Society

Thursday

Taki

High life | 20 July 2017

I switch personalities at Spectator parties, depending who the guests are: for our readers’ tea party, I am a warm and gracious semi-host, swigging scotch, but graciously answering questions about my drinking, love life and writing habits. For our summer Speccie spree, I turn into a tight-lipped, street-smart tough guy, conscious of my brave obscurity but determined not to give in to the Rachel Johnson syndrome of self-advertisement. (Whew, that wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be.) The tea party for our readers is always a polite affair. After all, the ham better be nice to the knife, or else. I particularly liked meeting the father

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 20 July 2017

Valencia was a furnace. During the short ride from the airport, the taxi driver supplemented his chat about the weather with a photo on his phone sent by his father-in-law. His father-in-law lives about an hour away. The photo showed a bus stop on a deserted street. Attached to the bus shelter was a temperature gauge with large green digital numbers showing 50.5°C. Little wonder, observed the taxi driver, that the street was deserted. He dropped me outside the Sercotel Sorolla Palace hotel where Eva was waiting on the steps. Eva was the Spanish PR lady, or shepherdess, in charge of 13 travel journalists from all over Europe on a

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 July 2017

Two months after I cancelled Sky, a strange letter arrived in the post. ‘We are writing to you because we haven’t heard anything from you since we previously wrote to you about your overdue account,’ it said. Of course, I realise that it is easier for a rich man to get himself prosecuted for attempting to push his camel through the eye of a needle than for a customer to leave Sky. But I had taken no chances. My Sky account was terminated not by a call centre flunky trilling ‘And how can I help yourself today? Can I call yourself Melissa?’ It was cancelled by a ‘service excellence consultant’

Robin Oakley

The turf | 20 July 2017

A woman I once encountered at the dining table whose prime years were clearly behind her described herself as ‘approaching fifty’. Noting our raised eyebrows she added, ‘Look dears, I don’t have to say from which side.’ Suddenly the weighing room too seems full of veterans. Lightweight jockey Jimmy Quinn is certainly approaching 50 from the wrong end while Frankie Dettori and Franny Norton, both still in their riding prime, are 46. It was, though, the 49-year-old John Egan, who recently shrugged off a chipped vertebra in a Kempton fall with a teenager’s resilience, who had me comparing. I noted lately the remarkable coincidence that both he and his talented

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 20 July 2017

The first week of July is heaven for those of us who don’t normally hear the words ‘bridge’ and ‘holiday’ in the same sentence. Off we trot to Biarritz to walk on the beach, eat delicious food and, at around 4.30 p.m. every afternoon, take a stroll in the sun to the old Bellevue casino to play some bridge — finishing in time for dinner ofc. Back home the LMBA held their London Swiss Congress last weekend at YC — no walk on the beach that. Swiss is a punishing format; you continually play people with the same score as you so the last couple of matches can often decide

Jan Moir

Diary – 20 July 2017

Monday morning and I am heading south on Harley Street towards a rendezvous with ramifications, a date that is also a terrible coincidence. The last time I was on this page I had just been despatched to the Viva Mayr clinic in Austria to have colonic irrigation. Bizarrely, here I am again, on another assignment to have the same treatment, this time at its new London outpost. Why oh why do section editors keep sending me to do this? I rack my brain for answers, for clues, a hint, a sign, but nothing springs to mind. Any ideas? Keep them to yourself. Speaking of deep cleansing, the Cumbrian family firm

Toby Young Toby Young

Winter is nearly here – bring on the body count

As a Game of Thrones fan, I feel ambivalent about the fact that the saga is finally wending its way to a conclusion. The latest season, which debuted on Sunday, is the last series but one; there will only be a total of 13 episodes across both. On the one hand, I feel sad about the fact that a television series that has given me so much pleasure is coming to an end. But I’m also a little relieved. At times, following the sprawling cast of characters and multiple story-lines has felt a bit too much like hard work. The past few seasons have become bogged down as the writers

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 20 July 2017

Q. Last summer a friend of my brother-in-law’s house-sat for us while we were in Greece for a week. We paid him £25 a day and all he had to do was look after our dog and water the garden when necessary. I left food for him, including fruit, in our fridge. Mary, I say including fruit because, to my annoyance, when we got back we found he had stripped my raspberry canes of every single raspberry and eaten most of our figs. Because we couldn’t find anyone else he is returning this year and it might sound feeble but I just can’t tell him not to help himself. What

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Salt-beef delirium

Katz’s Delicatessen, established 1888, is a theme park of Jewish-American food, with tribute gift shop, on the lower east side of Manhattan. There is nowhere more Jewish than Katz’s except Haredi Brooklyn, but if you go there you don’t come back. Katz’s offers a gentler Jewish experience, if you can conceive of such a thing, or it at least attempts it; it offers a kind of Judaism you can enjoy over lunch, which I find amazing because I have never managed it. (No one, for instance, talks about the Holocaust in Katz’s, not because they don’t want to but because they can’t. Try saying Treblinka with a dumpling in your

Dot Wordsworth

Support

The Foreword didn’t bode well. This was on the first page of The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices. It was a ‘Foreword by Mathew’ as though he were some promising infant. In the second sentence he gave thanks ‘for the support and the respect for my independence which has been shown by her [Theresa May’s] team’. Two things — support and respect — should have a plural verb: have. As for support, we would hear it more than 100 further times. Support came thick and fast, more than once per page. Sometimes it meant ‘agree with’: ‘We support the basic principle of a more dynamic, responsive welfare system.’ More

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 July 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, told MPs before the summer recess: ‘No backbiting, no carping. The choice is me or Jeremy Corbyn. Nobody wants that.’ Her remarks followed a spate of leaks and negative briefings from cabinet ministers. It was said that Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had called public-sector workers ‘overpaid’. He responded by warning cabinet colleagues against leaking, but maintained a 10 per cent pay disparity was a ‘simple fact’. In a presumed response to a poster on the wall of the European Council’s Brexit taskforce meeting room, headed ‘Tintin and the Brexit Plan’ and showing Captain Haddock lighting a fire in a lifeboat, Boris

Pabulum

2319: Poem III

Unclued lights are words from a famous poem whose title will appear in the completed grid and must be shaded. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across 4    Fox then dish regulator (11, hyphened) 11    Foals need bananas like certain bats (9, hyphened) 12    Some ignore a great bore (5) 13    Payments to Pope in old coin and notes (7) 14    Nun pig ignored for a long time (3) 15    Tidy number dine on beef (4) 20    Underhand goblin only within Quebec (7) 21    Liqueur I get with round (7) 24    Tinker and MC possibly in conversation (6) 25    Powdered fruit sustains me (6) 29    Cardinal we inducted in the middle (5) 31    Girl

Sabuhi Gard

Jane Austen finds a surprising fan in the Bank of England’s Mark Carney

Winchester Cathedral, where Jane Austen was laid to rest 200 years ago this week, was the venue chosen for the unveiling of the new £10 bank note, which will feature a portrait of the English novelist. On a humid July day, tourists, pensioners, banknote geeks and a few noisy children packed the aisles. The atmosphere was expectant, as worshippers gathered to get a glimpse of ‘Reverend’ Carney at the pulpit. Smartphones were whipped out as soon as he started speaking. I travelled with my family as an off-duty journalist and was expecting the rather dry and technical explanations favoured by the Bank of England governor in the inflation report. But

The Spectator

No. 2316: Divine alteration

Redundant words were 12A virgin, 16A crazy, 38A mammal, 18D state, 21D greed, 25D tendon, 34D extremist. These respectively defined 14A vestal, 20D lunatic, 6D marsupial, 23D Indiana, 33A cupidity, 15A paxwax, 41A absolutist. Roman gods (underlined) in these words were turned into their Greek equivalents.   First prize Nadya James, Heanor, Derbyshire Runners-up Ben Stephenson, London SW12; Rowan Priestman, Burdrop, Banbury, Oxon

Lucy Vickery

Cat call (no. 3007)

In Competition No. 3007 you were invited to submit a poem about Larry, the Downing Street cat. Larry came to No. 10 in 2011 from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home during David Cameron’s premiership. He was left behind when the family moved on, though Mr Cameron denied that this was because he hated cats. Although he has been less than impressive in his role as Chief Mouser — apparently spending more time kipping than hunting down rodents — the ten-year-old tabby has inspired a book, a cartoon strip and has accrued 136,000 followers on Twitter. Honourable mentions go to Sylvia Fairley, Frank Upton, Basil Ransome-Davies, Paul Carpenter, Frank Osen and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Single mothers, not wealthy presenters, are the real victims of the BBC’s gender disparity

There is a group of women who have every reason to feel aggrieved to learn that the BBC is paying Gary Lineker £1.8 million a year and John Humphreys between £600,000 and £650,000. But it doesn’t include Jane Garvey and Emily Maitlis, both of whom appear to be grubbing by on a little below £150,000. It is the 101,000 women found guilty last year of evading the TV licence. If you want a genuinely worrying gender disparity, forget the BBC’s highest-earners and look at the balance of people at the bottom of society who are being dragged through the courts for the non-payment of the tax. The Perry Review into the TV licence,

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Madness in the Med

On this week’s episode, Isabel Hardman is joined by guests to look at the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and how NGOs might be making things worse, rather than better. We also wonder whether Bristol should be ashamed of its past, and discuss binge drinking with Julie Burchill. Fewer than 300 miles off the Libyan coast lies the Italian island of Lampedusa. With a population of just over 6,000, Lampedusa has become the nexus of a migration crisis that has rumbled on for years, with seemingly no resolution in sight. In this week’s magazine, Nicholas Farrell reports from Italy on a crisis that he believes is being compounded by boats run

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Andrea Leadsom hails Jane Austen as one of our ‘greatest living authors’

Oh dear. Although there has been much excitement this week at the news that Jane Austen will feature on the new ten pound note, some appear to have got a bit carried away in their celebrations. Speaking in the Chamber this morning, Andrea Leadsom shared her personal joy at the news: ‘I’m delighted to join in celebrating Jane Austen, who will feature on the new ten pound note – one of our greatest living authors.’ However, given that Jane Austen sadly passed away in 1817 it appeared that Leadsom had got her dates mixed up. Happily, she was quick to realise her error – rephrasing to say that Austen was one of the

James Mumford

In defence of offence

On Tuesday the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) announced a crackdown on gender stereotyping. Adverts suggesting men are useless around the house – racing out of the door, leaving the stove bubbling over and the dishes unwashed – could be censored because they ‘reinforce and perpetuate traditional gender roles.’ Images of beautiful mothers mopping spotless floors will be able to be banned. How do the ASA define gender stereotypes? ‘Gender stereotypes relate to body image, objectification, sexualisation, gender characteristics and roles, and mocking people for not conforming to gender stereotypes.’ Well, that’s pretty much everyone. The ASA will have the power to make billboards bare. For as far as my own body