Society

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Was Thomas Hardy a stalker?

The call for letters from a fictional character to his, hers or its creator complaining about their portrayal brought in a mammoth entry bristling with outrage. John Milton was bombarded with complaints by the thoroughly hacked-off cast of Paradise Lost. Wodehouse, too, got it in the neck from a parade of cheesed-off Bertie Woosters (Aunt Agatha wasn’t overly happy either). The Grinch gave both barrels to Dr Seuss (‘To be here in You-ville does NOT make me happy’). And Billy Bunter called out Frank Richards for fat-shaming. There were sparkling performances from Mae Scanlan, Roger Rengold, C.J. Gleed, Robert Schechter, J. Seery and Max Ross. The excellent entries printed below

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Why it’s a shame Steve Bannon is being sidelined

There were three reasons why I so badly wanted Donald Trump to win the US presidential election. One was that the alternative was Hillary; another that I knew it would annoy all the worst people in the world; but the third was a positive one: I genuinely believed that as an independently wealthy, outsider candidate with no loyalties to the DC establishment, Trump was going to be the revolutionary hero who would finally free the people from the shackles of a corrupt, sclerotic and self-serving ruling elite. Some may scoff at my naivety. But there was evidence to support my view. Brexit had just happened and what seemed clear from

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Who will win the French election – and does it even matter?

Who will win the French presidential election? Does it even matter? Nothing in the programmes or personalities of the leading contenders gives confidence that any of them can fix the Fifth Republic and the corruption, dysfunction and stagnation that it has inflicted on the French. At Marie-Trinité’s café in the southern French village where I am an elected councillor, the mood before the voting is one of weary resignation and disgust. Yet this election does matter, and it can make a difference, not only because all of the probable outcomes threaten to make things even worse, but because almost all of them have the potential to be particularly painful for

William Cook

This election will be won or lost on the suburban battleground

In Westminster, all the general election chatter is about Brexit. Will Tory Remainers turn Lib Dem? Will Labour leavers desert Jeremy Corbyn? As polling day draws near, however, the Europe obsession must recede. Politicians may not be able to look past last year’s referendum, but voters will have moved on. MPs will find that, as before, the great issue of our time will be just one of many on the doorsteps. This summer’s battleground won’t be Brussels. It will be suburbia. Domestic matters will decide whether Theresa May returns to Downing Street with a fat majority, and no one is more domesticated than the average suburbanite. We are intensely local.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May’s great gamble

Theresa May has long been clear about what sets her apart from other politicians: she doesn’t play political games. When she launched her bid for the top job last year, she was clear that — unlike her rivals — she hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of Westminster. She told us that she didn’t drink in the bars or gossip over lunch. She invited the TV cameras into her first Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister to record her telling ministers that ‘politics is not a game’. The danger for May in calling an election three years ahead of schedule is that it looks a lot like game-playing. Has a 20-point poll

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

The real victims of this snap election? The bankers’ wives

The people I feel most sorry for in the wake of Theresa May’s shock announcement are not moderate Labour MPs, nor even the pollsters, who really will be in trouble if they get another election wrong. No, it’s the bankers’ wives of west London. If the EU is going to be the No.1 issue in the campaign, and the Tories are standing on a pro-Brexit platform, how will the poor dears vote? On the one hand, they were very, very angry about the outcome of the EU referendum and, even today, they’re not above buttonholing leavers at cocktail parties and giving them the hairdryer treatment. They regard David Cameron as

Henry Jeffreys

Until the election is over, anti-social media is best avoided

On Tuesday morning I was thinking to myself how oddly pleasant social media seemed. Then Theresa May dropped her election bomb. Immediately the posts started appearing: ‘Tory scum’ and ‘Tories launch coup’, then came the memes and I thought: I can’t take another two months of this. I’d only just tentatively returned to Twitter and Facebook following Brexit and Trump; now I find myself wanting to suspend my accounts again. I think back nostalgically to general elections of yesteryear. I vaguely remember some fellow students being pleased about Blair winning in 1997 but most of us were more excited about seeing Teenage Fanclub at Leeds Metropolitan University. The polls of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Expect the unexpected in Theresa May’s pointless poll

A general election is called and in a matter of hours a neutral and unbiased BBC presenter has likened our Prime Minister to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Governments rise and governments fall, but some things stay just as they always were. It was Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM programme who made the comparison, while interviewing the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. In fairness to Mair, he had been alluding to Theresa May’s apparent wish to create ‘unity’ within Westminster, a truly stupid statement within an address which sometimes made no semantic sense and sounded, to my ears, petulant and arrogant. Then along came the opinion pollsters to tell us exactly what

Friday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books podcast: The British boarding school

“The happiest days of your life?” This week in the Books Podcast I ask the authors of two recent books about boarding schools whether the system that has formed the characters of the British ruling classes for several centuries is a blissful idyll or the Stanford Prison Experiment in cricket-whites. I’m joined by Ysenda Maxtone-Graham, whose Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939-1979, is a shrewd history of the fluctuating jollity of hockey sticks, and by Alex Renton, who in Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class argues that British boarding schools have for many years been incubators and enablers of sexual and

Thursday

Raymond Keene

BCM

The British Chess Magazine is the oldest continuously published chess magazine in the world. Recently it has been boosted by the appointment as co-editor of the Belgrade journalist Milan Dinic, who cut his teeth on the news journal Svedok (Witness). The last issue contained an interview with the entertaining and controversial Nigel Short, as well as excellent comments on some of Short’s wins from Bunratty, where he won first prize with 6/6.   Short-Hunt; Bunratty Masters 2017; Queen’s Gambit Declined   1 Nf3 d5 2 d4 Nf6 3 c4 e6 4 Nc3 Be7 5 Bg5 Nbd7 6 e3 0-0 7 Bd3 b6 This is not good as the fianchetto of the

Raymond Keene

no. 453

White to play. This position is from Costachi-Toma, Calimanesti 2017. Can you spot White’s winning coup? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 25 April 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 The question should have said that White had two winning tries. 1 Qf5 is a good one but 1 Rb8+ wins. Last week’s winner Revd Paul Greenland, Chelmsford, Essex

Peter Jones

Cicero, the lagomaniac

A year ago, the Danes reached into their groaning cracker barrel and pulled out ‘hygge’ as their own solution to the world’s problems. That was bad enough, but now it is the Swedes’ turn, offering up ‘lagom’ as the shrine before which all must now grovel in untimely worship. Yet what are both of these but replays of two hoary classical injunctions? ‘Hygge’ ultimately stems from the philosopher Epicurus (d. 271 bc): ‘He who needs tomorrow least will approach it with the most pleasure.’ In his take on the subject, the poet Horace (d. 8 bc) urged Leuconoe to ‘trust as little as possible in tomorrow’ and instead carpe diem,

The Spectator

Letters | 20 April 2017

Benedictine engagement Sir: Matthew Parris has missed the point (‘Give me the Anglican option’, 15 April). He compares Rod Dreher’s suggestion that modern Christians emulate the Benedictines with the retreat into self-imposed exile of groups like ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Beni Isguen community. The Benedictines did not withdraw from the world. They engaged with the fractured society of the Dark Ages, showing a better way through their schools, almsgiving and prayer. A number of recent books, including Tom Holland’s Millennium, have charted the astonishing role the monasteries played in dragging Europe out of barbarism. In Britain, the Church and its monastic orders set up many of the institutions on which

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 20 April 2017

Q. May I pass on a tip to readers wishing to reject a hopeful romantic partner without hurting their feelings? I recently made an overture towards a friend I have long admired. At first I was hurt when he confessed he didn’t return my feelings. However, he said the reason he didn’t see me in that way is because I remind him of his niece, to whom he alleges I bear a close physical resemblance. My self-esteem was spared the hit it would otherwise have taken and we have resumed our friendship. — F.W., Notting Hill, London A. Thank you for passing on this helpful tip. Q. I’ve been invited

Dot Wordsworth

Envelope

One can push many things — a pen, one’s luck or (up) daisies. But the MP Dominic Raab told the Daily Telegraph last week that Theresa May and Boris Johnson ‘are demonstrating courage in pushing the diplomatic envelope’. Since the most famous envelope recently enclosed Mrs May’s letter to Donald Tusk, this figure of speech might have obscured rather than illuminated his meaning. I don’t mean to write about pushing the envelope, on which I’ve remarked before. The metaphor is from aeronautics, where it refers to parameters (often confused with perimeters) or limits. The late Gerald Kaufman complained of this Eurojargon 37 years ago, explaining in a book that ‘an

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 April 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, having repeatedly said that there would be no election until 2020, surprised the nation by suddenly standing at a lectern in Downing Street, while the wind ruffled her hair, and saying that she sought a general election on 8 June. ‘Britain is leaving the EU and there can be no turning back,’ she said. ‘The country is coming together but Westminster is not.’ She said later that she had taken the decision after a walking holiday in Wales, and had spoken to the Queen on Easter Monday. The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, passed in 2011, required a two-thirds majority of all MPs (or a motion

Taki

High life | 20 April 2017

If any more proof were needed that Brexit is the best thing to happen to Britain since 1066 and all that, here it is: geologists have at last assembled a picture of the forces that tore a ten-million-year-old land bridge away and turned Britain into an island rather than a peninsula of Europe such as Denmark and Scandinavia. Yippee! It was God himself who ordered it. The bridge ran from Dover to Calais and deep into Cheeseland, until the Almighty decreed Brexit. All this may have taken place a very long time ago, 450,000 years or so, but it’s proof that God never wanted Britain to be part of Europe.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 20 April 2017

When I was depressed 20 years ago, the (then) new antidepressant drug Prozac sorted it easily. It took six weeks for it to lift me up and I stopped taking it after four months. I experienced no side effects and lived happily ever after, believing that the episode was a one-off. Marvellous. Back in January, just before my 60th birthday, the black dog came back and I was again in front of a doctor, depressed but phlegmatic, confidant that a few months worth of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors would get me back on the dance floor with all my comfortable illusions restored. A friend had recommended I ask for Venlafaxine

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 April 2017

Goodbye then, Bal-ham. You were my gateway to the south. I loved you for so many more reasons than that, but the fact that I could get away from you and go down the A3 to the verdant grasslands of Cob-ham was probably one of the biggest ones, if I’m honest, so by and large Peter Sellers was right. It was a love/hate relationship. The dynamic of our life together was forged by the state line that runs through you, which is every bit as drastic as the Mexican border. My flat was a few hundred yards from the boundary between Lambeth and Wandsworth, so I have spent the past