Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

No. 852

White to play. Torre-Parker, New York Simultaneous exhibition, 1916. White resigned, seeing no defence to the threat of Rc5-c1+. Which move would have led to the opposite result? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 2 June. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Qf4+! 2 Rxf4 (or 2 g3 Qd2+ wins) g3 mate. Last week’s winner Michael Low, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset

The Spectator

Will any party stand up for ‘Nick’?

Meet Nick. He is 30 years old, has a good job and lives in London. He keeps himself to himself. He isn’t political. At least he never used to be. And yet the struggle of Nick has become the struggle of our age. For Nick, the social contract has broken down. Nick embodies a generation for whom achieving the same life quality as their parents is a distant dream  After he has paid his taxes, student loan and the rent for his Zone 4 shoebox, Nick’s take-home pay is meagre. He knows where his money goes: on the benefits, social housing and remittances of one Karim, 25, an aspiring grime

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How Covid broke Britain

It was at about this time, five years ago, that the workers at my (then) local farm shop began wearing plastic bags on their feet, over their trainers. This was because of a report somewhere that said the Covid virus hung about on the ground and then leapt, with great agility and cunning, on to people’s shoes, from whence it swiftly decamped to your bloodstream and killed you. We were still rubbing raw alcohol on to our hands wherever we went, if you recall, because whatever you touched harboured the virus. You couldn’t actually go in the farm shop but had to give your orders to the staff who manned

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Marvelling

For Comp. 3401 you were invited to submit a poem that included the line ‘My vegetable love should grow’ from Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. There were lots of entries, some of them quite fruity (sorry). There are too many worthy runners-up to name names, but the£25 vouchers go to the winners below. My vegetable, love, should grow, not end up on your plate, at least until it’s won first prize at the village fète. I’ve never nurtured one so vast, nor hosed a hue so green – how can you think of eating it like some mere runner bean? But at my back I hear you mutter It’s just

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Liverpool parade crash, Starmer sacrifices Chagos Islands and an octopus invasion

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that ‘more pensioners’ would qualify for winter fuel payments, but did not say how many or when. Nigel Farage of Reform said he would scrap net zero to fund things like abolishing the two-child benefit cap and reversing the winter fuel cut in full. Millions of public-sector workers such as doctors and teachers were offered rises of between 3.6 and 4.5 per cent. From July, typical household energy costs will fall by £129 a year, still higher than a year earlier. South Western Railway was renationalised. Thames Water was fined £122.7 million by Ofwat for breaching rules on sewage and shareholder dividends.

Nick Timothy

Racing is being regulated out of existence

As a parable that sums up the dysfunction of the modern state and the over-regulation of industry, this has it all: government by unaccountable quango, ministers whose actions are the opposite of their words, puritanical campaigners given the power to dictate how people spend their money, a refusal to recognise glaring trade-offs and the cost of regulation, and the complacency with which a great British success story might be killed off. The success story in question is horse racing. With five million fans a year visiting 59 courses, racing is Britain’s second most popular spectator sport after football. And we are good at it. We have the best horses, the

Fire

2705: Thirty sevens

The unclued lights have an award-winning feature in common. Across 5 Webcam perhaps covering temporary accommodation (6) 10  With Head absent, our teachers brewed liqueur (10) 12  Start to grumble and show contempt, returning cabbage and sprouts (6) 16  Virginia starts to gripe about loss of nerve (5) 17  French film-maker returns in time to shake things up (7) 20  Views wild rhinos surrounding empty zoo (8) 25  Women’s popular victory (3) 26  Hero sat awkwardly in proximity (7) 28  Can start to see city in outline (7) 29  Hail one empty vehicle (3) 31  Run profit-making facility for outside users (8) 34  Distinctive qualities of musical about revolutionary (7)

Henry Dimbleby

Should we give weight loss jabs to children?

I have seen the future of food. And some of you won’t like it. On a research trip to the Netherlands last week, along with the fellow partners of my firm, Bramble, I took a speedboat tour of the port of Rotterdam. One of the most awesome sights was the so-called ‘Innocent Blender’ – a vast smoothie-making fortress, box-shaped and silver – glinting over the water. This is where the British-based, Coca-Cola-owned company makes its ‘tasty little drinks’. The factory location makes sense: most of Europe’s imported fruit comes via Rotterdam. Massive tankers – 600ft long and filled with 40,000 tons of chilled orange juice from Brazil – move through

The Spectator

2702: Some beef – solution

Triplets related to 38 WELLINGTON were 4A, 13 and 26 (WW2 bombers): 11, 27 and 32 (boots) and 1D, 12 and 31 (New Zealand cities). First prize Jude Wilson, Surbiton, Surrey Runners-up Sarah Darlington, Acton Trussell, Stafford; Sharon Harris, Hadlow, Tonbridge, Kent

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall can’t come soon enough

Is Pride flopping? This parti-coloured celebration of all things LGBTQIA+ started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men. Then it became a day, then a week, then a month, and now it spreads throughout the summer, accompanied by all manner of feast days and ‘visibility’ events. Its expansion coincided with the addition of all the letters after the first three. This is when it became a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality – very old hat – but just about anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional, ranging from wearing wigs to not fancying any kind of sex at all. Every peccadillo was

Lara Brown

The next front in the gender wars

April’s Supreme Court judgment ought to have been the final nail in the coffin for transgender ideology. The belief that you can pick your gender, like you would a hat in the morning, seemed to have ended. The highest court unanimously confirmed that for the purposes of the Equality Act, sex is biological – immutable, material and not up for ideological reinterpretation. Yet if the past decade has taught us anything, it is that the gender industry doesn’t give up; it adapts. Numerous organisations, many taxpayer-funded, now exist for the sole purpose of pushing back against any resistance to trans orthodoxy. Defeat is merely a fundraising opportunity. The semantic contortions

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Are beards a political statement?

Yes, it was right of the police to announce quickly that they did not think terrorism was the motive in Monday’s Liverpool horror, thus heading off potential riots. The police also said the person arrested was a white man. If he had been a black man, would they have said that? If not, why not? Watching film of the incident, I felt uneasily reminded of the scene in Belfast in 1988 when two British soldiers in civvies drove out of a side road and found themselves in the middle of a Republican funeral cortege. The suspicious crowd began to threaten the car. The soldiers lost their nerve, one drawing his

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Has King Charles gone doolally on his Canada trip?

I like King Charles. I visited him at Windsor Castle recently as Mrs Miller picked up a gong. The castle has been beautifully restored. It is full of treasures, looted from the Empire. There were no refreshments, only a porcelain water bowl for the guide dog of one of the honourees. The King was charming, looking a little the worse for wear, perhaps. He graciously laughed at Mrs M’s joke. He’s a thoughtful guy. A little odd, which is no bad thing. But he seems to have gone completely doolally on his trip to Canada this week, where he opened Parliament with the most modern of empty gestures. The King’s

Chas Newkey-Burden

We need more animal cruelty on TV

Animal rights campaigners are up in arms because Disney+ is able to use a legal loophole to broadcast a scene of a rat being forcibly immersed in liquid. The RSPCA has slammed Disney for showing a controversial scene from the 1989 thriller The Abyss where a live rat is deliberately submerged in fluorocarbon liquid. The rat is seen struggling during the scene and the charity said the experience was clearly one of ‘terror’ for the poor little rodent, although the filmmakers insist it survived. The scene had previously been cut from all UK screenings by the British Board of Film Classification, which ruled that it breached animal cruelty laws and

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Robert Macfarlane: Is a river alive?

40 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Robert Macfarlane. In his new book Is A River Alive? he travels from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the pollution-choked rivers of Chennai and the threatened waterways of eastern Canada. He tells Sam what he learned along the journey – and why we need to reconceptualise our relationship with the natural world.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Charles has shown true statesmanship in Canada

As his younger son conducts an attention-seeking trip to China, it was King Charles, addressing Canada’s House of Commons and Senate, who showed how a calm, dignified approach to public life pays far greater dividends than empty point-scoring. The King has been a popular and welcome figure in Canada since he arrived with the Queen on a brief visit yesterday; the enthusiastic greetings from tens of thousands of Canadians was no mere piece of theatre. Charles’s oft-forgotten status as King of Canada has been foremost in people’s minds, thanks to the carefully and adroitly handled pageantry surrounding him, but it was his set-piece speech in the Senate in Ottawa that

Alexander Larman

What is Prince Harry doing in China?

Whenever you read about the latest international escapade of Prince Harry’s, it is hard not to think of the famous words said about the Scarlet Pimpernel, the evasive hero of Baroness Orczy’s novel: ‘They seek him here, they seek him thereThose Frenchies seek him everywhereIs he in heaven or is he in hell?That damned elusive Pimpernel’ ‘Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Travalyst Founder’, as he was so grandiloquently billed by his hosts, delivered a brief speech that was the usual mixture of buzzwords and clichés Swap out ‘Frenchies’ for ‘international news media’, and ‘Pimpernel’ for ‘Duke of Sussex’ and you’ve got a pretty good insight into the constant fascination with

Laurie Wastell

The public have a right to know about the Liverpool car suspect

A 53-year-old man has been arrested after a car ploughed into a crowd of Liverpool supporters during their Premier League trophy parade last night. Hundreds of thousands were out on the streets to celebrate when the car collided with pedestrians on Water Street, in the heart of Liverpool city centre, shortly after 6 p.m. Twenty-seven were taken to hospital, two of them with serious injuries, while 20 were treated on the scene. Four of the injured were children. Mercifully – miraculously – no one seems to have died. There will be a particular spotlight on Merseyside Police and what information it releases to the public, following criticism over how it handled Southport

Monday

Michael Gove

Why is antisemitism so pervasive? Irving v Lipstadt 25 years on

31 min listen

This spring marks the 25th anniversary of the landmark judgment in the infamous Irving v Lipstadt Holocaust denial case. David Irving sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt after she had described him as a Holocaust denier in her 1994 book, for his claims that Jews had not been systematically exterminated by the Nazis. Given the burden of proof in English libel law being on the defence, it was up to Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin to prove her claims were true that Irving had deliberately misrepresented evidence. In 2000, the Judge found in her favour. Deborah Lipstadt and the lawyers that represented her, Anthony Julius and James Libson, join Michael Gove

Rory Hanrahan

The sad death of the English pub

It was a drizzly Tuesday evening in the 17th-century Oxford village pub I manage, the kind of night when regulars huddle close to the bar, pints glowing amber under low lights. An old chap in a flat cap, nursing his third ale, grumbled about the council’s latest parking scheme. The village curate, leaning on the bar, sparred with the local councillor over the steep cost of saving the church roof. A young couple, new to the area, weighed London against Oxford, sneaking glances at the football on the telly. For a moment, the pub hummed with life – a microcosm of England, where strangers turn mates and the day’s weight