Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 15 June 2017

Q. Having retired, my husband is now an enthusiastic observer of the goldfinches, greenfinches and bullfinches in our garden. Their numbers have increased dramatically since he planted ornamental thistles and teasels, and put out feeders with nyger seed. Our kitchen has French windows which offer a commanding view over the large garden. My problem is that my husband, who has a very keen eye while I do not, keeps spotting some sort of bird activity and urgently requiring me to look at what he is seeing. ‘Look! Just on that shrub in front of you — that thin tree where I’m pointing!’ The instructions are imprecise and I always miss

Dot Wordsworth

Trooping the Colour

Language is a weapon to do down others. ‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella disdainfully of Pip in Great Expectations, while noting how coarse his hands were. Words like the and of are also useful shibboleths to show someone doesn’t belong to our club. ‘No denim’ says the advice for entry to today’s Queen’s Birthday Parade, on pain of entry being refused. It is the occasion of Trooping the Colour. Of course my husband, especially, and I too call it, Trooping the Colour, never interpolating the fatal of. The ceremony is said to go back to Marlborough, but one of the earliest references cited by the Oxford English

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 June 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, spent the week confronting the consequences of the general election that she had called to bring ‘stability and certainty for the future’. It had instead surprisingly left the Conservatives with no overall majority. They won 318 seats (a loss of 13) and Labour 262 (a gain of 30). The Scottish National Party won 35 (a loss of 21), with the Conservatives gaining 12 extra seats in Scotland, even capturing Stirling. Labour won an extra five seats in Scotland. Angus Robertson, the SNP leader at Westminster, lost his seat, as did Alex Salmond. Nick Clegg, the former Lib-Dem leader, lost his seat, but Sir Vince Cable won

Doc

2314: 4÷4=8

The unclued four-letter words can be paired in a particular way to form the remaining unclued lights, one of two words. Elsewhere, ignore two accents.   Across 1    Border force on bank guarding river (8) 5    View of a hill removed from a magazine (6) 10    Take steps against token performance (10) 12    As a physician, I must conceal ill feeling (6) 16    Composer having business with French joiner (5) 17    French abbot from Swiss city with primitive plough (7) 18    Curved pathway for car (7) 25    Scotland’s own Foreign Department (3) 26    One or two, say, splitting place in tomb (7) 28    Emirates’ manager endlessly in charge in his

Hannah Lucinda Smith

The Grenfell Tower blaze was a disaster waiting to happen

Those images from the early hours of Wednesday – fire shooting up the side of a tower block, with desperate people trapped inside it – were what I have been fearing for seven years. In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks. In their original form, tower blocks are stacks

Doc

to 2311: Keith II

The unclued lights, as well as KEITH, are Scottish place names. TARBERT was required at 28A, rather than LARBERT. First prize Una Lynch, Haywards Heath, West Sussex Runners-up R.R. Alford, Oundle, Peterborough; Anson, London SE5

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Grenfell Tower and the politics of needless death

As the body count rose from the Grenfell Tower fire, sensible people warned us not to rush to judgement. Activists, mainly from the left, denounced a complacent housing bureaucracy at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, and a Conservative government, which had refused in its laissez-faire way to regulate rented housing. The warnings sounded sensible. At the time of writing, I still do not know for sure why the fire spread with such ghastly effectiveness. Why rush to judgement and into print? In any case, is there not something wrong with people whose first reaction to a disaster is to take cheap shots? But sensible points can be beside

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Rebooting the Maybot

On this week’s episode, we examine the fallout from last week’s shock election result, and ask what’s next for both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. And, to give you a brief respite from all the politics, we also speak to one of the world’s greatest living pianists. First up: In this week’s magazine, James Forsyth describes the repercussions of the hung parliament within the Conservative party, and the attempt being made to ‘reboot the Maybot’. But can the Prime Minister be patched back to health? Or is she so defective that she’s set to be junked? James joins the podcast, along with Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of The Observer. As

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Are conservatives a bunch of neanderthals? Some on the left seem to think so

How tragic that the country – and indeed the world – is being dragged rightwards by a bunch of Neanderthal conservatives who relish ignorance and despise experts. That, in as many words, was the argument advanced here by Nick Cohen on Monday, as well as by many others on the Left. Nick wrote: ‘…in Britain and America one trend is clear: the better-educated you are the less likely you are to vote for the right. Like Mill, I am not arguing that educated people are always clever. Intellectuals have always included fanatics and cranks among their number. But I can say this: in a country where ever more people are going

Laura Whitcombe

How to keep your dog safe from thieves

Five dogs are stolen every day in the UK and only one gets reunited with its owner, according to police data analysed by insurer Direct Line. In 2016, there were 1,774 reported dog thefts, with just 21 per cent recovered. The number of thefts was up 19 per cent compared to 1,491 just two years earlier. However, these figures are likely just the tip of the iceberg – further research conducted by Direct Line found that 1.5 million people have had a dog stolen from them within the past five years. Of those bereft owners, nearly a quarter (23 per cent) said their pet was stolen from their garden, 11

Helen Nugent

Now it’s cheaper to use your mobile phone abroad

Praise be, there’s some good news on the financial front this morning. Roaming charges for the use of mobile phones while overseas have been abolished as from today. Under the new European Union law (the Roam Like Home legislation), British mobile phone users can now make phone calls, send text messages and use data in other EU countries without incurring a further charge. The new rules mean that Britons will be subject to the same prices they pay at home. However, it still won’t be possible to call local numbers when abroad for no charge. The new regulations apply to calling or texting other British mobile phones. The European Commission said: ‘Each time a

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hands off our Ruth

At last, there is light in the north. The long Scottish Tory winter has finally ended, giving way to the freshest spring imaginable. Just ten days ago, leading Scottish Tories believed they might win half a dozen seats at the general election. Even on election night they struggled to accept the reality of what was happening. ‘Ayr? Really?’ But they did win Ayr. And Stirling. And Angus. And Gordon. And Moray. This was emphatically not Theresa May’s victory. It was Ruth Davidson’s. Now, in the aftermath of this Ruthquake, a question arises: if Ruth can save the Scottish Tories, couldn’t she do something similar south of the border? Every newspaper

Bruce Anderson

Uncorking the past

I have been thinking about the Dark Ages. This has nothing to do with Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn. A friend of mine, Chase Coffin-Roggeveen, has a doctoral thesis in mind about the increasing use of wine for liturgical purposes during the English Dark Ages. Like all scholars who address that period, he has to wrestle with slender sources. Those who do not leave documents tend to be written out of history: think of the Wends. There are revisionists, such as Sally Harvey, who contrast the surviving beauties of Saxon civilisation — consider the manuscripts — with the Normans’ brutality. There is an obvious three-hour essay question: ‘How dark were

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Universities should offer one-year courses

In every respect bar one, those bloody Corbyn-supporting students have a much tougher time of it than I did, what with my full grant and my tuition fees paid. But by God, learning stuff is easy nowadays. The young of today just cannot conceive what a chore it was to eke out enough material for an essay in 1984. To find out anything took hours of mostly wasted effort in a library. If you imagine a world where every page of Wikipedia took half an hour to load, it should give you some idea of what it took to educate yourself back then. That’s why we were all drunk and

William Cook

West Middlewick Farm

In springtime in our family, we always have the same old argument: where should we go on our summer holiday (I know, I know — we should have booked it months ago). Every year I make the same suggestion, and every year I’m shouted down. ‘Let’s go back to West Middlewick Farm,’ I say, more in hope than expectation. ‘No! There’s nothing to do there!’ reply my wife and teenage children. ‘But that’s exactly why I like it,’ I protest, before we go and book an overpriced villa in Spain or Italy. This year, however, I’m feeling a bit more optimistic. The exchange rate is rotten, the British weather is

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s have a dose of business sense in Downing Street before it’s too late

Take no notice of the resilience of the FTSE100 index, which, having reached record pre-election highs, shed barely 100 points at its opening last Friday and recovered most of them by Monday. Dominated by multinational companies, it is being sustained by global market sentiment and the relative weakness of the pound, which makes our blue chips look good value; it is not offering a signal that investors think all is well. But do take notice of the Institute of Directors, speaking largely for mid-sized businesses, when it says that confidence among its members has crashed since polling day: from 34 per cent optimistic vs 37 per cent gloomy last month,

Phillip Williamson

Oceans apart

Readers of The Spectator will be familiar with the argument that climate change, like Britpop, ended in 1998. Raised on a diet of Matt Ridley and James Delingpole, you may have convinced yourself that climate scientists, for their own selfish reasons, continue to peddle a theory that is unsupported by real-world evidence. You may also have picked up the idea that the ‘green blob’, as it has been called in these pages, is somehow suppressing the news that global warming is a dead parrot. That was the case made by Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Forum in a Spectator blog in February last year.

Prue Leith

Fad diets are just junk

Why do we do it? We really need to stop supporting the snake-oil industry. We know there is no such thing as a miracle diet, a magical health cure, a mystical practice or a strange (and always expensive) product that is going to make us youthful, happy and, above all, thin. When Planet Organic first opened in Westbourne Grove, it was a great shop, with a butcher, fishmonger and baker as well as a good range of veg and groceries. Now a third of the shop is shelf upon shelf of supplements, beauty preparations and diet books; another third is a café; and what meat and fish there is comes

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

The Conservatives’ real problem? It’s that the electorate now sees them as reckless

The opposition wants to raze your house to the ground. No, bear with me. Analogy. They say they’ll pull it down, and build a new one with, I don’t know, walls of gold, and hot and cold running unicorns. ‘You can’t trust them,’ says the government, ‘because they want to knock your house down!’ And normally, normally, this would be quite an effective message. Only this time it is delivered from inside the cab of a JCB by a government that also wants to knock down your house, and has already demolished your garden wall. ‘Honk honk!’ they’re going, on that pull-down-horn thing, with eyes gleaming like those of actual