Society

Thursday

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.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

These latest sanctions against Putin might just work

‘Sanctions,’ said Kofi Annan, ‘are a necessary middle ground between war and words.’ Neither the EU nor the US will deploy troops or missiles to defend Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists, while Vladimir Putin basks in hostile Western words and turns them to domestic advantage. That leaves sanctions as the only means of seeking to influence him. But do they work? Evidence is not persuasive: in 200 cases studied by academics in Washington, from the League of Nations action against Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia in the mid-1930s to Russia’s assault on Georgia in 2008, sanctions were judged successful in one third of cases; in many of those, success was ‘partial’. In

The Spectator

Podcast: The lure of the crowd, anti-Semitism and Cameron’s uncertain future

Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. In this week’s View from 22 podcast, Ross Clark looks at the rise of crowd culture. We have succumbed to the lure of the crowd, he says. Lara Prendergast suggests social media is to blame. In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips argues that anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. The silence from the political class in the face

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Next to the great halal scandal, grouse is small beer. But which has M&S banned?

Last year I got my grouse at M&S. The birds, I mean. There’s a little fresh meat section in the Kensington branch round the corner from me at work, and it was dead handy to get game there when I was in money. In fact, if you want gastronomic popular elitism, grouse in supermarkets is as close as you get. Simply roasted with buttered breadcrumbs…nothing nicer, really. Tragically, the treat’s off this year. Mark Avery, the former conservation director of the RSPB, has been lobbying the chief executive Marc Bolland not to stock it, on the basis that ‘if you persist with selling grouse meat, it sends a clear signal

David Blackburn

Is NATO a busted flush?

Rory Stewart is no soft-touch. When he was elected chairman of the Defence Select Committee, it was thought that he would hold the government and NATO’s feet to the fire. And so it has come to pass. The committee has published an alarming report on NATO’s unpreparedness to meet a threat from Russia. It says, in terms, that the risk of Russia attacking a NATO member, either conventionally or asymmetrically, is ‘small’ but ‘significant’. NATO has inadequate rapid reaction forces, cyber defence and strategic plans to counter this risk. The report also makes a telling political point: the public might no longer support NATO’s defining principle that an attack on

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The rise of crowd culture – a generation scared to do anything alone

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_31_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ross Clark and Lara Prendergast discuss the demise of individualism”] Listen [/audioplayer]Hell, as one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s characters said, is other people. Unless, that is, you happen to be British and born after about 1980, in which case hell is the opposite: being alone for more than about five minutes. As for the absolute pit, the eighth circle or however else you describe the geography of Beelzebub’s kingdom, that is being left alone without a 3G mobile phone signal. Of all changes in British life over the past generation, nothing has been quite so as stark as the strange death of individualism. When in 1995 the then transport

Antonia Oettingen

The war that we Germans really don’t mention

In 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm had an ambitious task for my great-great-great uncle Karl Max von Lichnowsky. He sent him to London to be our ambassador there, with orders to try to ensure Britain’s neutrality (at the very least, in cases of conflict with Russia and France). Although Lichnowsky already had a sympathetic relationship with Britain’s foreign minister, Edward Grey, who also hoped to avoid a war, his mission failed. His personal objective — to deter the Kaiser from going to war — fell flat too. In a telegram sent on 18 July 1914 he pleaded with Kaiser Wilhelm to ‘spare the German people a war from which nothing can be

Bruce Anderson

From Glyndebourne to St Thomas’s Hospital

‘Don’t you think you’re drinking too much?’ said the nurse, contemplating the array of bottles. ‘But I feel so thirsty,’ I replied. A doctor arrived and concluded that powerful intravenous antibiotics did require a lot of liquid, so that the orange juice was acceptable as well as the water. The trouble had started at Boisdale. We were having a modest lunch, to taste some new Spanish wines while working out which sherries would accompany haggis. A Palo Cortado from Gonzalez Byass won that prize. We then moved to Ranald’s cigar terrace to reaffirm the partnership between Speyside and Havana. Only problem: I was feeling increasingly wretched and it was showing.

David Blackburn

An amateur’s guide to the glories of Gleneagles

Pity the folk at Gleneagles. They have the misfortune to host the Ryder Cup this year. Nothing, surely, can surpass the drama of the previous contest between the United States and Europe, held at Medinah Country Club near Chicago in 2012. The Yanks dominated for two days before Ian Poulter, an Englishman who plays golf with an intensity that borders on divine possession, marched on to the 18th green late on the second evening. He had the bit between his teeth, having made four straight birdies to keep himself in his game. All square; the US 10–5 up in the match overall. With darkness gathering and the boozy American support