Society

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

J.K. Rowling’s schizophrenic politics | 1 July 2017

On the face of it, there is nothing complicated about the politics of Harry Potter, who made his first appearance in The Philosopher’s Stone 20 years ago. Like his creator J.K. Rowling, who once gave £1 million to the Labour party, he is a left-wing paternalist in the Bloomsbury tradition — the love child of John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He feels a protective duty towards the common man (‘muggles’ in the lexicon of the novels) and a loathing for suburban, lower-middle-class Tories like the Dursleys, his Daily Mail-reading foster parents. The arch-villain of the saga is Voldemort, a charismatic Übermensch who believes in purity and strength and in

Friday

Ed West Ed West

Donald Trump is a gift for the progressive narrative

With all the awfulness in Britain this year, it’s been easy to forget about what’s happening across the pond, which is some small comfort. Donald Trump’s travel ban came into effect last night. It is a more nuanced and reasonable version of the order he issued in March. Will it make much difference to security or, more pertinently, the rate of immigration from these countries? Who knows, but the damage from the earlier ban has already been done. When I first saw the future president speaking at rallies, he appeared to me a left-wing person’s idea of what a right-wing man is – loud, confident, small-minded, Manichean in his world

Rebecca O'Connor

The debt elephant in the middle class sitting room

At some point in the last ten years, since the financial crisis (for that life-changing decade is an anniversary we are approaching), a change in perspective occurred: we went from seeing unsecured debt as something that is undesirable but occasionally necessary to something that is both unavoidable and normal. Credit cards and loans, once something for emergencies, are now a vital way to get through the month until payday for millions of people. Research from GoCompare found that 22 per cent of the British public relies on credit cards to live. The average consumer credit debt was £7,349 in April this year – £543.70 extra per household on a year

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Sporting life

Can chess and bridge be considered sports? According to a European Court of Justice judgment earlier this month, bridge is a sport and should be granted the same official status as football, rugby and tennis. The Daily Telegraph report says: ‘Advocate General Maciej Szpunar ruled that sport was an activity requiring a certain effort to overcome a challenge or an obstacle and which trains certain physical or mental skills. To be a sport it is not necessary that the activity has a certain physical element. It is sufficient that the activity has a significant mental element which is material to its outcome.’   This judgment is of great significance for

Raymond Keene

no. 463

White to play. This position is from Caruana–Carlsen, Paris 2017. Can you spot White’s winning coup? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 4 July 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 Qxe4 Last week’s winner R.F. Tindall, Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Diary – 29 June 2017

To Fortnum & Mason last week on the hottest evening of the year to present the Desmond Elliott Prize for this year’s best first novel, which I helped judge. I had to acknowledge the weather in my speech: I was perspiring, ahem, liberally. Sweating like a… what? The traditional comparator is now definitely verboten. Like Keith Vaz before a select committee? Like Boris in an Eddie Mair interview? Too niche. I went for ‘like a British Brexit negotiator’ and got a gratifying laugh. They won’t be laughing two years from now. We had two superb runners-up in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You and Kit de Waal’s My Name Is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 29 June 2017

Q. We have friends to stay each year in Scotland and it’s always a pleasure. Guests know there is signal only in my dressing room, and that they should clear their decks electronically before coming. Yet every year, due to poor planning, people need to commandeer our laptop. The problem is they leave business flotsam and jetsam behind, when I feel they should leave it as they found it. A bossy notice is not in keeping with holiday spirit, so how can one make this point? — N.M., Oxford A. If this happens every year, it’s time for you to stop fretting. Simply order a cut-price spare laptop to serve

Dot Wordsworth

Romance liver

‘Ha, ha!’ said my husband, waving the Spectator letters page in the air. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ He was overcome by the news that I had mistakenly said MCC stood for Middlesex Cricket Club instead of Marylebone Cricket Club. I did not point out that he had read the column before it was sent in and said nothing at the time. Instead I began to shell some peas at the kitchen table, always a soothing occupation. No tear rolled down the side of my nose. Before I relate my secret consolation, I’d like to mention the chant ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ that has become so popular of late. It derives, via football

Peter Jones

Prince Harry’s sense of duty

Asked about the monarchy, Prince Harry said his aim was to ‘modernise’ it. Not that any royal wanted to be king or queen, he said, but they would ‘carry out [their] duties at the right time. We are not doing this for ourselves but for the greater good of the people.’ It sounds as if he thinks he is doing us a favour. The question of one’s communal obligations was first raised in the West in Homer’s Iliad (8th century bc). In a dangerous assault on the Greek camp, King Sarpedon, an ally of the Trojans from Lycia (S.E. Turkey), explained to his cousin Glaucus the reason for risking their

Taki

High life | 29 June 2017

A major Greek ship owner, whose political knowledge matches his wealth and business acumen, explained to me what the Qatar brouhaha is all about. My friend Peter had the foresight to invest in liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers, among the most expensive of ships to build but big-time money-makers. Why is it that it takes a major ship owner to tell us what’s really going on? Forget the bull put out by American hacks, whose minds no longer seem to function — at least since Trump’s triumph last November. Here goes: we sat on my terrace in Gstaad under the stars, watched the mountains turn from grey to dark blue,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 29 June 2017

I got up, made a pot of coffee and sat and read the paper. A churchgoing charity worker had stolen enough money from a 102-year-old woman to buy three properties in the UK and to consider buying a village in Spain. Nearly one in three court cases at magistrates’ courts fails to go ahead because the defendants can’t be arsed to turn up. The British are now so fat that endangered breeds of heavy horses such as the Suffolk Punch are being revived as personal transport. A computer screen aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth, our spanking new, state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, launched last week, was seen to be displaying the logo of

Melissa Kite

Real life | 29 June 2017

Since moving to my dream home in the country a month ago, I’ve only had to fight a parking dispute, a right of way dispute, a council tax dispute and a dispute over my neighbour’s loft room being several feet inside my house. ‘It’s going well, isn’t it?’ I said to the builder boyfriend, as we sat slumped on the dusty sofas in our front room overlooking the idyllic village green at the end of another hard day’s country living. ‘What is that lump sticking out of the plaster up there?’ he said, looking beyond me to the right-hand corner of the ceiling. ‘I don’t want to know,’ I said.

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 29 June 2017

I’ve just returned from two weeks playing in the European Open Championships in Montecatini in Italy, and I’m so whacked I can hardly get out of bed. Playing pressurised bridge for nearly ten hours a day is exhausting, but try doing it under the relentless heat of the Tuscan sun, in a huge tent with inadequate air conditioning (three players actually collapsed). We all grumbled like mad, but of course I loved every second. I only wish I’d done better: I reached the A-final in both the mixed and women’s pairs, but played poorly each time, which was hugely frustrating for me and my poor partners. Not as frustrating, however,

Toby Young Toby Young

J.K. Rowling’s schizophrenic politics

On the face of it, there is nothing complicated about the politics of Harry Potter, who made his first appearance in The Philosopher’s Stone 20 years ago. Like his creator J.K. Rowling, who once gave £1 million to the Labour party, he is a left-wing paternalist in the Bloomsbury tradition — the love child of John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He feels a protective duty towards the common man (‘muggles’ in the lexicon of the novels) and a loathing for suburban, lower-middle-class Tories like the Dursleys, his Daily Mail-reading foster parents. The arch-villain of the saga is Voldemort, a charismatic Übermensch who believes in purity and strength and in

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 June 2017

At Guildhall on Tuesday, the Centre for Policy Studies held its Margaret Thatcher Conference on Security. Its title is an implied reproach to the way security is seen by current governments. You couldn’t have a Barack Obama Conference on Security, or a Donald Trump one, because neither cares about the subject. You could, I suppose, have a Theresa May Conference about Security, but that would have nothing to say about international institutions and alliances, the values of democracy, totalitarian ideology, and the needs of global defence. It would concern itself with second-order subjects like the surveillance of terrorist suspects and the state of deportation law. Many have complained that the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 June 2017

Home In preparation for the vote on the Queen’s Speech, the Government, after weeks of negotiations, bought the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in the House of Commons by promising to spend a billion or two pounds in Northern Ireland on broadband and other good things. In reply to expostulations from the Opposition, Nigel Dodds, the parliamentary leader of the DUP, told the Commons: ‘We might publish all the correspondence and conversations we had in 2010 with Labour front-benchers, and in 2015 with Labour front-benchers, and indeed also the Scottish National party, because some of the faux outrage we have heard is hypocrisy.’ Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party,

Lavatch

2316: Divine alteration

Seven clues contain a redundant word, each defining one unclued light. These seven unclued lights all undergo partial 1 across (in Collins) before entry, in a consistent manner. Resulting grid entries are not real words. Unchecked and cross-checking letters in all eight unclued lights could give: NEWS — I’LL HINT THIS: CRUX’S LATIN   Across 12    Physicist’s drole gibe cracking up virgin (9, two words) 13    Love time off to produce plant sheaths (6) 16    Decide crazy American quits US city (6) 17    Old claim Reading’s awful (7) 20    Male’s arms twirling (4) 22    A hero, one up to revel in high spirits (8) 24    Points taken by genius director

The Spectator

to 2313: Goldfish

Extra letters in clues gave SAM GOLDWYN, to whom are attributed I’LL GIVE YOU (5) A DEFINITE (8) MAYBE (1A), INCLUDE (23) ME OUT (7), and IN TWO (33) WORDS (34A) IM-POSSIBLE! (38). Goldfish was his former name.   First prize Magdalena Deptula, Eton, Berkshire Runners-up Eddie Looby, Longbridge, Birmingham; Sue Topham, Newark

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The abortion amendment is the first proper ambush for this government

The first proper government ambush of this Parliament is upon us. The Speaker has announced which amendments to the Queen’s Speech will be put to a vote this evening. Along with the official Labour Brexit amendment calling on the government to negotiate an outcome that prioritises jobs and the economy, there are two amendments from Labour MPs that will ruffle feathers on both sides of the House. Chuka Umunna’s amendment criticising the Queen’s speech for not keeping the option of single market membership on the table could see many Labour MPs rebel from their party’s ‘official position’. Meanwhile, Stella Creasy’s amendment on the abortion rights of Northern Ireland women looks set to cause