Society

Thursday

6 Aug 2015

Racing loses its Voice

Reviewing a biography of Arkle, Peter O’Sullevan wrote, ‘He had an obit to die for.’ So did The Voice himself. It could have been a sad Goodwood with the death of the greatest racing journalist and the retirement of champion jockey Richard Hughes, the stylish equine burglar who stole so many last-gasp victories on the difficult undulating track, but instead it proved to be as Glorious a week as ever celebrating those two fantastic careers. Peter O’Sullevan (like his late friend Lord Oaksey) drew countless thousands of us into racing with his ability to convey the excitement of the sport in print or behind the microphone. He then kept us

Tanya Gold

Something fishy

Selfridges is skilled at making things that are not hideous (women) look hideous (women dressed as Bungle from Rainbow or a tree, after shopping at Selfridges). So I was not surprised to discover that it has summoned a ‘pop-up’ restaurant to its roof. It is called Vintage Salt and it is based on a Cornish fishing village. Not a real one, such as Newlyn, but a fake one, such as Padstow, which is based on Selfridges anyway. Selfridges shoppers do not want reality but a half-remembered contortion of something they read in Vogue while having their hair dyed banana yellow in St John’s Wood High Street in the company of

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 6 August 2015

Sweden’s flagship event is the brilliantly well organised Chairman’s Cup held in Orebro, attracting great players from all over Europe. Unfortunately I couldn’t go so I had to content myself with watching on BBO. The final was riveting — a Swedish team of Juniors, plus the Dutch champion Marion Michielsen, eventually succumbing in the last set to a team of Polish Juniors. On this hand, Piotr Zatorski claimed a huge swing for his side by finding a way to nine tricks in a no-play 3NT. North probably wasn’t worth more than 2NT at his second go, but juniors are juniors, and they love overbidding. West led a fourth best Heart,

Dot Wordsworth

Big ask

‘That’s unnecessarily crude,’ said my husband, turning momentarily from the television and improving the shining minute by setting the whisky glass chinking. (He takes ice in it.) ‘What? A “big ask”? That’s not crude,’ I replied. ‘Oh, ask,’ he said in a sort of liquid-hoarse whisky-throaty voice seldom remarked upon by phoneticians. He was watching sport, so the cliché came as no surprise to me. The sports pages are thick with it. Jeremain Lens, whoever he is, may be ‘an exciting player but proving it in the Premier League is a big ask’. For gee-gees, a big ask is graduating from winning a maiden to a good Group 2 race.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 6 August 2015

As someone who has rarely written a sentence in praise of the late Sir Edward Heath, I hope I can escape charges of ‘cover-up’: I don’t believe the accusations against him. Even the word ‘accusations’ is an exaggeration, actually, since the story so far seems to be Chinese whispers with nothing amounting to evidence, put out by the frightened police. When this fashion for airing unsupported claims of child abuse has finally run its course, we shall be collectively ashamed of it, and people like Tom Watson MP will be seen for the McCarthys they are. (This is true, by the way, even if some of the things Mr Watson alleges

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 August 2015

Home Tom Hayes, aged 35, a former City trader who rigged the Libor rates daily for nearly four years while working in Tokyo for UBS, then Citigroup, from 2006 until 2010, was jailed by Southwark Crown Court for 14 years for conspiracy to defraud. The government sold a 5.4 per cent stake in Royal Bank of Scotland, for 330p a share, against the 500p or so that it paid six or seven years ago to save the banking group; the government now owns 73 per cent of RBS. Monitor, the regulator for health services in England, sent out letters ‘challenging the plans of the 46 foundation trusts with the biggest

The Spectator

Barometer | 6 August 2015

Rogue traders Former UBS trader Tom Hayes was jailed for 14 years for rigging the Libor market. How long could you go down for financial misconduct? 19 months (plus a £100,000 fine) in the case of Julian Rifat, former trader at Moore Capital, convicted of insider trading in March this year. 7 years in the case of rogue trader Kweku Adoboli, convicted of fraud in 2012 after trading at UBS without taking out parallel hedged positions. 7 years for Alex Hope, who conned £5.5 million out of 100 investors via an unauthorised collective investment scheme. 13 years in the case of Nicholas Levene, convicted in 2012 after running an illegal £32

The Spectator

Ted talk

There was a grim inevitability that the name Edward Heath would one day be trawled up in connection with allegations of sexual abuse of children. As one of our few unmarried prime ministers, Heath always attracted speculation about his sexuality. The public image of a private man wedded to his career, content to spend his spare time playing music and sailing, has long given way to a presumption that he must have been a repressed homosexual. Because of our national obsession with paedophilia, this in turn has all too easily morphed into the suspicion that he had a sexual interest in underage boys. Anyone who tells the police that they

Mr Magoo

2223: Clerihew

29 6 (4 words) is 1 24 (3 words). 24 11 10 (4 words), but 6 11 36 (4 words). Across 3 Secret compartments disguised in most of tables (12, two words) 12 Card game with same elements as brag (4) 14 Prohibit female and male from looking on the dark side (6) 15 Work in three successive notes for tropical protection (8, two words) 17 Bear began to strip identical parts off tree (5) 19 Issuing a term recalled by politician (9) 21 After start of solo, Carmen heartlessly re-created this? (5) 23 Exploiting our party in Government (5) 25 Do harvest from famous playing fields? (8,

Taki

High life | 6 August 2015

Nestled under the Acropolis, snug and safe among the ancient ruins of a long-ago grandeur, Plaka is the only remaining protected area of Athens. Greedy developers are as welcome there as a certain Minnesota dentist would be at an Aspinall Foundation animal sanctuary, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. I see signs on old and battered but beautifully classical houses asking for bids ‘to develop’. No harm in trying, I guess. With the economy in the toilet — a horrid word but necessary — anything can happen, and Greek law has never been sacrosanct when the loot’s right. Never mind. It’s 40 degrees Celsius, probably 50 on the marble

Mr Magoo

To 2220: Poem II

The Poem was ‘Kubla Khan’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 3A, 23, 42, 43, 3D, 4, 10 and 16 are words from the poem. KUBLA KHAN appears in the twelfth row. COLE (1A) and RIDGE (24) were to be shaded. First prize James Long, Richmond, Surrey Runners-up John Fahy, Thaxted, Essex; John Honey, London W13

Douglas Murray

We are still blinded by the ‘halo effect’

Every age has people protected by a certain ‘halo effect’? At points in the past members of the clergy might have been said to enjoy the advantage. More recently it would appear that celebrities were the ones who could get away with anything. We like to think we are beyond all this now – and it’s true that we’re wise to cardinals, priests, politicians and disc-jockeys. But our own blind-spots haven’t gone away – they’ve just changed. It has often occurred to me that if you wanted to perform any great con trick these days you could do no better than to have a hard to pronounce name, wear achingly

Damian Thompson

BBC ‘environment analyst’ explodes on Twitter as BBC presenter mocks Met Office’s climate prophecies

Climate change is the subject of a complex debate in which, increasingly, experts disagree with each other. Nearly all of them believe in man-made global warming, but they’re not sure how bad the problem is or how to tackle it. Meanwhile, the ‘sceptics’ are no longer dominated by scientifically illiterate amateurs. Many of them believe in anthropogenic global warming, though they don’t think it’s happening today. So you’d expect the BBC’s ‘Environment and Energy Analyst’, Roger Harrabin, to proceed with caution. Not so. Here are two tweets he sent out yesterday (links here and here): Quentin Letts is the Daily Mail‘s parliamentary sketchwriter and theatre critic, celebrated for his sometimes caustic but more often gentle wit. He

Miles Goslett

How I blew the whistle on Kids Company – and Camila Batmanghelidjh

Until February 2015, when The Spectator published my article on Kids Company, not a single bad word about it or its chief executive Camila Batmanghelidjh had appeared in the mainstream media. This may seem surprising now, as the scale of the scandal surrounding the now-defunct charity unfolds, but for the best part of 20 years it was treated by journalists and politicians with a reverence which I believe it had not merited for a long time. I first began looking into the charity in 2013. What struck me was the improbable statistics repeated ad infinitum in newspapers and on news programmes – notably those about the number of children and young

Brendan O’Neill

Can the binge-drinking killjoys please chill out? We’re trying to get drunk

Nothing better sums up the out-of-touchness of public-health prigs than the debate about so-called binge drinking. To these teetotal, ciggie-dodging suits, for whom fun is the foulest of f-words, and who are such miserabilists that they’re made sad by the idea of happy hour, anything more than four units of booze a day for a bloke, and three for a lady, counts as binging.Four units is two pints of weak lager. Three units is a large glass of wine. Are these people for real? That’s lunch for many of us. On party nights most of us have more than that before we even don our glad rags and leave the house. Consider

Matthew Lynn

The real ‘Super Thursday’ will be when interest rates rise

Turn-up. Eat lunch. Swap a few pleasantries with the other people in the room, leave interest rates on hold, and then collect a cheque on the way out. I am starting to wonder why I can’t have a job on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. It certainly doesn’t look terribly difficult. This week, the Bank is making a change to its usual routine. Instead of just announcing the latest monthly decision on rates, it is also releasing a vast amount of fresh information on the economy, in a move that the media have already dubbed ‘Super Thursday’, presumably on the grounds that unlike plain old ordinary Thursdays, City

Fraser Nelson

Journalists didn’t kill Kids Company. Camila Batmanghelidjh did

To listen to Camila Batmanghelidjh on the Radio 4 this morning, you’d think that her upstanding charity had been mysteriously assassinated by a vicious media – and by nothing else. This sounded like a very different Camila Batmanghelidjh to the one who telephoned me after The Spectator first blew the whistle on the irregularities at Kids Company – she was apoplectic. Didn’t I know that journalists normally love Kids Company? Kids Company has now collapsed – and not because journalists had (finally) been allowed to start asking questions. It has collapsed because Camila Batmanghelidjh ran up financial costs that she was not able to cover. She ran the charity, the

Rod Liddle

Beware the microaggression mob

Have you been microaggressive recently? My guess is that in some way or another, you have, you bastards. If you are not sure that you have been microaggressive, here’s a very good piece indeed by Brendan O’Neill which delineates the sort of thing that might be considered microaggressive by some third-rate academic or the sort of people who run student unions in our universities. Laugh now. Later microaggression will be an everyday part of our lives. These people are winning.

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: End-of-year report

From ‘The End of the First Year‘, The Spectator, 7 August 1915: What of the future? Shall we be able to make as good a show in the second year of the war as we have in the first? We believe we shall make a far better show. The willingness to make sacrifices in order that we may win the war is far greater than it was a year ago, because the need for such sacrifices is far better understood. Next, though our preparation is not as great or as successful as it ought to be, it is infinitely more advanced than it was a year ago. We have not

Ben Wilkinson

Days

when you weren’t anyone. Days gone undercover. Days half-dead in half-light, days under the covers. Days hoping for a dawn that wouldn’t come, days nights and the sun a dull, faded thing seen through nights of curtains drawn through days of nothing but you, you being the last thing you’d want to think about, you being, you’d discovered, precisely the fucking problem. Days indistinguishable. Everything a problem. Days gone, days not done but done in from the start, days of never touching a pen or making a start but thoughts a blank — days of feeling nothing then everything, everything come to nothing. Days put behind you. Days that don’t deserve