlier this week. You can find the full interviews on The Spectator’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SpectatorTV (02:07)
Next: should trail hunting be banned? Flora Watkins concedes that the hunting community has not helped its case over the years when considering the future of the sport. However, she argues that a minority should not spoil a sport that is ‘thrilling, sociable and bloodless’. In a heated discussion, Flora joins the podcast to make her case with campaigner Dominic Dyer. (17:43)
And finally: what to make of Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo? In the magazine this week Claire Lowdon argues that the novel is an ‘enjoyable old-fashioned love story… but high literature it is not’. Why? Reviewing the book for the Times James Marriott argues Rooney’s characters are ‘sensitive’ but also too ‘precious and prissy’. How warranted is the criticism of Rooney? Claire and James join the pod. (31:50)
Hosted by William Moore and Gus Carter.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Spectatio magazine is the greatest magazine of English language. Subscribe today for just £12, |
| 0:05.0 | and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online to see for yourselves. Also, against my advice is editor, |
| 0:12.3 | we're giving away a free £20, John Lewis-Owitro's voucher. Given that you're spending 12 quid, |
| 0:17.4 | you can do the maths. Go to spectator.com.com.uk forward slash voucher. But |
| 0:22.1 | don't hurry because this offer probably loses us money. |
| 0:32.5 | Hello and welcome to the edition podcast from The Spectator, where each week we shed a little |
| 0:37.0 | light on the thought |
| 0:38.0 | process behind putting the world's oldest weekly magazine to bed. I'm William Moore, the Spectator's |
| 0:43.2 | features editor. And I'm Gus Carter, the Spectator's Deputy Features Editor. This week, we ask, |
| 0:48.8 | what do the four conservative candidates stand for? What's the future for trail hunting? And is Sally Rooney Mania over? |
| 1:00.5 | Head of Tory Party conference, Katie Balls, our political editor, interviewed each of the |
| 1:08.3 | leadership candidates for Spectator TV. Why do you think the Tories lost the 2024 election? |
| 1:13.9 | We lost the ear of the British public. |
| 1:16.7 | They stopped listening to us. |
| 1:18.9 | The government didn't address properly in a truly conservative way, the big issues. |
| 1:25.0 | But the bottom line was people didn't really understand what we stood for. |
| 1:28.8 | There's many reasons, but the fundamental one is we lost the trust of the British people. |
| 1:33.0 | You can watch the full hustings on the Spectator's YouTube channel, Spectator TV, |
| 1:37.3 | and find a short transcript in the magazine opposite Katie Bowles' cover piece, |
| 1:41.4 | where she writes, Fight Club, who comes out on top? Katie says that next week |
| 1:47.2 | is the most important week of this very long-running Tory leadership campaign, where the final two |
| 1:52.7 | candidates are set to be decided. And she looks ahead at the dark arts and guerrilla tactics |
... |
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