Society

Thursday

27 Oct 2016

In defence of Zac Goldsmith

I’m baffled by the reaction to Zac Goldsmith’s decision to resign as the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. It is being interpreted, even by MPs on his own side, as an act of opportunism, a chance to rehabilitate himself with the metropolitan elite after his bruising defeat in the London mayoral election. Surprisingly few people seem willing to entertain the idea that he might be acting on principle. Exhibit A in the case for Zac’s defence is the fact that he’s the MP for Richmond Park in the first place. Zac could have applied to be the candidate in any number of safe Conservative seats in 2010 and, given his

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 27 October 2016

Q. We hired a villa in the Camargue through the so-called ‘Sloane web’. You either know the uber-Sloane who runs it or you don’t. All his properties are in perfect taste and located in idyllic spots. No one is ripped off. However, we have just returned from a villa whose (Sloane) owner stayed on in an annexe close by for the first three days and continued to do lengths in the pool every morning and join us for dinner every night, dropping names all through the courses to justify her presence. She was fine as a person but we had paid to have the villa to ourselves. What should we

Tanya Gold

No place like Rome

Roma sells ancient-Roman-style food near Fenchurch Street station at the east end of the City, near Aldgate. It is, therefore, a themed restaurant in a conventional, ebbing financial district, a cursed place in need of Windolene; and this is something to applaud, at least theoretically, because it is ambitious. Who remembers ambition, which is more interesting than greed? The last themed restaurant to open in these parts was Fable, a repulsive fake library and fusion destination for lawyers on Holborn Viaduct which I hope has burnt down, or at least been sued for copyright infringement by-makers of fairy tales everywhere. It was as magical as date rape, and the fairies fled.

Dot Wordsworth

Straik

I’m very glad I followed a friend’s recommendation to read The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield, an author neglected to the point of disparagement. The vehicle of the book is a tale of seafaring in the 1860s, and one of Masefield’s great strengths is vividness. He deals with material objects in motion. But description of such objects is impossible for any writer. If the reader has never seen an oak tree, no amount of description will conjure it up. A simple example in The Bird of Dawning (the title is the name of a ship) comes when the hero remembers to take with him from a sinking ship a

Fieldfare

2284: Shocking!

Unclued lights consist of a quotation (in ODQ), its speaker and source, and a synonym (one hyphened) of each of its three words. Its author appears in the grid and must be shaded. Across 1 Excel as old Greek character among women (11) 11 Cable runs past part of bow (6) 13 Look in after settling vagrant (7) 15 Firework is dead wicked (5) 16 No hesitation in game giving derisive gesture (5) 17 Homer teacher’s badge of honour (6) 18 Holding first note, see about singing technique (5) 21 Cope, plain, fitted with skirt-like sections (5) 22 Minor storylines credited to important people bring in pounds (7, hyphened)

Donna Laframboise

Blinded with science

We’re continually assured that government policies are grounded in evidence, whether it’s an anti-bullying programme in Finland, an alcohol awareness initiative in Texas or climate change responses around the globe. Science itself, we’re told, is guiding our footsteps. There’s just one problem: science is in deep trouble. Last year, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, admitted that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” In his words, “science has taken a turn toward darkness.” Medical research, psychology, and economics are all in the grip of a ‘reproducibility crisis.’ A pharmaceutical company attempting to confirm the findings of 53 landmark cancer studies was successful in only six

Michael Heath

The Battle for Britain – 27 October 2016

Fieldfare

to 2281: Fail

Extra letters in clues form the phrase BITE THE DUST. Thematically created entries at 10, 11, 19, 29 and 34 (in which the types of dust are pother, pollen, stour, bort and ash) are defined by 15, 30, 18, 39 and 9. First prize Andrew Bell, Shrewsbury, Shropshire Runners-up Brenda Widger, Bowdon, Cheshire; John Honey, Brentford, Middlesex

Charles Moore

It’s not Alan Turing who needs an apology

My invitation to the Pink News dinner (where David Cameron won an award) on Wednesday night promised ‘an inspirational evening’ which would be a ‘celebration of the contritions of politicians, businesses, and community groups’ after ‘another historic year for LGBT equality’. I assumed, at first, that ‘contritions’ was a misprint for ‘contributions’, but maybe not. Contrition for any deed committed or word spoken against gay people in the past is now compulsory for all who wish to take part in public life, rather as Catholics must be absolved before taking communion. I agree that the criminalisation of consenting, adult, private, homosexual acts was cruel madness. But I am suspicious of

Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: Le Pen’s victory

On this week’s podcast, we discuss the rise of Marine Le Pen, how murder is handled on social media, and how a cake has changed the debate about gay rights. Marine Le Pen’s Front National has surged in the polls and it now looks likely that she will make the run-off in 2017 French presidential election. In this week’s cover feature, Jonathan Fenby looks at how Le Pen has changed the French Right, and considers the prospects of her rivals Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. On the podcast, Agnes Poirier tells us that: “Her great success is that she’s not her father. Here’s a woman who was born in 1968, she’s twice divorced, she’s

Emma Lunn

Are we ready for app-only bank accounts? A growing number of firms think so

Bank staff might no longer recognise your face when you walk into a branch – but a banking app might. Biometrics (the authentication of your face, voice or fingerprint) are among the futuristic features offered by a new breed of banks which reckon branch networks, call centres and websites are on the way out. These days it’s all about the app and, in some cases, the app alone. If you want to grab some of the best savings rates on offer, opening and running your account on your smartphone is your only option. Atom Bank is currently topping the tables for one and two-year fixed rate bonds (at 1.4 per cent

Helen Nugent

Car insurance, economy, pensions, PPI

Car insurance premiums are continuing to rise as the AA’s latest British Insurance Premium Index shows the average premium for a comprehensive car insurance policy has increased by more than £20, to £585.84, over the three months ending 30 September. This is a jump of 3.7 per cent over the third quarter. Over 12 months, the average quoted premium has risen by 16.3 per cent, adding almost £82 to a typical motor policy. ‘We are witnessing sustained price increases once again which is bad news for drivers,’ said Michael Lloyd, the AA’s director of insurance. In other motoring news, new data from uSwitch.com suggests that millions of motorists risk paying an

Mark Mason

Burlington Arcade

It all began with oysters. Londoners used to eat them as they walked along, throwing away the shells much as they do burger wrappers now. Lord George Cavendish, owner of Burlington House on Piccadilly (now the Royal Academy), was sick of shells littering his garden, and so in 1819 decided to open a shopping arcade down that side of his property to protect it from the ‘tossers’. Nearly 200 years later the place is thriving. You can buy expensive watches and shoes, perfumes and scarves, wallets and pens. Fred Astaire would get ‘lost for days’ in the Burlington, having discovered it when an admirer bought him nine pairs of gold

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 29 October

We’re not due a Wine Club offering in the magazine until next week, but so good were the wines that I tasted recently with-FromVineyardsDirect .com that we just had to include them so that readers might join in the fun. It’s an entirely French line-up, ideal for autumn. And despite the plunging pound and the fact that the wines were very decently priced in the first place, we even squeezed a bit of a discount out of Esme Johnstone and his gang, for which we’re very grateful. The 2014 Clotilde Davenne Sauvignon de Saint Bris (1) is a delightful curiosity, a Sauvignon Blanc from Burgundy in what is really Chardonnay

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Sweet sorrow

So, is that it? The end of sweetness, and the end of taste? Physically speaking, those things will no doubt carry on, when The Great British Bake Off moves to Channel 4 next year. We’ll still take vicarious pleasure in the mouth-watering sweetness of someone’s ‘crème pat’. The taste of lavender will still ‘come through’ in a contestant’s 12 identical puff pastry miniatures. But I’m referring to the abstracts: the sweetness, and the taste. I fear that those might have gone for ever. With Britain tearing itself apart this summer and autumn, one half being sarcastic and nasty about the other half all the time, the weekly hour-long patch of

Roger Alton

Allardyce’s sacking was not just

The other day Sam Allardyce was photographed with Sir Alex Ferguson at a Manchester United Champions League match at Old Trafford. It was clearly the first step in some sort of Allardyce rehabilitation programme. Now, I was never a great fan of his appointment as England manager: anyone who calls themselves ‘Big’ should probably not be allowed anywhere near a once-great English institution. What we have now — Gareth Southgate on a trial, or, one day I hope, Eddie Howe of Bournemouth — is preferable. Nonetheless, the manner of Allardyce’s execution by the FA is troubling. Entrapment has a long and honourable tradition in investigative journalism — in exposing wrongdoers

The Spectator

A deadly silence | 27 October 2016

From ‘Secrecy and disease’, The Spectator, 28 October 1916: The war might have damned us, as Germany planned, but it will end in saving us. Afterwards we shall be a more highly organised nation than we once thought necessary or desirable, and we shall see all things rather differently, but we shall be much stronger. A very noticeable example of the change of heart and outlook is the attitude of people towards this question of venereal diseases. The war has brought us much too closely into contact with real and hard things for us to shrink blushing, as people too often used to do, from a question which concerns the

Lucy Vickery

Lines on the left

In Competition No. 2971 you were invited to submit poems written by Jeremy Corbyn. The seven printed below take £20 apiece but oh, for more space: there were so many terrific entries. Honourable mentions go in particular to Brian Murdoch, Paul Carpenter, John Whitworth, Rip Bulkeley and Josh Ekroy. Shall I compare thee to Teresa May? Thou art more lovely and more socialist: More Corbynista thou than fashionista; More fair art thou to me, in every way. Stay by my side and be my Frida Kahlo; Oh, come and be my red under the bed, Or, in th’immortal words of Gary Barlow Stay with me, girl, we’ll rule the world

Danny Kruger

Too big not to fail

‘Bad policy.’ ‘No discernible impact on the key outcomes it was supposed to improve.’ ‘Deliberate misrepresentation of the data… a funding model that could have been designed to waste money’. ‘A waste of £1.3 billion’. ‘Failed’. The media’s treatment of the troubled families programme, whose evaluation has recently been made public, cannot have cheered David Cameron in his last week as an MP. History does not look likely to be kind to his great social policy. We should, however, be grateful to the former prime minister for his quixotic attempt to do the right thing on a massive scale. Because in doing so he exposed the fallacy which has dominated

Emily Hill

‘Hillary Clinton is a disaster!’

Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph. ‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road