Society

Saturday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The Six Nations is the most exciting sport on the planet

Perfection in sport: unattainable, but sometimes you can come close. Moments, people, actions you never tire of watching: Roger Federer’s backhand; Virat Kohli’s cover drive; Mo Farah’s acceleration off the final bend or little Lionel Messi dribbling through a crowded penalty area as if his opponents were shadows; Fred Couples’s sensuous golf swing. Last weekend another moment: the long pass from England’s Owen Farrell to Elliot Daly for that decisive try in the final minutes at the Principality Stadium. This 25ft rocket, superbly timed and delayed long enough for Farrell to be in touching distance of the defensive battery, was so quick and flat it left the defence flummoxed. It

James Forsyth James Forsyth

For the sake of Britain’s constitution, will everyone please shut up?

One of the striking features of Britain’s unwritten constitution is how it relies on various people keeping their opinions to themselves. The monarch, the Speaker of the House of Commons and senior judges must all avoid expressing political views in public – or even in what one might call semi-private. It’s not their right to remain silent; it’s their responsibility. The royal family is expected to stay out of politics from birth, the Speaker is an MP who puts aside partisanship when he or she is dragged to the chair, and judges must show that they are applying the law, not advancing their own agenda. Any appearance of partiality is

The Spectator

The Labour party has turned into a political bed-blocker

Just as it seems that Labour has reached the bottom of the abyss, Jeremy Corbyn and his party somehow manage to find a new low. The latest nationwide poll puts them at 24 per cent, trailing the Tories by 16 points. No wonder Labour MPs look so boot-faced around Parliament, and an increasing number are hunting for jobs elsewhere. If a general election were called now, the Conservatives would win a huge majority. Labour would be further than ever from power, arguably even finished as a major parliamentary force. Polls are not rock-solid indicators of future electoral success or failure, but Labour’s ratings are so abysmal as to suggest a

Friday

Helen Nugent

Business rates, retirement, housing and retail sales

There’s more on the government’s upcoming changes to business rates today, with a group of Britain’s biggest employers’ associations condemning the move. The BBC reports on a letter written by 13 groups, including the British Retail Consortium, the Federation of Small Businesses, Revo, the Association of Convenience Stores, the British Property Federation and the CBI, who want ministers to drop the ‘outrageous’ increases to business rates. They are particularly angry about a clause they believe could prevent firms appealing against rate rises, even if firms can prove they are wrong. The next business rates revaluation comes into effect on 1 April – the first for seven years. Retirees The Guardian reports on research by

Thursday

Raymond Keene

no. 444

White to play. This position is a variation from Hou Yifan-Ju, Gibraltar 2017. Hou lost this game to her compatriot. The puzzle shows what might have happened if her opponent had gone wrong. How can she conclude her attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 21 February or email victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a £20 prize 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 … Qe1+ Last week’s winner John Briggs, Whickham, Newcastle upon Tyne

Taki

High life | 16 February 2017

Gstaad One’s unpopularity on account of calling it a night diminishes in direct proportion to the severity of the next morning’s hangover. I was literally booed by Geoffrey Moore and co. for asking the wife of a friend to drive me 200 yards to my chalet. Co., not Geoffrey, had other plans for the lady, and I will give you, the readers, two guesses what those plans were. It was 5.30 a.m., the friend’s wife did look awfully charming — desirable is closer to the truth — and co. was getting touchy-feely, so I opened my big mouth and asked her to drive me home. The next day, all sorts

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 16 February 2017

A deep frost in the winter of 1821–22 killed the orange trees in Nice. The Anglican minister to the English colony, the Reverend Lewis Way, appealed to his congregation for relief funds to provide work for redundant orange-pickers. The money raised was spent on the construction of six miles of coast road, the redundant orange-pickers were employed as navvies, and the completed road became known as the Promenade des Anglais. On 14 July 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian bisexual gym bunny, drove a 19-tonne truck into a crowd assembled on the Promenade des Anglais to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, killing 86 and injuring 450. On 13 February 2017,

Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 February 2017

Fine, so I got it completely wrong. It turns out the sale of my flat was not held up by a wiggle in the garden, but by a kink in the kitchen. This kink in the kitchen is far more serious than a wiggle in the garden. I should have realised that, the buyer’s solicitor has complained. I don’t know why I got the idea that exchange of contracts had been delayed by a mistake in the plan for the garden, but I’m struggling to keep up. I’ve been deluged with complaints about absolutely everything I had thought was fine. From the crisp new electrical safety certificates to the diligently

Robin Oakley

The turf | 16 February 2017

The drumbeats are quickening ahead of the Cheltenham Festival and at this stage there really is no substitute for going racing. Some might have ducked Newbury’s Betfair Hurdle meeting on Saturday because of the bitter wind, which made a hot-water bottle the most prized object on the winner’s rostrum, and because the other two key races on the card were reduced to three and four runners. More fool them. Both produced intriguing contests and vital clues for the Festival. An earnest statistician once asked a northern trainer what the crucial signs were that told her when one of her horses was ready to win a race. She replied, ‘Just one.

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 16 February 2017

What can be more regrettable than picking up a huge hand and landing in the wrong contract?   It happened to me recently in a Hubert Phillips match. I had a 3-3-5-2 twenty-four count, all Aces and Kings, and my left hand opponent opened 3♠ which was raised to game on my right. I gave it a proper think and emerged with 6NT. Wrong! 7 Diamonds was laydown but 6NT had no play. I still feel sick!   In the third division of the Norwegian premier league recently, a hand came up that was so extraordinary it provoked a global ‘what do you bid?’ contest. You are sitting South, and

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

American English

Ralph’s Coffee & Bar is in the Polo Ralph Lauren flagship store on Regent Street. It is rare that fashion admits food exists and when it does, it usually does something insane with it, like when the Berkeley Hotel celebrated fashion week by inventing a shoe biscuit, so you could eat your shoe. But Ralph Lauren, who dresses Melania Trump because other designers will not — believing that the withholding of couture equals meaningful opposition to tyranny, a position that makes me laugh even as I place my head in the oven — goes beyond couture and into the weird lands of lifestyle. Don’t know who you are, but want

Dot Wordsworth

Rocket

‘It is rocket science,’ said my husband waving a pinnately lobed leaf snatched from his restaurant salad. He doesn’t much like rocket salad and wishes all supplies had perished along with the lettuces of Spain. So as a distraction I tried telling him that rocket leaves were connected with street urchins, caterpillars, caprices and hedgehogs. The herb rocket is older in English than the sky-rocket, which appeared no earlier than 1566. The firework rocket took its name from rocchetta in Italian, meaning ‘little bobbin’, from the similarity in shape. There is a related old word in English, rock, which once meant ‘distaff’ and is used by historians now to mean

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 16 February 2017

Q. My husband and I like to go to concerts and recitals but he is an artist with a very annoying habit of sketching the musicians in performance. The scratch of the pencil and his hand movements are distracting and I worry about his annoying other people nearby. Sometimes it is too dark for him to see what he’s doing, but not always. When I ask him to stop, he insists no one else minds (even though people have, on occasion, voiced their irritation). What can I do to stop this annoying habit? —S.T., Chirton, Wiltshire A. Make a point of always buying three tickets rather than two. Give the

Toby Young Toby Young

Can I bear to sack the digital babysitter?

I was astonished to discover in conversation with another dad last week that he and his wife intended to introduce a screen ban over half term. Not limiting their children to something reasonable like two hours a day. But a blanket ban. How on earth will they cope — and by ‘they’ I mean him and his wife, not their two kids? It’s not as if they’re going on a family cycling holiday on the Dalmatian Coast. No, they’ll be spending this week at home in Acton. The poor buggers will be forced to play Monopoly Empire from first thing in the morning till last thing at night. When I hear

Peter Jones

From Tacitus to Justin Welby

Many are still questioning the enthusiasm with which newspapers have implicated Archbishop Justin Welby, as a young man, in the abusive activities of a Christian camp leader for whom he was working. This line from the Daily Telegraph is typical: ‘Archbishop Welby is said to have gained much of his early grounding in Christian doctrine from the Iwerne holiday camps, where boys were recruited for John Smyth’s sadomasochistic cult.’ The Roman historian Tacitus (d. c. AD 117) was a master of this sort of insinuation, in which ‘is said’ (as used above) exculpates the writer from responsibility for the statement, and the relative clause ‘where…’ associates the young Welby with a cult

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 February 2017

Home The Queen opened a new National Cyber Security Centre in London. Britain’s contribution to Nato has fallen below the promised 2 per cent to 1.98 per cent of gross domestic product, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, because GDP has grown. The annual rate of inflation measured by the Consumer Prices Index rose to 1.8 per cent in January, from 1.6 in December; by the new index to be used from March, called CPIH, which includes some housing costs, inflation had already reached 2 per cent. Unemployment fell by 7,000. Joe Root, aged 26, was made captain of England. A YouGov poll for the Times put Labour

Columba

2297: Thoroughly

Each of nine clues contains a misprinted letter in the definition part. Corrections of misprints spell a two-word phrase. Clues in italics are cryptic indications of partial answers; in each case, the indicated part must be placed as suggested by the thematic phrase to create the full answer to be entered in the grid. Resulting entries (one of which is a two-word name) are defined by unclued lights.   Across 1   Observation point secured by dog in window (5, hyphened) 4   Chatter about old vestment, very dark (9, hyphened) 9   Ice can help with treatment of the head (10) 14  Master destroys foxes (5) 15  Caught by magnetic field strength

Columba

to 2294: Times Square

Perimeter words are names of the most recent GEOLOGICAL PERIODS.   First prize J.P Green, Uppingham, Rutland Runners-up Paul Jenkinson, Zollikon, Switzerland; Sebastian Robinson, Glasgow.