Society

Thursday

Mark Mason

Tourists are trickling back to Egypt – to beat the crowds, go now

Egypt’s revolution of 2011 didn’t just get rid of President Mubarak: it did a pretty good job of clearing out the tourists, too. The political uncertainty since then has made people wary of visiting — meaning more space and lower prices for those who do make the trip. But you’d better be quick if you want to take advantage: this seems to be the year that Egypt is opening up again. BA are resuming their Sharm el-Sheikh flights in September, while Abercrombie and Kent are back up to three boats for their Nile cruises (they had been down to one). I started in Aswan, home to the alarmingly named Hotel

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Rory McIlroy and the grandest prize in golf

The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors in the same year, and has only been done once, by the extraordinary Bobby Jones in 1930. Jones was awarded a ticker-tape reception in New York, and a golfing writer of the time with a feel for geometry called it ‘The Impregnable Quadrilateral’, a fortress that could never be taken. Jones, a lawyer by profession and unimpeachably honourable in his play, was a canny young man as well as a remarkable player: he had backed himself for the grand slam at the start of the year with a British bookmaker

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

What happened to Julie Burchill on silent retreat

When I told my friends that I was planning to attend a silent retreat, they all laughed. It’s true that I am something of a convivialist; my idea of heaven is a big table in a warm restaurant, the table shimmering with the laughter of friends and the glugging of wine, and me picking up the bill. On the other hand, I was a solitary only child and I look back on those days with great fondness. Before the long stagger up the primrose path of pleasure started, the only companion I needed was a book; I well remember my mother crying because I preferred to sit in my room

Douglas Murray

‘The truth is hard’: an interview with Roger Scruton

To the extent that Britain has philosophers, we do not expect them to address issues of any relevance to the rest of us. They may pursue some hermeneutic byway perhaps, but not the urgent or profound issues of our time. Roger Scruton has always been an exception in this regard, as in many others. He has spent his adult life thinking and writing about the nature of love, the nation state, belonging, alienation, beauty, home and England. But even his closest readers may gulp at the relevance of his latest subject matter. His new novel, The Disappeared, is set in the north of England and centres on the recent rape-gang

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Airport wars: why I’m betting on Gatwick

Easter is a good time to talk about airports — or perhaps a bad time, if you bought your Spectator in the shopping labyrinth that impedes your path to the departure gate after a maddening wait in the security queue, where only a quarter of the scanners are working. I’m with you, and not just in spirit: in fact, that’s me being led away by men with machine guns, after an altercation over the contents of my wash-bag. It’s a curious fact that no one has ever succeeded in imbuing airport terminals with the romance, dignity and passenger satisfaction quotient of 19th-century railway stations. At best they are soulless, at

Ian Thomson

‘I will call the police!’: My close encounter with ‘revenue protection’

‘Make yourself a happy bunny this Easter with cheap tickets and egg-cellent deals!’ chirped the Abellio train company advert. I use Abellio’s Greater Anglia service regularly from London and was looking forward to a nice fluffy ride to Norwich. I was late for the 9 a.m. train but the Liverpool Street station Abellio assistant smilingly informed me I wouldn’t need to pay extra for the later train. I bought a cup of coffee and presented my ticket to the barrier staff at platform 11. A dignified-looking man of African origin with ritually scarred cheeks seemed to be unusually officious. Tapping my ticket with the sharp end of a pencil he

Lucy Vickery

Yawn

In Competition No. 2891 you were invited to think of the most boring lecture topic possible and submit an extract from that lecture. Christopher Gilbert gamely -submitted an extract from a real lecture he is due to deliver on the impenetrable-sounding topic of heteroscedasticity. But Brian -Murdoch, observing that it was all ‘a bit near the knuckle’, decided against putting his own genuine ‘Comments on the Prologues to the Old Frisian Laws’ into the ring. His fictitious offering not only made it into the winning line-up but also won him the bonus fiver. The rest take £25 each. Scribal Division of Words at the End of Lines in Vernacular Prose

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

Why doesn’t Osborne admit the link between the jobs miracle and slowing down deficit reduction?

Will George Osborne come ever clean about his successes? I caught up with the Chancellor in Leeds today and asked him about the Treasury’s role in the jobs miracle. I put it to him: isn’t it the case that he has decided to go slower on deficit reduction to support the jobs boom? The figures show that this is exactly what’s happened: the Treasury isn’t getting as much tax in because so much of the increase in employment is in low-paid jobs. [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/N7pwS/index.html”] Osborne has decided to cut these workers’ taxes, and even support their income through tax credits. You’d think a compassionate conservative would make a virtue of this and say

Digby Warde-Aldam

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Royal Albert Hall, review: who goes to a Noel Gallagher gig?

When people say Noel Gallagher is big-headed, they don’t know the half of it. He has what is known as a ‘classic rock-star build’ – that is, a tiny, fragile little body with a ludicrously big bonce on top, like one of those football figurines. I know this because I saw him once. He was standing outside the University of Westminster, looking cross as he jabbed a text message into his phone. It must be heavy, that head. From my seat in the Albert Hall, I watched as Noel stood hunched over his mic, like Quasimodo delivering a TED talk. It’s probably a bit off-key to mock a man for

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: National concentration

From ‘National Concentration‘, The Spectator, 3 April 1915: A WORD or two of explanation seems necessary in regard to the attitude which we and others have taken up towards football displays, racing, and drinking during the war. Some people seem to think that those who hold our views want to find in the war an excuse for introducing Puritanism by a side-wind. Others seem to imagine that we think a war can only be waged successfully with sour faces and grim looks, and that there is no place for that gaiety and gallantry which have always marked, and, thank Heaven! still mark, the British fighting man. Let us say with

Tuesday

John Raffles

Another scare story about e-cigarettes. What we should be worrying about is sugar

‘E-Cigs Time Bomb’, shrieks the front page of today’s Daily Mirror. Vaping gets kids hooked on nicotine, experts fear. Experts do a lot of ‘fearing’, it strikes me, but what we don’t know – cannot know for years – is whether e-cigarettes will cause long-term addiction to nicotine. Or what proportion of those nicotine addicts will be people who wouldn’t have smoked cigarettes if a safer alternative hand’t been available. Tiny is my guess. I notice that the Mirror’s online version of the story backs away from the panic-stricken splash, actually describing the story as a ‘scare’. One triggered, no surprise, by the state of California, which is obsessed with banning

Steerpike Steerpike

Ed Balls gives speech in graveyard about Labour’s help for small business

This morning Ed Balls gave a speech promising to help small firms succeed if Labour get into power. However, with Balls keen to inspire voters Mr S is curious as to why he chose to such an uninspiring location. Sky’s Sophy Ridge reports that the speech took place in a graveyard: Ed Balls is giving a speech on Labour’s help for small business. In a graveyard. #GE2015 pic.twitter.com/OuvRWst7qr — Sophy Ridge (@SophyRidgeSky) March 31, 2015 Could it mean that the party are taking business gravely seriously or is simply an omen as to what may happen to British business under Labour’s rule? Either way the party seem to be making a habit of choosing curious

Daniel Jackson

Why liberals want us to act like children

Have you noticed how often adults – particularly of the earnest, nagging variety who work in the public sector – are behaving like children? I don’t mean acting childishly, but literally behaving like children. Last week delegates to the NUS women’s conference were using ‘jazz-hands’ instead of clapping – in case it should trigger an anxiety attack. I can think of five-year-olds who would squirm at that spectacle. Meanwhile, Brown University in America recently debated sexual assault on campus. A serious topic, but the authorities deemed it necessary to create a ‘safe space’ full of play-doh, bubbles, calming music and colouring books. Yes, colouring books. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. As the New York Times

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Calm before the storm

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 3 April 1915: Whether it is the lull before the storm or only an accident we do not know, but in any can there is a most curious absence of news both from the western and the eastern theatres of the war. In the western sea area we read of a certain amount of Zeppelin activity, but not of a very important kind. Of fresh news from the land there is very little except from the Argonne, where as neual the fighting sways backwards and forwards, but with a slight inclination in favour of the French. In the eastern theatre the reports from the

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

War of words: Karen Danczuk in Twitter spat with Sunday Times columnist

During her time as a Labour councillor, Karen Danczuk has managed to have bust-ups with women in both the Conservative party and her own. As well as Danczuk’s ongoing spat with Louise Mensch over her revealing selfies, she claimed last month that Harriet Harman had told her to join Girls Aloud – something Harman has denied. With Danczuk now stepping down from local politics to focus on a career in the media, there are two new ladies in her firing line. The outspoken ‘Selfie Queen’ has taken umbrage with a comment made about her by the Sunday Times columnist Katie Glass. Glass took to Twitter yesterday to josh that she was worried she would look like Danczuk if she took a holiday selfie of herself.

Robert Wargas

How a tetanus shot could help treat a deadly brain cancer

The history of cancer research is one of inevitable hype and dashed hope. Though most people have been primed to believe in elusive ‘cures’, the most important news is usually about slowly strengthening imperfect treatments. Some of the most promising of these involve vaccines. A study published recently in Nature, a top-tier journal, has demonstrated that a tetanus shot, when administered before an experimental vaccine therapy, can lengthen survival times for patients afflicted with glioblastoma multiforme, a dreadful brain cancer that is almost universally deadly. Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina injected patients with a tetanus booster before administering a vaccine designed to target the brain tumour. Those who

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Podcast special: eve of the general election campaign + SNP spring conference

The general election campaign kicks off tomorrow and Labour appears to have the ‘Big Mo’. In this View from 22 podcast special,  Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and I discuss the state of the polls — and the new YouGov/Sunday Times poll which suggests Labour are four points ahead — and whether Ed Miliband’s ‘win’ in the TV Q&A this week has put the Tories on the back foot. What can we expect to happen in the first week of the campaign? We also discuss the SNP’s spring conference in Glasgow and why the Nats are trying to reach out to the rest of the United Kingdom, You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and

Saturday

Daniel Mael

In defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Max Blumenthal has made a name for himself as a Jew whose main bete noire is the Jewish state. Preferring fairy tales to facts and evidence, Blumenthal paints a picture of a Nazi-esque, evil incarnate (and completely fictitious) Israel. Now, not content with defaming Israel, Blumenthal has moved on to defending Islam against one of its bravest critics in a long and mendacious hit-piece entitled “Exposing Anti-Islam Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Latest Deception.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born refugee, overcame a patriarchal upbringing in a Somali Muslim family, during the course of which she was subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) and a forced marriage. She sought asylum in the Netherlands and

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Muslims, Jews and Christians use identical twins to ‘prove’ homosexuality isn’t genetic

The subject of identical twins has been on my mind ever since I read a magnificently creepy thriller called Ice Twins by SK Treymayne – a pseudonym meant to sound like a woman, but it fact belonging to the novelist Sean Thomas. I read it because Thomas is in the new Spectator Life explaining how the pressures of the market push the writers of psychological thrillers towards female-sounding names – so he (sort of) turned into a woman to make Ice Twins a bestseller, which it duly became. The book is tightly plotted, meticulously researched and I urge you read it – but what grabbed my attention was the subject of that research:

Friday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Jeremy Clarkson and the Political Correctness of the Right

One of the many delusions of the Right is the myth of conservative robustness. Conservatives don’t play the victim card, they say. They tell it like it is, and don’t care who knows it. They stand on their own two feet, and take it on the chin. They have guts and backbone too. It’s easy to mock the anatomical clichés, but middle-class leftists should worry. Millions of people are about to vote for Ukip, in part because they resent a modern version of Victorian prudery that has stopped robust debate, and allowed sharp-eared heresy hunters to patrol the nation’s language. If fellow citizens are prejudiced, then there is indeed a