Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

J.K. Rowling’s schizophrenic politics

On the face of it, there is nothing complicated about the politics of Harry Potter, who made his first appearance in The Philosopher’s Stone 20 years ago. Like his creator J.K. Rowling, who once gave £1 million to the Labour party, he is a left-wing paternalist in the Bloomsbury tradition — the love child of John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He feels a protective duty towards the common man (‘muggles’ in the lexicon of the novels) and a loathing for suburban, lower-middle-class Tories like the Dursleys, his Daily Mail-reading foster parents. The arch-villain of the saga is Voldemort, a charismatic Übermensch who believes in purity and strength and in

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 June 2017

At Guildhall on Tuesday, the Centre for Policy Studies held its Margaret Thatcher Conference on Security. Its title is an implied reproach to the way security is seen by current governments. You couldn’t have a Barack Obama Conference on Security, or a Donald Trump one, because neither cares about the subject. You could, I suppose, have a Theresa May Conference about Security, but that would have nothing to say about international institutions and alliances, the values of democracy, totalitarian ideology, and the needs of global defence. It would concern itself with second-order subjects like the surveillance of terrorist suspects and the state of deportation law. Many have complained that the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 June 2017

Home In preparation for the vote on the Queen’s Speech, the Government, after weeks of negotiations, bought the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in the House of Commons by promising to spend a billion or two pounds in Northern Ireland on broadband and other good things. In reply to expostulations from the Opposition, Nigel Dodds, the parliamentary leader of the DUP, told the Commons: ‘We might publish all the correspondence and conversations we had in 2010 with Labour front-benchers, and in 2015 with Labour front-benchers, and indeed also the Scottish National party, because some of the faux outrage we have heard is hypocrisy.’ Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party,

Lavatch

2316: Divine alteration

Seven clues contain a redundant word, each defining one unclued light. These seven unclued lights all undergo partial 1 across (in Collins) before entry, in a consistent manner. Resulting grid entries are not real words. Unchecked and cross-checking letters in all eight unclued lights could give: NEWS — I’LL HINT THIS: CRUX’S LATIN   Across 12    Physicist’s drole gibe cracking up virgin (9, two words) 13    Love time off to produce plant sheaths (6) 16    Decide crazy American quits US city (6) 17    Old claim Reading’s awful (7) 20    Male’s arms twirling (4) 22    A hero, one up to revel in high spirits (8) 24    Points taken by genius director

The Spectator

to 2313: Goldfish

Extra letters in clues gave SAM GOLDWYN, to whom are attributed I’LL GIVE YOU (5) A DEFINITE (8) MAYBE (1A), INCLUDE (23) ME OUT (7), and IN TWO (33) WORDS (34A) IM-POSSIBLE! (38). Goldfish was his former name.   First prize Magdalena Deptula, Eton, Berkshire Runners-up Eddie Looby, Longbridge, Birmingham; Sue Topham, Newark

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The abortion amendment is the first proper ambush for this government

The first proper government ambush of this Parliament is upon us. The Speaker has announced which amendments to the Queen’s Speech will be put to a vote this evening. Along with the official Labour Brexit amendment calling on the government to negotiate an outcome that prioritises jobs and the economy, there are two amendments from Labour MPs that will ruffle feathers on both sides of the House. Chuka Umunna’s amendment criticising the Queen’s speech for not keeping the option of single market membership on the table could see many Labour MPs rebel from their party’s ‘official position’. Meanwhile, Stella Creasy’s amendment on the abortion rights of Northern Ireland women looks set to cause

David Whitehouse

The truth about the global warming pause

Between the start of 1997 and the end of 2014, average global surface temperature stalled. This 18-year period is known as the global warming pause, also sometimes referred to as the global warming hiatus. The rise in global temperatures that alarmed climate campaigners in the 1990s had slowed so much that the trend was no longer statistically significant. It has been the subject of much research and debate in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Then, in the spring of 2015, El Niño, a warm ocean phase in the equatorial Pacific developed. It rapidly drove up global temperatures by 0.5°C in less than a year. In fact, the 2015/16 El Niño turned out to

Laura Whitcombe

How to beat villa holiday scams

There’s been a surge in fake villa rental websites setting up since January, with fraudsters targeting properties listed on the popular Villa Plus and Airbnb websites, according to this week’s Sunday Times. The scam sites use stolen images of real villas listed on legitimate rental websites and list them under bogus names to entice holidaymakers to part with their cash by bank transfer – often thousands of pounds. Villa Plus told the newspaper that at least 10,000 of its images had been stolen by scammers and pointed to paradisevillaholidays.com as one alleged fraudulent website. The site, which was still accessible when Spectator Money looked at it, features a property named Villa

Sebastian Vella

Letter from a Corbynista

Dear Uncle James, Thank you for your note (‘Letter to a Corbynista’, June 24). Firstly, of course we’re still friends, so there is no need to worry about that. The world would be a boring place if we all agreed on everything, and probably a backward one too if no one was challenged on their views. I should also explain my background for the benefit of readers not related to me. I come from a Conservative-voting family, I’m privately educated and I work as the financial controller of a multinational group. If there is a stereotypical Labour voter, or even a ‘Corbynista’, I’m not sure I’d fit the mould. In

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 29 June 2017

Laikipia, Kenya   During our evening walk on the farm, Claire kept looking around nervously instead of engaging in conversation. At one point the dogs ran ahead, probably thinking that they were after the scent of a rabbit. Seconds later, they tore back past us, leaving a trail of dust, and heading after them came a bull elephant moving at quite a pace, trunk up, ears flapping. Claire took off after the dogs and I followed, briskly but grumpily. I had been irritated by Claire’s anxiety in the bush, excited by the story of an incident that had happened a few days before, when an elephant had charged and completely

Simon Barnes

Andy’s ace

Who will you cheer for if Andy Murray meets Roger Federer at Wimbledon? It’s not a straightforward question, at least not for the English. The loveliness of Rodge and the awkwardness of Andy — however British — makes for a difficult and revealing choice. Different if you happen to be Scottish. I remember a conversation in the gents at Melbourne in 2010. Two Scots, companionably pissing side by side, were loudly discussing the final of the Australian Open just completed. An Englishwoman alongside them in the stands had been cheering Federer, the straight-sets winner, rather than Murray. ‘She was everything I was brought up to hate.’ But Murray was never

Bruce Anderson

A toast to the new Scottish dawn

‘Stands Scotland where it did?’ As the bottles circulated, we were able to answer Macduff’s question in much more optimistic terms than would have seemed possible even a month earlier, thanks to Ruth Davidson, the Malcolm Canmore of our age. It is extraordinary. Scottish Tories spent almost 20 years on the fringes of politics, marginalised and derided. During that black period, it was clear no other force in Scotland could be relied on to defend the Union. After the Nats’ triumph in 2015, an unpleasant version of Rousseau’s general will seem to have triumphed with it. If you did not support the SNP, you were not a proper Scot. If

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why driverless showers are key to the housing crisis

Although it is commonly assumed that faster-than-sound passenger travel died with Concorde, this isn’t quite true: it overlooks the Caledonian Sleeper. With a few whiskies inside you, this is as close as you can get to teleportation. Yes, according to the timetable it takes about eight-and-a-half hours between Perth and London, but as you are asleep for eight of them, this makes for a supersonic speed of 900 miles per conscious hour. Quite simply, if you are asleep, or otherwise productively or pleasurably engaged, travel time isn’t that important. And if you accept this principle, it becomes clear that Google and Tesla’s Elon Musk have missed an opportunity to really

Juliet Rix

A century of De Stijl

It starts as soon as I arrive. In Den Haag Centraal railway station, the kiosks, windows, lift shaft, piano and even the hoarding on the building site outside, are all cheerfully decked out in red, blue and yellow rectangles, black lines and an occasional patch of straight-sided white. Holland’s capital has gone Mondrian mad; the style of De Stijl (the modernist art movement to which he belonged) is plastered all over town, indeed over much of the country. Holland is in the grip of ‘Mondrian to Dutch Design: 100 Years of De Stijl’, a year celebrating its ‘most important contribution to the 20th century’. De Stijl’s influence is everywhere. It

John Mcentee

When gossip was king

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Nigel Dempster, once the world’s best-known gossip columnist. For three decades he was paid a fortune by the Daily Mail to provide juicy tittle-tattle about the royal family (he was a close friend of Princess Margaret), the aristocracy (particularly priapic minor baronet Dai Llewellyn), tycoons including Jimmy Goldsmith and racing figures such as Robert Sangster, as well as mainstream TV stars like David Frost and Robin Day. Alas, by the time of Nigel’s death (from the awful effects of progressive supranuclear palsy) his Diary page was already an anachronism. His brand of gossip was in its death throes. His cast

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The Bank of England is enslaved by groupthink

I do find it odd that I’m so often having to write about the science of global warming, species extinction and ocean acidification because, though I’ve certainly acquired a pretty useful base knowledge over the years — superior, I’m guessing, to 97 per cent of scientists — it’s really not my main interest. What fascinates me far more is the way the faddish preoccupations of a few green cultists have somehow come to dominate our entire culture, corrupting the intellectual current, suborning institutions, crushing dissent — much as Marxist, fascist and Nazi ideologies did in the 20th century, only with rather more widespread success. Let me give you a recent

James Walton

Mad about the girls

It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are separated by safety barriers, as the glow sticks wave and the band’s name is excitedly chanted. But in Storyville: Tokyo Girls (BBC4, Tuesday), there was one fairly major twist: the teenage girls were the band, and the middle-aged men their swooning fans. As this jaw-dropping documentary explained, the girls in question are known in Japan as ‘idols’. Their songs tend to be about how demure and innocent they are; and to prove it, they often perform in school uniforms — although with skirts a lot shorter, I suspect, than is

Lucy Vickery

What Alice did next

In Competition No. 3004 you were invited to submit an extract from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Trumpland. As I was listening to Kellyanne Conway’s alternative-facts interview earlier this year, Humpty Dumpty’s words from Through the Looking-Glass floated into my mind (‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’) and it struck me that Donald Trump’s America might be a good candidate for the Carollian treatment.   In what was another closely fought contest, Chris O’Carroll and D.A. Prince were unlucky losers. The winners take £30 each and the bonus fiver is

Wednesday

Helen Monks Takhar

Who is most at risk of identity theft? The answer might surprise you

If asked, who would you say are the type of people most vulnerable to identity theft? The young and transient, whose credit cards find their way to the doormats of long-left flat shares? The elderly and vulnerable, who unwittingly reveal personal information to fraudsters? How about the savvy and entrepreneurial? A new report by Cifas reveals that around 20 per cent of identity fraud victims are company directors, even though they make up less than 9 per cent of the UK’s population. Cifas, a not-for-profit company which works to protect organisations and individuals from financial crime, says this makes company directors one of the most at-risk groups for identity fraud crimes.