Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 13 August 2015

Q. Is there a polite way of not letting someone hold your baby? I love giving mine to people to hold but I don’t like it when he gets handed back to me stinking of someone’s perfume. Is there a kind way of keeping him away from anyone I don’t like the smell of, ideally without giving my son a bad reputation? — Name and address withheld A. Everyone will agree that the smell of clean baby trumps any other and that such a smell should never be overwhelmed. But there is no way of politely preventing handling by the over-perfumed. You must put up with it. After all, babies are

A.N. Wilson

Diary – 13 August 2015

Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day, announcing the unthinkable — the surrender of the great imperial power to the secular, gas-guzzling, unheeding West — seemed like a profanity. So much came to an end with that surrender that it is not possible to celebrate it, particularly since the method chosen to defeat Japan was nuclear-fuelled genocide, not once — which would have been unforgiveable enough — but twice. Surely the Japanese who survived that monstrous pair of bombings, both of which were without any military or moral justification, were staring at what motivated Guy Crouchback —

The Spectator

Stop health tourism

Speaking after the Stafford hospital scandal in 2010, the then newly appointed Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, grandly announced plans for a charter to support whistleblowers. The government, he said, would ‘create an expectation that NHS staff will raise concerns about safety, malpractice and wrongdoing as early as possible’. We now know just how that fine pledge worked out. In 2013 this magazine ran a piece by J. Meirion Thomas, then a cancer specialist at the Royal Marsden hospital in London, about his concerns at how the NHS was being exploited by health tourists. He had tried, he said, to expose an ineligible foreign patient but had as a result been

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 August 2015

Home The Metropolitan Police encouraged people to celebrate VJ Day despite reports in the Mail on Sunday (picked up from an investigation by Sky News) of plans by Islamic State commanders to blow up the Queen. The RMT union announced two more strikes on the London Underground for the last week in August. Network Rail was fined £2 million by the rail regulator for delays in 2014-15, many of them at London Bridge. A tanker carrying propane gas caught fire on the M56 motorway near Chester. England won the Ashes series after beating Australia by an innings and 78 runs at Trent Bridge; Australia had been bowled out for 60

Doc

2224: All here

The unclued lights (two of two words), individually or as pairs, are of a kind. Elsewhere, ignore one accent.   Across   9    Aromatic fragrance from front half of royal residence (4) 11    How embroiderers’ work fell apart — without any trouble (10) 12    The best spinners? (4) 16    Loved one short moment in the air, almost (5) 20    The first way to acknowledge on paper? (7) 21    Talk of a bit of pork crackling (7) 24    Small pastures revealing weaver’s reeds (5) 25    From where to watch the partnership (5) 27    Artlessly return spring water with alkaline solution, mostly (7) 30

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2015 H1

It’s a red-letter day for us here at 22 Old Queen Street. The latest circulation figures for British magazines have just been published and show that sales of The Spectator have broken through their all-time high. More people are buying the magazine now than at any time since we started publishing 187 years ago. Our last high was in the first half of 2006; since then, print publications have struggled to cope with the challenges of the digital age. Newspaper sales have fallen by 40 per cent and are falling still; ours bottomed out mid-2009. Different publishers have responded in different ways; some have full paywall, others no paywall at all. We

Doc

To 2221: Shielded

The unclued lights are heraldic terms. First prize Simon Horobin, Kidlington, Oxon Runners-up Mick O’Halloran, Dunsborough, Australia; John Roberts, Cheltenham, Glos

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Failed candidates highlight Labour’s southern discomfort

While the Labour leadership contest is in a miserable state, other parts of the party are trying to get on with working out how it can recover in 2020. Two big questions are how to deal with Ukip and how to make Labour a winning force again in the South of England and I look at the senior party figures who are trying to get going with answering these questions in this week’s politics column. So anxious are those who actually fought the general election in the South that they’ve written a letter to all four leadership candidates and deputy leadership contenders to remind them of the importance of making Labour

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The feminists who fell for a bleeding hoax

Did you know that tampons were just another brutal expression of the oppressive patriarchy? I must confess that I didn’t either, until the story broke this week about an unfortunate woman who decided to run the London marathon during her time of the month without any panty pads, in ostentatious protest against the alleged male practice of ‘period-shaming’. I’ll come to the ‘unfortunate’ part in a moment. But first, the background. Her name is Kiran Gandhi (a Harvard MBA and former drummer of the agit-rock collective MIA) and four months ago, she chose to run the London marathon, unencumbered by the ‘absurd’ presence of a chaffing ‘wad of cotton’ wedged

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Free markets and dumb luck

The greatest mistake made by conservatism was its overly close relationship with neo-classical economics. This was a marriage of convenience: finding themselves Johnny-no-mates in the academic world, the conservative establishment hastily bunked up with the only group of social scientists who were prepared to talk to them. This cohabitation was not only unhealthy but boring. Economics is obsessed with a very narrow definition of efficiency, beyond which it can see no other virtues. It hence turns political rhetoric into a slightly Aspergic narrative about efficiency and growth — as though Churchill had urged us to fight the second world war ‘to regain access to key export markets’. But this efficiency

William Cook

Hamburg

‘What was it like growing up in Liverpool?’ a journalist asked John Lennon. ‘I didn’t grow up in Liverpool,’ he replied. ‘I grew up in Hamburg.’ My father grew up in Hamburg too, at the end of the second world war. The city had been bombed to smithereens. Cigarettes were the only currency, and my grandma had to trade her jewellery for food. When she met a British soldier who offered to take her to England, she grabbed this lifeline with both hands. If only she were alive to see her smart home town today. When the Beatles came here in 1960, they stayed in St Pauli, the dockside red-light

Bruce Anderson

In search of the platonic gazpacho

We were eating tapas and talking about Spain. Leaving caviar on one side, when jamón ibérico is at its best, there is nothing better to eat. In the Hispania restaurant, it is always at its best. Nothing could match it, although Hispania’s cured leg of beef, the anchovies, the black pudding and the blood pudding all gave their uttermost. But there was one marginal disappointment. Gazpacho is one of the world’s great dishes, and like several others — haggis is the obvious comparison — it began as a food for the poor, only using cheap and readily available ingredients. Early recipes call for only stale bread, water, olive oil —

Simon Barnes

Best of enemies

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3″ title=”Alex Massie and Michael Henderson discuss England’s victory against Australia” startat=1184] Listen [/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip. Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope. Thank God I was leaving: those poor buggers

Deborah Ross

Great expectations | 13 August 2015

Trainwreck is a romcom as written and directed by Amy Schumer, the American comedy prodigy whose Comedy Central sketch show is properly hilarious and transgressive, from what I’ve seen. Indeed, if nothing else, I beseech you to watch one particular sketch, as viewable on YouTube, where a group of famous Hollywood actresses gather to celebrate one of their number’s ‘last fuckable day’, explained as follows: ‘In every actress’s life, the media decides when you’ve finally reached the point you are not believably fuckable any more….’ So my hopes for this film were sky-high. My hopes were that it would take the standard, misogynist romcom tropes and give them the pitiless

Mark Mason

Old boys’ network

Are you a man? Those of you who don’t fall into the category of ‘adult male’ will clearly answer no — but even those who do might not say yes. Do you apply the label ‘man’ to yourself? Are you happy using the phrase ‘I’m as [insert quality] as the next man’? You’re not? Me neither. At 43 I’ve spent a quarter of a century as a man in the eyes of the law, but still the word feels too grown-up for me to use it about myself. Several friends have admitted the same thing. Winston Churchill was a man. Floyd Mayweather is a man. We, on the other hand,

Lucy Vickery

Pet hate | 13 August 2015

In Competition No. 2910 you were invited to submit a poem by a pet who is cheesed off with its owner. The contempt in Basil Ransome-Davies’s closing couplet, written from the perspective of a bolshie moggy, was echoed throughout the entry by a hacked-off parade of bullied, misunderstood and condescended-to pets: He wants affection, he can kiss a duck. It’s what my mother told me: bipeds suck. I especially liked Sylvia Fairley’s homicidal preying mantis and Bill Greenwell’s scheming goldfish. Equally impressive were Hugh King, John Priestland, George Tetley, John-Paul Marney and Dave East, who were unlucky to miss out on a place in the winning line-up. Those entries printed

The Spectator

Boy soldiers

From ‘What will they do with it?’, The Spectator, 14 August 1915: It is true that in a good many cases boys of 17 ought not to be sent to the trenches. Such boys would, however, be quite serviceable for home defence purposes, and it is obvious that we must in any case keep a quarter of a million, and perhaps half a million, soldiers in these islands to resist a raid. Not only do boys of 17 learn very quickly, but six months of good food and military drill and of life in the open would enormously improve their physique and make them the better able to bear the trials with

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The clock that stopped: the victory of nuclear arms and defeat of nuclear power

‘I visited the black marble obelisk which marks the epicentre of the explosion, and I saw the plain domestic wall-clock retrieved intact from the rubble with its bent hands recording the precise time of day when the city was obliterated: 11.02 a.m. I was glad to be alone, because I could not have spoken.’ Published here 20 years ago, that was my memory of Nagasaki, the target on 9 August 1945 of the second and last nuclear weapon ever deployed. The subsequent seven decades of non-use of nuclear arms — deterred by that most chilling of threats, ‘mutually assured destruction’ — is one of the miracles of modern history, given the

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

‘Life in Squares’ reminds us that the Bloomsbury Group liked sex. That’s about it

I didn’t have very high hopes for ‘Life In Squares’ (the BBC three-parter about the Bloomsbury circle which concluded this week).  But the first episode stuck me as promising.  The second faltered, and the third was rushed and anti-climactic.  Nevertheless it was all much better than expected, with some strong performances. The main reason for advance pessimism was a certainty that the programme-makers would try to woo their audience with lashings of sex.  I don’t know why programme-makers do this.  It’s like nudity in opera.  Nobody who wants to see nudity has to go to BBC 2 on a Monday evening and watch a drama on the Bloomsbury Group to

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Make politics more ‘transparent’ and politicians will become less honest

Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write: I feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Following months of scandal over her email shenanigans (in a nutshell: she’s been using a private email address rather than her government one) she’s just had to hand her email server to the FBI. And anyone who has so much as a smidgen of the DNA that makes up the empathy gene must surely be thinking to him or herself: ‘Oof. Poor Hillary.’ Imagine having to pass every email you’d ever written — whether in jest, anger or horniness — to the powers-that-be, knowing they could be pored over in public. I know what I’ll