PERCH (13A), SCAR (21A and 10D), SHAD (40A), EEL (5D) AND CARP (19D) were ignored in wordplay in their clues. The other unclued lights are listed in Chambers as things you may FISH for. First prize P.D.H. Riddell, London SE23 Runners-up Lynne Gilchrist, Willoughby, Australia; A. Willson, Leicester
The election is far too tight to call, but one thing is certain: from now until the early hours a lot of people will talk a lot of balls — across all platforms — just to pass the time. The competition to be most fatuous will be most intense among tweeters and talking heads — but who will win? You decide! The Spectator tonight launches the inaugural ‘Pundyfilla’ Award for Inane Political Commentary. Look out and listen on social media, news sites and TV for the most pointless twaddle, the most redundant observations, the most screamingly obvious analysis, and tweet your nominations to @spectator. A bottle of Pol Roger for identifying the winner.
From ‘War by Poison’, The Spectator, 8 May 1915: THE nature of the gases by means of which the Germans have won undoubted local successes is gradually being ascertained, and the more we know of the gases the more brutal does the use of them appear. At first we heard them spoken of simply as asphyxiating gases, a description which suggested that men were overcome by them as men are rendered unconscious by fumes in a mine or a sewer. But the information now coming from the hospitals proves that the Germans have not scrupled to resort to a truly diabolical use of chemical science, and to discharge at their opponents
The defence of the Westminster first-past-the-post voting system is that while it’s certainly unfair, it delivers decisive results. A relatively small swing in support from one party to another can deliver the kind of parliamentary majority that ensures fully functioning government. This worked well when British politics was a two-party business, and pretty well when it became a three-party affair. But in this new era of multi-party politics, the Westminster voting system is no longer fit for purpose — as the past few months have demonstrated. When Britain was asked about changing electoral systems in the referendum for the alternative vote, we stuck with the devil we knew. Understandably: at
Never before — at least, not in living memory — has there been such a disconnect between north and south Britain. We vote together, but cast our ballots in very different contests. Scotland and England, semi-detached in the past, are more estranged than ever. The mildewed contest between David Cameron and Ed Miliband touches few hearts north of the Tweed; the battle between Labour and the SNP still mystifies many of those sent north to observe the strange happenings in Scotland. Edmund Burke wrote of another revolution: ‘Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all
There are those who claim that this column is idiosyncratic. They have seen nothing yet. I am about to mention a subject which has never previously appeared in any drink column, ever. Tapioca. That must be the acme of idiosyncrasy. I was staying with my friends Eyzie and Ro in Somerset. Especially if you have no weight issues, they are the perfect hosts, for they both love cooking. My duties are limited to bottle–opening, saucisson-slicing and, of course, supervision. They also have an abundant kitchen garden, a deep freeze full of the trophies of the game season and excellent local suppliers for all the victuals they themselves cannot provide. A
Despite being the old man of St James’s, Berry Bros & Rudd is anything but stuffy. Yes, of course Berrys is traditional, selling plenty of cru classé claret, vintage port and so on, but it’s imaginative too, championing neglected regions as much as it does emerging ones. It has over a dozen wines from long-ignored Greece, for example, and was the first major merchant to list serious Chinese wine. They have done us proud here, not least because the wine buying director, Mark Pardoe MW, being the soft-hearted, easily persuaded, Spectator-loving chap he is, has lopped up to 20 per cent off the RRPs. The 2012 Domaine Lyrarakis Dafni (1)
I don’t like to make business predictions, but — barring some apocalypse — I suspect there will be plenty of estate agents around in 2065, and occupying prominent high-street shopfronts just as they do now. This may seem an absurd prediction: after all, almost no one now uses an estate agent to find a house: we go to property websites instead. And, since we all assume the purpose of an estate agent is to find buyers for a house, a role usurped by Rightmove and Primelocation, we think the remaining days of the estate agency are few. However, perhaps the principal role of an estate agent is not to find
From ‘War by Poison’, The Spectator, 8 May 1915: By the consent of all men who are not savages, the use of poison is ruled out in war, and has been prohibited by custom for centuries. And war by poison is being practised not only in Europe; in German South-West Africa the Union troops, as we are informed by a Colonial Office Paper, have come across many wells poisoned with arsenic… ‘Poisoned wells’! The very phrase calls up visions of warfare with the wildest and most fanatical tribesmen in the world, but not with the inhabitants of the most highly organised country in Europe.
Unusually, I didn’t leave the British Isles until I was 35, when I went to the Maldives for a fortnight. (You bet it was a culture shock, considering that the most exotic place I’d been until then was the Bognor Regis branch of Butlins.) But I’ve globetrotted like a footloose fiend since then, and on my travels I’ve observed that the pricier the watering hole, the less likely vacationers are to look happy. The Crane is one of the most beautiful hotels in Barbados, but plagued by sour-faced English types complaining about there being no skimmed milk or a cloudy swimming pool (‘quite troubling’). There were groups of good-natured Americans
After the heat of battle: the accolades, the recriminations, the telling of history by the victors. It’s six months early for our Parliamentarian of the Year shortlist, but my nominee for this year’s top award is… the honourable member (or one of them) for the constituency of Athens B, Yanis Varoufakis. Last week, the grandstanding Greek finance minister was declared to have been ‘sidelined’ from his nation’s on-the-brink debt negotiations, following a more than usually stormy meeting with fellow European finance ministers in Riga. ‘They are unanimous in their hate for me; and I welcome their hatred,’ he tweeted, quoting Franklin Roosevelt. How we journalists sighed at the prospect of
‘Are all of these questions about politics love — because I’m really not political?’ Oh dear. I’ve just lost another respondent two minutes into a three-minute survey and the chances of achieving my hourly target, and therefore continuing my employment in pre-election polling, are receding fast. Perhaps she didn’t hear my scripted preamble: ‘Could you spare a few minutes to take part in a survey on the upcoming general election?’ What sort of questions did she think I’d ask? ‘Do you think SamCam pulled off the midi-skirt?’ At least I can take pleasure in hearing a colleague struggle a few booths down. ‘No, not electrics madam, election.’ And then, a
In Competition No. 2896 you were invited to take Kipling’s ‘If’ and recast it on behalf of a politician on the campaign trail. In an interview with the New Republic in 1985, Mario Cuomo said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. And Hugo Rifkind, in conversation on Radio 4 with the poet Ian McMillan about the relationship between politicians and poetry, noted that ‘If’ is often cited by politicians as moral inspiration. So it seemed like a good idea to give you the chance to put a twist on Kipling’s rousing poem, on behalf of one of the contenders in the current campaign as they neared the
Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like Cambridge (it’s in the same town), though bizarrely its excellence has yet to filter through to the official UK uni rankings, where it’s rated 115th out of a list of 123. Anyway, the point is, I won. Sort of. I ‘won’ this extremely important prize in the way that Michael Mann, the shifty climate scientist, has been known to claim he ‘won’ the Nobel prize when it was awarded to the IPCC. That is, the prize wasn’t handed
Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains were open, lights on. Music must have been playing, though I couldn’t hear it through the glass, because she was singing as she danced the dog about, leaning back to balance his considerable weight. Her arms made a seat for him, as you might carry a child, his paws on her shoulders. The woman gazed down lovingly at the dog, who looked embarrassed but patient, as if this wasn’t his first dance and wouldn’t be his last. I watched them for a while, standing unseen in the street, half-wondering whether
Seventy-four per cent of men and 64 per cent of women in Britain will be overweight or obese by 2030, or so the newspapers have reported today. In Ireland, the situation will be still worse, with the obesity rate amongst women predicted to rise from 23 per cent today to 57 per cent (!) in 2030, with 89 per cent of Irish men overweight. The research in question was presented at a conference in Prague today but remains unpublished so we do not know how its authors arrived at these figures. A representative of the World Health Organisation says, ‘the data needs to be taken with extreme caution’, but this advice
Today’s front pages have received criticism across the board for being too party political with the election only a day away. Now questions are also being asked as to why Peter Hitchens’ weekly column was missing from the Mail on Sunday at the weekend. Instead, the columnist, who has been vocal about his disdain for David Cameron, tweeted his pre-election column from five years ago on Monday. The article asks readers ‘not to fall for the shimmering, greasy, cynical fraud which is the Cameron project’: So far no explanation has been offered and Hitchens has said that he is unable to comment on why his column was missing from the paper: However, the writer is
The excitement and anxiety was tangible during the election of 1997. Even as a child I was able to pick up on it. I saw the signs of stress in the adults around me: jiggling knees, bitten lips, my mother twirling hair around an index finger. Elections are stressful and this can cause serious health problems – anxiety, obsessive compulsive tendencies and even depression. A senior editor of a British publication spoke to me about his ‘irrational’ and ‘obsessive’ behaviour around the American election in 2000, in which he was rooting for Dubya: The internet just was just up and running and I found myself compulsively visiting websites to see if there had been
From ‘National Concentration’, The Spectator, 8 May 1915: The two great needs of the hour are more men and more munitions of war. We have got so to organize our forces that while more men are spared for the fighting line, there shall also be more men engaged, and efficiently engaged, in the manufacture of shells and other munitions of war. We have always pleaded in these columns for scientific recruiting, but what we want now is scientific recruiting, not merely for horse, foot, and artillery, but also for the factory and the shipyard. Translated into the world of immediate action, this means that we have got to do two
Beatrice Elizabeth Mary. Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. These are the full baptismal names of Princesses Beatrice, Princess Anne and the Queen respectively. And what use are any of them other than the first one in each case? Today the papers have worked themselves up into a state of mild hysteria over the Cambridges’ choice of name for their daughter. Charlotte: fine, one for Prince Charles. But the Elizabeth and especially the Diana bit really got them going – the child’s third name merited an entire front page in the Mail. Diana won’t be forgotten, says her ‘closest friend’, Rosa Monckton. Well, fine. But what are the chances that anyone will remember
