Society

Friday

Sadiq Khan

This government’s disastrous prisons policy is putting the public at risk

Data released yesterday lays bare the true scale of the growing crisis in our prisons. Suicides up 69 per cent in a year. Self-harm up 27 per cent since 2010. Serious assaults up 30 per cent, and the numbers absconding up 10 per cent in a year. One in five prisons rated ‘of concern’ – double the figure 12 months before. Sharp falls in courses to help reform prisoners. Hundreds of sex offenders no longer getting the courses they need to stop them re-offending. Yet you wouldn’t have known this by what the Justice Secretary was doing yesterday. While he was off giving a speech way outside his own brief,

Jane Kelly

The NHS’s sympathy deficit

Sometimes I have a quiet time as a voluntary hospital visitor. But recently I’ve witnessed a lot of distress from people of all ages and types. The other week I saw an elderly Middle Eastern man bent over a bin in a ward corridor, crying almost uncontrollably. I asked him the problem and he stuttered out that he had been watching his daughter sleeping, and he believed she was going to die. I went off to find a nurse as I felt I didn’t know enough about his situation or hers to help. The nurse wouldn’t tell me anything due to patient confidentiality. I returned alone to the man and

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Treasure Island

As I write, young Jonathan Hawkins has stormed into the lead in the British Championship in Aberystwyth with the tremendous score of 6/6. This is not quite a record since in the British Championship of 1976, won by Jonathan Mestel, the new champion won his first nine games, a record unlikely to be surpassed.   It is too early to tell whether Hawkins has won this year but from what I have seen of his games his style exhibits a felicitous blend of accurate strategy and alert tactics, always a difficult combination of talents to confront. The following game is a case in point. Simon Williams is a grand- master,

Raymond Keene

no. 325

White to play. This position is from Rogers-Milos, Manila Olympiad 1992. White is a mass of material down but the black forces on the kingside are irrelevant. Can you spot the brilliant finish?   Answers to me at The Spectator 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 shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 Rxg6+ Last week’s winner Tom Teague, Boughton Heath, Chester

Taki

Even Switzerland is turning lefty. Am I going to have to move to Wyoming?

 Gstaad I am looking out of my window at the green landscape and forested mountains rising beyond, as peaceful a scene as there is in this troubled world, but this is Switzerland, a country that hasn’t fought a war in 700 years, resisting both Napoleon and Hitler through friendly persuasion and by having banks that don’t talk. No longer. The new big bully on the block, Uncle Sam, in cahoots with the vermin that is the EU, is forcing the Swiss to open up and spill the beans. What I don’t get is why the Swiss are lying down and playing dead. Sure, they have all sorts of referendums, but

Jeremy Clarke

The indiscreet charm of Jim Davidson

Le tout Torquay was there, cramming into the Princess Theatre with a drink in each hand ten minutes after the show had begun. I pressed in among them. Jim Davidson, in a black shirt, a baggy old pair of jeans and business shoes, was already onstage introducing his show and bantering with people in the front row. ‘What’s the matter with you in the wheelchair, love?’ he said, cupping his ear at her. She was blind, she said. ‘Then what the fuck are you doing right down here at the front?’ (Laughter.) ‘Can you see anything at all, love?’ She couldn’t, she said. ‘Well, just to give you an idea,’

Melissa Kite

The only woman who can make me lie

With a heavy heart, I have just conducted my biannual lying session. I hate that I have to do this. I am an honest person driven to the extremes of fib-telling by a situation that I can see no other way out of. Every time I find myself in this situationI search my soul for a better way out. But there just is no other way. I have to lie. I have to lie when I sit down in the dental hygienist’s chair and she asks me the question: ‘Have you been flossing?’ I do not understand why it should be that a woman in a white coat holding a

Alexander Chancellor

You can’t spin yourself into authenticity – as Ed Miliband is finding out

For a politician to draw attention to his own deficiencies is a desperate attempt to curry favour with the electorate that has been tried before with dismal consequences. The most famous case is that of the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith who, at his 2002 party conference, addressed the problem of his dullness as a political performer by saying that no one should ‘underestimate the determination of a quiet man’. One result was that Labour backbenchers would raise a finger to their lips and say ‘shush’ whenever this croaky-voiced man was speaking in the House of Commons. He tried to sound tougher at the next year’s Conservative conference by

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 31 July 2014

The brilliant American bridge writer and former world champion Eddie Kantar once overheard two wives in his bridge class arguing about which of their husbands was the worse player. The first wife said, ‘Look, there’s no contest. Last night, my husband was in 7NT with 11 top tricks, and dummy had the ♥AQ with the ♥K onside, so a finesse would have worked. But he managed to wind up in dummy at Trick 11 and, with two cards left, led the ♥Q from ♥AQ!’ The second wife simply shrugged and said: ‘What’s so terrible about that? Against my husband, that play works.’ I was reminded of this exchange last week

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Nepotism, aid and Chatsworth

Nepotism rules Sir: Julie Burchill’s piece ‘Born to be famous’ (26 July) was very strong and as, like her, I’m an ex-Labour supporter turned conservative, it echoed my opinions. The performing arts in particular were a great outlet for the untapped talents of what we used to call the working classes. Between the mid-1950s and about 1980, coming from a modest background was no handicap in the arts or (primarily Labour) politics. Today’s media/political axis is rife with both nepotism and persons who have little comprehension of everyday life. To his credit, David Cameron has at least done some work before joining the two other party leaders, who are the pampered

Miriam Gross

Miriam Gross’s diary: As a qualified teacher, I say let in the ‘untrained’

I knew that the historian Sir Richard Evans was a rather abrasive and quarrelsome man, but I was staggered by his vicious attack on Michael Gove in the Guardian last week. Here’s Evans’s first sentence: ‘Gove presided over the disintegration of our school system; he opened up teaching to untrained people in state schools, because he had contempt for professional educationalists. The restoration of professional teaching in our schools must now be an urgent priority.’ What? Those who follow these things will know that the two men have a history of exchanging insults, but how bizarre of Evans to vent his spleen on untrained teachers. Many great teachers are untrained

The Spectator

Hold on to your umbrella, Mr Putin: what the Russians lose without British trade

Off the shelf How do we boycott Putin? Some things we traded with Russia, by value, between March and May 2014: Export Mineral fuels £23m Nuclear reactors, boilers and machinery £164m Aircraft, spacecraft and parts thereof £46.6m Art, antiques etc £7.7m Fish, crustaceans and molluscs £3.25m Umbrellas, walking sticks and riding crops £170,925 Explosives and pyrotechnic products £11,998 Import Mineral fuels £1.36bn Nuclear reactors, boilers and machinery £1.37bn Aircraft, spacecraft and parts thereof £29.3m Art, antiques etc £11.6m Fish, crustaceans and molluscs £2.38m Umbrellas, walking sticks and riding crops £0 Explosives and pyrotechnic products £0 Source: UK Trade Info If you have to ask… A property developer complained after being

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How to accept wine refills at parties without getting drunk

Q. At a drinks or a dinner party, when very attentive waiters are hovering, I tend to let them keep topping my glass up since the alternative — continuing to say ‘no thank you’ — is so disruptive of conversation. However, my wife tells me that other men clearly manage to find a way of keeping track of how much they have had since other men don’t seem to get as legless as I do. What do you suggest, Mary? — R.B., Exeter A. Have 20 coins in your right-hand pocket. Each time the waiter fills you up, mark his input by discreetly transferring one coin into your left hand

Dot Wordsworth

The mystery of the missing Mrs

I don’t much care for being called Wordsworth. Oh, the name is rather distinguished, though it came from my husband, but I mean that I don’t like to be referred to as ‘Wordsworth’ without the Mrs. It makes me sound like a convicted criminal. I don’t even like Jane Austen being referred to as ‘Austen’. I know it sounds prissy nowadays to call her ‘Miss Austen’, but we don’t hesitate to refer to Mrs Thrale (though she became Mrs Piozzi) or to Mrs Patrick Campbell, though she married George Cornwallis-West in 1914. (After he was divorced from Winston Churchill’s mother in that year, she reverted to ‘Lady Randolph Churchill’, which

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes: My grandfather’s dire omen on the eve of war

This week’s issue is dated 2 August. On that date 100 years ago, my great-grandfather, Norman Moore (always known as ‘NM’), went to Sunday Mass. ‘Father Ryan,’ he noted in his diary, ‘seemed hardly to have thought of the war… I told [him] I felt uncertain whether August would be a good time for a mission to Protestants but I gave him the £5 I had promised.’ Later, he and his wife Milicent went to tea with their Sussex neighbours, Lord and Lady Ashton, who ‘seemed very little informed of the gravity of the situation’. Back at home, a telegram arrived from NM’s friend, Ethel Portal: ‘Germany occupied Luxembourg Reported

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 31 July 2014

Home Britain is to halve to three months the time that EU migrants without realistic job prospects can claim benefits, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in an article for the Daily Telegraph. Workers for the Passport Office who belong to the Public and Commercial Services Union went on strike ostensibly to ‘end staffing shortages that have caused the ongoing backlog crisis’. Driverless cars will be allowed on roads from next year. Newham council in east London approved a £1 billion scheme for an ‘Asian Business Port’ to be built by the Chinese at the Royal Albert Dock. The Gherkin office block in London was put up for sale, with

Doc

2173: Men of note

The unclued lights are of a specific kind.   Across   11    Top flier backs help for sloth (6) 12    Birds on the barriers (5) 14    Mayfly larva on cobras, dead (5) 15    The head that’s characteristic of the Russian Church (5) 17    Lay claim to 32s somehow (6) 19    Eric needs new place to stay (9) 21    Caught fish, mushy peas and wine? (7) 24    Short Celt, retired keeper, in a 2-2 match? (9, two words) 26    Prince, lively, talking idly (9) 30    Spanish muleteer, backward, out east, love (7) 31    Churchmen waving signal around prison (9) 33

Doc

to 2170: Hector’s summer nights

The unclued lights are the titles of the six movements of Nuits d’Eté (Summer Nights in translation) by Hector Berlioz: 38, 10/6D, 30/25, 19, 15, 12/18.   First prize Philip Berridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire Runners-up Richard Foden, Vesenaz, Switzerland; Mrs E.J. Simmons, North Wembley, Middlesex

Steven Vates

The insidious re-normalisation of smoking

The NHS has long since been smoke free, banning smoking on-site for patients and staff alike back when I was a nursing student. Of course this is ignored pretty much universally by patients and visitors, and every time you enter a major hospital it is usually through a cloud of tobacco smoke whilst the poor nurses must change out of their uniform and leave the hospital site in their rest break. It was with great surprise then, whilst sipping my morning coffee recently and trying to recover from the hacking smokers cough acquired entering the building, that I noticed a patient nearby sat merrily smoking away. I was incredulous. Outraged.