Society

Monday

Nicky Morgan

The doom and gloom of the unions shows how out of touch they are with teachers

From school places to behaviour to teacher training, the teaching unions have excelled themselves with their doom and gloom pronouncements at their conferences this weekend about the state of our schools.  We shouldn’t be surprised, there is, afterall, an election coming up and we all know where the union leaderships’ loyalty lies. But these conferences have simply served to highlight one thing – that the gulf between the leadership of the classroom unions and their members is wider than ever before. Because the unions’ depressing portrait isn’t what I see when I look at England’s schools today. The first commitment I made as Education Secretary was to get out of Westminster

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Osborne and Miliband compete to see who has the worst housing policy

So who is talking more nonsense about the housing market: George Osborne or Ed Miliband? From today’s newspapers, it’s hard to tell. The problem: the era of low interest rates has fuelled an asset boom. Perhaps an asset bubble. Property prices are soaring to ridiculous levels, unaffordable for anyone without money in their family. This causes real despair for young people. So what to do? Ed Miliband’s solution: he’ll ‘harness’ (by which he means ‘divert’) money put into first-time buyer ISAs into housebuilding. This policy could only have been devised by a bunch of academics who don’t understand markets. The whole point of ISAs is that people can invest money wherever they like:

Saturday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

We don’t think of highly gifted people as mentally disabled. Perhaps we should

I’m intrigued by this recent study suggesting that intellectual gifts and learning disabilities, far from lying on opposite ends of a spectrum of intelligence, sometimes go hand in hand. Intrigued, but not surprised. Very bright people can be odd – we all know that. The eccentric genius is one of the clichés of history and fiction. But it’s rooted in observation. One thinks of wild-haired Oxford dons at high table, singing music hall songs in iambic pentameter while spraying their neighbours in Brown Windsor soup. Or the story of a distinguished academic banned from dining in his own college after – so legend has it – reinforcing his argument about the intellectual failings of women

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Britain might want a holiday from history, but we’re not going to get one

The more I think about the debate on Thursday night, the more I think it was a disgrace that there was no question on either defence or Britain’s role in the world. This country might want a holiday from history. But, sadly, we don’t look like getting one on. On Europe’s Eastern border, the Russians are behaving in an increasingly aggressive fashion. The Times’ account of a recent meeting between ex-intelligence officials from Russia and the US shows just how bellicose Putin is and reveal that Britain might well soon have to decide whether to honour its Nato Article 5 obligations to the Baltic states. On Europe’s Southern border, Islamic

Thursday

Raymond Keene

From Russia with love | 2 April 2015

In the James Bond film From Russia with Love there is an evil mastermind named Kronsteen. The character is in some ways based on the Russian chess genius David Bronstein, and the chess game ‘from the Venice International Tournament’ that forms the backdrop to the opening sequence is taken from a game between Bronstein and Boris Spassky. A new book by Steve Giddins, Bronstein Move by Move (Everyman Chess), gives a superb insight into the creative processes of the chessboard colossus through a series of deeply annotated games. This week’s game and notes are based on those in this highly rewarding and entertaining book. Botvinnik-Bronstein; World Championship Moscow (Game 17)

Raymond Keene

No. 356

White to play. This position is a variation from Bronstein-Zilberstein, Tbilisi 1973. Bronstein has just given up a piece on d5 but has a clever tactical idea in mind. Can you see the key move? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 7 April or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and there is a prize of £20. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 … Na3+ Last week’s winner Graham Baker, Campsea Ashe, Suffolk

The Spectator

Spectator letters: The modern equivalents of Unity Mitford

Unity’s modern equivalents Sir: I don’t understand why David Pryce-Jones is still banging on about the Mitfords (‘You are always close to me’, 28 March). Of course my great-aunt Unity was misguided and wrong to adore Adolf Hitler. She was not alone, though. In the 1930s millions of Germans and many non-Germans were equally in thrall to the new National Socialist government. A lot of people were taken in by the propaganda. Perhaps Mr Pryce-Jones could more usefully get his few hundred quid fee from The Spectator by writing an article about Unity’s modern equivalents — the idiotic British girls who are travelling to Syria to help Isis, the Nazis of our

The Spectator

Could you afford to take a job with the royal family?

Royally paid Staff at Windsor Castle were balloted in strike action over pay. What can you earn in the royal household, according to adverts on the British Monarchy website? — Housekeeping assistant: £14,500 pa. Duties include ‘preparing rooms and cleaning upholstery’. Meals are provided, as is accommodation ‘for which there is a straight salary adjustment’. — Telephone operator in Privy Purse and Treasurer’s Office: £20,500. 38 hours per week. Includes some bank holiday and weekend working. — Ticket sales and information assistant for the summer opening of the Royal Collection: £8.80 per hour. Contract includes a minimum of 300 hours between June and September. Suicide watch French and German police

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A cemetery with cocktails: La Coupole and the spirit of the brasserie

La Coupole, Montparnasse, is the grandest and most famous of the old pre-war Parisian brasseries; that is, if you have an Esprit Brasserie loyalty card, as I have, you can dine in homage to dead continental intellectuals — plus Ernest Hemingway — whenever you wish, and with 20 per cent off. They sit, dead in black and white on the walls in their spectacles, like the toys Star Wars sold but more rigorous and interesting. Ernest Hemingway is to Parisian brasseries what Mickey is to Disney World; Edith Piaf — or Salvador Dalí — is Daffy Duck. Me, I sat under a playful cartoon of Jewish intellectuals murdered by the

Dot Wordsworth

The new Fowler still won’t grasp the nettle on ‘they’

I’ve been having a lovely time splashing about in the new Fowler. It has been revised by Jeremy Butterfield, an OUP lexicographer. There’s a new usage in it that I want to talk about, but first a word about the title. The title page says Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. In 1996, the previous edition, the third, edited by good old Robert Burchfield, was The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. In 1926 H.W. Fowler’s celebrated book had been published as A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. We called it Modern English Usage both before and after 1996, and more often Fowler — a metonym and more, as Jeremy Butterfield

Taki

Even a perfect opera such as Don Giovanni improves with a good red

End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves. But the days are longer and soon spring will chase away any remaining winter blues. The Eagle Club’s closing is a perennial festive day, with speeches by our president Urs Hodler, an almost teary goodbye to our very own Pino — who has seated and fed us for 44 years — and the Taki Cup awards, won the past two years by my son J.T. in record time: 34 minutes to conquer the highest mountain in Gstaad. (Charlotte Cotton was only five minutes slower, an amazing feat for a young woman.) It was a hell of

Jeremy Clarke

One day the Condor and the Eagle will fly wing-tip to wing-tip

The pub was disappointingly empty, so I took my first pint of the evening upstairs, where some sort of New Age society was holding a public talk and discussion. I gave the woman seated just inside the meeting room my £5 entry fee and found a spare seat at the back next to a big bloke with a beard. In the five minutes or so before the talk began, I counted 47 other people in the room, all of them white. Five chaps had advanced male pattern baldness, another had very obviously dyed hair (black). The total number of beards was six, including a goatee. Average age, at a guess,

Melissa Kite

Farewell, Cobham — oh flat, boring, lovely Cobham; hello, Dorking

Farewell then, Cobham. You were the place I ran to when the metropolis became too much, and urban life overwhelmed me. You were to me a shining beacon of blandness in an otherwise frighteningly exotic world. I loved you and held you in mythical esteem. In times of disappointment, I yearned for you every bit as much as Margo Leadbetter did. ‘Cydney! We’re moving to Cobham!’ I would shout at the spaniel whenever Lambeth Council did something Marxist, which was often. We didn’t ever quite move to Cobham, but we kept the horses there. For nearly 15 years, this gave us a bolthole down the A3 to escape to, from

Alexander Chancellor

The fox that killed my chickens depressed me more than 250,000 tsunami deaths

It is hard to know how a tragedy is going to move a person who is not directly affected by it. Over a death or misfortune in the family, or among one’s friends, one is sure to feel pain and grief. But what of those other ghastly events involving people, maybe hundreds or thousands of them, with whom one has no connection? They provoke shock, disgust and horror, but not necessarily great personal sadness. Could it be true that I was more depressed when a fox killed all my chickens than I was when the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 swept over a quarter of a million people to their

Robin Oakley

Who will fund a prize for the true fighter pilots of the Turf?

After listening to a violinist’s justification of his playing, Dr Samuel Johnson responded tartly: ‘Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.’ Racing’s marketing arm, Great British Racing, probably attempted the impossible in trying to satisfy all parties concerned in devising a new structure for the Flat Jockeys Championship. As part of its efforts to give greater narrative and structure to racing’s untidy seasons, its plan is for the title, which will now include a £25,000 prize, to be awarded to the jockey who rides the most winners between the Qipco-sponsored Guineas meeting at Newmarket on 2 May and the Qipco-sponsored Champions Day on 17 October. It

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 2 April 2015

Wednesday night is league night. Sacrosanct. I’ve missed only one in seven years and that was when my daughter was giving birth. Priorities, you know. But last Wednesday I had an offer I couldn’t refuse: dinner with Henry Kissinger. Not a date, I reluctantly confess, a smallish dinner, but you can’t have everything. He may be 91, but boy does he still have ‘it’! Ooh, the voice. Ooh, the brain. Ooh, the twinkle. I gushed inwardly like some bodice-ripping Poldark groupie. But I have to admit, when talk turned to world defence, my thoughts drifted away momentarily to bridge defence and how everyone says it’s the hardest part of the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 2 April 2015

Home The nation greeted with well disguised enthusiasm the beginning of the general election campaign after the dissolution of parliament. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, stood at a little plywood lectern in Downing Street and said: ‘In 38 days you face a stark choice’ — between him and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party. The Conservatives said they would create two million jobs in the next parliament. Their claims that Labour’s plans would cost each household £3,028 extra in taxes were met with baffled scepticism by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Some business leaders indignantly rejected Labour’s claims on a poster that they supported the party’s opposition to

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How I can I avoid being invited to any more country house weekends?

Q. Someone I was at university with but hadn’t seen much of over the ten years since invited me to come for a weekend at his country house. I went once and, although it was perfectly fine and they are perfectly nice, wouldn’t want to go there again. Life’s just too short to spend weekends with people you can’t really talk to. But now his wife has identified me as a ‘spare man’ and is keen for me to come again. I have given excuses for not accepting subsequent invitations but she is really persistent and has now said they are going to be there all of July and August

Toby Young Toby Young

Lefty myths about inequality

As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years? Or is that just scaremongering on the part of the left? By most measures, there’s not much evidence that the United Kingdom became more unequal in the last parliament. Take the UK’s ‘Gini co-efficient’, which measures income inequality. In 2009/10, it was higher than it was at any point during the subsequent three years. Indeed, in 2011/12 it fell to its lowest level since 1986. Data isn’t available for the last two years, but there’s no reason to think it has exceeded what it was when Labour left office. George

Lavatch

2205: In shape

The unclued lights (including one of three words, one of two words, and one hyphened) form two thematic groups in the grid. They consist of a theme word, four lights which it defines in one sense, and three which it defines in another. A fourth example of this latter group, part of an unclued light, must be highlighted. Ignore one apostrophe.    Across   10    See bird that’s yellow (6) 11    Old, tragic character’s love for pungent stuff (7) 13    Cook destroying starter in oven (4) 14    Assessment of painter – one’s in shock (9) 17    Suspect pockets diamonds with hesitation in TV programme (6) 19    Time judge gets banned