Society

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 6 July 2017

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 July 2017

Home Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged colleagues to make the case for ‘sound money’; he said, ‘We must hold our nerve,’ as he came under pressure to end the public-sector pay cap of a 1 per cent rise a year. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, thought that pay rises could be awarded in ‘a responsible way’; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, did not think that taxes would need to increase to accommodate pay rises. Firemen boasted of a 2 per cent pay rise. The government won the vote on the Queen’s Speech by 323 to 309 after heading off an amendment by the Labour MP Stella Creasy,

Doc

2317-370

The subtraction reveals the link between the unclued lights which saw light then. Three unclued lights consist of two words, and others form four pairs. In addition, a personal announcement is revealed clue by clue, for starters.   Across 1    Jaunty seat astern with hot bearing (13, two hyphens) 9    Unitarian’s cross, interrupted by vulgar Canadian leader (7) 11    Lover coming back with very English turn (7) 13   Yemen’s wind is whirling, low murmur initially (6) 15    This animal is clumsily laden (5) 19    Horizontal figure showing spirit in new dance (7) 20    Entice with a pamphlet, we’re told (7) 23    Fruit less decomposed around mid-October (5) 24    Othar rewrote

Tim Cooper

How shareholders can help keep large businesses in check

Investors are increasingly turning to shareholder activism to make their views heard, and their campaigns are working. As public trust in large businesses and politicians is at an all-time low, many argue that, in the right hands, activism is more effective than political intervention in curbing corporate excess and poor governance. According to research by FTI Consulting, shareholder campaigns in the UK nearly doubled from 28 to 51 last year as people increasingly used their ownership of companies to make a difference. Globally, campaigns have increased nearly five-fold since 2010 and now focus on a huge range of issues from boardroom pay to climate change. Recent high-profile campaigns have included

Ian Katz

Media culpa

A thread runs through several of the stories that have defined this turbulent summer: reporters have been shocked by the levels of hostility they have encountered. ‘They hate us,’ one seasoned producer told me returning from a Grenfell Tower protest. ‘I haven’t felt anything like it in 20 years.’ When the battalions of the media descend on any big story, the experience rarely leaves those caught up in it feeling warm and fuzzy about the fourth estate. But this is different. In each case there is a specific, albeit related, animus. During the election, it was Corbyn supporters convinced the mainstream media was bent on doing down their man. At

The Spectator

to 2314: 4÷4=8

One of the unclued 4-letter lights is placed in the very middle of another to form each of the four unclued 8-letter solutions: 8, around 30=44; 19, around 22=2, 37, around 25D=20; 38, around 21=13.   First prize Val Urquhart, Butcombe, North Somerset Runners-up John Kitchen, Breachwood Green, Herts; Ros Miller, Oxford

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: The wisdom of the zombie apocalypse

In this week’s books podcast, we’re talking about the lumbering hordes of the living dead. Yup: it’s Zombie Apocalypse time, as I sit down with Greg Garrett, author of the erudite and absorbing Living With The Living Dead: The Wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse. More than just a survival guide, this book considers the literary, cinematic and theological history of the zombie — the vast popularity of the genre, and the extraordinary range of meanings and anxieties that zombies have incarnated over the years. From the undead Spider Man in Marvel Zombie comics, through the White Walkers in Game of Thrones… by way of T S Eliot and the Book of Revelations. All together

Steerpike Steerpike

Robbie Gibb moves from the BBC to Downing Street

On Tuesday, Steerpike revealed that the hunt was on to find a new No 10 director of communications, with the BBC’s James Landale pipped against his Beeb comrade Robbie Gibb for the top job. After Landale dropped out of the race, the plum job has gone to Gibb, the head of live political programming at the BBC. The BBC supremo joins No 10 as Director of Communications. While Gibb enters government at a testing time, his experienced pair of hands will no doubt be an asset to May and her team. It also marks a return to party politics for Gibb – he worked for the Tory party before joining the

Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Survival of the sneakiest

Could there be a better metaphor for the corruption that now pervades all top-level sport than the use of motors in professional cycling? It’s so perfectly shameless. If you’re going to cheat by finding illicit ways in which to enhance your performance, as virtually all sportspeople today are forced to do (we’ll come back to that), why mess about with half-measures? Find a motor and strap it on. Undying glory and unimaginable wealth are just the other side of that mountain. Open that throttle, baby! In December last year, Istvan ‘Stefano’ Varjas, a Hungarian engineer who claims to have invented the technology necessary to conceal a near-silent engine in a

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The keys to the kingdom await

Give them all peerages as far as I’m concerned: if you can pick up a gong for bunging a few quid to a political party, you surely deserve something if Sonny Bill Williams practically tears your head off. This marvellous, heroic British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand has been one for the ages, whatever happens on Saturday. It’s the much maligned North going head to head with the cocky champions of the South — and holding our own. It says to all those snippy Kiwis: stop dissing the Six Nations (and how much can we look forward to that now!) What is so heartening about that victory last

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The strange case of my first love and the stolen Stradivarius

Because I’d been reading about Stradivarius on the bus home, my helpful iPhone suggested a related story: the Totenberg Ames Stradivarius, stolen and ‘silent for decades’, was to be played again in concert. Idly, on the hot top deck of the 38, I read on. Roman Totenberg, the celebrated Polish-American violinist, was 70 when his beloved Strad was taken back in 1980. He’d spent the evening playing Mozart at the Longy school of music in Cambridge, Mass, and when he left his dressing room to glad-hand fans, a former student slipped in and sloped off with the fiddle. The police had their suspicions, but these were the days before CCTV

Matthew Bell

Arms and the man

Meeting men used to be so easy. I don’t mean that in a Grindr sort of way. I just mean that when a chap bumped into a chap, you knew what to do. Stick out your paw and shake his hand and everyone could move on. Now, though, the everyday occurrence of being friendly to a fellow male is a minefield of potential slights. And it is all the fault of the man-hug. The handshake, once such a simple act of courtesy, now seems too stiff, too formal, too English. It has become absurd to shake hands with your father, or your best friend. You might as well tell him

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Cathar country

I once spent three months living in the Languedoc, writing my first novel. The highlight was the few days I allowed myself away from my monastic schedule to visit Cathar country. I’d been dying to see it because the castles and the landscape are so stark and dramatic, the history is so dark, bloody and weird, and because I wanted to try cassoulet in its proper location. I can’t remember much about the various cassoulets I tried except that, though it’s impossible to go wrong with goose, sausage and beans, none of them was quite as good as the one I laboriously recreated at home from a recipe in my

Michael Tanner

Gustav Mahler

When I began listening to music seriously, in about 1950, I had read about Mahler but wasn’t able to hear any — almost none of his works was available on 78s, apart from the celebrated pre-war recordings of the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, under Bruno Walter, and they were way beyond a teenager’s pocket. Reading about his symphonies — vast, anguished, tormented, ecstatic — I was desperate, and when I finally managed to hear that recording of the Ninth I was suitably overwhelmed, as I still am. During the 1950s I was able, slowly, to hear, though not to get to know, the rest of his

Deborah Ross

Do not be afraid

It Comes at Night is a horror film and I can’t say horror is my favourite genre. In fact, as far as I can see, I haven’t reviewed a horror film since 2009 (Paranormal Activity; scared the bejeezus out of me). But I’d read that this was clever, engrossing and original, so why not? My bejeezus can take it once every eight years, surely. So we were braced, my bejeezus and I, but rather unnecessarily, as it turned out. This is not especially scary (thankfully, but even so) and, what is more, the storytelling is so spare that I never understood what ‘it’ was and whether it did come at

Jessica Berens

At death’s door

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in Covent Garden and we are all learning how to kill ourselves. The venue is a nondescript community centre in Stukeley Street. It usually hosts activities for children, so there are crayon drawings and anti-bullying posters on the noticeboard. Today, however, a purple pop-up banner displays the Exit International logo and its mission statement: ‘A peaceful death is everybody’s right.’ Admittance to the four-hour workshop costs £50 and is reserved for those over the age of 50 and the seriously ill. The company collects around the tea hatch, everyone fanning themselves with their copies of the Exit International magazine, Deliverance. There are 80 or

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Being anti-smoking damages your mental health

I lit a cigarette in an open-air car park a couple of years ago as I was walking to the exit. I noticed a Nissan Micra heading towards me from the far corner and thought at first it was going to run me over. But it pulled up alongside and a woman put her head out of the window. ‘Do you realise that other people have to breathe in your smoke,’ she snarled, ‘including people like me, who have cancer.’ There was nobody within 50 yards of me, apart from this deranged woman who had driven double that distance simply to register her hatred. I wondered for a while about

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 8 July

As readers well know, we love Pol Roger champagne at The Spectator. We like to think of it as pretty much the house pour. It’s used at all our events and also simply to calm our nerves at the end — or, occasionally, the start or middle — of a testing working day. We can’t seem to get enough of it. No, I mean we really can’t. We’re always running out. Happily, we had just enough to go round at the latest in our series of Spectator Wine-maker’s Lunches, hosted by the always ebullient James Simpson MW, MD of Pol Roger Portfolio. Readers canny enough to book a ticket were

Lucy Vickery

Brought to book

In Competition No. 3005 you were invited to take your inspiration from Anthony Lane’s terrific ‘The Book of Jeremy Corbyn’, an account of the general election that ran recently in the New Yorker and was shared widely on social media: ‘And there came from the same country a prophet, whose name was Jeremy. His beard was as the pelt of beasts, and his raiments were not of the finest. And he cried aloud in the wilderness and said, Behold, I bring you hope.’ You were asked to flesh out the story with a version of either ‘The Book of Boris’, ‘The Book of Theresa’, ‘The Book of Tim’ or ‘The

Wednesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The NHS is one year older, yet none the wiser

The NHS is one year older, yet none the wiser. Having spiralled into perpetual crisis years ago, no one can pretend the gargantuan system is looking great for its age. Its fragile condition has all of us worried – not least because of the millions of lives that are forced to depend on our monopoly health service. The NHS’s woes are thought by some to be the result of some evil right-wing push towards privatisation – and by no means a reason to hold back oodles of praise for the healthcare system. If anything, the health service’s troubles have served as a call-to-arms to defend the status quo. But despite the jabs and digs