Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 March 2017

Of all the many indignities I have suffered at the hands of my iPhone, the humiliation that sickens me the most is that it has rendered me ungrammatical. This monstrous device. This vile, evil, vindictive, obstructive, disingenuous, fiendish machine. I hate it. I loathe it more than I had thought it possible to loathe an inanimate object. For example, I just sent a message to the builder boyfriend saying: ‘Casserole on the oven, can you hear it?’ The BB will come in later, look on the hob for a casserole and, finding none, open himself a tin of soup. He will not look in the oven. And he will not

Robin Oakley

The turf | 30 March 2017

Bookmaker Paddy Power once famously declared, ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward to it you need to have your doctor check you are still alive.’ This year it seemed that the whole place was in danger of being enveloped in Irish tricolours. Irish-trained horses won 19 races compared with the mere nine taken by horses trained in England. Willie Mullins, despite drawing a blank on the first two days and seeing the previously unbeaten Douvan vanquished thanks to injury, still trained six but was beaten to the Festival championship by Gordon Elliott with another six victories and more second places. With Sizing

Dot Wordsworth

St Thomas’s

Everyone praised the staff of St Thomas’s Hospital during the terrorist attack. My husband of course brought his own fly to put in the ointment. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said. ‘They were told about it years ago.’ He was not referring to medical matters but to the spelling of the hospital’s name, attached to the building in letters taller than a man as St Thomas’ Hospital. I mentioned it here in 2008. Now a reader has written to the editor of The Spectator, saying that the jumbo-sized error remains on show. It is undoubtedly wrong. Why can’t people who run a big hospital grasp the simple rules for using apostrophes? Oxford Dictionaries

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 30 March 2017

‘Ducking is for experts. Don’t try it.’ So says my partner Artur Malinowski every time I duck a trick in defence and let the contract through. Nice to know that experts also get it wrong, as was spectacularly demonstrated in the semi-final of the Vanderbilt Teams held in Kansas City recently. The two Davids (Bakhshi and Gold), playing for the Schwartz team, bid a tad enthusiastically to slam, missing two aces. The defence took the first one, and at trick four, after pulling trump, Bakhshi played a diamond towards dummy’s King and West (Swedish international Johan Sylvan) went into the tank. ‘What are you thinking about?’ I screamed at my

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 30 March 2017

An email from the high-minded Carnegie Endowment, marking the triggering of Article 50 and the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, speaks of ‘The Closing of the European Mind’. ‘The cult of the protective sovereign nation-state,’ it goes on, ‘will not provide convincing solutions to 21st-century challenges, which are inherently transnational.’ This is true, in a way. Lots of modern challenges cannot be solved by the nation-state alone. But is there anyone — even including the ‘Anywheres’ defined recently by David Goodhart — who would be happy to inhabit a space completely unprotected by a sovereign state? Surely it is only with the confidence engendered by living in a well-functioning

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 March 2017

Q. As an artist I’m indebted to my sponsor. I also like him, but not his habit of ringing me up when he has friends in the room, asking me to describe, for example, a party I’ve recently been to and then putting me on loudspeaker. It’s a good thing that he considers me to be entertaining, but I draw the line at being required to act the stand-up comic to an invisible (even if appreciative) audience. My mother says ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. Can you rule Mary? — Name and address withheld A. You are not a human jukebox available to churn out anecdotes on demand.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 March 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, wrote a letter to Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, with formal notification of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. If no agreement is made sooner, Britain would cease to be a member in two years. The other 27 member states had celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. Asked by the BBC if Mrs May would be the ‘elephant in the room’ at the shindig, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said: ‘She’s not an elephant.’ Douglas Carswell, the MP for Clacton, announced that he was leaving the UK Independence

Toby Young Toby Young

The bawdy and beautiful game

I can barely contain my excitement. The Easter break is nearly upon us and I will soon be heading off to an exotic locale where I can cast off my work-soiled garments and rediscover earthly pleasures. I will spend my time eating, drinking and singing, sure in the knowledge that no one will judge me because I’ll be surrounded by members of my elite metropolitan tribe. I’m talking, of course, about Pride Park, home of Derby County FC, where I’ll be travelling to an away game on Friday with 1,000 fellow QPR fans. This fixture clashes with a private party being thrown for my friend Barry Isaacson, once the most

Columba

2303: Great 32

The puzzle marks the centenary of the death of a person whose name is formed by two unclued lights. Five unclued lights (three of which consist of two words each) are titles of 24 by the person in question.   Across 1    Language in queue around noon (5) 11    Fly low and pass round lake (10) 13    Gets excited about good idea to produce aubergines (9) 15    Growl resounded around (4) 16    Specific attempt to restrict drip (7) 17    Empty space behind label apart from mark like a birthmark (7) 18    Cross and tense, short of time (3) 19    Hibiscus, some arranged

Columba

to 2300: The law

Extra letters in clues give CONSTABLES, defining 7, 21 and 39. Other unclued lights are CONS (12, 16, 18) and TABLES (9, 20, 30).   First prize Roland Rance, London E17 Runners-up Nigel Dobbs, Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim; Ian Shiels, Bramley, Leeds

Steerpike Steerpike

Alan Rusbridger changes his tune on the demands of editing

After George Osborne was announced as the new editor of the Evening Standard, there was outrage across the House as many asked: how can Osborne serve as an MP, financial advisor and daily newspaper editor all at the same time? Alan Rusbridger has now graced us with his take on the situation. In an editorial for the New York Times, the former Guardian editor says that it  ‘would be better’ if Osborne were to make ‘a clean break from politics’ and become ‘a great crusading editor on behalf of the people’. Part of Rusbridger’s issue with Osborne’s appointment is that he doesn’t understand how the former Chancellor will have the time: ‘I edited

Helen Nugent

Are we heading for another credit-fuelled debt crisis? New figures show household debt at record high

The Bank of England is concerned that banks and building societies may have made it too easy to borrow money – and with good reason. Figures released by the Bank today show that household debt is at record levels, with credit card debt increasing at its fastest rate in more than a decade. It’s not difficult to see how this happened. Lenders deluge households with offers of new credit cards, and regularly raise the borrowing levels on existing plastic. There’s a plethora of deals on cards to entice people to switch their debt to new providers and the minimum monthly repayments are often so minuscule that many customers only ever

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Charlotte Rampling

A few years ago, Charlotte Rampling signed a contract to write her autobiography – and then, the project not long underway, called the whole thing off. But this month she publishes something quite out of the usual run of celebrity memoirs. Who I Am, co-written with the French man of letters Christophe Bataille, is a slender, riddling approach to the actor’s inner life – not a catalogue of film anecdotes but rather a hesitant return to the child she was. She joins me to talk about why she’s done things this way, about the legacy of her Olympic medalist father, and about the terrible tragedy that defined her young womanhood.

Laura Whitcombe

Seven things you need to know before buying pet insurance

We’re a nation of cat and dog lovers with an estimated 40 per cent of UK households owning a pet. This Saturday marks the start of National Pet Month. Celebrating its 28th birthday with events across the country and online, the main aim is to promote responsible pet ownership. The headline sponsor is Tesco Bank Pet Insurance and that should be a pretty big clue that the organisers encourage responsible owners to consider pet insurance. As many of us know, having a pet can be a huge commitment – emotionally, practically and financially. As for the latter, a dog will cost its owner on average between £16,000 and £31,000 over

Frederick Forsyth

Marine A: the shambles that shamed us

Like it or not, and many in high places will loathe it, what we may now call The Blackman Affair is not going to go away. It will be recalled as a shambles and a glaring miscarriage of justice. Also remembered will be the ferocious, self-serving and vindictive role of the establishment in permitting this injustice to occur. Posterity will say that a Royal Marine sergeant on an exhausting assignment in Northern Helmand, Afghanistan, in the late summer of 2011, shot and killed a Taliban terrorist who, though undoubtedly dying and wholly unsaveable, was not yet quite dead. A more expanded account might add that a nearby corporal, secretly filming

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Liverpool’s press mess

The comedian Jimmy Carr is not necessarily a guy you would trust on much, but he was spot on the other day when he said that the Hillsborough disaster was something you would never joke about. Of course not, but it seems you can’t have even a sliver of a divergent view. Now, thanks to the timorousness of one of the world’s major football clubs, and the pusillanimity of the Premier League, a bitter little drama is being played out that could have savage implications for freedom of the press. Early in February this year Liverpool FC announced that the Sun would be banned from all home facilities, Anfield and

Nicholas Farrell

The rescue racket

What is happening in the 300-mile stretch of sea between Sicily and Libya, day in and day out — in other words, what ‘we’ are doing there — is beyond reasonable doubt insane. A sane person would assume that the 181,436 migrants (a new record) who made it by sea to Italy last year had done so under their own steam in flimsy fishing boats and dinghies at least some of the way across the Mediterranean. This, after all, is the message aid agencies and governments put out. In fact, every one of those 181,436 was picked up by EU and non-government aid-agency vessels off the Libyan coast just outside

Katy Balls Katy Balls

North Berwick

My home town is better than yours. Don’t take my word for it. This month North Berwick was crowned ‘best place to live’, at least in Scotland, thanks in part to its good schools, community spirit and low crime. The news hasn’t come as a surprise to locals — it’s a town perched between an extinct volcano and the North Sea on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, so we know it’s something special. But there’s more to us than pretty streets, beaches and fish and chips. The first thing to note about North Berwick is that it is in Scotland. This may seem obvious, but it’s often

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 1 April

We start this week with the ever reliable 2015 Corney & Barrow House White (1), largely because if we didn’t I would get angry letters asking why not. I really do wonder why my mother doesn’t just pick up the phone instead. She’s got my number. A blend of 70 per cent Colombard and 30 per cent Ugni Blanc, produced by Producteurs Plaimont in Gascony, this has been Corney & Barrow’s best-selling white for over 20 years and is pretty much the Spectator Wine Club’s too. It’s light, zesty, fresh and uncomplicated; perfect, in fact, for springtime drinking. It’s also a cracking price at £6.63 with the Brett-Smith Indulgence (whereby