Society

Monday

Mark Davies

In defence of John Inverdale

I love Clare Balding. In line with just about everyone else, I think she is a class act. And having known her since university days, I can vouch for the fact that not only is she a very nice person, but also – rather marvellously – completely unaffected by her very well-deserved status as a national star. But she landed John Inverdale in it on the last day of the Olympic Games, after he had already come in for a large amount of totally unwarranted stick. He was criticised for apparently ignoring people he is interviewing, because he does what all broadcast interviewers do in such situations and kept his eyes open

Helen Nugent

House prices, pensions, help-to-buy and BHS

Britain’s biggest estate agent expects UK house prices to fall 1 per cent in 2017 before recovering in 2018 because of economic weakness caused by uncertainty following the referendum decision on 23 June. Countrywide says that the Brexit vote will have an impact on the economy generally, which will feed into household incomes and possibly delay decisions to move house. People are also trying their luck more when it comes to negotiating the price of their new homes, as higher stamp duty payments and Brexit mean people feel able to ask for a lower price. Although availability of finance is good, Fionnuala Earley, Countrywide’s chief economist, said we shouldn’t ‘push’ to buy a home while prices

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Imperial pint of champagne

Jonathan Ray gives a heartening update on the campaign to bring back the imperial pint of champagne When the Spectator urges so things start to happen. You might recall a despatch of mine a week or so ago concerning a Spectator Winemaker’s Lunch we held for readers in our boardroom, hosted by James Simpson MW, managing director of Pol Roger (UK). Whilst we consoled/congratulated ourselves (delete where applicable) in the immediate aftermath of Brexit by drinking plenty of fine vintage Pol, James pointed out that one benefit of our departure from Europe could be the return of the much-missed imperial pint of champagne, a deeply civilised measure roughly equivalent to

Sunday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why is the RSPB picking on grouse moors?

The Twelfth of August was heralded for me by an email from the RSPB. ‘RSPB warns driven grouse does not have a future without change’. Jeff Knott, the head of the society’s nature policy, goes on to say that ‘The illegal killing of birds of prey like the hen harrier must end, and sadly this tars the reputation of every grouse moor estate and every shooter.’ It would be wearisome (not least because Matt Ridley’s piece last week set it all out so well) to go through how most such accusations about the killing of hen harriers are false, how hen harriers do better on kept moors than on unkept ones,

Saturday

Alison Wolf

How to build a top maths school

This year, every single student at King’s College London Mathematics School achieved an A or an A* in A-level maths, and every single one of them is going to either Oxbridge or another Russell Group University. Last year, Alison Wolf wrote about what she’d learnt in the process of helping to found this specialist free school. King’s College London Mathematics School is precisely one year old. And on 13 August it woke up to AS-level results that make it one of the ten best state schools in the country. 97 per cent of students got an A in mathematics. 90 per cent of grades in maths and further maths were

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

In praise of bisexuality

I’ve never seen a National Treasure whose head I didn’t have a strong urge to shove down the nearest toilet. So when I read that Christopher Biggins had entered the latest Celebrity Big Brother house for a rumoured £150,000 – far, far less than what I was offered, to put it mildly – I fair hugged myself with glee at how cheap they’d got him. I had every reason to dislike him already; many years ago, when I was showing off about what I’d be like if I was a gay man – ‘Rupert Everett, probably, or Oscar Wilde, or Arthur Rimbaud’ – my husband fixed me with a cold glare (for

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: The doom delusion | 20 August 2016

It’s August 2016 and the best time in human history to be alive. Well, at least that’s according to Johan Norberg, who writes this week’s Spectator cover piece on the new golden age. Never, he says, has there been less war, disease, conflict, discrimination or poverty. So why do we find that so hard to believe? On the podcast, Lara Prendergast is joined by Fraser Nelson and Johan, who says: ‘What I’ve done is look at long-term data and statistics – everything from poverty, malnutrition, literacy to fatalities of war, the risk of dying in a natural disaster, the risk of being subjected to a dictatorship – and everything is

Friday

Emma Webb

Is jailing Anjem Choudary the best idea?

Don’t let off your celebratory party poppers just yet! Anjem Choudary may be facing jail, but he is a slippery man – an ex-lawyer always careful to push the boundaries of the law he despised without breaking it – so don’t think he won’t try to play a bad hand to his advantage. There’s a phrase about ‘never wasting a good crisis’. And I have no doubt that is precisely what Choudary will do. The judge could order him to be suspended, David-Blaine-style, in a glass box and he would probably find a way to radicalise people using semaphore. A forthcoming study by The Henry Jackson Society think-tank has found that

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Charles Moore ‘voted’ twice as a public service. Why send the police after him?

Shortly before the referendum, Charles Moore emailed me with an idea: he’d always thought how worryingly easy it would be for someone like him, registered in two addresses, to vote twice. So he proposed to do so, and then write it up in the magazine – to flag up weaknesses in our system. As he writes in this week’s magazine: In Sussex, I went to the polling station early. I took my polling card, which is not compulsory, and asked the clerk what the significance of the barcode on it was. He had no idea, so presumably it has no security function (or the clerks are poorly trained). I voted to

The Spectator

It’s time to defend Brexit

One of the many incorrect predictions about this year’s referendum was that those who voted for Brexit would soon regret it. The theory was that these deluded souls only intended to lodge a protest vote, and would be overcome with buyers’ remorse as Britain fell headlong into a deep recession. Two months after the referendum, there is precious little regret. Polls suggest that just 5 per cent of those who backed Brexit wish they hadn’t; the same is true for those who voted Remain. However, the Remainers have moved quickly and effectively into post-campaign mode and have found a new vocabulary. Their new enemy is ‘hard Brexit’. They seize on

Rachel Springall

Savers braced for more turbulence and paltry returns

As if things weren’t bad enough for savers, the months ahead are looking bleaker than ever. The repercussions of the EU referendum sent the markets into chaos and in turn led the Bank of England to drop the bank base rate to 0.25 per cent, the lowest level in more than 300 years. So where is the good news in all of this? I’ll break it to you now – there isn’t going to be any for quite some time. Savers were doomed to poor rates well before the Bank of England stepped in. But the decision gave providers an excuse to slash savings rates even further. So far this August we

Helen Nugent

Property, pensions and home insurance

Britain’s obsession with property has propelled the country’s net worth to an estimated £8.8 trillion, an increase of 6 per cent (£493 billion) compared with the end of 2014, The Guardian reports. A surge in house prices in 2015 offset the UK’s decline in savings, the slow recovery of the banking sector and the Government’s growing debt mountain. Overall, house prices increased by 7 per cent in 2015 to add a further £355 billion to the already huge value locked up in Britain’s homes. The Office for National Statistics said in its annual assessment of Britain’s assets and liabilities that the value of dwellings was estimated at £5.5 trillion at

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Adams apple

Grandmaster Michael Adams turned in a superlative performance earlier this month to win the British Championship for the fifth time. The first occasion was 27 years ago in Plymouth. Adams’s performance on this occasion included victories with the black pieces against the two former British champions David Howell and Gawain Jones. Adams’s score of 10/11 equals the record set up by Julian Hodgson. It is likely that this record will never be broken, since the English Chess Federation in their wisdom have decided from now on to reduce the number of rounds in the Championship from 11 to 9.   Howell-Adams; British Championship, Bournemouth 2016 (diagram 1)   After a

Raymond Keene

no. 422

White to play. This is a position from Adams-R. Pert, British Championship, Bournemouth 2016. What is White’s most direct route to victory? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 23 August 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 Rxh7+ Last week’s winner Hugo Restall, Wanchai, Hong Kong

Andrew Marr

Diary – 18 August 2016

Throughout our holiday, reports from Rio rippled in — last thing at night, first thing in the morning — a regular golden swoosh of heartwarming news. We are only an averagely sporty family, but these Olympics made us all happier. Across the media, there’s been a mild controversy about whether the remarkable achievements of Team GB say anything bigger about Britain — ‘We always punch above our weight’ — or very little; ‘Sport is sport and only sport, and that’s why we like it.’ But of course there are wider lessons. First, there was real, big long-term investment provided by the National Lottery and the foresight of Sir John Major.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 18 August 2016

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, who was supposed to be on a walking holiday in Switzerland, wrote to Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, saying that she wanted to strengthen Britain’s trading relationship with China despite uncertainty over the construction of the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. During her absence and that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer from Britain, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, was the ‘senior minister on duty’, Downing Street conceded. Regulated rail fares in England and Wales and regulated peak-time fares in Scotland will rise by 1.9 per cent in January, that being the annual rate of inflation in July, as measured by the Retail Prices

The Spectator

Barometer | 18 August 2016

Four-letter surveys A judge at Chelmsford Crown Court who was sworn at by a man she was sentencing to jail swore back at him from the bench. How common is swearing? — A study in 1980 by Timothy Jay of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts analysed 11,609 words of everyday conversation and found 70 taboo words — a rate of 0.7%. — A similar study in Britain in 2006 suggested that between 0.3% and 0.5% of words we utter are swearing, and a 2007 US study suggested a rate of between 0.5% and 0.7%. According to the latter, Americans utter between 15,000 and 16,000 words a day, 80–90 of

Taki

High life | 18 August 2016

An item in an American newspaper had me thinking of my father all last week. Old dad died 27 years ago, which means I have outlived him in age, the only thing I have ever outdone him in. His achievements were too many to list here, and everything I have I owe to him. Compared to his accomplishments, mine has been the underperformance of the century, not that he ever made it obvious. To the contrary, all he did was praise me. He was extremely generous to everyone, especially his employees, took care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, was a decorated hero during the occupation, and I’m proud

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 18 August 2016

I took the only spare chair on the terrace of the Modern bar, one of four bars on this Provençal village square. By repute, it’s the bar where the least snobbish of the villagers meet and drink. Rough, some might say. Old-fashioned ideas of masculinity and femininity are more clearly marked here than at the posher bars up the road. It was market day. Sixty or so locals, plus one Englishman — moi — occupied the steel-framed wicker chairs arranged around the trunk of a plane tree. At the next table a sweet little girl in a pink kimono embroidered with flowers had a balloon attached to a small bat

Melissa Kite

status

Whenever I try to use the NHS I end up feeling like Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense. No one can see me. It is as if I don’t exist. And unlike Dr Malcolm Crowe in the movie, I have not, as I wait in hospital and GP surgery queues, found an ally with a special gift which enables him to see me when no one else can. No one has ever come up to me and whispered: ‘I see sick people!’ Instead, I languish like a ghost in every south London minor injury clinic, A&E and doctor’s surgery. Recently, I received a letter informing me that my local