Society

Friday

Martin Daubney

The hair-raising truth? Dreadlocks don’t belong to one ‘culture’

Hardly a day goes by without some hen-brained millennial student telling us that something that we’ve enjoyed for centuries has suddenly become racist. The Rhodes statue. The bronze cockerel from Jesus College, Cambridge. Sombreros. Kimonos. Native American headdresses. The Cultural Appropriation Brigade has now decided that dreadlocks cannot be worn by white men.We know this because a video has gone viral, in which a female African-American student at San Francisco State University called Bonita Tindle seems to attack a white man with dreads called Cory Goldstein. In the video – which has been viewed more than three million times  – Tindle says Goldstein cannot have dreads, as the hairstyle comes from ‘my culture’. Yes,

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Bellum sociorum

The internecine but friendly annual rivalry between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, generously hosted last month by the Chess Circle of the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, resulted in an overwhelming 6-2 victory for the light blues. Cambridge now leads the longest-running chess series in the world with 59 wins. Oxford has 53 wins, and 22 matches have been drawn. Oxford have in the past benefited from grandmaster representation in their team, but this year they were clearly outgunned in rating terms. In spite of dour resistance, the heavily weighted rating, statistics eventually told in favour of Cambridge. The match was, as ever, efficiently controlled by David Sedgwick, while the

Raymond Keene

No. 402

Black to play. This is from Pichot-Khismatullin, Moscow 2016. What was Black’s killing blow? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 5 April or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. 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 Rc7 Last week’s winner Oliver McEvoy, Elstree, Herts

The Spectator

Letters | 31 March 2016

Amber warning Sir: James Forsyth’s interview with Amber Rudd (‘The Amber Express’, 19 March) was very revealing, but also slightly disappointing. She is right about the succession of ‘zealots’ who preceded her in setting British energy policy, but after the billions wasted on wind and solar, paid for by stealth taxes added to our electricity bills, and now providing around 2 per cent of capacity, does she still support the drive towards ‘renewable energy’? Britain now has the most expensive electricity in Europe, hardly an encouragement for business investment. After years of negotiations, escalating costs and serious questions about EDF’s technology and financing problems, the minister had a very strong case to

Peter Jones

The Greek Donald Trump

Why does the Republican party loathe Donald Trump? Because Trump is the ultimate loose cannon, beholden to no one. And even worse, he is popular. What trumpery! Ancient Athenians would have loved him. With no known political or military experience behind him, Cleon surged into the gap left by the death of Pericles in 429 BC, when Athens was locked in a difficult war against Sparta. The son of a rich tanner — certainly not ‘one of us’ — he presented himself as the warmongering, go-get-’em alternative to the cautious Pericles. Full of extravagant promises (including state handouts), he increased the tribute from Athens’ imperial possessions and worked up a

The Spectator

Barometer | 31 March 2016

Area of doubt Hillary Clinton has said that if she is elected she will open files on the US military facility in Nevada known as Area 51. Some rumours which will almost certainly not be confirmed: — According to a physicist who claims to have worked there, nine captured alien spacecraft have been examined there. Another says that a small band of aliens works there. They are 5ft high, wear dungarees and came from a planet called Quintumnia, 45 years’ travel time away. — Scientists there are working on a 6,000mph plane called Aurora, a prototype of which has already been flown. — Workers are suing the USAF after their

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 31 March 2016

Q. Twice recently our host has clinked his glass, required us to stop relaxing and instead take part in a round-table discussion. My wife and are involved in the maelstrom of the Westminster village by day and we have had enough of it by the evening. Is there a courteous way to reject the request of a host attempting to hijack his own dinner party in this way? — Name and address withheld A. Clink your own glass and say your doctor has ordered that in the short term you don’t blur the boundaries between work and play and, since you would find it impossible not to join in, would

Taki

High life | 31 March 2016

My old friend and one-time doubles partner Ray Moore has stepped down as chief executive of the Indian Wells Tennis Tournament for telling the truth. As Rod Liddle wrote in these here pages a couple of weeks ago, ‘There is nothing more damaging to a career than telling an unfortunate truth.’ Ray Moore was a very good South African tennis player and is a very nice guy. He once partnered me to a final in a major tournament and we have stayed friends for 40 years and more. The man who owns the Indian Wells tournament, multi-billionaire Larry Ellison, is a pretty disgusting individual, who among many other horrors has

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 31 March 2016

While I was in Provence, my hostess and I went out one day for a walk in the hills. We walked for three hours and didn’t encounter another soul, and apart from a couple of blue-tits, nor did we see any wildlife. At one point we came to an old stone monastery chapel perched on a ledge with aerial views of forested hills and mountains stretching away to the horizon and not a sign of the 21st century visible. Architecturally, the chapel exterior was simplicity itself, suggesting a holy order of utmost austerity. My hostess had been here before, she said. In fact she makes a point of coming up

Melissa Kite

Real life | 31 March 2016

After a year of affordable car insurance, I knew I had to be in for it when my premium came up for renewal. Nothing prepared me, however, for the quote that came through from Aviva, who I am thinking of re-naming Amorta, or Adversa, which just sounds more appropriate. You may recall that after I won my personal injury dispute with no liability or fault on my record after three years of fighting, I was refunded thousands of the sky-high premiums Aviva had been charging me while the case was going on — because, naturally, they had to assume I was guilty of causing spinal injuries to two members of

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 31 March 2016

The Parish Church of St Luke in Sydney Street, Chelsea, is enormous. Vaguely reminiscent of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, it was built in the 1820s to accommodate a congregation of 2,500 people and was one of the earliest Gothic Revival churches in London, with a higher nave than any church in the capital other than St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. It was built at great expense with the help of a government subsidy as a result of the Church Building Act of 1818, by which Parliament allocated funds for building new churches in the urban areas of Britain where populations had greatly outgrown the facilities for Christian worship. Chelsea

Robin Oakley

My Cheltenham misery

Everybody has their glory memory from Cheltenham this year. Some celebrate the extraordinary seven victories for the quietly confident Willie Mullins, together with such versatile horses as Douvan and Annie Power. Others will forever remember a misty-eyed Nicky Henderson greeting Sprinter Sacre after his Champion Chase victory enabled the most handsome idol in training to leap back onto his pedestal after two injury-dogged years. Then there was the Rolls-Royce supercharger effort that saw Thistlecrack surge clear of his field in the World Hurdle. I carry one other image, an image conjured up for me by the great French trainer François Doumen, who won a Gold Cup with The Fellow in

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 31 March 2016

Tom Townsend, my esteemed teammate and the Telegraph’s bridge correspondent, did the double last weekend at the London Easter Festival of Bridge. First he won the Championship Pairs playing with Mark Teltscher and then he won the teams playing with … me! Well — on my team anyway. Tom and Mark have had considerable success playing Pairs together even though Mark can be found more often at the poker table. But he takes his bridge outings very seriously and ‘warms up’ by playing rubber bridge at TGRs for a couple of weeks before a tournament. His poker skills, reading the opponents and judging risk against reward, will have come in

Toby Young Toby Young

Why I’m uneasy about academies for all

As someone who believes in limited government, I feel conflicted about universal academisation. I’m a fan of the academies policy because it reduces the involvement of politicians and bureaucrats in taxpayer-funded education, but there’s something a little Stalinist about the state forcing all local-authority schools to become academies. It’s using socialist methods to bring about a conservative goal. It reminds me of that paradox first-year philosophy students struggle with — is it right to force a slave to be free? Jeremy Corbyn and the teaching unions have decided that this is a good issue for them and are planning a national campaign against ‘forced academisation’. But the emphasis on the

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Send in the Alsatians

Islington is a bellwether, and also a joke: the most unequal borough in London, where social housing leans against £4 million terraces (for now, loyal Conservative voters, only for now), and also the holy font of Blairism as it appears in ‘It’s Grim Up North London’. Here, it is said, they sang the Blairite version of the Red Flag: ‘The People’s flag is deepest pink/ It’s not as red as people think/ So raise the scarlet banner high/ The college song, the old school tie.’ No more; the jokes are dust, and Blair, it is rumoured, is living on a jet full time, flying away from himself or, as I

Dot Wordsworth

Gender fluid

Benjamin Franklin thought that an excess of electric fluid gave rise to positive electricity, and a deficiency of the fluid to negative electricity. ‘New flannel, if dry and warm, will draw the electric fluid from non-electrics.’ By an electric he meant substances such as glass, and indeed the air. I’m not sure how much we think of electricity as a fluid today. James Thurber’s mother worried that it would run out of the sockets unless one left a plug in them, but she was perhaps unusual. Flann O’Brien put forward the similar theory that darkness was due to the accretion of ‘black air’. Fluid mediums persisted in our world view because it was hard

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 31 March 2016

Home The Indian company Tata decided to sell its entire steel business in Britain, putting more than 15,000 jobs in jeopardy. The buy-to-let business was squashed by the Prudential Regulation Authority imposing more stringent borrowing criteria in parallel with an increase in stamp duty from this month. The Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee said that ‘the most significant’ domestic risks to financial stability were connected to the referendum on EU membership. The French utility company EDF agreed to take on part of its Chinese partner’s financial risks from cost overruns in building the Hinkley Point nuclear power station. BHS, the department store chain, attempted to secure its future in

The Spectator

Power failure | 31 March 2016

A fortnight ago, the energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, declared grandly that Britain, alone in the world, would commit to a target of reducing net carbon emissions to zero. ‘The question is not whether but how we do it,’ she told Parliament. It is now becoming painfully clear how this target will be reached: not by eliminating our carbon emissions but by exporting them, along with thousands of jobs and much of our manufacturing industry. This week, Tata Steel announced that its entire UK business is to be put up for sale. That came after Stephen Kinnock, whose South Wales constituency includes Tata’s giant plant at Port Talbot, joined a union

Columba

2254: Ecofriendly

Answers to clues in italics must become 15 (hyphened) to create grid entries. Definitions of these entries are supplied by unclued lights, one of which consists of two words. Elsewhere ignore two accents.   Across   1    Convince court without question, wearing dark blue (8) 11    Endless praise in resort prepared for sharks (12) 14    Melodies soprano practises (7) 17    Quarrels providing force in manuscript (5) 18    Bullfighter rushed right round (6) 22    Passage about heartless prison camp in speech (8) 23    Horse we trained in whatever place? (7) 24    Struggle to grab a bone (6) 25    Be agitated and refer

Columba

To 2251: Animal track

WILD HORSES, the title of a track on STICKY FINGERS (1D) by the ROLLING STONES (12), defines the other unclued lights. First prize C.G. Millin, Ramleaze, Wilts Runners-up John Angel, Woodbridge, Suffolk; J. Anson, London SE5