Society

Thursday

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 13 July 2017

Here’s one of my favourite hands from the European Open Championships — although it caused David Gold to spend the next hour kicking himself. David is a world-class player, but even Homer nods, and after days competing in a sweltering tent in the Tuscan countryside, he made a small error which led him to go down in a slam. He realised it a second later — exactly the same time as one of our opponents, the Russian champion Andrey Gromov, who leaned over to point it out, only for David to cut him short with a forlorn ‘I know’. Mind you, only an expert would consider it an error; most

Dot Wordsworth

Pride of lions

‘Are they all gay too?’ asked my husband, waving the Sunday Telegraph with its headline ‘Pride of Lions’. He had been delayed ​ in traffic in the sun during the Pride in London rally the day before and was still showing signs of confusion. The headline was referring, through a play on words, to the British and Irish Lions’ unexpected draw against the All Blacks. But I was then surprised to discover that pride for a group of lions is ​the resurrection, accomplished in the late 19th century, of a medieval term (deriving from lions as symbols of the sin of pride). It disappeared from English for 400 years, after

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 July 2017

Home In her first big speech since the general election, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘I say to the other parties in the House of Commons… come forward with your own views and ideas.’ She was responding to a government-commissioned review of modern working practices by Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, and a former adviser to Tony Blair. The report was hostile to payment in cash and suggested that immigrant visas might insist on non-cash payment for work. Unemployment fell by 64,000 to 1.49 million. A leading article in the Evening Standard, edited by one of Mrs May’s enemies, George Osborne, commented on

Andrew Marr

Diary – 13 July 2017

It has been an unqualified delight, even if it is mildly absurd: I have been chairing the judges for this year’s Forward Prizes for poetry, wallowing in some quite extraordinary writing. It has been like gorging on champagne truffles every day. We are nearly there. Winners are emerging. But the absurd aspect is that everybody being judged is already a fine poet, with much to say and fine technical skill; so, winnowing down to ‘winners’ relies on personal prejudice and chance mood on one particular day. That’s horribly unfair and I think all the judges feel it. So why have such a prize? Because the hullabaloo and coverage will draw

Columba

2318: Groundwork

One unclued light (four words) is the title of a 40 recorded by 43 (two words). This title forms a cryptic indication of one unclued light, which defines each of the other unclued lights.   Across 11    Unlucky guys taken in by bad old lie (9, hyphened) 12    Try to turn round cubic mineral (4) 17    Noted folio poorly made (5) 20    Proceed, worried after revolutionary call (7) 21    Favouring relations, quickly write back (7) 24    Tea in family’s village in Scotland (7) 25    Journal from Suez in Egypt (5, hyphened) 26    Old letter with very large moral significance (5) 28   

The Spectator

to 2315: Trunk call

4, 40, 43, 1, 3, 16 and 17 were all examples of PORTMANTEAU words, into which are packed the sense (and sound) of two other words.   First prize F. Whitehead, Harrogate, N. Yorks Runners-up Mark Rowntree, London SE10; D.G. Page, Orpington, Kent

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Would a cashless world be a better place? Not necessarily

Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into the tax net through the use of apps and other digital payment platforms. Would that really be a good thing? The first point to be made is that it’s probably going to happen anyway over the next decade — at least if we go the way of Sweden. There, cards and phones are almost universally

Bruce Anderson

I nourish my dream of a fat pill

As good conversation should, the talk meandered from the serious to the playful. One of the serious topics was overseas aid. A generation ago, Peter Bauer, as fine a scholar as ever, addressing himself to that subject, produced a lapidary dictum: ‘Much overseas aid is a subsidy from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.’ Recent DFID ministers such as Alan Duncan and Andrew Mitchell insist that there have been improvements. Others are sceptical. Announcing that we will spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid can create a moral hazard. There is pressure to spend the money: less pressure to ensure that it is wisely

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A vicious reaction to a very bad word

Having a nigger in the woodpile and a skeleton in the closet are closely related problems, although subtly different. In the first case it is a problem which is lurking, hitherto unseen, but which may pop up very soon to cause mayhem and mischief. In the second case it is a problem which has been hidden from public gaze quite deliberately but which may yet emerge, clanking and rattling, to ruin one’s life. Both terms are capable of giving grave offence. The first because it probably dates from the time at which some white people enslaved some black people (about 150 years, give or take), as opposed to the time

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

To buy cheap art, buy architecture

Of the 375,000 listed buildings in England only 2.5 per cent are Grade I. Half are churches; many are otherwise uninhabitable, such as Nelson’s Column or the Royal Opera House. There are perhaps only 2,500 Grade I listed buildings in England in which you can feasibly live: these include Buckingham Palace and the Sutherland gaff. Eighteen years ago, when we had twins and decided to move out of London, my wife discovered a four-bedroom apartment in the roof of a Robert Adam house a mile outside the M25. To our astonishment, it was barely more expensive than ordinary housing of similar size nearby. I recently asked my neighbour, an economist,

Simon Barnes

Is Johanna Konta British?

Have you been cheering for the excellent Johanna Konta at Wimbledon? Go, Jo! Or should that be Go, Yo? Johanna (pronounced Yo-harner) was born to Hungarian parents in Sydney and came to Britain when she was 14; her parents moved to Eastbourne while she went to train in Barcelona. She became a British citizen in 2012. Is she really British, then? Or is she a Plastic Brit, exploiting our great nation for what she can get? Greg Rusedski came from Canada to represent Britain at tennis in 1995, aged 22, even wearing an ill-advised Union Jack bandana. The Lawn Tennis Association (Britain’s national federation) later tried to persuade Novak Djokovic

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Taylor report is wrong to suggest cash in hand is fundamentally dishonest

Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into the tax net through the use of apps and other digital payment platforms. Would that really be a good thing? The first point to be made is that it’s probably going to happen anyway over the next decade — at least if we go the way of Sweden. There, cards and phones are almost universally

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Let’s keep up the Moggmentum

‘We need to talk about why the internet is falling in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, because it’s not OK,’ warns a recent post on the Corbynista website The Canary. Its anxiety is not misplaced. Polite, eloquent, witty, well-informed, coherent, principled — Jacob Rees-Mogg is the antithesis of almost every-thing the Labour party stands for under its current populist leadership. And far from putting off voters, it seems to be a winning formula. Even sections of the elusive and generally very left-wing youth vote appear to be warming to the idea that our next prime minister shouldn’t be (alleged) man-of-the-people Corbyn but yet another plummy, Old Etonian millionaire… This ought to

Sebastian Vella

Letter to my uncle (contd)

Dear Uncle James Thank you for your thought-provoking comments on my last letter (8 July). I accept that personality played a part in my deciding who to vote for. However it also seems to me that your own criticism of the Labour party is centred around personality — i.e. based on Jeremy Corbyn’s personal view of socialism rather than the actual policies put forward by the Labour party, which are not socialist. I agree that socialism hasn’t worked in the examples you’ve given. However, I don’t think that this is relevant to us today since a Labour government would not turn the UK into a socialist dictatorship. When it comes

David Adams

Free as a jailbird

Food programmes are having a strange effect on me: I watch them and feel nauseated. Masterchef, The Great British Bake Off, Great British Menu, half a dozen others. In the past I’ve watched and loved them all, sharing the exhilarating triumphs and gut-wrenching despair of the trembling hopefuls. A thousand times I’ve held my breath with them, waiting for the axe to fall: ‘The person leaving us this week is… Wendy.’ Cue the tears and blotchy, shell-shocked face — and that’s just me. But lately something’s changed. I noticed myself finding the way the experts and chefs talked about the food vaguely distasteful, and the feeling grew stronger. It came

Jonathan Mirsky

The lesson of Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died, eight years into his 11-year prison term. He was the greatest champion of democracy in a country where there are many others also detained by the Communist Party, which insists those convicted are not dissidents but criminals. Tried in 2009 for subversion, Liu had just been moved under police guard into a hospital and diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. While his original sentence aroused an international outcry, followed by the award of the prize in Oslo — where his chair was empty — the news of his fatal illness provoked demands that he be allowed to go abroad for possible treatment. Liu himself said

Mark Mason

Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room

The Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room is a gorgeous bit of Inside. Like any coastal town, Southwold has an awful lot of Outside, which it can throw at you very hard and very fast. So the small redbrick building tucked away near the seafront is both charming and useful. It was built in 1864, in memory of Captain Charles Rayley. He’d been in the Royal Navy since Trafalgar, fighting pirates in Borneo and privateers in the West Indies, one of whom gave him a sabre cut across the cheek. When Rayley died his widow commissioned the Reading Room as an alternative to Southwold’s pubs, a place where sailors and fishermen could

Lucy Vickery

Laughing matter

In Competition No. 3006 you were invited to submit a sonnet that takes as its opening line Keats’s ‘Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:’ (This was a sonnet Keats chose not to publish but transcribed into a long letter he wrote over a period in early 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats, his brother and sister-in-law.)   The challenge drew a pleasingly large, inventive and witty entry which saw you deploy a range of sonnet patterns (there are some 30 variations of the form in The Oxford Book of English Verse).   In an especially closely contested week, Julia Munrow, J. Garth Taylor, Chris O’Carroll, Susan McLean,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Emily Thornberry succeeds where Corbyn fails at PMQs

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions could have been memorable purely for the novelty of Emily Thornberry deploying a tremendous amount of sass in her questions to Damian Green as the pair stood in for Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. But it was also memorable because as well as leaning across the despatch box and delivering one-liners in comedy voices, the Shadow Foreign Secretary also asked some good, searching questions about the government’s position on Brexit, particularly on what would happen practically if there was no deal. Unlike Corbyn, who has always struggled to ask questions on Brexit at this session because of his own ambivalence about the matter, Thornberry is quick