Society

Thursday

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 February 2015

Before returning to Australia about a decade ago, Michael Courtney spent several years playing high-stake rubber bridge in London. Those of us who occasionally kibitzed him will never forget his sheer brilliance at the table. Michael has the pleasingly shambolic look of a mad professor, and his imagination seems to operate in a different dimension: he always has his eye on the deceptive card, the one to throw his opponents off the scent. In the intervening years, he’s clearly lost none of his prowess: his team has just won the Australian trials. Hearing this news prompted his former wife Margaret — also a talented player — to post a message

The Spectator

In this election, won’t someone please weaponise defence?

Britain is forfeiting its position on the world stage. With no national debate, we are surrendering our claim to be a major player in international affairs and undermining the Atlantic alliance that has kept Britain and Europe secure for 65 years. In these circumstances, it is easy to understand why Barack Obama has felt obliged to warn David Cameron of the damage he would be doing to the special relationship and to Nato if he failed to commit Britain to spending the bare minimum on defence. The Prime Minister has given several spending pledges — on education, health and overseas aid — so his silence on defence speaks volumes. It

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 February 2015

Home Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, told Parliament that Britain reserved the right to supply arms to Ukraine, as ‘We could not allow the Ukrainian armed forces to collapse.’ The Prince of Wales, embarking on a six-day tour of the Middle East, said on Radio 2 that he ‘particularly wanted to show solidarity really, deep concern for what so many of the Eastern Christian churches are going through in the Middle East’. John Longworth, the head of British Chambers of Commerce, called for a referendum on membership of the European Union to be held in 2016, a year earlier than David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has promised, in order to

Toby Young Toby Young

Immigration, not money, will improve Scotland’s most deprived schools

I suppose we should be thankful that Nicola Sturgeon has acknowledged there’s a problem with Scotland’s public education system, even if she’s hit upon the wrong solution. Earlier this week, the First Minister announced that the Scottish -government would be trying out its version of ‘the London challenge’, a programme carried out by the last government, to address the chronic underachievement of Scotland’s most deprived children. In the past, the SNP has deflected criticisms of its education record by pointing out that Scottish 15-year-olds did marginally better than their English counterparts in the 2012 Pisa tests. But the difference between the two groups is minuscule and both have declined dramatically

Dot Wordsworth

That annoying ‘likely’ is more old-fashioned than American

What, asks Christian Major of Bromley, Kent, do I think of ‘this new, I assume American, fad for using the word likely as an adverb’, as in the great Taki’s remark that Alan Turing ‘likely won the war’ (Spectator, Letters, 31 January)? Well, I would most likely not use it in exactly that way, although you’ll have noticed that I have just done so slightly differently. The adverbial usage to which the Kentish Mr Major refers is now more likely to be heard on the lips of Americans and Scots, but it is hardly a fad, since it dates from at least as far back as the 14th century. In

Columba

2198: Tuck in

Each of sixteen clues contains one misprinted letter in the definition part. Corrections of misprints spell the name (three words) of a 1A, contents of which are given by five unclued lights (including two as a pair). The 1A’s name also describes the location in the grid of its contents in relation to two other unclued lights.   Across   5    Turn reptile around in silence (6) 9    Changed vote around end of transmission (10, three words) 14    Board beginning without director (3) 16    Free love stopped by force (6) 17    One in new question referring to magic square (5) 20    Showy woman once

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2014 H2

The Spectator’s sales figures are out today, and our rise continues. The website’s traffic is up a remarkable 50 per cent year-on-year to 1.8 million monthly unique users and over 4.5 million pageviews. But the rise in digital is not coming at the expense of print sales, which are also rising – our sales in the UK are up 4pc over the last year – which, in a market down 4pc, is not bad going. Our print subscriptions stand at a five-year high and are rising all the time. So reports about the death of print have been exaggerated. A print magazine has inimitable advantages – you can’t curl up in the bath

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

From Umbrella Man to the Coughing Major, the truth is often very strange

Are you sitting comfortably and wearing your tinfoil hat? If so, open YouTube and watch a full-screen version of the Zapruder film, in particular the section after frame 215 where the presidential limousine passes behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. What you will see, partly obscured by the sign, is a man’s opened umbrella 30 feet from the presidential car when the first shot is fired. Yet it hadn’t rained in Dallas since early morning; Dealey Plaza was bathed in sunshine. As you can imagine, many conspiracy theories formed around ‘Umbrella Man’ — who also appears in still photographs of the scene. Some theorised that the umbrella canopy concealed a gun

Columba

To 2195: In question

Material from superfluous words in clues gives ‘fingers on buzzers’ (describing 2/20 and 8/33), ‘your starter for ten’ (indicating 31, which is defined by 24) and ‘have to hurry you’ — all PHRASES (4D) used by BAMBER GASCOIGNE when he presented University Challenge. 24 January 2015 was his 80th birthday.   First prize Hilda Ball, Belfast Runners-up Jacqui Sohn, Gorleston-on-Sea, Norfolk; Wilf Lewsey, East Leake, Loughborough

Dolly Alderton

Not ready for real love? Tinder is the one for you

There was once a time when finding a twenty-something on a dating site was as rare as finding a pensioner in a branch of a Hollywood Bowl. Having an online dating profile was a last-ditch attempt at love reserved only for those intent on finding a long-term partner. Match.com, E Harmony, Guardian Soulmates; the clue was in the name. An earnest, humourless amalgamation of abstract nouns promising everlasting love. They were websites that boasted of their high marriage rates and whose users all listed ‘the great outdoors’ as a hobby. Dating sites were not entered into lightly. Then, in 2013, an app called Tinder was launched and a back door

Genevieve Maitland Hudson

It’s hard to judge a charity’s performance by its emotional rhetoric

Questions about whether a particular charity fulfils its aims are being asked with increasing frequency these days, and quite right too. It’s no longer enough for a charity to have good intentions. They need to show that they’re putting those intentions to some sort of use because money is tight and need is high. There is an important point here about how we judge the kinds of services that are delivered by charities. The general assumption is that it is rather hard to judge how a charity performs. There is an absence of standardised and comparable measurement, and the evidence from evaluations is of poor quality. Some charities go so far as

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The orthodoxy of safety

Props to Goldsmiths Students’ Union, for taking the ‘safe space’ concept to absurd new levels. Last week, one faction of the union hosted a screening of the film Dear White People and advertised it as being ‘for BME students’. BME stands for ‘black and minority ethnic’ – and the poster specifies that this screening is for students of ‘African, Caribbean, Arab, Asian and South American ethnic origin’. The union’s welfare and diversity officer and education officer both reiterated this message on Facebook and Twitter, then stated that before the screening, there was a BME ONLY social happening at Cafe Natura. There it is: racial segregation at a British university. Imagine if the tables were

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A bold idea that might just help the Tories win a majority

Iain Duncan Smith has come up with a bold idea that might just enable the Tories to break out of the inch by inch, trench warfare of current British politics. The Work and Pensions Secretary wants to see the right to buy extended to those living in Housing Association properties. At present, housing association tenants are offered very limited discounts and can only buy properties that their association has acquired since 1997. An even more radical version of this scheme would see all housing association tenants who have been in work for a year given their homes. When these properties were sold, the state would take a significant chunk in

Steerpike Steerpike

Middle-aged non-smoker for hire: Sebastian Faulks looks for work

Sebastian Faulks has just finished work on his latest book, Where My Heart Used to Beat. Rather than go on holiday now the deadline has been met, the Birdsong author is on the look out for a nine to five job. Writing in this week’s edition of The Spectator, Faulks says he is open to pretty much anything so long as the  job comes with a decent level of office gossip, the opportunity to lunch and the chance of promotion. ‘I have now spent almost a quarter of a century alone in a garret staring at a blank wall and I think it has driven me a bit mad. I’ve done my stint.

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Military timetables | 12 February 2015

From ‘The New “Day” and Merchant Shipping’, The Spectator, 13 February 1915: THE Germans have such a mania for fixing a day for achieving some important purpose that we should feel guilty of a certain want of responsiveness if we grudged them anything of the pleasure they are deriving from contemplating the mystical date of February 18th. This is the new “day” on which the terrific process of starving Britain out by means of a few submarines is formally to begin. So be it it! The greatest day of all—Der Tag—was a kind of idealistic conception projected upon the screen of the future, like Messianic prophetic poetry. Naturally no actual day—a

Bruce Anderson

Why soldiers are the funniest people

We were discussing wit. I uttered a self-evident truth which proved gratifyingly controversial. Of all the people I encounter, the soldiers are much the funniest. I took no prisoners among those who tried to disagree, merely telling them to get out more and find themselves in decent company. Military humour is an abiding delight. It may be that not every reader has read George MacDonald Fraser’s three McAuslan books (he also wrote the Flashman series and Quartered Safe Out Here, about the Burma campaign, said to be Prince Philip’s favourite book). Quartered Safe is a war memoir of the highest order, while the McAuslans put our author up there with

Melissa Kite

I wouldn’t want to be a girl in the age of Tinder

My foray into the world of online dating was short-lived. Within a few hours of my profile going live, a deluge of young men in their early twenties began to bombard me with messages. I was shocked and somewhat delighted. At my age, I had expected mostly sad widowers and maybe the odd divorced equine veterinarian, encouraged by the pictures of me on my horses. To attract a clamour of Ashton Kutchers was beyond my wildest dreams because, although I was now undoubtedly in the cougar age group, I really hadn’t seen myself as a Demi Moore. When I opened the messages, however, any notion that these handsome young men

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The delicious cant of the Guardian is such a treat on a Saturday morning

One of the highlights of my week comes on a Saturday morning, when I make myself a cup of fair-trade coffee and settle down to read the letters page of the Guardian. My wife usually joins me — it’s a sort of date thing, romantic in its own way — and we sit there cackling, our cares and woes forgotten for a while. Sometimes it is the smug little commendations of some earnest article that has uncovered the suffering of an hitherto unreported minority of the population — that stuff is quite funny. But then all newspapers print letters from readers telling them how good they are. Much more fun

Aidan Hartley

Having oozed optimism for a decade, I am a bit down about the Hopeful Continent

Juba I discovered a 1954 Morris Minor parked outside the Catholic mission station in Mopoi, South Sudan. The car had been there for so long that a guava tree was growing up through the gearbox. To me it was a tragic memorial to Daniel Comboni, the canonised 19th-century missionary who set out to ‘save Africa’ and whose followers built Mopoi. Just a year after that Morris Minor came off the production line, civil war erupted. Millions of deaths later, Mopoi was half-ruined, strangled by figs — though inside the church I found the votive candles still burning and the Blessed Virgin with a resigned expression, raising her hand as if