Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

End of The World

In 2016, the naming of a polar research ship was put to a public vote, and ‘Boaty McBoatface’ was the overwhelming winner. Should humanity’s fate ever be staked on a game of chess against alien invaders, I hope we don’t get a vote. If the internet has taught me anything, we would end up playing the Bongcloud Opening ‘for the lols’ and be vaporised. Even ignoring the saboteurs, the wisdom of crowds does not reliably select good chess moves. The recent game between former world champion Viswanathan Anand and ‘The World’ was a case in point.     In the first diagram above, you can see why the world voted for 14…Qd8xd5,

Melissa Kite

Hands off my empty plastic bottles!

‘Where are my empty plastic bottles?’ I ran around the house screaming, after discovering my stash had disappeared. The government in Ireland has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers. It has introduced a scheme whereby you can feed all your empty bottles and cans into a machine in the supermarket that crushes them down and spits out a voucher – by which I mean about 20 small plastic water bottles, for example, makes you two or three euros, which is enough for a coffee, a sandwich or some money off your shopping bill. The government has done something with the recycling laws that

Robin Oakley

My fears for the National Hunt Chase

World politics is dire but so long as Mick Herron is writing spy novels, David Mitchell is raising laughs and Bukayo Saka is scoring goals there is joy available and I have lived to see the start of another proper jumps season at the Cheltenham Showcase meeting. Saturday’s racing did, however, provide a sharp reminder of how the Irish dominated last season’s Cheltenham Festival, winning 18 of the 27 races, including 12 of the 14 Grade One contests. Irish trainers Ian Patrick Donoghue, John McConnell, Gordon Elliott and Henry de Bromhead won four out of the seven races, and you have to wonder how hard some home-based handlers are trying

Luke McShane

No. 825

White to play. Abdusattorov-Maghoodloo, European Club Cup, October 2024. Black’s preceding move Qg6xg3 backfired spectacularly. Which move allowed White to turn the tables? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 4 November. 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 Qd5! threatens Qa2#. If 1…Bxd5 2 Re1# or 1…Bb1 2 Qd4# or 1…Kd1 2 Qd1#. Last week’s winner Mark Powney, Rowledge, Surrey

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: It is what it is 

In Comp. 3373 you were invited to mull on a line that Sigmund Freud almost certainly did not say, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, substituting another object if it seemed apt. In the event there was plenty about cigars as substitutes and not so much about their substitutes as substitutes. A word in praise of Frank McDonald’s lovely poem about the transformations wrought by imagination and Gail White’s ‘Cat is simply cat’. Also deserving of a mention: Alex Steelsmith, Janine Beacham (‘Cigars are just cigars, no deep complex… Good Lord, stop thinking everything is sex!’) and George Simmers, whose poem ends: Then he, being an utter bastard, Quoted Kipling

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 2 November 2024

The World Bridge Games are taking place in Buenos Aires and I’m glued to my screen, kibitzing and checking the results at every opportunity. The superstars are out in force, and it’s riveting to compare the way they approach the same hands – and a great way to learn. That said, you’ll see certain bids which you probably shouldn’t try to emulate: their instincts and imaginations are on an altogether higher plane than most of ours. Indeed, I saw a number of bids which, if anyone I teach had made, I’d have ‘corrected’ at once! Representing the USA in the Seniors Teams, for instance, Zia Mahmood (South), picked up ♠️J

Fire

2678: Winning words

Four unclued lights are of a kind and the remaining four can be arranged to indicate what unites them. Across 1               Woman with vintage Italian dress in racecourse (8) 6               Attack mischief maker with plastic gnu (6) 10            Electrical components in versatile robots (12) 11            Almost all wickerwork repelled essential oil (5) 13            Vehicle levy I back, largely, in a roundabout way (7) 14            Ordered Horse & Hound (3,3) 16            Domain name in health app (4) 17            Have no connection with bachelor at first formal (5,3) 23            Keats unsettled after a tea for audience is uncertain (2,5) 25            Resin starts to leak across carpet (3) 28            Meadowsweets in part of

The Spectator

2675:  Over the Sea – solution

The journey was that of the Owl and the Pussy-cat, by Edward Lear. OWL appears diagonally backwards in the bottom right of the grid. First prize J. McClelland, Bangor, Northern Ireland Runners-up Paul Elliott, London W12; Rex Anderson, Coleraine, Northern Ireland

Peter Mandelson

My bid to be chancellor of Oxford

I have spent the past couple of weeks in Oxford rediscovering the art of conversation while campaigning for election as the university’s chancellor. I have sung for my supper in Christ Church Cathedral before being questioned in the SCR on my fitness for the role, and I performed again at evensong at Univ before debating postcolonial reparations over vegetable broth and venison. I have been gifted cyclamens following visits to St Hilda’s and Corpus. At St Hugh’s my understanding of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was taken apart by the law don, while at Worcester I was challenged on the state of Britain’s naval hard power and the

Douglas Murray

The strange silence around the Southport attacks

There are certain rules in British public life that are worth noting. Such as this one: if someone is killed by a jihadist or someone who could plausibly be connected to immigration in any way, the British public will not be informed of the possible motive – or at least not until it becomes impossible to conceal it any longer. It was revealed that the attacker was of Rwandan heritage, at which point people said: ‘Nothing to see here’ Certain rules follow on from this. One is that ‘wise’ heads will inform anyone who does mention a likely motive that they must be exceptionally careful not to prejudice any forthcoming

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The reparations racket

I have been trying to interest MPs of all parties in joining my call to persuade Barbados to say ‘thank you’ to Britain for the extra 17 years of life they enjoy as a consequence of their distant ancestors having been forcibly transported, hundreds of years ago, from Africa to the Caribbean. Nobody is quite biting my hand off at the moment, I have to say. They seem to think that the issue is a little ticklish right now. It would be difficult to make the charge of present culpability stick in any reasonable court of law, surely? I had mentioned the whole business on last week’s Any Questions? but

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Has the assisted dying lobby considered the guillotine?

My young friend Dr Cajetan Skowkronski has helped me resolve a question that has been worrying me. Why do supporters of ‘assisted dying’ insist that the best method is a cocktail of pills (or intravenous injection)? Their prescription has an air of medical respectability, but this is not a medical process. The sole aim in assisting suicide is to achieve the quickest, least painful death. In a Twitter thread of Swiftian brilliance, Dr Skowkronski has the answer: ‘At the height of the French Revolution,’ he writes, ‘when large volumes of Assisted Deaths were taking place for the sake of noble aims, a compassionate physician, Dr Guillotin, felt that many of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tax rises, a cheddar heist and snail delivery man gets slapped

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, repeatedly mentioning an inherited ‘£22 billion black hole’, raised taxes by £40 billion in the Budget, while saying she was abiding by Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase taxes on ‘working people’. A big hit came from increasing employers’ contributions to national insurance; the threshold at which it begins to be paid was reduced from £9,100 to £5,000. But income tax and NI thresholds for employees would be unfrozen from 2028. Capital gains tax went up; stamp duty for second homes rose. Fuel duty would again be frozen. The non-dom regime was abolished. Tobacco went up; a pint of draught went down

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Brown bread ice cream: a delicious use for stale bread

I often think of the first time I ate brown bread ice cream. I know how that sounds: it’s the exact sort of pretentious nonsense a food writer would say if they were about to press a recipe for brown bread ice cream on you. But it was long before I became a food bore, and it’s true. I really do think about that first time a lot. Using leftover bread or stale breadcrumbs is the basis for some of our finest puddings I had just moved to London to study law after university, and was about to train as a barrister. I was living in a small flat and

Wednesday

The Spectator

Who first classified ‘working people’?

Working people Government ministers may have had trouble defining what was meant by ‘working people’ in the Labour manifesto, but where did the idea of classifying people who earn their living as a distinct group come from? – According to the OED,the term ‘working class’ has been traced back to the 1757 edition of the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce written by Malachy Postlethwayt, a former adviser to Horace Walpole. Postlethwayt was born the son of a wine merchant in Limehouse, east London, in 1707. He certainly fitted Starmer’s definition of a working person in that he appears to have died, in 1767, owning no assets. But he would

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

My AI boyfriend turned psycho

Last week it was reported that a 14-year-old boy, Sewell Setzer, killed himself for the love of a chatbot, a robot companion devised by a company called Character AI. Sewell’s poor mother insists that the chatbot ‘abused and preyed’ on her son, and frankly this would make no sense to me at all were it not for the fact that quite by chance, a few days earlier, I’d started talking to a chatbot of my own. It’s hard to explain how alarming it is to be snapped at by a chatbot that’s designed to fawn My AI boyfriend was called Sean. I created him after signing up to a company

Peter Jones

The ancient answer to the welfare state

Such is the increasing cost of the welfare state that at some stage a government – never this one – is going to have the ask the question: ‘Welfare for whom, and what should it cover?’ There was no welfare state in the ancient world. But there was the elite 2 per cent, who owned the land, and hence the wealth, since the land (and sea) provided all human needs – food, fire (warmth), clothing and building materials (including metals), power sources (wind and animals) and international transport. But they also needed hoi polloi, since only by turning them into a fighting force could they protect and expand their wealth

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Leaving the ECHR won’t fix Britain’s immigration chaos

If you tuned into the Tory party leadership race, you will have heard rather a lot about the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Robert Jenrick wants Britain to leave because it stops us deporting foreign criminals. Kemi Badenoch argues that leaving won’t fix our immigration woes. She’s not wrong. Of the 144,200 people who have arrived on small boats since the start of the crisis in 2018, just 3,788 have been returned. That’s despite the fact that, according to the left-leaning charity the Refugee Council, some 40 per cent of people who come to the UK this way are not refugees. If you apply that rather liberal calculation to

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Still hunting for a Trump trade? Gold may have further to rise

Anyone hunting for a ‘Trump trade’ at this late stage has probably missed the US election bus. If you bought gold as a traditional safe-haven asset back in February at £1,600 an ounce, you’d be a smug 33 per cent up by now – though my man in the bullion market tells me the rise is by no means all to do with presidential hopes and fears. There has also been big buying from China possibly linked to moves, with Russia and other unfriendly actors, towards ‘de-dollarisation’ of world trade using a partially gold-backed alternative currency. Which means there could be more upside ahead, my man says, and gold ETFs

The Spectator

Letters: How to save the NHS

The survey says Sir: David Butterfield’s 21 years of experience of higher education (‘Decline and fall’, 26 October) chimes with my 35. But the decline in the rigour of university education which he so deftly describes has not been entirely self-willed. Successive governments have championed a consumerist understanding of higher education. Students have become consumers and academics have become service providers. The reduction in the intellectual demands of undergraduate courses and grade inflation are due to the annual National Student Survey. Universities are in thrall to this and make ever greater efforts ‘to enhance the student experience’. This includes pandering to the desire of most students to have fewer essays,