Society

Saturday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron are alike in their narcissism

When Theresa May invited Donald Trump to London, shortly after his inauguration, the howls of the bien-pensant commentariat could be heard from Islington to Brighton. Yet when Emmanuel Macron invited the American president to Paris to stand by his side on Bastille Day, there was barely a peep. How to explain this? Sophie Pedder, Paris editor of the Macron-infatuated Economist, was quick off the mark. Macron, she announced, had extended his invitation to Trump from a position of strength and credibility. ‘May has neither.’ The Elysée press office could not have expressed it more viciously. Yet this conveniently overlooks that May’s invitation was issued before the general election, when May

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will May dare slap down any of those angling for the top job?

There are so many people angling for the Tory leadership now that it really is easier to list those who haven’t yet written an attention-seeking op ed or been spotted plotting in a shady spot in Westminster. It’s not just the ones who fancy the job for themselves, or the little nascent campaign teams that are springing up around them. It is also those who plan to run in order to guarantee themselves a top job in the Cabinet when the new leader carries out a unity-focused reshuffle. As James says in this week’s magazine, some are so advanced in their plans for the next leadership race, whenever that might

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Queen’s gambit | 13 July 2017

International master Andrew Martin is the head of the English Chess Federation Academy. He is well qualified for this post, since his conversational writing style is both characteristically endearing and informative. It is very easy to learn from Andrew’s work. His latest book is a tour de force of the venerable Queen’s Gambit which was originally popularised in the great 1834 series of matches between Labourdonnais and Macdonnell in London. Since then it has formed a staple of every champion’s repertoire. This week’s game, with notes based on those in Andrew’s book (First Steps: Queen’s Gambit Declined, Everyman Chess), shows how devastating the Queen’s Gambit can be in the hands

Raymond Keene

no. 465

White to play. This is from Nepomniachtchi-Korobov, Khanty-Mansiysk 2017. Black’s king is clearly in desperate trouble. What is the most accurate way to finish off? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 18 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 … Nd5 Last week’s winner Trevor Lloyd, London WC1

Taki

High life | 13 July 2017

I was going through my paces in Hyde Park, sweating out the booze, raising the heartbeat with short wind sprints, keeping my mind off the weekend’s debauchery and the ensuing Karamazovian hangover. I sat down on a bench, took off my sweaty polo shirt, opened the Daily Telegraph, and took in some rays. A police officer approached me — but with a smile. ‘Are you by any chance Taki?’ he said. ‘Guilty as charged, constable, but this time I’m clean.’ He smiled broadly and asked if he might sit down. Well, Constable Hackworth turned out to be straight out of The Blue Lamp. A Spectator reader, he somehow recognised my

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 July 2017

The hen party was seated at an outside restaurant table under the plane trees when I arrived. They sat with straight backs conversing normally, looked cool and lovely, and everything appeared seemly. Yet it was now ten o’clock on their first night on tour. They seemed unusually glad to see their chauffeur; apart from this, there was nothing to suggest that they were even slightly drunk. Appearances might have been deceptive, however, for they were all of them privately and expensively educated young women. I was bidden to be seated and offered a glass of wine, which I accepted. I sat and sipped and listened to their chatter. That something

Melissa Kite

Real life | 13 July 2017

‘What do you think it means?’ I asked the builder boyfriend as we stood in front of the sign. A huge placard, it had been hammered into the ground by the village action group. ‘Keep Our Village in the Green Belt’ is the gist of what it says. But behind it is another sign, which has been there since we arrived, and, we assume, long before that. This one says ‘No Horse-Riding’. The new sign has been put just in front of the first, slightly to the right, so that the two are unavoidably read together as you enter the village, and form a sort of double message, as impenetrably

Peter Jones

Property’s not theft

Sir Trevor Nunn is directing a play called ‘Dessert’. It seems to be a virtue-signalling riff on the evil of possessions. Doubtless Cicero and Aratus will not feature. On the face of it, the Roman statesman Cicero (1st c bc) was a passionate upholder of property rights. He said ‘it is the proper function of the state and its citizens to ensure for everyone the free and undisturbed guardianship of their possessions’. But that did not mean ownership of property overrode the state’s central purpose and therefore duty — the maintenance of social cohesion and so social harmony, that concordia to which Cicero returned again and again. His whole point

Toby Young Toby Young

My wife’s revenge has me at break point

Fifteen years ago, when I was The Spectator’s drama critic, Caroline used to complain that she had become a ‘theatre widow’. I was spending at least three nights a week in the West End while she was cooped up at home. Occasionally, I was able to persuade her to come with me, but most of the time she just made a face: ‘I’d love to accompany you to the musical version of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, but unfortunately I have an unbreakable appointment with the sofa and the TV set.’ Well, she has her revenge. Caroline is captain of the Park Club Ladies Second Team and if she hasn’t got

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 13 July 2017

Q. Is there an etiquette regarding security gates? My wife and I were invited to dinner by new neighbours who have bought a house formerly owned by lifelong friends of ours. In the old days, any visitor would have just swung in off the road through the open stone gates and made their way up the drive to the house. On arrival this time, we were depressed to find black metal security gates barring our way. We waited for the sensor to open them but nothing happened. I then had to get out of the car and stand in the rain pressing buttons on an electronic panel. I waited a

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