Society

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Hacks turn out in droves to watch (sorry, report) porn protest

Mr S strolled to Westminster this lunchtime to see what all the fuss was about some porn protest. He wasn’t alone. Hacks significantly outnumbered the protestors, who were upset about the recent changes to UK pornography regulations. Despite the abundance of dictaphones, notepads and cameras, Mr S strongly suspects that many of the hacks were simply there to ogle – not that they’d ever admit it. Here are some of Mr S’s favourite snaps:  

Sebastian Payne

Watch: why doesn’t Russell Brand stand for Parliament?

In case you hadn’t heard, Russell Brand was on Question Time last night with Nigel Farage. It was explosive to say the least, with Brand and Farage clashing over pretty much everything. The most electrifying moment – see above – came when a member of the audience rightly pulled up Brand over his throwaway remark that Farage didn’t care about disabled people. The fellow pointed out that the Ukip leader had ‘never criticised the disabled’ and told Brand ‘if you’re going to campaign, then stand…you have the media profile for it, do it.’ Yet instead of his usual reasoning that parliamentary democracy is broken and not fit for purpose, Brand offered a mealy-mouthed pitiful excuse for his incessant shouting from

Thursday

Raymond Keene

London greats | 11 December 2014

The London Chess Classic, graced by two former world champions Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik, as well as the world number two, Fabiano Caruana, is nearing its close. Full details can be found on www.londonchessclassic.com and there is still time for chess fans to visit the event at Olympia, since it runs to 14 December. The London Classic continues the great tradition of outstanding events and superlatively creative games which have been played in the capital. London has been the home to such outstanding champions of the game as Andre Philidor, Wilhelm Steinitz and Emanuel Lasker while Steinitz himself claimed that two of the supreme creative masterpieces of his time

Raymond Keene

Christmas chess puzzle

White to play. This position is from Anderssen-Kieseritzky, London 1851. It is a brilliant encounter that became known as the Immortal Game. White has already gambitted both rooks. How does he finish off?   Please note that this is not a prize competition. No need to send in answers!   Last week’s solution 1 Be3

Taki

Taki’s Christmas gift to readers: a masterclass in the art of seduction

Here is my Christmas gift to Spectator readers, one that applies mostly to unmarried males, but is also available to married ones who might wish to test if that old magic still works. (Female readers of the best magazine in the whole wide world might also pick up a few hints.) This is, of course, not to be confused with the amateurish, vulgar and embarrassing inventory of the American Julien Blanc on how to pick up women. His guidance is meant for tattooed beer drinkers trying to pull drunken slags in cheap bars. Mine is for gentlemen endeavouring to make an impression on ladies and well brought-up young women. Here

Jeremy Clarke

Forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us

After lunch on Christmas Day my father always stood at the sink in his apron and yellow Marigolds and did the washing-up. Rolling up his shirtsleeves the gentleman’s way, as he claimed it was, with two turns maximum to just below the elbow, he couldn’t wait to get started. I can see him now, paper hat, suds up his arms. However, the underlying and perhaps most pressing reason for his doing the washing-up all afternoon was that he was a furtive drinker. When my father courted my mother, he led her to believe that he was a non-smoking, teetotalling Christian believer, when in truth he was the exact opposite of

Melissa Kite

Here’s what I’ve learned in 2014

The countryside is all very well so long as you know you can leave it. Funnily enough, exactly the same can be said for the town. I realise I have spent the entire year trying to decide whether to sell up and move from London to the wilds of Surrey. Or stay put in Balham. I’ve spent more evenings on Zoopla than can possibly be healthy. And now I think about it, I guess the reason I have struggled so hard to make a choice is that town and country are dependent on each other to produce their own special magic. I cannot enjoy the country unless I know I

Alexander Chancellor

Without Jesus and with less Santa, what does Christmas mostly consist of?

More than ever this year I find friends planning to go abroad for Christmas, some to countries such as India where the sun shines and Christmas is barely celebrated at all. I can see why. The goodwill and good cheer that the festival is intended to foster is all too often outweighed by the stress and anxiety it causes. This has been the case for years, but it gets worse with the passage of time. More couples divorce, more families break up, and Christmas tends not to heal such wounds but to aggravate them. The preparations for Christmas are more than joyless; they are soul-destroying. Try visiting Oxford Street at

Robin Oakley

Christmas reading for racing folk

‘Hang on a minute—he’s a bit wobbly,’ trainer Oliver Sherwood told photographers imploring him to stand with his winner when Many Clouds won this year’s Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury. Truth be told, Many Clouds’s popular trainer was wobbly too, understandably emotional after a victory which reminded many that a trainer whose string of Cheltenham Festival victories were a year or two back can still produce big race winners when he has the horse. The after-race moments were a reminder, too, of the warmth and generosity of the jumping scene. As I was shaking the tearful Oliver’s hand in congratulation, he was hugged vigorously by Sarah Hobbs, wife of Philip

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 December 2014

Pierre Zimmermann, captain of the hugely successful Monaco team, plays with Franck Multon and they are probably the best sponsor/professional partnership in the world. Franck occasionally partners a somewhat less gifted lady who, after he opened a minor, bid 3NT. He put dummy down and left the table. When he returned, she had gone one down and he informed her that her bidding was totally wrong and that if she ever bid 3NT over his suit opening again he would leave and not return! Sometime later she was playing with another world-class partner who, when she opened 1♦, immediately jumped to 3NT. ‘You should NEVER make that bid,’ she admonished

Mary Killen

Dear Mary solves problems for Jim Broadbent, N.M. Gwynne, Jesse Norman and others

Once again Mary has invited some of her favourite figures in the public eye to submit personal queries for her attention. From Jesse Norman MP Q. We’ve been having a little local difficulty at work with one or two colleagues who vigorously assert their loyalty to the organisation, but then go and join a would-be competitor. It’s not that this is bad for morale; on the contrary. But it confuses some of our customers. Your advice would be most welcome. A. Take the tip of a top industrialist who never tried to refuse a resignation: congratulate the deserter effusively on his decision and declare publicly that he and his new

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The most preposterous restaurant to have opened in London this year

Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was a car park, but that particular hell is over. Instead there is Skate at Somerset House with Fortnum & Mason, which is a purple-lit skating rink next to a ‘pop-up’ shop or ‘Christmas arcade’. This, because all PR copywriters think they write for Jennifer’s Diary in 1952, is apparently ‘the most chic and complete Christmas experience in London this season’. I doubt it. There is, for instance, no sign of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Father Christmas, or rogue elves, although there is a ‘twinkling 40ft Christmas tree hand-picked from the

Toby Young Toby Young

What will it take to live up to my father’s Great Life?

I received a phone call the other day that I wasn’t expecting. It was a BBC producer calling about a Radio 4 series called Great Lives, presented by Matthew Parris. Each week, a distinguished guest is asked to nominate someone they believe is truly deserving of the title ‘Great Life’ and then they come on the radio to discuss that person, along with an ‘expert’. I got rather excited as she was explaining this. Had someone really nominated me? When she told me the name of the guest I was even more thrilled — Brian Eno, the founder of Roxy Music. ‘The rock legend?’ I said. ‘That’s awfully flattering.’ ‘Yes,

William Cook

Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: why I love Blackpool

‘Jesus is the light of the world,’ reads the sign outside Blackpool’s Central Methodist Church, but all along the promenade the lights are going out. I’d returned to my favourite seaside resort to catch the end of the Illuminations, an annual attraction that brings several million visitors here every year. Since 1879, this vast canopy of fairy lights has stretched Blackpool’s summer season into autumn, flooding the seafront with ‘artificial sunshine’. But even Blackpool, with all its razzamatazz, can’t turn winter into summertime. From the Central Pier to the South Pier, the Illuminations are now all dormant. Only a modest cluster remains, between the Tower and the North Pier. It

The Spectator

100 years of Pyrex, processed cheese and nudes in movies

Marking a century Some things which celebrate their 100th birthday in 2015: 3-D films The first was shown at the Astor Theater in New York on 10 June, featuring the Niagara Falls. Nude scenes in films Audrey Munson played an artist’s model in Inspiration, a film by George Foster Platt released by the Mutual Film Corporation on 18 November 1915. It didn’t lead to a long career. By 1920 she was selling kitchen goods door-to-door. The following year she tried to take her life and in 1931 was consigned to a psychiatric hospital where she spent the rest of her life before dying, aged 104, in 1996. Pyrex, which was

Peter Jones

How the Romans taught Latin (N.M. Gwynne would not approve)

Barely a week passes without someone complaining about the teaching of English or foreign languages, usually because it involves too much, or too little, grammar. The ancients also had to face the problem. Clearly, non-Romans who wanted a career in Roman high society, the courts, civil administration or the army needed to learn Latin. So they did, and by the 2nd century AD, the Greek essayist Plutarch was able to say that almost all men used Latin. Certainly, as the Vindolanda tablets demonstrate, the Latin of the Germanic officer Cerealis was very respectable. But Romans also admired Greek culture enormously, and Latin literature drank deeply at its well (the statesman Cicero could

Joan Collins

Joan Collins’s diary: The joy of fake Christmas trees

Every year Christmas comes earlier and earlier in America. Cards, baubles and imitation trees were being sold in the big department stores in August, and the street decorations have been up in Beverly Hills since well before Halloween. From late October onwards, it’s the season of dressing up and showing off in downtown LA. Street parades are all the rage and hundreds of thousands of people saunter around in costumes, some gorgeous, most grotesque. Infants and children are usually done up as baby chicks or bunnies, which is inoffensive — but some adults go beyond the boundary of what is acceptable. On Santa Monica Boulevard I saw one inordinately fat

Dot Wordsworth

The curious language of Christmas carols

I could never understand as a little girl why we sang: ‘Away in a manger, no crib for a bed.’ I knew what a manger was, and I knew that people set up cribs at home and in churches with the Child Jesus in the manger and the animals, shepherds and all the trimmings. It turns out that I was right to be puzzled, for crib has the primary meaning of ‘a manger’, not ‘a baby’s cradle’. It’s a good old English word. Richard Rolle wrote in the 14th century of Jesus ‘born and laid in a crib between an ox and an ass’. The ox and the ass do

The Spectator

Spectator letters: RT replies, Bristol bristles, and Ross Clark doesn’t (yet) eat his hat

Moscow writing Sir: After months of lamentations from western politicians and officials about losing the ‘information war’ to Russia, a former executive editor of Radio Free Europe tries to paint everything Russia Today does in terms of a ‘propaganda’ campaign (‘Moscow calling’, 6 December). If RT is not inherently bad, it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, says John O’Sullivan. Take the sectarian violence in Libya, and the Syrian rebel groups that have now become Isis. Russia Today was reporting on these issues years before anyone else cared to. According to O’Sullivan’s article, when we cover the hypocrisy of US or European policies it is simply to further RT’s pro-Russian,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Charles Moore’s notes: A matched pair of popes, and a patronising judge

Pope Francis is favourably compared to Pope Benedict in the media. I hope it is not being slavishly papist to admire both of them. For Francis, the chalice is half-full. For Benedict, it was half-empty. But one attitude is not superior to the other. The Church needs both, like Christmas after Advent, Easter after Lent. Things are, in the Christian view, very bad, yet all shall be well. Put the two men together, and you have most of what you need. In paragraph 135 of his judgment in the Andrew Mitchell ‘Plebgate’ case, Mr Justice Mitting says that P.C. Rowland, the police officer whom Mr Mitchell was suing for libel, is ‘not the