Society

Thursday

Freddy Gray 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

Lucy Vickery

Fashion statement

In Competition No. 2981 you were invited to submit a poem about a politician and an item of clothing.   Michael Foot’s donkey jacket; Harold Wilson’s Gannex mac; William Hague’s baseball cap; Hillary’s pantsuit: all featured in what was a cracking entry. I especially enjoyed Fiona Pitt-Kethley opening line on Theresa May’s leathers: ‘Her look’s more S&M than M&S…’ There were strong performances, too, from Jennifer Moore, Anne Woolfe, Albert Black, Tony Reardon, Dorothy Pope and Derek Greenwood.   The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s.   She’s a woman for all weather, Legs resplendent in fine leather. Has she flayed some

Wednesday

Julian Marr

If you want some advice…hire a financial adviser

Asked earlier this month for his 2017 financial resolution, the newly knighted former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb replied it could be summarised in four words: ‘get a financial adviser’. No matter how much assistance you can find online these days, most people would still think twice before setting out to sell their own house or draft their own will. Nor would they be inclined to fit their own boiler or do their own dentistry. And yet, for whatever reason, people tend not to think of financial advice in the same way. I say ‘for whatever reason’ but, historically, two elements have tended to loom pretty large: trust and cost.

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

How the Stepford students rekindled racial thinking

Many mad things are happening on campuses. Fancy-dress parties are banned lest the costumes offend minority groups. Saucy pop songs are forbidden lest they turn male students into marauding sex machines. Controversial speakers are No Platformed. But perhaps the worst thing is the rekindling of the racial imagination, the return of judging people by race. Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day in the US, a day when Americans, and many non-Americans too, celebrate the man who most famously said people should ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’. Also yesterday, it was reported that the student union at the School of

Rebecca O'Connor

Mortgage rates are fuelling the generational wealth imbalance

At some point a few years ago, after the financial crisis had passed but the economic stats still showed the effects, while wandering down the posh bit of my local high street where all the top-end furniture retailers, Italian delis and estate agents reside, I suddenly got it. I noticed that the ones carrying the White Company, Fenwicks and Russell & Bromley shopping bags were all roughly between 50 and 60. Despite the country apparently being in the doldrums, this well-dressed, insouciant and slightly aimless tribe had money to spend. All the economic indicators were telling us GDP was still pretty flat, unemployment and wages were still struggling, food bank

Helen Nugent

Inflation, pensions, housing and fraud

Inflation has risen more than expected and the headline rate is now at its highest level since July 2014. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the Consumer Price Index (CPI) hit an annual rate of 1.6 per cent in December – up from 1.2 per cent the previous month. Economists had predicted an increase to 1.4 per cent. Weaker sterling since the Brexit vote has affected the cost of many prices. The ONS said that higher food prices and air fares helped to increase the CPI. Ben Brettell, senior economist at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: ‘December’s producer price data contains a strong indicator that higher inflation is coming. Input

Monday

Mike Fotis

When did second-rate financial products become acceptable? We must get better at complaining

When asked recently by a waiter if I was enjoying my pizza, I replied: ‘It’s great, thanks.’ But I was lying. It tasted no better than a £2 supermarket pizza, and I was further put off by a rather persistent fly hovering above the table. While we’re all good at moaning – a reassuringly British sign as we head further down Brexit Road, and Donald Trump becomes the most powerful man in the world – we’re dreadful at doing it publicly or in a way that actually makes a difference. But for the good of the financial services industry (and Newcastle’s Pizza Express), we need to stop putting up with the

Helen Nugent

Private medical insurance, housing, savings and energy costs

As fears over the state of the NHS continue to hit the headlines, new data shows that the number of people buying private medical insurance has increased significantly for the first time since the financial crisis. Figures compiled by LaingBuisson, a healthcare consultancy, and reported in The Guardian, reveal that ‘after falling steeply between 2008 and 2011 and then staying flat, demand for private medical insurance cover in Britain rose by 2.1 per cent in 2015 with just over 4 million people insured’. Housing ThisisMoney reports on Rightmove’s latest index which shows that house prices soared by more than 6 per cent in some parts of the country in 2016.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

What Oxfam won’t tell you about capitalism and poverty | 16 January 2017

Your average milkman has more wealth than the world’s poorest 100 million people. Doesn’t that show how unfair the world is? Or given that the poorest 100 million will have negative assets, doesn’t it just show how easily statistics can be manipulated for Oxfam press releases? They’re at it again today: the same story, every January. “Almost half of the world’s wealth is owned by just 1% of the world’s population” it said in 2014. It has done variants on that theme ever year, each time selling it as a new “big” story. All the time peddling the impression that inequality is getting worse, that the rich are engorging themselves at the

Sunday

Anne Jolis

How the Church of England changed my life

It was October 2010 the night the priest came to our door. The knock startled Tim’s dullard beagle into a howl just as Tim’s mother was serving up dinner. She and her husband had flown in from New York a few weeks earlier to care for their dying son. Tim and I had moved to London the year before. Our friends — newsroom colleagues — visited sometimes, though only with advance notice. Tim’s brain tumour had severely blunted his wit. I was prone to crying jags. As a couple, we did not inspire drop-ins. Tim’s mother told us to start eating and went to answer the knock. The beagle ricocheted