Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

How to exploit a crisis

The phrase ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s something the left is better at than the right. Take the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle. Earlier this month, the CCDH held an ‘emergency’ meeting to discuss the role of social media in fuelling the public disorder that followed the murder of three girls in Southport, and on Tuesday it published the policy recommendations that emerged from that meeting. The difficulty is that ‘hate speech’ is often used by

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

How I lost my faith

God used to exist. He doesn’t any more, but back in the early 1970s he was a major presence in my life. The world at that time was run by President Nixon and his adviser Ted Heath, but their power was limited, and even they had to defer to God’s authority. That’s how it seemed to me. A howling spirit or a weeping martyr might burst forth, dripping blood or swathed in tongues of fire I was encouraged by the adults to converse with God and to ask for his guidance and I spoke to him often, in class when we prayed, at night in my bedroom, and at Mass

Melissa Kite

Why can’t I just buy a boardgame?

The little toy shop stood at the highest point of a steep winding lane of shops all painted different colours, near the harbour. So quaint, so beguiling and magical was this place, it was like walking into your childhood memory box. On the shelves of games on the back wall I found KerPlunk, Connect 4, Buckaroo, Guess Who, and all the old favourites. I needed some board games because a friend was coming to stay with his four children and we would need to while away the long West Cork evenings which would probably be rainy and windy. We are usually happy doing nothing in front of an open fire but

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Lucy Letby and the problem with statistics

First Fred West, now Lucy Letby. At this rate, it won’t be long before Herefordshire has produced more serial killers than it has miles of dual carriageway. You might assume growing up in one of England’s loveliest counties would make people placid, but then you haven’t spent half your life stuck behind a caravan on the A465. They may not all kill people, but Herefordshire people overtake like psychopaths. It only takes one dodgy assumption to reach a conclusion that is diametrically wrong But I’m going to park my Monmouthshire prejudice here and suggest that something about the Lucy Letby conviction seems off to me. I’m not going to talk

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The unappetising truth about tasting menus

The tasting menu has fallen from fashion, and this is good. They are a curio – a window to the chef’s soul – and they have always incited more pity in me than awe. They draw the chef’s subconscious on the plate, and it isn’t always palatable; or, rather, it is too complex for joy. In their own words, they are unhappy. In The Devil in the Kitchen, Marco Pierre White writes that he was haunted by the loss of his mother, and his kitchen was an attempt to recover her. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘I was trying to kill myself but sacrificing your health for your career was all

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I avoid my neighbours on holiday?

Q. We have some neighbours who we don’t mind at all – they are perfectly nice, just not part of our friendship group. We have heard they are heading to Majorca, to the same town where we have a holiday home, and will be there at the same time as us. We are now dreading running into this couple out there as it will be difficult not to invite them to our house. It seems very unfriendly but we don’t want to see them in Majorca any more than we do in England. Help! – P.T., Dorset A. Initiate preemptive contact with the neighbours. Convey you have heard they are

Aidan Hartley

My hopes for Africa

Lake Malawi As we speed southwards along the potholed road near Lake Malawi’s shores, I tell my colleague Helen that overpopulation in Africa is just a myth. On either side of the road is an unbroken procession of women carrying firewood on their heads, of barefoot children, of poor men on bicycles, avenues of huts, suicidal goats, blighted crops and dusty lands rising towards distant, once–forested hills. Malawi had four million people at independence from Britain in 1964 and today it’s five times that number. It may look like a land that has eaten itself – but it’s going to be all right, I say. Africa is getting richer, healthier,

Bruce Anderson

The treasures of sherry

We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points of comparison. As a very broad generalisation, Spaniards can be divided into three political groupings. There is a Europhile elite who take their political identity from a projected European future, and almost none from their nation’s past. To them, Spanish history is largely a record of backwardness, poverty, oppression and conflict. The EU is a means of ensuring that this past can be left in the past. British wine-lovers should not talk too loudly about the treasures of sherry The two much larger groups cannot forget the past, and especially

Janet de Botton

Bridge

What is the most advantageous attribute for a great Bridge player? Is it maths, or memory? I like the answer Sweden’s Peter Fredin gives: ‘Imagination.’ We’re not talking about the kind that lets you imagine you’re the best player in the world, but rather the ability to see how things look to the opponents. Peter has been gifted with a lot of imagination (both kinds actually!) Here’s a hand he showed me from a Pairs event at the Swedish Bridge Festival, while making a poor effort to keep a straight face. Note that the first act of deception started in the bidding; instead of describing his hand to his partner

Dot Wordsworth

When did monkeypox become ‘mpox’?

Writing about monkeypox in The Spectator in May 2022, Douglas Murray repeated a formula he had put forward in 2020, explaining ‘the problem with us humans as a species’: ‘Someone always shags a monkey.’ Now an outbreak of new, improved monkeypox is upon us, and the first thought has been to avoid stigmatising monkeys. It has been renamed mpox. The Oxford English Dictionary, a vasty hoard where words can lie undisturbed for more than a century, was quick to comment: ‘Mpox was originally named monkeypox because it was first seen in laboratory monkeys. It was later identified in rodents and other small mammals, various wild primates, and humans. After a

Luke McShane

Marathon

Earlier this month, at the Kingston Invitational, Peter Lalic won a game against 12-year-old Billy Fellowes in 272 moves. Published in full, it would take up most of this article and resemble a cryptographic message more than a game of chess. But it earns a place in the record books as the longest over-the-board game in history, eclipsing the game Nikolic-Arsovic, Belgrade 1989, which was agreed drawn after 269 moves. Billy Fellowes-Peter Lalic Kingston Invitational, August 2024 The first diagram, at move 18, sets the scene. With more space to manoeuvre, Black holds a clear strategical advantage. The snag is that both of the natural pawn breaks which open up

Luke McShane

No. 816

White to play. Caruana-Firouzja, Sinquefield Cup, 2024. Caruana exchanged rooks, but soon ran out of checks and resigned before the b2 pawn could promote. Which move would have secured a draw here? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 2 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Qh8+! Then 1…Kd6 2 Qf8+ or 1…Kf4 2 Qh2+ Ke3 3 Qg1+ or 1…f6 2 Qh2+ Kd4 3 Qg1+ Last week’s winner Henry Beecham, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Environ-mental

In Competition 3364 you were invited to submit a piece of psychogeography exploring a mundane journey. A cartoon in the Guardian recently defined psychogeography as ‘walking around criticising gentrification’ – though it can be down on decline too. One rule of thumb is that if you can imagine Will Self saying it, it’s probably right. You rose magnificently and pretentiously to the challenge and if there were space and £25s enough, I could haveincluded three times the number of winners. If Huddersfield is the world, then B&M Bargains, trading at the great crossroads, is its Istanbul. And just as memories of Constantinople and of Byzantium haunt that extraordinary city, so

Fire

2669: Partners in crime

Four pairs of unclued lights are all similarly linked.                 Across 5               Mark sample of class essays (6) 9               I’m beginning to like hot chap’s twinkling of an eye (10) 14            Beginning of oxidisation on iron container? (3) 17            One who chooses mixed ramen (5) 18            Of sound mind, regularly returns wearing gold ring (5) 20            Followers regret taking European money (7) 22            Half of Earth’s journey round Sun used for retaining heat … (7) 24            … is lacking energy in orbit (7) 25            Direct lines to the centre of Leningrad I installed (5) 26            Biting cold and dry outside (5) 28            Frank doffs cap to old money (7) 31            Shooting

Joan Collins

Do I have too many friends?

Can one have too many friends? I asked myself this question as we prepared yet another dinner party for ten people, at which I ate and drank far too much as usual. Forget bikini body – it’s kaftan time in Saint Tropez at the moment for me. We’ve been at our villa in the South of France for nearly three months this summer and during that time we have hosted 34 guests, who stayed anywhere between three days and two weeks. We’ve hosted two daughters, one son, in-laws and cousins, several dozen friends and one baby granddaughter, and they have kept Percy and me on our social toes. But we

The Spectator

Is this Rachel Reeves’s idea of a programme for growth?

It is certainly true that the Labour party has been more than a little devious over the tax rises that are to come. After an election campaign in which it insisted it had no plans – and no need – to increase taxes beyond a few measures such as extending VAT on school fees, mysterious holes started appearing in the public finances as soon as the party achieved office. So acute, apparently, is the lack of funds that Sir Keir Starmer felt the need to warn us this week that October’s Budget will be ‘painful’. It is an old trick, which David Cameron and George Osborne also tried to pull

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The death of free speech in Britain

In Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front government. Nine years after its publication, submission seems more imminent on this side of the English Channel. My American friends are surprised to learn there’s no equivalent to the First Amendment in Britain. They have forgotten a free press was one of the things their ancestors rebelled to establish in the US. Free speech is a much more recent thing in the UK. If it was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s. If free speech in the UK was born in the 1960s, it seems

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Who will protect me?

Police are hunting a ‘hooded figure’ who sprayed ‘no whites’ on the wall of a primary school in Birmingham. The coppers presumably have racial hatred in mind, but there could be a much more innocent explanation for that which otherwise would be simply a case of vandalism – or even one of laudable graffiti art which may, one day, sell for millions of pounds to a rich idiot devoid of discernment. The school is located in the Alum Rock area of the city, a ward which consists almost entirely of ‘BAME’ people, according to a city council factsheet. So it may be that the hooded figure with the spray can