Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The DUP deal is a vulnerability for the Tories

The DUP deal is a vulnerability for the Tories. Whatever justifications ministers come up with for the extra money for Northern Ireland, there’s no getting around the fact that it wouldn’t be going there if Theresa May didn’t need the DUP’s support to be PM. But in the House today, Labour failed to land any blows on the arrangement. Damian Green’s debating points were effective and neither Emily Thornberry nor the SNP were nimble enough to trip him up. Nigel Dodds, the DUP’s Westminster leader, joked that in the interests of transparency he might publish the DUP’s correspondence with Labour and the SNP at the start of the 2010 hung

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The clamour for answers over Grenfell Tower is growing fast

Why is it taking the government so long to give even a ballpark figure of the number of people who are missing, presumed dead, in the Grenfell Tower fire? The streets around the disaster site are littered not just with appeals to find missing relatives and friends but also with posters alleging a cover-up and that the true number of dead is much higher than the official figure of 79. Most accept that the destruction caused by the fire makes it extremely difficult to identify many of those who were killed in it. But what is causing frustration among survivors and desperate friends and family is an apparent refusal to

Ruth Sunderland

All banking should be ethical, all of the time

The Co-operative Bank, an ethical lender based in Manchester, has extraordinarily loyal customers. Why, you might wonder, is having loyal customers so extraordinary? Well, in the case of Co-op Bank, you could hardly blame them if they took their accounts elsewhere. The fact so many have stayed put, despite the bank’s spectacular fall from grace, might well have something to do with the paucity of other options on offer. There’s a screaming need for an ethical alternative to the bonus-hungry greed of the mainstream banks, who all too often treat their customers with contempt. Before it ran into the rocks, it seemed as though the Co-op Bank fitted the bill.

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘Alex Salmond/has been grilled, gutted and gammoned…’: clerihews about contemporary politicians

Everyone loves a clerihew, its seems. The request for ones about contemporary politicians drew an enormous and excellent entry — from veterans and newbies alike — and even included a couple of limericks for good measure. For the avoidance of doubt, the clerihew is a comic four-line (AABB) poem characterised by metrical irregularity and awkward rhyme. Here’s an example from — who better? — the form’s inventor, E.C. Bentley: Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Popular rhymes included ‘charmer’ and ‘Starmer’; ‘Boris’ and ‘Horace’; ‘Sturgeon’ and ‘burgeon’; ‘Corbyn’ and ‘absorbing’. Putin likes to ‘put the boot in’, apparently, and that David Davis

Toby Young Toby Young

The writers of the Guardian’s ‘Brexit Shorts’ have swallowed Project Fear

Earlier this week the Guardian launched ‘Brexit Shorts’, a series of monologues written by Britain’s ‘leading playwrights’ about the aftermath of the EU referendum. Now I know what you’re thinking: ‘What fresh hell is this?’ But bear with me. Watching the first batch of these short films, which are on the Guardian website, isn’t complete purgatory. Not because they’re much good, obviously — although one is, and I’ll come to that in a moment. But because the reason these writers are so anxious about Brexit is due to their uncritical acceptance of Project Fear. Perhaps they’ll become a little less hysterical once they’ve been introduced to some solid facts. Take

Saturday

David Butterfield

Why The Spectator is the world’s oldest weekly magazine

Founded in 1828, The Spectator has been proud to describe itself as ‘the oldest continuously-published weekly in the English language’. But this is rather modest, for it is both the oldest weekly magazine in the world, and the oldest general-interest magazine continuously in print. Yes, the internet is full of claims and counter-claims in this most competitive of fields, but the facts prove to be unambiguous. First things first. The oldest cultural and literary magazine that is still on the go is the Serbian monthly Letopis Matice srpske, which first appeared in 1825, three years before The Spectator. However, this magazine has had a number of breaks in publication: it didn’t appear in

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Every London council faces the challenges of Grenfell Tower

It’s very weird when a friend is in the news. I’ve known Nicholas Holgate for years. Until now, he was Town Clerk for Kensington and Chelsea council. I would say this, but he’s one of the most decent people I know; think rock-solid integrity, think public service. He was in the Treasury for years before moving to the council; central government’s loss, local government’s gain, I thought at the time. And he’s a Liberal Democrat, though he had to sit on that while he worked in government. Anyway, he’s the one person in the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire who has had to resign in consequence of what happened;

Fredrik Erixon

Why the right is losing its way

If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it is in good company. Across Europe, right-wing parties are struggling to find messages that resonate. It’s not that voters have turned away from conservative ideas: polls show a huge number interested in individual liberty, lower taxes and the nation state. The problem is that conservative parties have given up on those ideas — and, as a result, voters are giving up on them. Take Fredrik Reinfeldt, prime minister of my native Sweden between 2006 and 2014. He started off well, reforming welfare and cutting taxes. But then it all went

Peter Jones

Plato and Aristotle would have understood Corbyn’s appeal to the young

Whether the youth vote had any serious impact on the result of the general election or not, Jeremy Corbyn knew how to exploit it in a way both Plato and Aristotle would have understood. In his Republic, Plato argued that democracy resulted in rulers behaving like subjects and subjects like rulers, with teachers pandering to the young, and the young in turn despising them. As a result, youths make ‘every conversation or action into a trial of strength with their elders’, while their elders ‘patronise them, exuding bonhomie and a sense of fun, and imitate them, because they do not want to appear disagreeable or despotic’: Corbyn rapping with assorted

John Mills

It’s vital we act now to fix the ticking time bomb under our economy

The UK economy is not in good shape. We invest a lower proportion of our GDP every year than almost anyone else, which is the main reason why our productivity is almost static. We have deindustrialised to a point where we do not have nearly enough to sell abroad to pay for our imports. We have a chronic balance of payments problem financed by selling assets and borrowing from abroad. As a result, both as individuals and as a nation we are getting deeper and deeper into debt. What growth we have is driven by consumption, financed by asset inflation rather than by exports and investment. On almost every measure,

Friday

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Great Tigran’s heir

Tigran Petrosian is the great chess hero of Armenia. World champion from 1963-1969, his best games exhibit a profundity which few other champions have matched. Sadly he passed away in his fifties, in 1984, but his legacy lives on in Levon Aronian, who has emerged victorious from Stavanger. Scores from Norway (out of 9) were Aronian 6; Nakamura and Kramnik 5; Caruana, So and Giri 4½; Vachier-Lagrave, Anand and Carlsen 4; Karjakin 3½.   Aronian-Kramnik: Stavanger 2017 (diagram 1)   Here Black should play 19 … Qg5. 19 … Qg4 20 g3 Now White has weaknesses along the h1-a8 diagonal but his central pressure more than outweighs this. 20 … fxe5

Raymond Keene

no. 462

White to play. This position is a variation from Kramnik-Giri, Stavanger 2017. How can White exploit the terrible position of the black king? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 27 June 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 Qxh5 Last week’s winner Dave Forbes, Ellon, Aberdeenshire

The Spectator

Letters | 22 June 2017

May’s convictions Sir: Nick Timothy seeks sympathy by revealing that his ‘loved ones’ are upset by the personal attacks to which he is now subject (Diary, 17 June). They could have been spared distress if he had not invited retaliation by swearing at senior ministers and civil servants who crossed him. How could a prim vicar’s daughter have allowed endless profanities from this ill-mannered man and his ill-tempered associate Fiona Hill? Perhaps Timothy’s most extraordinary claim is that ‘a return to traditional campaigning methods’ was planned but Lynton Crosby vetoed it. Traditionally the Tories did not contract out their campaign to consultants charging vast fees. The leader and party chairman

Anthony Horowitz

Diary – 22 June 2017

Five years after I swore I’d finished with him, it’s odd to be back on the road with Alex Rider. It’s also quite confusing. In the 16 years it’s taken me to write the books, Alex has aged just 15 months while I’ve experienced 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the Arab spring, Brexit, Presidents Obama and Trump, and Theresa May. Until a few months ago, I would have said that life feels much the same in the UK where Alex and I live. But three terrorist attacks, the election and the horrendous fire at Grenfell Tower threaten to tear us apart. Even the queen was heckled when she visited the

Taki

High life | 22 June 2017

A famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel about a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ I thought of the novel as I was driven up to Gstaad during last week’s heatwave. Disembarking in Geneva, I felt I was back in Nairobi, circa 1970, on my way to Mombasa and a romantic interlude among the elephants and wildebeest. The old continent now looks like Africa, especially in airports and public spaces. But things will have to change if we want things to stay the same, I told myself again and again. In the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 22 June 2017

‘Yours?’ I said to the woman watching the mechanic poring over the latest-shape Renault Mégane for faults. (I was waiting to have a word with the mechanic about my Clio.) ‘Yes. I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘All my life I’ve driven German cars, and then I got this one, and I just can’t get used to it.’ ‘Why did you change then?’ I said, annoyed by the snobbery. ‘I’m a spirit medium,’ she said. ‘I have lots of wealthy clients. I was working with one in her home, and it came into my head to say to her, “He says you must give everything away, including Bella.” I didn’t

Melissa Kite

Real life | 22 June 2017

All had gone suspiciously quiet down our little track on the village green, and we had begun to think we were being accepted by the neighbours. We settled in. We continued to park our car in the public space outside our house, and after a week or so not too many people told us to sod off and die. We put in for the monstrously high council tax to be reviewed. We made a few friends. We were happy. And then the dreaded day came when we had to take our building materials down the side alley which goes across a neighbour’s back garden. We knew it had been a

Robin Oakley

The turf | 22 June 2017

Back on the political beat with CNN for the general election, I was reminded how politics is now dominated by personality, or the lack of it. Led by the media, we want our politicians to be authoritative enough to dominate an EU summit yet ‘normal’ enough to know what’s topping the pop charts or who’s in the final of Strictly Come Dancing. It has led to idiocies such as Gordon Brown pretending he listened to the Arctic Monkeys or an ingratiating David Cameron claiming to have voted for Will Young on X Factor at his daughter’s insistence when Young was actually on Pop Idol, which he won before Cameron’s daughter

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 22 June 2017

The past two weeks have seen hundreds of passionate bridge players head for Montecatini in Italy for the 8th European Open Championships. The first two events, Mixed Teams and Mixed Pairs, had possibly the most exciting finals of all time — both successful gold medallists winning on the heart-stopping last board. The Pairs saw Poland’s Justyna Zmuda and her partner Michal Klukowski beat Germany’s Sabine Auken and Roy Welland by 1.27 IMPs on the last deal, while in the Teams the Russians (MNEPO) took gold from the clutches of the American/Swedish group led by Andrew Rosenthal, also on the very last board! There has seldom been more excitement, even if