The Spectator's summer party is a reliable fixture on the London season, the kind of event where a man can feel his opinions confirmed by the quality of the wine. Michael Gove, now the magazine's editor, will host this year's gathering. Among his guests, reportedly, will be Azealia Banks.
Miss Banks is a rapper from Harlem. She is gifted. She is also the person who spent three days on social media in 2016 describing fellow artist Zayn Malik in terms that the Guardian declined to print in full. She later wrote things about actor Russell Crowe at a Los Angeles party in October of that same year that resulted in her removal from the premises and a police report. In 2020 she dug up and boiled her dead cat on Instagram. She has publicly feuded with Iggy Azalea, Azealia Banks's mother, Cardi B, Sarah Palin, and a number of other parties in ways that have generated hundreds of thousands of words of coverage, almost none of it flattering.
Her claim to this invitation is that she called Kemi Badenoch “iconic.” That is the whole of it.
Gove, who has spent three decades inside British public life explaining what conservatism means and why it matters, has apparently decided that a favorable tweet from a New York entertainer constitutes an endorsement worth celebrating at a garden party in Westminster. The price of the entry ticket is a single adjective posted online.
There is a longer argument available about whether the Conservative Party, polling where it polls, can afford to be selective about its admirers. That argument is not wrong. It is also not the interesting one.
The interesting one is what this reveals about the hunger. A serious magazine does not import a transatlantic celebrity brawler to its summer drinks because the ideas on offer are sufficient. It does so because the room needs filling with something louder than the ideas. The Spectator has published since 1828. It survived Peel, Disraeli, Suez, and Mrs. Thatcher's three terms. It arrives at 2026 requiring Azealia Banks to make the party feel alive.
The invitations went out on or around 28 May 2026. The party is scheduled for late June. The cat has been dead for six years.