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Society

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Gay marriage happened because society wanted it, not because government ordered it

Should right-wing politicians be more moral? The question is being raised by Ricky Ross on his superb Sunday morning show on Radio Scotland*; I will be one of the guests. We recorded the discussion this morning. Why, he asked, are Tories seen as being a bit cold-hearted, obsessed with the rich and unconcerned with welfare? Why couldn’t they put themselves at the front of a social mission, like gay marriage? It’s an important point: Tories tend to dislike being seen as preachy and pious, so avoid the moralising language that Labour politicians are quicker to use. But that doesn’t mean they’re not driven by the same sense of moral purpose:

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why are students now cheering about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo?

I witnessed something genuinely disturbing at Trinity College Dublin last night: trendy, middle-class, liberal students cheering and whooping a man who had just given the closest thing I have yet heard to a justification for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. It was as part of a debate on the right to offend. I was on the side of people having the right to say whatever the hell they want, no matter whose panties it bunches. The man on the other side who implied that Charlie Hebdo got what it deserved, and that the right to offend is a poisonous, dangerous notion, was one Asghar Bukhari of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee.

Carola Binney Carola Binney

The backlash against the Stepford Students is intensifying

The Oxford University Student Union this week added another feather to its cap on free speech by banning a new student magazine called No Offence from being distributed at Freshers’ Fair next week. The ban was on the grounds that the publication might – you guessed it – ’cause offence’. No Offence was, according to its founders Jacob Williams and Lulie Tanett, set up to ‘promote debate and publicise ideas people are afraid to express’. It’s an offshoot of the Open Oxford Facebook group – the open-minded antithesis to some of Oxford’s more notorious social media expurgators – which aspires to ‘welcome all view-points, however controversial, and encourage vigorous but respectful discussion’.

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Homer nods

Paul Morphy, in a strange prefiguration of the later career of Bobby Fischer, was often described as ‘the pride and sorrow of chess’. In the late 1850s he blazed like a meteor across the chess firmament. He sprang to prominence by thoroughly defeating the German master Louis Paulsen in the New York tournament of 1857. Based on this success, Morphy travelled to Europe where, in quick succession, he inflicted match defeats on the established European masters such as Lowenthal, Harrwitz and finally Adolf Anderssen, who was very much regarded as champion after his victory at the London tournament of 1851. Morphy’s victories were so great that we tend to regard

The Spectator

Letters | 1 October 2015

Cold-calling ET Sir: Alexander Chancellor has called for Spectator readers to suggest a message to send into space on behalf of the world, in response to some Russian billionaire’s prize of £1 million for the best (Long life, 19 September). Given that the nearest form of intelligent life is at least 60,000,000,000,000 miles away, it had better be a good ’un, as we all know what we Earthlings tend to do with cold-callers. Moreover, given that the bulk of the world’s population cleave to the notion that our life-form is God-given and unique among the planets, it should probably be penned by a consummate ad man; someone steeped in the art

Raymond Keene

No. 381

Black to play. This is from Botterill-Basman, Eastbourne 1973. What is Black’s best move? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 6 October or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week there is a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 … R6f3+ Last week’s winner Nigel à Brassard, London W1

Taki

High life | 1 October 2015

If cheating is the cancer of sport, losing has to be its halitosis. I stunk out the joint in Amsterdam last week, and even managed to be thrown (a first) for my troubles. Winners, for some strange reason, never have an excuse. Losers tend to. Mine is that my opponent was born after the war, whereas I was in an age group that was born before it. The rules are that one fights opponents within five years of one’s birthday, either way. My opponents were double that, but I should have registered an objection before the matches began. Some did and stayed out. I did not. I arrogantly thought I

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 1 October 2015

Every morning for the past two years, on waking, I’ve reached out for the white plastic tub on the bedside table, shaken out four oval white tablets into the lid, tossed them into my mouth, and washed them down with a pint of water. Initially I counted myself lucky to be selected to take the expensive drug abiraterone for two years as part of a nationwide clinical trial. As I understand it, abiraterone turns off the adrenal glands, thereby depriving prostate cancers of their favourite nourishment, testosterone. (Presumably, I have also been without adrenaline for two years and impervious to loud bangs.) I tolerated the drug easily until about three

Melissa Kite

Real life | 1 October 2015

At least two insurances are going to have to go, as I grapple with fear of penury, I have decided. My health insurance is looking increasingly pointless, because I never use it. I just keep it going because I daren’t stop it. And I think the same can be said of my ‘Being A Cool Person’ insurance. If you have never heard of the latter, it is also sometimes referred to as ‘membership of Soho House’. I have had it for donkey’s years but I never avail myself of it. I used to use it a lot in my heyday, when I could party with the best of them. Back

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 1 October 2015

When Robert Peston, the economics editor of the BBC, interviewed George Osborne on television in an open-necked shirt with collar awry and a wisp of chest hair on display, he was subjected to a barrage of criticism to which he responded with vigour. It was ‘bonkers’ to suggest that wearing a tie made a journalist serious, he said, or that a tie should be worn out of respect for the interviewee. ‘I didn’t not wear a tie out of disrespect for the chancellor,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t wear a tie because I don’t really like wearing a tie. I think these TV conventions are nuts.’ A report in the

Robin Oakley

Fair minded

One of Alan Bennett’s characters once lamented, ‘We tried to set up a small anarchist community …but people wouldn’t obey the rules.’ Perhaps he should have found a job within horse-racing. Just look at the aftermath to this year’s St Leger. I was at Bath Races that day when the authorities thoughtfully broadcast the Doncaster Classic on their big screen, and I am not writing without prejudice. Some near the Bath screen endured the undignified spectacle of a tan-trousered spectator, now well qualified for his bus pass, giving a passable imitation of a whirling dervish while shouting home Ralph Beckett’s filly Simple Verse as she flashed first past the post

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

High steaks

Smith & Wollensky is a restaurant from The Shining: a terrifying American steak joint by the Thames, four months old, with a £10 million refurbishment and no passing trade; it sits opposite the Georgian houses in John Adam Street, like a cow biting into a wedding cake, wondering what went wrong. It seats possibly 400 people; when I went on Sunday evening four tables were taken — one by a pointy-beard convention — and a whole floor was closed but still lit. I love this: the spectral restaurant; the restaurant from your nightmares; the restaurant at the edge of an apocalypse, boasting of butchering — and ageing — its ‘patriotic’

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 1 October 2015

The 42nd Bermuda Bowl has kicked off in Chennai, and after several weeks of cheat-busting Boye Brogeland (‘The Sheriff’) has kept his promise to give us a clean World Championship. Four European teams qualified with cheats — oh sorry, Mr Smirnov; ‘ethical violations’ on your part — and were replaced by squads from France, Denmark and Sweden, while Poland lost its most experienced pair, Balicki/Zmudzinski, and is playing a team of four. The only Euro teams that survived with their reputations intact are England and Bulgaria. Geir Helgemo, probably the greatest player in the world, and his partner Tor Helness pulled out when their teammates were exposed as cheats. It

Dot Wordsworth

Critique

I lost my husband on the way from Malabar. He is easily lost. We had been talking about the verb critique, which we neither much care for. But, in gathering ammunition, I’d come across this charming sentence from a book of voyages translated in 1598 by William Phillip. He referred to a ‘fruite which the Malabares and Portingales call Carambolas’. Carambola, the fruit, might have given the Portuguese and Spanish the word carambola meaning ‘a cannon’ in billiards, cannon coming from carom, a reduction of the French version of the word, carambole. But there is a little place near Seville called El Carambolo. A club with the grand name of

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 1 October 2015

Q. A friend of mine is performing a recital in Dublin and has sent round an email advertising the time and date and asking if people will come to hear him play. I’ve already seen him performing once and it was pretty dire the first time round. Now I feel pressure is being put on me to go and see him yet again. As I live in Ireland and he’s given me plenty of notice, I don’t know how I can get out of it but dread the prospect of sitting through another hour of misery. He’s a sweet man and I don’t want to hurt him. — Name and

Toby Young Toby Young

The vision of Steve Jobs

Last week I went to a screening of Steve Jobs, the new biopic about the co-founder of Apple directed by Danny Boyle, and I was impressed. It’s structured like a three-act play, with each act set backstage at the launch of a new product — in 1984, 1988 and 1998 — and then unfolding in real time. Superficially, the film is about the gradual ascent of Apple (and Steve Jobs) as the dominant force in the personal computer industry, but beneath the surface it’s about much more than that. As portrayed by Michael Fassbender, Jobs isn’t just a common or garden perfectionist. He’s neurotic, obsessive, driven, ruthless and almost inhumanly oblivious

The Spectator

Barometer | 1 October 2015

Water worlds Nasa announced it had found evidence of running water on Mars in the form of dark streaks on mountains and cliff edges. On which other planets and celestial bodies can you slake your thirst? — Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, is believed to have an ocean of liquid water 60 miles deep, beneath 90 miles of ice. — Two other moons of Jupiter, Europa and Callisto, are also believed to have liquid oceans beneath ice crusts, the former having more water than Earth. No other planets in our solar system, however, are believed to have liquid surface water. Card check How many members does Labour have? 221,247 Labour

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 October 2015

Home In his speech at the Labour party conference, much of it taken from material that had been on the internet for some time, Jeremy Corbyn, its new leader, told the British people that most of them shared his values, such as ‘fair play for all, solidarity and not walking by on the other side of the street’. ​Mr Corbyn urged: ‘Let us build a kinder politics, a more caring society together.’ Supporters of the Class War movement with fiery torches and pig masks attacked the hipsterish Cereal Killer Café in Brick Lane, east London​.​ The Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate apologised after an RAF sergeant was

Fieldfare

2231: On the side

Unclued lights (three of two words; ignore one apostrophe) may be grouped to form a related triad.   Across   1    Old wife to claim freebie from party (8, two words) 5    Arrest of secret police (6) 11    King’s job reduced: that hurt part of the fleet (10) 16    From lack of energy Roman general loses a navy (5) 17    Cudgels seen abandoned on mountain (7) 20    Special toy for child with which to paint (8) 25    From poet, a conceit for 28 Feb? (4) 26    Electronic signal about work for shepherdess (6, hyphened) 28    Pay back cleric in time (6) 29    With difficulty, breathe air quietly (4) 31    Such

Fieldfare

To 2228: Unfair

GRASSHOPPERS (9) of ZURICH (30) is a team that plays football — not cricket, as indicated by corrections of misprints in clues. Other unclued lights are related STRIDULATING INSECTS (13 28). First prize R.C. Teuton, Frampton Cotterell, South Glos Runners-up N.J. Smithies, Guernsey; Charles McCulloch, Temple, London