Society

Friday

5 Jan 2018

The death of the high street has been greatly exaggerated

Predictions of the death of the shop have become as much a ritual of New Year as fireworks and the singing of Auld Lang Syne. The two big retailers which have so far reported on their business over the Christmas period have provided the usual ammunition. Next reported sales up by 1.5 per cent in the 54 days to 24 December (compared with 2016), but only because online sales (which rose 13.6 per cent) offset sales in physical shops (which were down 6.1 per cent). Debenhams had a miserable Christmas, with like-for-like sales falling 2.6 per cent in the 17 weeks to 30 December. It is now thinking of shifting

Isabel Hardman

Should we blame patients for the NHS crisis?

The whose-fault-is-the-NHS-crisis game has taken some strange twists and turns this week, with the debate bouncing from patients costing the health service £1bn last year to Jeremy Hunt having to apologise to patients for cancelling their non-urgent procedures as a result of the increased pressures on hospitals. Political debate tends to prefer black-and-white and easily identifiable scapegoats, but the health service is too complex for that. Take the missed appointments story. Yes, patients failing to turn up cost the health service a staggering amount. But who are those patients? It turns out that the most likely people to do what the NHS classes as a ‘DNA’ (did not attend) are

Jamie Bartlett

The trouble with ‘activists’

I often ask myself why there aren’t more people on the streets over climate change. After all, there is a near scientific consensus that we’re on the path to destroying every single living thing on the planet, including ourselves. Seems a pretty worthwhile cause. Yet you’ll typically find more people attending an English Defence League demo or a bitcoin conference than trying to close a coal mine. I’d like to propose an answer: ‘the activist’. I don’t mean the gran who donates each month to Greenpeace, or even Caroline Lucas. I mean the pros who roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. The people for whom being a climate

Thursday

4 Jan 2018

Raymond Keene

Game of the year | 4 January 2018

It is traditional that in my first column of the new year I review the previous 12 months and select the most outstanding game played at elite level to receive the accolade of game of the year. This time, there is little doubt that the most spectacular game of 2017 was the win by the Chinese grandmaster (and now World Championship candidate) Ding Liren against Jinshi Bei from the Chinese League. This game has become known as the Chinese Immortal and, as with the original bearer of the immortal accolade, Anderssen-Kieseritsky, London 1851, this game sees a queen sacrifice followed by a devastating attack against the opposing king. Indeed, the closing stages

Raymond Keene

no. 487

Black to play. This position is from Kasparov-Navara, St Louis 2017. How did Navara deal with Kasparov’s check? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 9 January or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 d6 Last week’s winner Peter Forrest, London N6

The Spectator

Letters | 4 January 2018

A church for all people Sir: I enjoyed reading Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s account of debates in the Church of England in the interval between our parish mass for Advent 3 and our service of nine lessons and carols (‘Mission impossible?’, 16 December). She asks whether the church is planning ‘a back-door “evangelical takeover”’. The simple answer is no. Yes, the Archbishops’ Council has helped to fund churches such as St Luke’s Gas Street in Birmingham, St Philip’s in Salford, and St George’s Gateshead — though it is a bit harsh to dismiss these churches, which are effective in reaching students, young people and families, as ‘centres for instant conversion’. But

Lara Prendergast

A taste of Taipei

The Taiwanese seem besotted with food. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has almost 700,000 objects in its collection, but the most popular two items are a piece of jade that looks like a pak choi cabbage and a stone which resembles a slice of pork belly. You can judge a nation by what it treasures most — and we only had three days in Taipei, so we decided to let the city’s culinary life dominate our experience. My boyfriend Ed and I arrived at night — hungry and awake. Unlike Bangkok, where we had just flown from, Taipei seemed to be a sleepy city. On a side street, away

Brian Hancill

Under the volcano

Roberto the guide had promised us the most spectacular church in Central America — so why had he brought us to a concrete ruin? Smiling at our confusion, he shooed us through the door and suddenly we were inside a rainbow. Row upon row of stained glass give the arched interior of Iglesia El Rosario a dazzling impact. And if the crumbling facade needs attention, well, the young mayor of San Salvador will have it fixed before long. There’s a big programme of improvements underway in the capital of El Salvador. The square outside the church is full of bulldozers and the dangerous tangles of wires that snake over every

Taki

High life | 4 January 2018

Gstaad When the snow finally stopped, the sublime, silent stars above made for dramatic viewing. Against silhouetted Alpine peaks, starry nights, untainted by light pollution, seem made in Hollywood. I arrived here one week before Christmas determined to get in shape following the debauch of New York. The snow was coming down, the town was empty, the slopes were perfect and both my children were with us. Then disaster: Wafic and Rosemary Saïd’s Christmas present arrived, and my thoughts went out to Bruce Anderson. The present was a super, super-duper magnum of Haut-Brion 1996, which I refused to share with guests and downed only with the family. Actually, I did

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 January 2018

As I stood there, I was reminded of the man of no fixed abode who, several years back, aged 68, made it into the local paper charged with shoplifting. He’d failed to steal a bottle of champagne and a hat to the value of £75. In court, the magistrate had inquired as to the brand of champagne. On being told that it was Pol Roger, he jocularly commended the tramp on his refined taste, and said that it inclined him towards leniency. That gay tramp came to mind now, two days before Christmas, as I stood in front of the champagne section in the French hypermarket, tempted by the special

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 January 2018

Reluctantly, I decided I would have to throw away the MRI scan of my head. I’ve hung on to it for years as potentially crucial evidence. But a New Year clear-out of my renovated house would mean nothing unless I made hard choices. Some randomly kept treasures needed to be culled now the house was almost finished. The scan package was huge — 15 A3-size slides showing my brain from every possible angle. I had it done by a private clinic after I decided the pain in my ears was a tumour caused by mobile phone use. This scare was very popular, you may remember, back when cell phones were

Robin Oakley

The turf | 4 January 2018

Jeremy Clarkson wrote recently about a day at Newbury. He declared: ‘Claiming that horses are different is like saying ants have recognisable faces. They’re all just milk bottles. Identical.’ He went on to insist that ‘in horse racing there never is any action. It’s just meat running about.’ Pausing only to note that he was ‘taken into the paddock so people could take my picture’, Clarkson added that at summertime racing events such as Royal Ascot or the Melbourne Cup ‘women decide that in order to watch a horse running along they must not wear knickers and should fall over in the paddock every five minutes’. For the Great Ego

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 4 January 2018

Well, I had a very merry Christmas thank you — and I hope you did too — but as usual I have torn myself away from the festivities, rushing back to play the EBU’s Year End teams’ tournament. I don’t know why I enjoy this tournament so much — it’s certainly not the very unglam venue. Perhaps it’s because it’s fun and buzzing and everyone seems in a good mood to have got through another Christmas intact. It’s the perfect way to ease yourself into the New Year. My (bridge) resolution is the same as it was last year — take longer before playing to trick one. In

Sarah Vine

Diary – 4 January 2018

Owing to the spectacular uselessness of Ticketmaster, my son missed out on his birthday treat, seats for Hamilton at the newly refurbished Victoria Palace Theatre. Our show was cancelled — just one of a total of 16 — and our allotted replacement date clashed with an immovable engagement. By the time the rusty wheels of Ticketmaster’s nonexistent customer service had ground into action, the entire run was sold out. I asked the boy’s godfather to accompany him in my place. Turns out even that’s verboten. Such is the hype that tickets are non-transferable — and require you to show a printed email confirmation, your original payment card and a photo

Toby Young

Why I’m a target for the twitchfork mob

Shortly after midnight on 1 January my phone began to vibrate repeatedly. Happy New Year messages from absent friends? No, I was trending on Twitter — the third-most popular topic on the network after #NYE. The cause was a story about me in the next day’s Guardian that had just gone live. The headline read: ‘Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator.’ Now, that is wildly overstating it. I’ve been appointed to the board of the Office for Students (OfS), the new body created by merging the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Office for Fair Access — one of 15 people! But the Guardian’s spin

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 4 January 2018

Q. At my son’s school the boys keep a clandestine leatherbound book known as ‘The Bible’, a sort of Rogues Gallery which, inter alia, keeps a detailed account of various misdemeanours and advice on how to circumvent school regulations. It is handed down from year to year, and one of my son’s friends was caught with it by his housemaster. The school believes that this kind of insubordination runs against the ethos of the school and have asked for the boy’s father to destroy the book. I think it is a well-written, amusing account of school life that bucks the trend of political correctness and encourages creativity. It is also

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 January 2018

Home In a message for the New Year, as though it were an immemorial custom, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Most people just want the government to get on and deliver a good Brexit, and that’s exactly what we are doing.’ It seemed a long time since, just before Christmas, Damian Green had resigned as the First Secretary of State, in a letter beginning, ‘I regret that I’ve been asked to resign’ and going on to ‘accept that I should have been clear in my press statements that police lawyers talked to my lawyers in 2008 about the pornography on the computers [in his parliamentary office], and that the

Dot Wordsworth

Can’t help but

Writing about Meghan Markle and the Duchess of Cambridge in the Sunday Times, India Knight wrote: ‘I can’t help but be reminded of the relationship between Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sarah, Duchess of York.’ Reporting on the Ashes for the Guardian, Geoff Lemon wrote: ‘I still can’t help but think that England are going to completely implode within the first hour.’ Reviewing A Christmas Carol in the Times, Dominic Maxwell wrote: ‘You can’t help but grin as a new Scrooge springs to life.’ To me this seems wrong. When a little string of syntactic instructions becomes opaque it can be almost universally misused. You may say I can’t love

William Cook

The call of the wild | 4 January 2018

As Sini harnessed up the huskies they were all yelping with excitement, but once we set off and the forest closed in around us they fell silent. Now the only sound was the soft patter of their paws as they raced ahead, dragging our wooden sledge through the snow. It felt good to be back in Lapland, the last wilderness in Europe, where temperatures can drop to –40C, where the population density is barely one person per square kilometre and where the natural world still reigns supreme. I’d been to Lapland once before, husky sledging, but that was across the border in Sweden, 300 miles away. This time I’d come

Mr Magoo

2340: Booboos

3 1A (eight words in total, one apostrophe) and 41 23 32 36 (seven words, including two accents) give two quotations (in ODQ) by 17 (two words), which possibly contradict each other or themselves. Across 10 With this cube, making something solid? (5) 11 Resolve to remove head of the BBC (5) 13 Old doctor and children taking shelter (5) 14 Tap – what to do when it’s stuck, some say? (6) 15 Crack first of clues remaining (5) 16 Old uncle’s disparaging about a poetical gem (8) 19 Receiver of sorts turning to crime (7) 21 The person about to get out of danger (4) 24 Make rector