Society

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: The world according to Larry, the Downing Street cat

The invitation to submit a poem about Larry, the Downing Street cat, went down well, attracting a hefty postbag. Larry, who came to No. 10 in 2011 from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home during David Cameron’s premiership, was left behind when the family moved on (though Mr Cameron denied that this was because he hated cats). The ten-year-old tabby’s patchy record as Chief Mouser — apparently he spends more time kipping than hunting down rodents — hasn’t dented his popularity; as well as having an impressive 136,000 followers on Twitter, he has inspired a book, a cartoon strip – and now a competition. Honourable mentions go to Sylvia Fairley, Frank

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why are students allowed to vote where they study?

The Electoral Commission is finally sidling up to the consequences of its failure to police voting registration. It finds the thought that lots of young people may have voted twice ‘troubling’. Why is it that students are allowed to register in their place of study as well as their home? After all, they rarely stay long enough to live with the consequences of their decision. This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article can be found here. 

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Welcome to the herd, UnHerd

A new star is born today into the centre-right blogosphere: UnHerd. The latest brainchild of Tim Montgomerie, founder of ConservativeHome, it has launched with a mission statement to ‘dive deep into the economic, technological and cultural challenges of our time’. Its launch blogs show a wide mix of subjects: a YouGov poll revealing the low regard with which the public view traditional news media, Peter Franklin on why we should get ready for Prime Minister Corbyn, James Bloodworth on the crash ten years on and Graeme Archer on how meat-eating may come to be seen as barbaric by our grandchildren. UnHerd is also marked out by its financing model. It has no

D Reilly

Gary Lineker, the leader we need

Is there a whiter place in London than Barnes? I ask only because I have been going there at the weekends for the last two years to buy artisan chocolate croissants and artisan coffee from a favourite artisan café (artisan is metropolitan for expensive), and to let my daughter bother the ducks at the picture perfect pond on the green. In that time I’ve been amazed by the lack of people of colour I have encountered. Once you start noticing you can’t stop. By my reckoning, in those two years I’ve seen only two people of colour in Barnes. A black man on a bike riding down the high-street, and

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Pimm’s No.6.

Well, that’s Wimbledon done and dusted for another year. All hail King Roger! It’s been a great tournament with much to enjoy. And it has certainly been a darn sight more enjoyable than the second Test match against South Africa. What a debacle that was. Sigh. Still, both events have given me the chance — armchair sportsman that I am — to settle back on the sofa, put my feet up, and rediscover my love of Pimm’s. I’m told that spectators got through 320,000 glasses of the stuff at Wimbledon over two weeks; just imagine how many couch potatoes like me were also knocking it back at home. That’s quite

Thursday

Raymond Keene

New in chess

New in Chess is one of the world’s leading chess magazines. At one time or another, every contemporary champion and leading grandmaster has contributed to it. Of particular interest are the regular columns by the English grandmasters Nigel Short and Matthew Sadler. The group also publishes many high-quality books. In Chess for Hawks, Cyrus Lakdawala regales us with a number of inspirational examples, including several from his own games. The title suggests a certain predatory attitude is necessary in striving for victory, but the prime message conveyed is: never give up, even if you only have the tiniest of edges. Persistence is everything. The always reliable Steve Giddins has compiled

Raymond Keene

no. 466

White to play. This position is from Quparadze-Uzunoglu, Cesme 2017. Black is hoping for counterplay on the a1-h8 diagonal but White’s next move put paid to this. What did he play? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 25 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 Bc5+ Last week’s winner Keith McDermott, Allerton, West Yorkshire

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