Society

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

It’s never good news when I trend on Twitter. The Oscars was no exception

When Kingsley Amis won the Booker prize for The Old Devils in 1986, he said that he had previously thought of the Booker as a rather trivial, showbizzy sort of caper, but now considered it a very serious, reliable indication of literary merit. It was a joke, evidently. Indeed, when he said it during his acceptance speech he grinned from ear to ear, just to make it crystal clear that he was being ironic. But it didn’t do any good. In a BBC round-up of the events of the year, the presenter said that Amis had won the distinguished literary prize in spite of having previously disparaged it. This was

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A business rates rise benefits nobody

I campaigned hard for a business rates review, and even tried to claim credit for it — or at least for its pro-northern bias — when details emerged last September. The smallest enterprises are exempt and the provinces will gain some benefit; but it’s clear that new rateable values from 1 April will impose undeservedly harsh rises on mid-sized businesses in London and the south-east. I’m even feeling a twinge of sympathy for Victoria Beckham, whose Dover Street boutique reportedly faces a 415 per cent hike. Philip Hammond, meanwhile, is in ‘listening mode’ — not least, we might imagine, when accosted by furious shopkeepers in his Runnymede and Weybridge constituency —

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Excusing a huge group of paedophiles isn’t the answer to tackling child abuse

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, who heads Operation Hydrant, the police investigation of ‘non-recent’ child abuse cases, now says that paedophiles who view images of child abuse should not be prosecuted, because police cannot cope with the numbers involved. Mr Bailey is wedded to the doctrine that someone who says he is an abuse victim must automatically be believed. The result, said Sir Richard Henriques in his scathing report on Operation Midland, is that the criminal justice system totters: ‘Chief Constable Bailey’s argument ignores the consequences of false terminology.’ Another consequence is that the child abuse statistics, unchecked, explode. Mr Bailey will not admit his error and so, in order to

Douglas Murray

Paul Nuttall and the tricks memory plays on all of us

Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher. In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true. Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Donald Trump and the end of the age of celebrity

The ongoing war between Donald Trump and the Hollywood A-list has entered a new and unpredictable phase. Celebrity criticism of Trump — keenly anticipated as the chewy takeaway from last week’s Academy Awards ceremony — was instead overshadowed by a celebrity cock-up. Thanks to a mix-up of the sacred envelopes, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway temporarily awarded Best Picture to La La Land, rather than the real winner, Moonlight. The result was an unforgettable tableau of confusion at the ceremony’s crowning moment. Trump had earlier let it be known that he wasn’t watching. Like a kid talking too loudly about his maths project while the others are getting ready

The Spectator

Carry on Major: real democrats don’t shout down Europhiles

As Prime Minister, John Major was intolerant of opposition from within the Conservative party over the EU — memorably calling Maastricht rebels ‘bastards’. It was unwise, and the bad blood it created within his party has been swirling around ever since. Now that the tables have turned and Sir John now finds himself the rebellious outsider on Europe, it is tempting for those on the Conservative party’s Eurosceptic wing, who for so long were denounced as freaks, fruitcakes and swivel–eyed loons, to take the same approach. Their instinct is to denounce Sir John, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke and others as dinosaurs seeking to deny the will of the British people. A

Friday

Helen Nugent

Stamp duty, home ownership, retirement and pensions

It’s the bane of home-buyers’ lives – and now a major building society has said that stamp duty is due a major overhaul. The Yorkshire Building Society said that nearly three-quarters of first-time buyers pay the tax, compared with just over half in 2006. It wants stamp duty to be a tax on property sellers, rather than buyers, according to the BBC. While house prices have risen, the stamp duty threshold has remained the same. It is levied on properties of more than £125,000, or £145,000 in Scotland. Home ownership The Guardian reports that home ownership in England has dropped to its lowest level for three decades but the amount of people

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Loire Valley

When I was a child growing up in Kent in the Seventies the highlight of any holiday or half term would be those bright sunny mornings when my father sniffed the air and suggested an impromptu trip to France. We would pile into my parents’ Mini, speed across Romney Marsh to Lydd Airport (Lydd Ferryfield as it then was), head directly onto the asphalt apron and then – taking a bit of a run at it – straight up a ramp through the open nose doors of a British United Air Ferries Bristol Superfreighter and deep into the aeroplane’s belly. These cumbersome craft could carry three cars and twenty passengers

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Mr Hundred Per Cent

Nigel Short has distinguished himself by scoring 100 per cent, winning all six games, in the Bunratty tournament which finished towards the end of last month in Ireland. Anyone who has competed in a chess tournament of almost any strength will realise how hard it is to win all the games. In Short’s case he played consistently solid yet aggressive classical chess and in the process defeated two grandmasters, Peter Wells and Alexander Baburin, the victim of this week’s game.   Next year sees Bunratty’s silver jubilee and they are hoping to attract as many previous winners as possible. Nigel will surely be high on the list.   Short-Baburin: Bunratty

Raymond Keene

no. 446

White to play. This position is from Tabatabaei-Vakhidov, Aeroflot Open, Moscow 2017. White has sacrificed a piece for a powerful attack. Can you spot his crushing breakthrough? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 7 February 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 … Qxb3 Last week’s winner Peter Dearnley, Leeds

Taki

High life | 2 March 2017

Gstaad Back in the good old days a funicular used to take skiers up, bucking all the way and stopping from time to time when the snowdrifts across the track got too deep. We used to wax our skis at every opportunity, deposit them in the baggage car, and ride the outdoor car. Most of us had a flask with good stuff in it, and once on top we’d push our laced-up boots into the toe irons and clamp them shut. We’d then wrap the long leather straps of the skis tightly around the boot, and presto, we’d be ready to ski. Skiing back then was an adventure, not just

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 2 March 2017

All told, I find that in the last week I’ve slept with a Chinaman, three black women from the United States, four South Korean women and one South Korean man. I slept with the South Korean man first, for two nights running, at the Chameleon Hostel in Alicante. Joon-woo and I shared a 9’ by 8’ four-bunk cell. We were both on the bottom, 18 inches apart. This quiet, cheerful chap was always showered and in his black pyjamas and yellow duck head slippers by 9 p.m. and fast asleep by 10. He slept silently and soundly and with no discernible movement until 9 or 10 in the morning, when

Melissa Kite

Real life | 2 March 2017

Shoot me if I ever let slip I’ve been mucking out with rubber gloves and a dustpan and brush. As God is my witness, I have just left a stable yard where the clientele were all ‘non-riders’ — women whose only joy in horse-owning was to make the mucking out last as long as possible. This is because horse-owning is changing, I fear. Stable yards where people once came to ride their horses are becoming petting zoos where women who have never grown up, possibly because daddy didn’t love them, store a horse they call My Minty, who they believe will fulfil their emotional needs by allowing them to overfeed

Robin Oakley

The turf | 2 March 2017

When the generals have lost heart and crept away from the battlefield it is hard for the ground troops to keep up their spirits. Although the Cheltenham Festival buzz is already in the air, BetBright Chase Day at Kempton Park last Saturday definitely had something deflated about it. Everybody was still doing their jobs but the atmosphere wasn’t one of celebration or expectation. The cover of the racecard for which punters had to fork out £3 carried, as it long has done, the words ‘Kempton Park — a Jockey Club racecourse’, but that doesn’t have the same ring about it now we know that the Jockey Club intends, as soon

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 2 March 2017

February is probably the most exciting and glamorous month in the bridge calendar. A couple of weeks ago, über-sponsor Pierre Zimmermann held his Cavendish Monaco Teams and Auction Pairs tournament, which attracts the best players in the world, all vying for a chance to pick up the big player’s pot or score in the auction. I played the Pairs with my regular victim Artur Malinowski — known by all as Bidonemoreski!   Mind you, it’s very tempting to overbid playing with Artur; his declarer play is so brilliant and he seems to conjure up tricks from thin air. Occasionally, when my dummy goes down, his ‘Thank you, partner’ has the

Peter Jones

No mumbling allowed

In the audience-free world of TV, where ‘acting’ and visuals have become of far greater importance than the actual words, it is no surprise that mumbling has become the fashion. Any ancient Greek actor engaging in such self-indulgent behaviour would quickly learn all about it. Tragedies and comedies were performed by masked actors, required both to speak and sing, and for the ‘choral’ parts to dance and sing to music, with a script that could veer linguistically from sublime limpidity to the most intense complexity. As a result, the highest premium was placed on voice training and the correctness, clarity and euphony of the actor’s delivery. Technical incompetence was simply not

The Spectator

Letters | 2 March 2017

Camilla for Queen Sir: On reading Melanie McDonagh’s argument against there ever being a Queen Camilla (‘Against Queen Camilla’, 25 February), I was reminded of a line from Brideshead Revisited, ‘Beryl is a woman of strict Catholic principle fortified by the prejudices of the middle class.’ Her opposition to Camilla seems to ignore the long tradition of infidelity among our royalty and nobility, where marriage has always been about more than just love. Eleanor of Aquitaine had been married to Louis VII of France, had borne him two daughters and had been unfaithful in that marriage, yet she went on to marry Henry II of England and become his queen consort.

Prue Leith

Diary – 2 March 2017

A fortnight ago I got a taste of what being far too famous might feel like. A leak that I’m a contender for the Mary Berry slot on The Great British Bake Off morphed into the fake news that I’d got the job. For 24 hours it was a lead story — then it was yesterday’s non-news. My daughter, Li-Da Kruger, has made me her plus-one on the maiden voyage of Viking Sky, the swankiest cruise ship imaginable, all spacious showers, leather handrails and the surreal experience of sitting in the hairdresser’s with a roiling sea of black water and white-topped waves rushing past. Li-Da was booked to show her

The Spectator

Barometer | 2 March 2017

And the losers are… La La Land was mistakenly announced as winner of the Oscar for best picture before the error was corrected in favour of the film Moonlight. Some other announcements which went terribly wrong: — In 2015 Miss Universe host Steve Harvey announced Miss Colombia as the winner. Two minutes after she had been crowned Harvey came back on stage to apologise that he had misread the card and in fact Miss Philippines had won. — In January 2016 Heart FM newsreader Fiona Winchester mistakenly announced that David Cameron, then prime minister, had died, before correcting herself and saying that David Bowie had died. — In December 2015