Society

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: taking poetry in new directions

Tennyson’s lines ‘bright and fierce and fickle is the South,/And dark and true and tender is the North’ (from ‘The Princess: O Swallow’) prompted me to ask for poems about either the North or South or one comparing the two. Midlands man John Priestland felt that something was missing: We know the North is at the top, The South is at the bottom, But isn’t there another part That Lucy has forgotten? But that didn’t stop the rest of you producing a wide-ranging and exhilarating entry that took me from the bridge table to North Korea and beyond. Impressive contributions from Hamish Wilson, Samantha Skyrme and Ann Drydale were narrowly

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: The Swedish model. How not to welcome refugees | 3 September 2016

For a certain type of social democrat, no country gets them quite as hot and bothered as Sweden. As Toby Livendell writes in this week’s Spectator cover story, Sweden has long regarded itself as a humanitarian superpower, taking in 650,000 asylum seekers in the last 15 years. But by far the biggest issue is integration. And this was brought to stark British attention last week when a Birmingham schoolboy was murdered with a grenade in Gothenburg. So, what has gone wrong in Sweden? To answer that question, Lara Prendergast is joined on the Spectator podcast by Fraser Nelson and Ivar Arpi. Ivar says: ‘Basically the Swedish idealism ran into a

Friday

Tom Waterhouse

The inside story of how the Brexit vote was won

In the months before the referendum, the ‘Leave’ campaign’s press operation had been in control of the campaign. But in the last three weeks, the baton was passed over to the ground campaign to get us over the line. Running a good ground campaign relies on three key phases. The first two of these – identification and motivation – are largely self-explanatory. Find target voters then work out how to enthuse them. The final stage is about getting out the vote – making sure people actually go to the polling station. This means ensuring your supporters vote in greater numbers than the other side (what’s known as ‘differential turnout’). The key to

Toni Saad

Why won’t junior doctors just admit they want more money?

Junior doctors are striking again: this time, for five days in a row over several weeks. This level of industrial action is without precedent in the history of the NHS. Even though I will soon be employed as a junior doctor under the terms of the contract, I think the decision to strike is scandalous. In the early stages of this row, it was possible to sympathise with junior doctors’ discontent about having a contract imposed on them. Now it has become harder and harder to know what it will take to please them. The contract they were offered was a good deal — even the BMA said so. Yet for

Rachel Springall

One month on, what the base rate cut means for you

It’s a month since the Bank of England cut the base rate to 0.25 per cent, the lowest level in more than 300 years. As expected, this has dealt a severe blow to savers while the mortgage market continues to thrive. Savings The Bank of England’s decision to drop the base rate has officially fuelled the fire of rate cuts across the savings market, resulting in August becoming the worst month of the year for reductions. There were a devastating 354 cuts made, compared to just three rate rises. This means that for every rate rise during the month there were 118 cuts. Worse still, some providers’ reductions were over five

Helen Nugent

Jobs, lending, energy bills and inheritance

Companies have cut new graduate jobs for the first time in four years because of fears about the economy since the Brexit vote. The number of vacancies has fallen by 8 per cent compared with last year, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters’ annual survey. The Times reports that the latest figures follow four years of growth and last year the number of graduate jobs increased by 13 per cent. This year’s fall also reflects nervousness about the effect of the incoming apprenticeship levy, which will be introduced in April with the aim of raising cash from business to fund expanded training in the workplace, the association said. Meanwhile,

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

It’s no surprise fellow medics are turning against junior doctors

When the BMA announced a new round of strikes they will have been prepared for a backlash from certain quarters. The criticism yesterday from Jeremy Hunt and Theresa May, who accused striking doctors of ‘playing politics’, won’t have come as a surprise. But what is different about this latest, unprecedented industrial action are the attacks on junior doctors now coming from fellow medics. For the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges to intervene as they did last night indicates a significant shift in this drawn-out dispute. Here’s what they said in a statement: ‘The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is disappointed at the prospect of further sustained industrial action by junior doctors.

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Queen’s Gambit rejected

One of the most reliable methods of frustrating chess computers is to play 1 d4 but then avoid the well-trodden paths of the Queen’s Gambit, in favour of delaying central occupation with c4. Instead white aims for an early e3, possibly supported by the queenside bishop fianchetto, or Bf4. The former is known as the Colle Attack, while the latter is called The London System. Such great masters as Zukertort, Capablanca, Alekhine and even our reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen, have used these less explored ways of entering the middlegame. Now the ever-industrious Cyrus Lakdawala has attempted to impose order and structure on the various transpositional possibilities and multifarious strategic

Raymond Keene

No. 424

White to play. This is from Palucha-Skettos, Bhubaneswar 2016. Here White destroyed the black position with a typical tactical thrust. Can you see it? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 6 September 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 1 … e3 Last week’s winner R.G. Chaplin, Woodford Green, Essex

Taki

High life | 1 September 2016

Just about this time of year, 42 years ago, Dunhill’s of London, the famed tobacconist, had a bold idea. Its president, Richard Dunhill, flew 32 backgammon players to New York and had them board the QEII for the return trip to Southampton. The backgammon players were a varied group. As with cricket of old, there were gentlemen and there were players. For players read hustlers and small-time con men. Among the gents were players such as Michael Pearson, now Lord Cowdray, some very nice Americans, like Porter Ijams, whose aunt was canonised, and yours truly. The hustlers were a more amusing bunch. There was Jean-Noël Grinda, a French tennis player

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 1 September 2016

A new footpath from the village down to the beach opened earlier this year to a great fanfare. It was cut through virgin woodland using JCBs and furnished with stout wooden National Trust gates, fences and handrails. At one point the path is lined with gigantic exotic plants, escapees from the ‘lost’ tropical garden of a long-since demolished old cliff-top house. What they are God only knows, but they are thriving magnificently beneath the shelter of the cliff. ‘It’s like going for a walk in bloody Africa,’ observed reactionary old Grandad to Oscar as we trotted down this path for the first time the other day. One of these triffids

Melissa Kite

Real life | 1 September 2016

‘Oh no, I can’t bear it,’ said the builder boyfriend when I told him I wanted to look at one more house with land. I have dragged him round too many one-bedroomed hovels with a few scrub acres out the back. We have had to be polite about too many dilapidated sheds which the owners are calling a stable block. We have had to think of too many ways to compliment a rotten pole barn, or a patch of bare earth and weeds a vendor claims is a sand school. We have smiled at too many bathroom taps in the shape of shells. We have said ‘Oo lovely!’ at too

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 1 September 2016

Americans want a president with the steadiest possible finger on the nuclear button, which is why they worry about the state of health of their presidential candidates, and why nowadays candidates often try to quash doubts about their health by releasing their medical records. Sometimes they overdo it, as in the case of Senator John McCain, who published 1,173 pages of medical records when he was the Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 election. There was too much there for anyone to absorb, but Barack Obama, who won that election, made do with just a brief letter from his Chicago doctor saying he was ‘in excellent health’. Doctors of potential

Robin Oakley

Old-fashioned values

Bookmaking’s image has changed. Alongside the arrival of the betting exchanges, the evolution of the big names like Hills, Coral, Betfred and Ladbrokes into gaming operators rather than old-style bookmakers has seen the decline of the family firms where clients could be sure of the personal touch, total discretion and often half a point or so above the generally quoted odds. Most of the big firms have decided too that telephone betting is not for them, which is how I have (part accidentally) become — to Mrs Oakley’s surprise and potential alarm — a client of Fitzdares, a bespoke operation catering mostly for high-rollers and happy to be described as

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 1 September 2016

By the time you read this, I will have (hopefully) played my first hand of bridge in five weeks. No bridge and very little BBO vugraph of interest — the withdrawal pangs were coming with painful regularity, so to take the edge off I turned to reading. Bridge Tips by World Masters, in which Terence Reese develops and enlarges the now famous Bols Bridge Tips from 24 world stars, was my favourite holiday read. Although it was published over 30 years ago I found them all fascinating, but Jean Besse, Swiss world star in the Fifties and Sixties, really touched a nerve with his advice: ‘Beware of your trump tricks.

Toby Young Toby Young

France began breeding jihadis in 1989

E .D. Hirsch Jr., the American educationalist and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out that may throw some light on why France has such a problem integrating its Muslim population. Called Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, it’s a comprehensive attack on the progressive approach that has done so much harm to schools in the West. Hirsch identifies three ideas in particular: that education should be ‘developmentally appropriate’, with the emphasis on learning through discovery; that it should be ‘child-centred’, taking account of different ‘learning styles’; and that the overarching aim of education should be the cultivation of ‘critical thinking’ skills. I’ve spent

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 1 September 2016

Q. We have a heavenly house in Corfu where we go as often as possible. The best thing about it is the intelligent Corfiot couple who look after it for us. Everything is spotless, the cooking is perfect, and their competence make us the envy of all our local expat friends. Now someone has told me that when we are back in England, our couple host wild parties and sleep in the master bedroom. There has been no damage, but instinct tells me that what she says is true. I don’t want to humiliate the couple with a showdown because I don’t want to lose them. But how else can

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Real legs and fake people

The Soho Hotel is an actors’ hotel. They come for press junkets and interviews that reveal nothing because there is nothing to reveal; in fact, I have long suspected that this consuming nothingness, screamed across newsprint with all the conviction of denial, is the point of them; anything to evade reality and bring forth the realm of stupid. So it doesn’t matter that the Soho Hotel doesn’t know what it is; that is a benefit, quite possibly a design. Actors don’t know who they are either, and this is why they feel comfortable in the Soho Hotel. It is another mirror. It is part of the Firmdale Group, which has

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 September 2016

Home Britain rejected a call by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France who hopes to return to power next year, ‘for the opening of a centre in England to process asylum requests for all those who are in Calais’. More than 9,000 migrants camp at the so-called Jungle near Calais; it was Mr Sarkozy who in 2003 helped implement the bilateral treaty that allowed Britain to place border officials on the French side of the Channel. Southern Rail reinstated 119 of the 341 daily services it cut in July. Katrina Percy resigned as the chief executive of the Southern Health NHS Trust following criticism that the deaths of people with

Dot Wordsworth

Taxi

Old Quentin Letts was on the wireless the other day asking ‘What’s the point of the London black cab?’ Between much shouting from my husband (a sign he is paying attention) I heard an old cabby explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. Really! There is no defeating this blunder, which is all over the internet. In reality taxi came into English from the French taximètre (1905), where the first element represents taxe, ‘tariff’. Taxis are hackney carriages. Autodidact cab-drivers cite an origin from Middle Dutch, in which an ambling horse was called hackeneie. But why did the Dutch call it