Society

Thursday

19 Jan 2017

Portrait of the week | 19 January 2017

Home Britain will leave the single market on leaving the European Union, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said in a speech at Lancaster House. Britain will leave the customs union to boot, she said, and ‘Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe.’ As for EU citizens living in Britain, she wanted to ‘guarantee their status here in the UK, but we do need reciprocity’. She proposed a ‘phased process of implementation’ of a Brexit agreement, but not ‘some kind of permanent political purgatory’. Parliament would be able to vote on the final agreement between Britain and the EU. In sum, she declared:

Doc

2293: Topping

The unclued lights (one of two words and one hyphened) are of a kind, all verifiable in Chambers. Across 4 Night-flier in gear (11, two words) 11 Fancy pictures from one publication with topless sequences (9) 14 City faraway from Helsinki, evidently (4) 15 Aunt Sally is retiring (3) 18 Dropping openers, new eleven win cheer (7) 19 Morning porridge for old bishop (7)… 22 …gay bishop, flexible (6) 23 Altered course on board being transported (6) 27 Welsh lake engulfing small wood (5) 29 Second Roman soldier beams (6) 31 Joints giving trouble in the feet, not the head (6) 34 New oboe pit in ecological community (7) 35

Simon Wilder

Flight into Israel

I’ve always lived in London. I grew up near Baker Street and went to school in Camden. Even when I was at college in Kent, I lived in Islington and commuted. Five years ago I moved to Belsize Park and I’ve been here, the nicest place I’ve lived, ever since. I didn’t mean to stay — I was going to see the world, but my father died and my mother said she needed me to be close. She said it with a tremor in her voice, so I stayed. London is in my heart and in my blood, but the wind has changed, like it did for Mary Poppins, and I

Michael Heath

The Battle for Britain – 19 January 2017

Doc

to 2290: Timely II

Perimetric trios combine to suggest HOG/MAN/AY: SHILLING, MALE, INDEED; SWINE, ATTENDANT, YES; MOUND, EMPLOYEE, EVER. The relevant activity is FIRST-FOOTING (35/25/16) and the relevant name is SYLVESTER (11). First prize Helen Hinder, Knaphill, Surrey Runners-up Mrs J. Smith, Beeston, Norfolk; Bill Stewart, Leicester

Lara Prendergast

The ‘clean eating’ gurus are now repenting – but the damage has been done

Ella Mills, née Woodward – aka ‘Deliciously Ella’ – was on Radio 4 this morning discussing ‘clean eating’. Many will know her as one of the main advocates of this fashionable nutritional advice, even though she now says she doesn’t like to use the phrase ‘clean’. Her best-selling book suggested that food could be used as medicine and could help cure illness. In August 2015, Isabel Hardman and I looked at the cult of clean eating in The Spectator. It had all the elements of a classic cult – devotees, a life-changing, inspirational message, a distinct lack of evidence to back up any of it – and now, it seems, even its most prominent priestesses are

Laura Whitcombe

Are you due a refund from EE? Here’s how to find out

Britain’s biggest mobile operator EE has been fined £2.7 million for overcharging more than 30,000 customers. Between July 2014 and July 2015, the company added almost £250,000 to the bills of customers who called its 150 helpline while abroad in the European Union. They were incorrectly billed as though they had made a call to the United States and charged a rate of £1.20 a minute instead of 19p. EE was fined more than 10 times the amount it overcharged as punishment for failing to refund affected customers until its regulator, Ofcom, stepped in. The company had previously maintained it was unable to trace individuals who had been mistakenly billed

Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: You’re fired!

On this week’s episode, we discuss the winners and losers as Trump moves into the White House, where Theresa May’s Brexit strategy is headed, and whether you can wear fur so long as the animal died in a snowstorm. First, the world’s media is currently congregated in Washington for the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. But what will happen when Trump swears the oath of office, and what will it mean for the UK and the rest of Europe? We had a peek behind the curtain this week, thanks to The Times’s intrepid reporter Michael Gove, but whilst we wait for the full reveal, we

Helen Nugent

Housing, banking, cash machines and car insurance

Hardly a day goes by without commentary and new research on Britain’s housing market. Now the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has said that the market ‘stuttered’ at the end of last year and has started slowly in 2017. The Guardian reports that sales activity fell in December and estate agents are less optimistic about prospects over the coming months. Rics said: ‘It remains to be seen if this is a temporary setback. The number of house sales in the UK faltered in December, and predictions for expected new sales over the next three months were also pared back.’ Banking jobs ThisisMoney reports on comments from Stuart Gulliver, the head of HSBC,

Freddy Gray

A renewed special relationship

Freddy Gray, Paul Wood and Kate Andrews discuss Trump’s arrival at the White House: As president, Barack Obama was too cool for the special relationship. The romantic bond between the United States and Great Britain, which always makes Churchill fans go all soggy-eyed, left him cold. Obama was more interested in globalism, ‘pivoting’ to Asia and the European Union. Donald J. Trump is a very different creature. The new US President seems to cherish Great Britain, whereas the EU annoys him. Brexit is beautiful, he believes — and the EU is falling apart. Trump may or may not know the name of the British Prime Minister but, as he

Simon Jenkins

Monumental folly

The astonishing has happened at Stonehenge. Some prehistoric force has driven ministers to make a decision. It is to spend half a billion pounds burying the adjacent A303 in a tunnel, to bring ‘tranquillity’ to the ancient place. The result has been a predictable outcry from protestors. The television historian Dan Snow has compared the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, with Isis in Palmyra: ‘vandals and zealots who destroy ancient artefacts’. Stonehenge drives men mad. The stones have for a quarter of a century been as impregnable to change as they have always been to interpretation. Whitehall has been unable to decide what to do with a single-carriageway road which runs

The Spectator

Who commands the sea?

From ‘Raiders, submarines and some naval problems’, The Spectator, 20 January 1917: At the moment the enemy’s fleet is compelled to remain in its own ports and to challenge us from safe retreats, sometimes behind lock-gates and always behind well-sown minefields. Still, the fact remains that the enemy can come out if they like, though we cannot make them do so when we like, and further that with good luck they can actually smuggle out a raider or two. We are top-dog, but up till now we have not been able to get a good bite at the under-dog, and he remains, though in a humiliating position, quite fit for work

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 21 January

I don’t know about you but my cellar took a pounding over Christmas and on New Year’s Eve. Yes, yes, I know it’s only a cobwebbed cupboard under the stairs. The point is that it’s all but empty apart from a few corks, some half-drunk vermouth, a shattered decanter, a bottle of Bailey’s (where did that come from?) and the faint whiff of cordite. I’ve an urgent need to regroup. Thank heaven, then, for Yapp Bros and this timely selection. It didn’t take Jason Yapp and me long to agree that we should look no further than the Loire for this offer. 2015 was a cracking vintage in the Loire

Roger Alton

Big trouble upstream

At a wedding a few years back a very gloomy looking guest, a well-known Geordie actor as it happens, arrived at the church door. ‘What’s up?’ asked the small boy patrolling the entrance. ‘Newcastle are playing this afternoon and I can’t find out what’s happening.’ ‘Give me your phone,’ said the lad, who clicked a few clicks before handing it back. The match was now live on the screen, via some pub in Oslo or whatever. God knows what he could access now — a transmission from Mars, presumably. A revolution is taking place which could have apocalyptic effects on football. In an insightful Telegraph piece, Jim White analyses how

Martin Vander Weyer

As the rich get richer and Trump takes power, Davos Man should be very afraid

I’ve objected before to the fact that supporters of Oxfam shops are unknowingly funding not only an aid charity but also a left-wing thinktank that promotes its beliefs with considerably more zest and clout than Jeremy Corbyn does. Its latest paper, An Economy for the 99%, issued to coincide with the gathering of the global elite at Davos, offers a killer factoid: that whereas three years ago the richest 85 people on the planet ‘had the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity’, today that equivalence applies to just eight mega-billionaires, led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara.

Melissa Kite

How did you kill that hat?

The well-dressed lady turned the fur collar over in her hands and fixed me with a withering stare. ‘Is this real fur?’ I was helping out in my friend’s clothes shop, a fashionable haunt in a chichi area of south-west London. ‘Yes,’ I said, bracing myself. She stroked the luxuriant fur, then asked, ‘What is it?’ ‘Fox?’ I said, making the answer a question, as you do when you are expecting protest. ‘Where did the fox come from?’ This was too much. I hadn’t the foggiest. So I fixed her with a meaningful gaze and said: ‘Northcote Road. It was going through the bins.’ She didn’t laugh. Was she going

Gary Bell Qc

Killer plots

We all love to mock Bond villains for their hilarious ineptitude at killing the hero. The ‘genius’ Dr No has a tarantula placed in Bond’s bed — though as it happens, tarantula bites do not kill humans except via anaphylaxis; he tries to have Bond run off the road, irradiated, and boiled alive in a nuclear cooling tank. Time and again, Bond is in the clutches of Smersh or Spectre or that chap with three nipples, and time and again they pass up the obvious bullet to the head in favour of crowd-pleasing stunts involving sharks, poison–tipped shoes, alligators, and men with giant metal teeth. Such things would never happen in

Rod Liddle

Stupidity takes hold of another students’ union

I had never heard the acronym Soas before I started work at the BBC, almost 30 years ago. But as a very young producer at the corporation I was asked to fix up a story about something appalling happening in Africa — I can’t remember exactly what. Famine or cannibalism maybe. Or perhaps one mitigated by the other. The senior producer told me to get someone from Soas to explain it all. What’s Soas, I asked? ‘The School of Oriental and African Studies,’ I was informed. ‘It’s in London. It’s basically a place where we try to work out what on earth the natives are up to now.’ It was

Hugo Rifkind

Piers Morgan is a shameless brown-noser. But maybe he’s on the right track

A few weeks ago I was having an argument with Piers Morgan on Twitter. Oh God, is that really how I’m going to start this column? What have I become? I was, though, and it started because he was brown-nosing Donald Trump. We’re talking a real nasal frottage here. I expressed derision, and he expressed fury at my derision, and on it went. At one point he called me ‘tough guy’. It was all very manly. Although it wasn’t a one-off, because he’s been at it — I mean the brown-nosing — ever since, including in this very magazine. A column here, a TV appearance there. Last weekend, he was

Matthew Parris

What really drives us in the big game of life?

When were you last in a game reserve? Perhaps most Spectator readers will be familiar with the experience and if you’re anything like me it’s a happy one. Where would I rather be than in an open-topped Land Rover as the sun rises over the African bush, wandering on wheels through the savannah, pausing unhurried to look around: switching off the engine, listening, watching, drinking it all in? But do I care if I spot a hyena to tick off on my list? Do I seriously fret about whether that graceful creature is an oryx or an eland, whether that glittering and iridescent bird is a greater blue-eared starling or