Society

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Grenfell inquiry outcome must not be predetermined

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

Tennis is the real loser at Wimbledon this year

Twice in the first few days of this year’s Wimbledon, I have been left mystified by the optimism of the BBC’s punditry team. I have heard both Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer referred to as being “in the best form” of their careers, and the odds reflect what is considered to be an open title race. For this year’s Championships curtain-raiser, we had the dubious privilege of watching 30-year-old Andy Murray dismantle 20-year-old Sasha Bublik, who hit 12 double faults and looked half the player that Murray did at 20, despite being considered a hot prospect by the ATP. It was a neat metaphor for how this season is unfolding:

Friday

Ed West Ed West

Young people check their privilege – and feel deeply disappointed

Who would want be a member of Generation Z? Having your every youthful screw-up tracked and recorded on social media, facing the robot job apocalypse and without a lolly’s chance in hell of ever owning a home in London – even if medical advancements allow them to work until they’re 200. To top things off, they’re saddled with years of student debt after their three years learning about Whiteness and Privilege at university. As the Guardian puts it: Students from the poorest 40% of families entering university in England for the first time this September will emerge with an average debt of around £57,000, according to a new analysis by a leading

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Judgment of Paris

This year’s Grand Chess Tour started in Paris, continues in Leuven (Belgium) and will go on to St Louis and then London. The Paris and Leuven legs are speed events, while St Louis and London revert to chess played at classical time limits.   In Paris world champion Magnus Carlsen won the rapidplay section, fell back in the blitz but eventually triumphed in a tie-break to be the overall winner against the French grandmaster Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. He netted $31,250 for his efforts. The first extract this week shows the decisive phase of Carlsen’s play-off decider.   Carlsen–Vachier-Lagrave: Paris tie-break 2017 (diagram 1)   The white rook keeps the dangerous black a-pawn under

Raymond Keene

no. 464

Black to play. This is a position from Carlsen–Vachier–Lagrave, Paris blitz 2017. Carlsen was winning this game but has just blundered. How did Black exploit his lapse? Answers by Tuesday 11 July to me at The Spectator 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 Rxg7+ Last week’s winner Graham Baker, Campsea Ashe, Suffolk

Taki

High life | 6 July 2017

A funny thing happened on my way to lunch last week. I opened the Daily Mail and read a few snippets about the Camilla–Charles saga by Penny Junor, stuff to make strong men weep with boredom. But then a certain item caught my eye: ‘Camilla and the Queen finally met in the summer of 2000, when Charles threw a 60th birthday party at Highgrove for his cousin King Constantine of Greece… They shook hands, smiled at one another, Camilla curtseyed, and they had a moment or two of small talk before going to different tables for lunch.’ Hey, wait a minute, I told myself. You were there, for God’s sake,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 6 July 2017

Up on the fifth floor the wind was like thunder. Wild gusts shook the window glass so violently I thought it might smash, which lent the occasion an unexpected drama and significance. I couldn’t entirely shake off the faint and appallingly egotistical suspicion that the universe strongly approved, or strongly disapproved, or something. My digestive system certainly disapproved. Viagra and the tart cheap fizz had brought on exquisitely agonising acid reflux. As it was getting on for nine o’clock, we decided that if we didn’t get up right now, leave the hotel, and go and find something to eat, we’d starve. As we walked down the hill into the teeth

Melissa Kite

Real life | 6 July 2017

Last night, I had dinner at the M25 services. I don’t mean I stopped for a break mid-journey. I mean I purposefully got into my car and drove from my house to a service station on the M25 because it was the only place to eat. This is not quite what I envisaged when I left London for the countryside. I imagined cosy meals in welcoming pubs. But of course the reality is that everything in the sticks shuts at an unknowable hour that changes every evening, so no matter what time you turn up the staff are cleaning the counter down. I don’t have a kitchen yet. The house

Robin Oakley

The turf | 6 July 2017

Having spent three quarters of my life covering politics and the other quarter following racing, I am often asked what the two have in common. One answer is that politicians are often gamblers. David Cameron tried to solve his party’s divisions over Europe by launching the Brexit referendum and failed spectacularly when an irritated electorate overturned the odds. Despite having a workable majority, Theresa May bet the Tory farm on a snap election seeking to increase it and she, too, lost on an apparent certainty. Playing party political games with the nation’s future, neither deserved any better. Certainly, I find few in racing who believe that Brexit, especially May’s beloved

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 6 July 2017

The European Open Pairs, the final event in Montecatini, was a long and arduous five-day slog, three of those days qualifying about a quarter of the field for the two-day final. Long Pairs events often feature a period when things are tough and it seems impossible to get any Matchpoints. How you play during these spells can define how you do in the event overall, but sometimes it can seem like the Bridge gods are conspiring against you. Today’s hand features young English talents Ed Jones and Tom Paske, who reached the final the hard way — by winning semi-final B, which qualified only six pairs — and another London-based

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 6 July 2017

Q. ‘Alfred’ is a friend of 30 years’ standing who has just married for the first time. Alfred retains all his charms but his wife is a horror show who carps and criticises our beloved friend in front of us. The only plus is that she is often away on business. Alfred has a country house to which he usually invites us over the summer. How can we tactfully arrange to be invited during one of his wife’s absences? — Name and address withheld A. Ring Alfred to synchronise diaries and find a time when they can come to stay with you. Keep saying the weekends he suggests are no

Toby Young Toby Young

The trouble with diversity training

Is diversity training snake oil? According to its proponents, women and minorities are not competing with white men on a level playing field when it comes to career advancement because of the ‘unconscious bias’ of their white male colleagues. The solution, if you’re the CEO of a large company, is to pay a ‘diversity consultant’ to train your managers to recognise and eliminate this bias. In America, it’s an $8-billion-a-year industry, yet a recent study in Australia suggests that, whatever is holding back women and minorities, it isn’t unconscious bias. The Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian government has just published the results of a randomised control trial involving 21,000

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Cold foam and spindly legs

Bibendum is a hushed restaurant on the first floor of the Michelin House on the Fulham Road. (Bibendum is the name of the Michelin Man; as such, he is the only restaurant mascot I can think of who is a morbidly obese drunk, and here of all places. It is a noble gesture in a district full of Prada and control). The building is extraordinary — an art-deco whim standing on a corner like Cinema Paradiso without the dreams. It was once the headquarters of the Michelin tyre company; as such, I admire the ambition of placing a tyre company in what is essentially a Venetian palace, but perhaps tyres

Dot Wordsworth

Clichés

The most tired cliché in English, suggests ​​Orin Hargraves, the American philologist, is at the end of the day. I’ve just read a review in the Times Literary Supplement of his book on ​​clichés, It’s Been Said Before, published not this year, or in 2016, or 2015, but in 2014. This seems an admirable attitude to noticing books. Why not leave a book a generation? Let time separate wheat from chaff, and save the effort of threshing and winnowing. Mr Hargraves m​ay well frighten readers into guiltily examining their worn, off-the-peg language, but he sees the glory of cliché. It provides ‘a stock of dependable formulas for conveying the ordinary’,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 6 July 2017

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 July 2017

Home Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged colleagues to make the case for ‘sound money’; he said, ‘We must hold our nerve,’ as he came under pressure to end the public-sector pay cap of a 1 per cent rise a year. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, thought that pay rises could be awarded in ‘a responsible way’; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, did not think that taxes would need to increase to accommodate pay rises. Firemen boasted of a 2 per cent pay rise. The government won the vote on the Queen’s Speech by 323 to 309 after heading off an amendment by the Labour MP Stella Creasy,

Doc

2317-370

The subtraction reveals the link between the unclued lights which saw light then. Three unclued lights consist of two words, and others form four pairs. In addition, a personal announcement is revealed clue by clue, for starters.   Across 1    Jaunty seat astern with hot bearing (13, two hyphens) 9    Unitarian’s cross, interrupted by vulgar Canadian leader (7) 11    Lover coming back with very English turn (7) 13   Yemen’s wind is whirling, low murmur initially (6) 15    This animal is clumsily laden (5) 19    Horizontal figure showing spirit in new dance (7) 20    Entice with a pamphlet, we’re told (7) 23    Fruit less decomposed around mid-October (5) 24    Othar rewrote

Tim Cooper

How shareholders can help keep large businesses in check

Investors are increasingly turning to shareholder activism to make their views heard, and their campaigns are working. As public trust in large businesses and politicians is at an all-time low, many argue that, in the right hands, activism is more effective than political intervention in curbing corporate excess and poor governance. According to research by FTI Consulting, shareholder campaigns in the UK nearly doubled from 28 to 51 last year as people increasingly used their ownership of companies to make a difference. Globally, campaigns have increased nearly five-fold since 2010 and now focus on a huge range of issues from boardroom pay to climate change. Recent high-profile campaigns have included

Ian Katz

Media culpa

A thread runs through several of the stories that have defined this turbulent summer: reporters have been shocked by the levels of hostility they have encountered. ‘They hate us,’ one seasoned producer told me returning from a Grenfell Tower protest. ‘I haven’t felt anything like it in 20 years.’ When the battalions of the media descend on any big story, the experience rarely leaves those caught up in it feeling warm and fuzzy about the fourth estate. But this is different. In each case there is a specific, albeit related, animus. During the election, it was Corbyn supporters convinced the mainstream media was bent on doing down their man. At