Best of the Spectator

This week, Michael is joined by Munira Mirza. Raised in Oldham and educated at Oxford, Munira worked at Policy Exchange before serving as Deputy Mayor of London under Boris Johnson and later as Director of the No.10 Policy Unit, where she helped shape the Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto. She now leads Civic Future and the think tank Fix Britain.
In the first of this two-part interview, Munira reflects on Labour’s vulnerability in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, and the ‘serious threat’ it faces if the Muslim votes flees to the Greens. She discusses the politicisation of religious identity, the influence of Islamism in Britain, and what she sees as a failure of public authorities to confront hard truths.
They also discuss the news this week that Valdo Calocane – the man who killed three people in Nottingham in 2023 – was released from hospital in 2020 because health professionals were concerned about the disproportionate number of black men who were being detained in the mental health system. Munira argues that fear of being accused of institutional racism has distorted decision-making, a scandal of potentially greater magnitude than the grooming gangs and with serious consequences for public safety.
Finally, she revisits Brexit and the 2019 realignment, defending the decision to leave the EU and arguing that levelling up was an attempt to fix a broken economic model built on high immigration and weak productivity.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

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On the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dr Yuri Stoyanov – of SOAS university in London – joins Damian Thompson to reflect on the religious dimensions of the war once again. The theological gulf between Russia and Ukraine is perhaps comparable to the political one and, for now, seems insurmountable, with the war increasingly being framed in some spheres as a 'Holy War'. You have to stretch back to the First World War to find a war within Christendom framed in these terms, but what effect is this having on the family of Orthodox churches across Europe and the Middle East? And how can we better understand this strand of Russian 'jihadism'?

Plus, what has the impact of the Papal succession been? And, how have other religious groups – such an estimated 2 million Buddhists – reacted in Russia?

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

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Two titans of broadcasting – LBC’s Iain Dale and Sky's Jon Craig – join deputy political editor James Heale for a whistle-stop tour of British by-elections. From Oxford City in 1938 to Chesterfield in 1984 right up to Runcorn in 2025, why do by-elections matter? When have they been most significant? And are longer vote counts the product of fractured politics in the modern age?

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

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There is an area of public spending nearly double what Britain spends on defence, more than policing borders or our streets. It's servicing the costs of what Britain has borrowed in the past. The growing debt bomb is continuing to climb with real consequences for the taxpayer. Michael Simmons takes a look at the data and speaks to the economist Paul Johnson about what political measures the government will have to take to tackle Britain's debt crisis, what it means for the taxpayer and why the reviving modern monetary theory movement is nonsense.

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My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the philosophy professor Hanna Pickard, whose new book is What Would You Do Alone In A Cage With Nothing But Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. She tells me why we need a new approach to ‘the puzzle of addiction’. She says the idea that addicts are helplessly in thrall to the compulsions of a ‘broken brain’ is wrong, that we need to understand how sometimes using even if it's looks like killing you can make a sort of sense – and describes how her own one-off experience of morphine set her on the path of trying to change the way we think about drugs.

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