Society

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Joan Collins celebrates her damehood with an old frenemy

With the Queen’s birthday honours fast approaching, future awardees can take inspiration from Joan Collins on the suitable number of events required to celebrate one’s damehood. Writing in this week’s issue of The Spectator, Collins reveals that she attended not one but seven events in total. However, things got off to a questionable start when her husband Percy forgot his photo ID, which was required to get past palace security for her investiture ceremony: ‘We averted a potential disaster when, at the gates, Percy confessed to having left his photo ID behind. ‘Will you vouch for this gentleman?’ the helmeted bobby inquired. ‘Well, I’m not sure if I’d go that far, but he is

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 April 2015

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much as the person who wrote its online headline, ‘Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t’ (18 April). It is true that ‘the wish to be the underdog’ is a defining urge of our age, even in relatively prosperous polities such as Scotland and Catalonia. But Parris is wrong when he claims that the closest the English come to the ‘Braveheart feeling’ is in their collective memory of the second world war. If only that were true. Would any other country make so little of its crucial

Raymond Keene

So there

Hikaru Nakamura has won the US Championship in convincing style with 8/11, ahead of Ray Robson and Wesley So. Things might have turned out differently had So not been disqualified after just six moves of his game against Akobian. These moves were: 1 d4 e6 2 c4 d5 3 Nc3 c5 4 cxd5 exd5 5 Nf3 Nc6 6 dxc5. Apparently, Akobian complained to the arbiters that Wesley So, the most promising grandmaster ever to emerge from the Philippines and currently ranked no. 8 in the world, had been scribbling notes to himself during the opening phase of the game. Since the opening is well known these notes could have had nothing to

Raymond Keene

No. 359

Black to play. This position is a variation from Troff-Nakamura, US Championship 2015. How can Black conclude his kingside attack with a standard tactic? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 28 April 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 I am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qxf7+ Last week’s winner Sergio Petro, Croydon, Surrey

Taki

High life | 23 April 2015

A recent column in the FT made me mad as hell. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, which is a bit like calling the Queen a busted flush because of her age. Sure, he writes how great Vienna was back when the Habsburgs ruled the roost, attracting people from all over, ‘some of them nuts’. He includes Freud, Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky. Not the nicest bunch I can think of, but then the paper is a pink one. He fears London might go the way of Vienna, and price itself out of the reach of everyone but a few Chinese, Russian and Indian billionaires. He’s right about London

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 23 April 2015

I’m such a constitutional lightweight lately that I’ve started looking on the website What’s On in South Devon for things to do of an evening that don’t involve total annihilation. What’s On in South Devon is surely one of those ‘shortest book in the world’ contenders. Weeknights it’s mainly the same local musicians playing the same deserted pubs; or some functioning psychotic preaching new-age nonsense in a church hall to folk whose gullibility gives one a rough idea of the infinite; or bingo. Listening to functioning psychotics in church halls is fun at first, but soon palls. I’d go to bingo if I didn’t already own a life-sized ceramic cheetah.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 23 April 2015

As a wise person once said (or if they didn’t, they should have), there is only one thing worse than being wrong and that is being right. I always get peevish when I win. After being told I had triumphed in my three-year phantom car crash battle, I started to feel survivor guilt. It was all very well for me, embroiling myself in a gargantuan struggle for justice following a low-velocity car prang. I factor time into my schedule to wage war on the world. I complain about life for a living, so far as anyone can. But what about all those other poor motorists who are well adjusted people

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 23 April 2015

There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the second child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It is hardly a very exciting event. Babies are born all the time, and there are already quite enough descendants of the Queen to ensure the survival of the Windsor dynasty on the throne of the United Kingdom for a long time to come. Yet there are many people in this country for whom this commonplace event will be more thrilling than the forthcoming general election, even though it could presage the dismemberment of the country itself. The British monarchy continues

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 23 April 2015

Congratulations to the Welsh women’s team, who staged one of the most spectacular comebacks I’ve ever seen at last weekend’s Lady Milne (the women’s home internationals). They were languishing in bottom place on Sunday morning, but managed to claw all the way to the top by the end of the day. You can imagine the celebrations: the last time Wales won was 27 years ago. Which just goes to show the importance of keeping your nerve. During the recent Yeh Bros Cup in Beijing, another team kept its nerve under even greater pressure. There are very few bridge events offering big cash prizes, but Yeh Bros is an exception: the

Toby Young Toby Young

The hazards of being a good sport

Not a day passes when I don’t look on my father’s record with shock and awe. I’m not talking about his authorship of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, his invention of the word ‘meritocracy’ or his creation of the Open University. I’m talking about the fact that he fathered a child at the age of 80. How on earth did he cope? My eldest was born when I was 40, with three more following in quick succession, and I already think of myself as an old dad. The problem is, they want to play with me all the time — rough, competitive, physical games — and it’s completely debilitating. The boys, aged

Justin Marozzi

Diary – 23 April 2015

Lunch with the man who hanged Saddam. My irrepressible old Baghdad friend Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Ealing neurologist turned Iraqi national security adviser, is on top form. This may not be unrelated to the news that the noose with which he hanged Saddam is up for auction. Interested buyers are said to include Kuwaiti businessmen, an Israeli family, a bank and an Iranian religious organisation. Mischievous tales are circulating about an offer of $7 million being rejected. Hearing Rubaie relive Saddam’s execution reminded me of the late Sir Wilfred Thesiger recalling how he shot up a tent full of sleeping Germans during the Allied campaigns in North Africa. ‘It felt like murder,’

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 23 April 2015

Q. I socialise in Shropshire every weekend and regularly give dinners which end at 2 a.m., but it’s a different matter in London, where I have to leave the house by six every morning. My problem is that I owe dinner to a lot of people, but I now baulk at how late they will stay, since no matter how heavily I hint, people seem to stay beyond midnight every time. Even if I invite them to come for an ‘early dinner’ at 7 p.m, they are still there at midnight. These are mainly neighbours or fellow parents from my son’s school, i.e. not lifelong buddies of the sort you could just

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 April 2015

Home The prospect of a parliamentary alliance between Labour and the Scottish National Party injected an element of fear into the election campaign. The SNP manifesto promised to increase spending and to find a way to stop the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said she wanted to make Labour in government ‘bolder and better’. Lord Forsyth, a former Conservative Scottish secretary, said that the building up of the SNP, to take seats in Scotland, was a ‘dangerous view which threatens the integrity of our country’. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said the Tories should not be ‘talking up’ the SNP. Even the Democratic Unionists

Dot Wordsworth

Non-existent phrases

‘Ten Norwegian phrases that don’t exist in English but should,’ said the headline. So I had a little look, as the writer on the internet, one Kenneth Haug, intended. Here’s one. Takk for maten. Should it exist in English? It means: ‘Thanks for the food.’ English, being a cousin of Norwegian, also used to employ meat to mean food, and we still run into the archaic sense in such contexts as the Bible. ‘The life is more than meat,’ says the Authorised Version in Luke 12:23, as the equivalent of Anima plus est quam esca. The 10th century gloss in the Lindisfarne Gospels made that ‘Se sauel mara is thon

Dumpynose

2208: Mort

Two words form the name of a fictional 28, described by his creator as a ‘22A/31/26’. Remaining across unclued lights are associated with the first word and down ones with the second. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across   1    Jackanapes swimming away from Jamaica belly-flops (8) 6    Taxmen laugh at seventy retired coppers (6) 11    Trifler enthrals former railman (10) 14    Old statesmen stands beside painter in food shop (8) 16    Some sham or phony rogue … (5) 17    … uttered marks (unacceptable) he had (7) 19    Most severe wind is in the Camargue (9) 23    Place with a birch tree (6) 24    Home Secretary boards train for subdistrict (6)

Dumpynose

To 2205: In shape

Unclued lights were set out in the form of two squares in the grid (shown here in red). The theme word was 18. 1, 10, 12 and 38 are defined by it in one sense; 15, 19 and 43 in another. Highlighting TIMES (square) gave the fourth example of a city square. First prize K.D. Birkett, Heysham, Morecambe, Lancs Runners-up R.A. Percy, Southport, North Carolina; Kenneth Robb, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Robert Van Egghen

God bless Peter Hendy. We all know London’s commuter services are awful

Anyone who has spent some time travelling on Southeastern’s packed-to-bursting commuter lines – elbows in the back and heads tucked under armpits – will no doubt today be cheering on the Transport for London commissioner Sir Peter Hendy: London’s commuter services are, as he says, ‘shit, awful’ and like ‘the wild west’. Hendy singled out Southeastern as being the worst offender — and he’s right. I travel on it almost every day. Since the closure of much of London Bridge due to refurbishments, the trains at my home station of Orpington have become ever more crowded. People are forced to cram on to an ever dwindling number of services. The

Julia Hartley-Brewer

Does Jamelia not know the first rule of Fat Club?

The first rule of Fat Club is: don’t talk about Fat Club unless you are yourself ‘big and beautiful’, or what most of us would call ‘grossly overweight’. Or just plain ‘fat’. Otherwise it’s as much of a no-go zone as the salad bar at a Weight Watchers’ meeting. So it didn’t come as much of a surprise when Jamelia, the former pop star and Loose Women panellist, came under sustained attack this week for talking about fat people. As a beautiful and effortlessly slim young woman, Jamelia is, of course, not allowed to talk about fat people. Those are the rules. So what outrageous hate-crime did Jamelia commit? Did

Sebastian Payne

Should politicians leave the wealthy alone?

Bashing the rich has become trendy. Last night, the Spectator hosted a debate at the Guildhall School of Drama on whether the rich have contributed their fair share to society, or if we should ramp up wealth taxes. It’s a very emotive topic and each of the speakers made a solid case for and against the motion: politicians should leave the wealthy alone — they already contribute more than their fair share. Proposing the motion, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson described how London is a city ‘shaped by the super rich,’ pointing out the number of places that serve a £20 vodka martini. But Fraser argued that society needs these wealthy people and