Society

Monday

Rebecca O'Connor

Keeping finances secret can be bad for your wealth (and health)

How much do you know about your spouse? Hair colour, date of birth, where they grew up, what they do for a living…how much they earn, perhaps? Not so much that last one, according to a number of respondents to a popular thread on Mumsnet last week. The proportion of respondents who do not know how much their husbands and partners earn was surprisingly high. ‘I have a rough idea,’ said one. ‘We keep our finances separate. As long as he pays his share of the bills, it doesn’t matter,’ said another. Really? Prudential, the insurer, found that 12 per cent of Brits do not tell their partners what they earn. Such

Helen Nugent

Rail fares, holiday visas, housing and pensions

Commuters spend more than a tenth of disposable income on annual rail season tickets, a BBC investigation has found. Figures also show some commuters pay almost 40p per mile of railway while others pay 11p per mile. Campaigners for better railways said people were ‘astonished’ so much of their income was going on travel. Train operators say rail travel is better value for money than running a car. The Government said it had capped rail fares in line with inflation. Holidays British holidaymakers could be forced to pay for visas to travel to Europe as a trade-off for the Brexit vote, the Home Secretary has admitted. The Telegraph reports that Amber

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why CofE schools must resist becoming more religious

The Church of England’s relationship with state education seems simple enough. Its schools have been a major source of strength, significantly slowing its rate of decline over the past few decades. Many congregations have been swelled by parents seeking a better-than-average state education for their offspring. From an Anglican point of view, what’s not to like?  Well, this: selection by church attendance is unpopular with those who do not benefit, giving the Church an image problem with its non-members. This makes some of its members, including me, uneasy. Also, the integrity of church attendance is in doubt, in parishes near a popular school. The cliché of the pushy parents faking

Sunday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Hillary Clinton leaves 9/11 memorial after suffering ‘medical episode’

Hillary Clinton has made an early exit from a 9/11 ceremony today after suffering a ‘medical episode’. The 68-year-old Democrat presidential candidate is said to have left the event abruptly, with Fox News reporting that she appeared to faint just before 10am as family members of the 2,977 victims were reading through their names. According to a witness at the scene, Clinton’s ‘knees buckled’ and her security team rushed her to a nearby van. Clinton’s campaign have since released a statement putting her departure down to her feeling ‘overheated’. Leaving her daughter Chelsea’s apartment this afternoon, Clinton told reporters she was ‘feeling great’. However despite her words, this situation will play into Donald Trump’s

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Before anyone sounds off about grammar schools, ask first where their children go to school

There’s a good reason and a bad reason why David Cameron hasn’t added his mite to the argument about the reintroduction of grammars, which his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, sounded off about yesterday. The good reason is that it would be the worst of form for the former Tory PM to diss his successor, even if he disagrees with her. The bad reason is that he’s got a dog in this fight; his son Elwen. You remember all the fuss about the rumour that little Elwen might be going to a feeder prep to St Paul’s, the private school? The Camerons invoked media privacy to see off discussion of that

Rose Asani

After years of desperation, at last there is a glimmer of hope in Syria

Sat on the dusty ground with the heat of the sun beating down on her, Nur looked exhausted. Arms wrapped around her knees, head bowed. I wondered if she had the energy to even get up again. Next to her was a suitcase and a couple of plastic bags, her whole life packed away. Three young children huddled behind her, their hands clutching at the back of their mothers clothes. Tiny, frail young lives who have witnessed conflict and terrors unimaginable. The eldest, a girl, looked up at me as I approached. Big eyes set in a hollow face stared out and through me without a flicker of emotion.  It

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Where should the line be drawn over the famous Kim Phuc photograph?

Can you imagine, in the wake of a terror attack in London, a tabloid, or any other kind of media outlet, publishing a photograph of a naked and distressed child caught up in the melee? It isn’t hard to answer the question. Of course they wouldn’t publish it. It would break every rule in the book. It is bizarre, then, to see Facebook accused of censorship for coming to exactly the same conclusion: that it wasn’t right to carry an image of naked and distressed child. It is even weirder to see Facebook attacked from a corner – the Guardian – which would normally be among the first to damn

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the world’s worst sitcom

The latest call was for stonkingly bad ideas for children’s books, an Olympic sport, a television sitcom or a reality TV series. Reading your entries brought back fond if painful memories of Alan Partridge’s Inner-City Sumo — ‘We take fat people from inner cities, put them in big nappies…’ — and monkey tennis. V. Ernest Cox’s proposed children’s book, A Pop-Up Book of Sexting, vied with John Samson’s Dignitas showjumping (don’t ask) for the bad-taste award, while Douglas G. Brown’s Poop Scoopin’ Fetishists scooped the gong for grossness. Top marks to Tracy Davidson’s pitch for the one-size-fits-all reality TV show The Only Way Is Strictly Come Dine With Me In

Friday

Helen Nugent

Rental costs, Mastercard, energy and motor insurance

The cost of renting a home in England and Wales was 5.2 per cent higher in July than the same month a year earlier, according to lettings agent Your Move. Its survey, based on analysis of about 20,000 properties, suggested that average monthly rent paid by private tenants rose to £846. The increase was sharpest in the South East of England. The annual rise in this region of 14.9 per cent was explained by a ripple effect from high rents in London. London had the highest average monthly rents, at £1,273, the survey suggested. Mastercard A £14 billion legal claim has been filed against Mastercard on behalf of UK consumers seeking damages

Douglas Murray

Are Isis Islamic? Hillary Clinton seems to think so

Here’s a strange thing. In a TV interview on Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton said that Isis want Donald Trump to become President of the United States. In her words, Isis are currently saying, ‘Please, Allah, make Trump president of America’. Personally I have no idea which ticket Isis will be campaigning for, come November. But I do find this all very confusing. We all learnt from President Obama that Isis have absolutely nothing to do with Islam. Indeed, when the group decapitated the American hostage Peter Kassig a couple of years ago, the Commander in Chief insisted that ‘Isil’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith’. But

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The Swinging Sixties should be renamed the Seedy Sixties

You know you’re getting old not when the policemen start looking young, but when a public figure dies and you say ‘O, I thought they were dead already!’ So it was for me when I heard that the Australian writer Richard Neville had died of dementia at the age of seventy four last week. Neville was never any sort of hero of mine – I was too busy promising my soul to Satan for a quick lick of Marc Bolan. But when I was thirteen and at the peak of my shoplifting prowess, I nicked his book Play Power on exactly the same robbing rampage that saw me take proud possession of The Female Eunuch,

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Back to Baku

The 42nd Chess Olympiad is now underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, and English grandmasters are making their best efforts to recapture the glory days of world team chess when England regularly finished in silver medal position to the mighty Soviets. After the early rounds Russia leads, with Kramnik as top board. The incumbent Chinese gold medallists are of course in contention, while the USA, already with Nakamura but strengthened by Caruana and So, is definitely among the favourites. Here are some choice positions from the opening rounds, where weaker teams face the giants.   Carlsen (Norway)-Hossain (Bangladesh) Baku Olympiad 2016 (see diagram 1)   This arose from a Nimzo-Indian Defence where Black

Raymond Keene

No. 425

White to play. This is a position from Short (England)-Pasaribu (Indonesia), Baku-Olympiad 2016. How did White win material? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 13 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 Bxf7+ Last week’s winner Oliver Cleaver, Broadhembury, Devon

Harold Evans

Diary – 8 September 2016

At weekends in our summerhouse at Quogue on Long Island, we go out to buy the newspapers and paper-cup coffee at the busy 7-Eleven in Westhampton. Several brisk young Hispanic women serve the long line of customers. Nobody mentions Donald Trump, though his latest vomit about deporting everyone like them is often on the front pages of the papers they hand us. The hurt and angst it must inflict may be mitigated somewhat in New York by the moral clarity of the city’s Daily News editorials blasting Trump as ‘un-American’, and the music video ‘Amnesty Don’, a spoof western mocking his talk of ‘going soft on immigration’. To the rage of

Taki

High life | 8 September 2016

I have a question for you, dear readers: is it me, or is there no newspaper or network in America that tells it like it is any more? Take, for example, the Anthony Weiner case. He is the pervert who keeps sending pictures of his penis to women over the internet, more often than not while in the company of his four-year-old son. If a man like that were married to Donald Trump’s closest assistant, The Donald would have been forced out of the race by now — no ifs or buts about it. But over on the other side, Hillary confirmed her trust in Huma Abedin, a Saudi-raised Muslim

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 8 September 2016

Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir   This morning I was woken just before daylight by the clear ‘ting’ of a meditation bell. The owner of the house was attending to his religious devotions in the little private chapel across the courtyard from my room. He is an ‘Amchi’, I’ve been told, which is a Ladakhi word for the village herbal-medicine man and astrologer. I’ve been staying at his house for two days, acclimatising to the thin air and doing nothing much except looking out of the window at the turbulent confluence, below the house, of the Zanskar and Indus rivers, and at the mountain ranges beyond. I’ve encountered the Amchi just

Dot Wordsworth

Doric

I’d seen The Gruffalo in Latin, so I was delighted when Veronica showed me a version her daughter had been given, in Doric. It begins: ‘A moose tuik a dander ben the wid./ A tod saw the moose, an the moose luiked guid.’ (I take it that every mother knows The Gruffalo by heart. The original starts: ‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood./ A fox saw the mouse, and the mouse looked good.’). Although Gaelic (Ghàidhlig) is the distinct language of Scotland, few bother to learn it, and the English-speakers there give the name Scots to various dialects of northern English. Sometimes they call it Doric,

Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 September 2016

What is happening to estate agents? Or let me put it another way. If the professional classes thought they were going to escape unscathed from ‘free movement of people’ then they were wrong. I feel it is only fair to warn the office workers and the suited and booted that their salaries are no longer safe from the Eurovision job contest. I know this because I have been trying to sell my flat for a while and a part of the problem has been that the agent put in charge of selling it was a young girl who, while sweet, lacked the ideal vocab range. I overheard her doing a

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 8 September 2016

There is no cherished assumption that now goes unchallenged. The latest one is that country air is good for you. Ronald Reagan was much mocked when he said in 1981 that ‘trees cause more pollution than automobiles do’, but scientists later surprised everyone by saying that he was at least partially right. And now it is claimed that if you live near to a pig, cow or chicken farm, you might as well be living in Oxford Street. A study conducted by Utrecht University in Holland has found that more Europeans die from air pollution in the countryside than in cities, mainly from the fumes of manure storage and slurry

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 8 September 2016

There are three reasons why I never make ‘psychic’ bids. First, because I’m a wimp. Second, because I often play with partners who are better than me, and I feel it would be arrogant to manipulate the bidding. And third, because you really have to know what you’re doing with psychic bids — and I’m not sure I do. But I know someone who does — Alex Hydes, my partner in the World Mixed Teams which are taking place in Poland this week (along with the Open, Women’s and Seniors). It’s a huge privilege to be on the England team — and to be partnering Alex in particular. He’s a