The Edition: Trump’s debate woes, how to catch a paedo & the politics of the hotel breakfast buffet

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The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week:

The US election is back on a knife-edge. Republicans hoped this week’s debate would expose Kamala Harris’s weaknesses. ‘They forgot that, when it comes to one-on-one intellectual sparring matches with candidates who aren’t senile, Donald Trump is very bad indeed,’ writes Freddy Gray. ‘A skilled politician would have been able to unpick Harris’s act, but Trump could not.’ Harris is enigmatic to the point of absurdity, but Trump failed to pin her down and may well have squandered his narrow lead. To discuss further, Freddy joined the podcast alongside Amber Duke, Washington editor at Spectator World. (02:05)

Next: Lara and Will take us through some of their favourite pieces from this week, including Fraser Nelson’s diary on the sale of The Spectator Magazine to Sir Paul Marshall.

Then: how to catch a paedophile. London Overwatch, a paedophile hunting group, pose as children online to snare unsuspecting sexual predators. They then confront the suspect and livestream the arrest to thousands of viewers. The Spectator’s Max Jeffery went along to see them catch a man who believes he has been speaking to a 14-year-old girl. Max was joined on the podcast by Nick, who runs London Overwatch. (18:34)

And finally: is it ethical to pocket a sandwich at a hotel breakfast buffet? Laurie Graham explores the ethics of plundering the hotel buffet in the magazine this week. Specifically, she reveals the very British habit that many Brits swipe food from their free breakfasts to save for lunch later in the day. Laurie joined us alongside Mark Jenkins, a former hotel manager in Torquay who listeners may remember from the Channel 4 documentary ‘The Hotel’ (27:51)

Hosted by William Moore and Lara Prendergast.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Subscribe to The Spectator in September and get three months of website and app access absolutely free.
0:06.0	Follow the Tory leadership campaign, Labor's inaugural budget and the US elections with Britain's best informed journalists.
0:12.0	And get your first three months free, only in September.
0:15.2	Go to www.spictator.com.com.com.com.uk forward slash sale 24.
0:33.2	Hello and welcome to The Edition Podcast, where each week we shed a little light on the thought process behind putting the world's oldest weekly magazine to bed.
0:37.6	I'm Laura Prendergars, the Spectator's Executive Editor.
0:40.9	And I'm William Moore, the Spectator's Features Editor.
0:43.4	This week, we ask whether the presidential race is now Kamala Harris's to lose.
0:48.4	We meet the paedophile hunters going viral online, and we debate the moral mindfield
0:53.6	of the hotel breakfast buffet.
0:59.0	A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.
1:03.0	In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats,
1:09.0	they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating, they're eating the pets of the
1:13.0	people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.
1:19.0	That was former President Donald Trump speaking during Tuesday's presidential debate with
1:24.2	Kamala Harris. The consensus, even in Republican circles, seems to be that
1:28.8	Harris came out on top. She managed to avoid sticky issues about her political past and goaded
1:34.9	Trump into some rambling and, at times, somewhat outrageous remarks. So, was this debate a game-changer
1:42.3	in the race to be the next US president in the same way that the Trump-Biden debate was?
1:48.0	That's the question Freddie Gray asks in the magazine this week.
1:51.3	And he writes our cover.
1:52.6	The headline is, Game on, Freddy Gray on America's very unpredictable election.
	...

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