Society

Thursday

Robin Oakley

Own up, Twelve to Follow fans – which of you sabotaged my BMW?

Mrs Oakley takes a dim view of my using the BMW that consumed much of her savings to ferry sacks of garden refuse and discarded paint tins to the council dump. She took an even dimmer view when, in executing a three-point turn recently, I missed a marker post behind me and reshaped the bumper: replacing it will require regular success in the Tote Placepot. But it really wasn’t my fault when a warning light flashed to tell us we had low tyre pressure. The garage reported that not just one tyre but all four had been penetrated by vicious-looking carpet tacks: it was either mindless vandalism or deliberate sabotage,

Raymond Keene

Vengeance is mine

The history of the world chess championship includes five title matches where the challenger was the former champion, seeking his revenge. These are Steinitz v Lasker, 1896; Alekhine v Euwe 1937; Botvinnik v Smyslov, 1958; Botvinnik v Tal 1961 and Karpov v Kasparov 1986. Steinitz and Karpov both failed in their bids to reclaim the championship, while Alekhine and Botvinnik were successful, the latter twice.   After the Candidates’ tournament in Khanty-Mansisk, the former champion Anand becomes the fifth deposed monarch of the chess world to have the chance to stage a comeback. When I organised the 2000 challenge by Kramnik to Kasparov in London, I offered Kasparov the right to an

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 1 May 2014

Somewhere highly intellectual I read that they were bringing back the Generation Game, recalling, in all their excruciating mundanity,  Brucie’s catchphrases. I had to eat my own snootiness at the Easter Championship Pairs, won by Susanna, yes OUR Susanna, playing with England supremo David Gold. ‘Didn’t she do well?’ I shrieked — and indeed she did. The first pair’s event is a two-day, three-session tournament, at the highly demanding matchpoint  scoring, so every trick counts. In other words, there’s no faking it. When you win that event you’ve played proper grown-up bridge. That’s why it’s called the Championship Pairs. Check out Ms Gross on this hand, executing a squeeze without

Raymond Keene

No. 312

White to play. This is from Botvinnik-Smyslov, World Championship (Game 2) 1958. White’s next was a clever way to win a pawn and achieve an overwhelming position. What did he play? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 6 May 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 am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 Qxh7+ Last week’s winner Risdon Nicholls, Essex

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Help! Wet wipes keep blocking the drains at our caravan park

Q. My sister and I own a popular caravan park which, for 30 years, has given happiness to around a hundred caravan owners a week. Over the past three years, however, our small profit has turned into a loss due to the craze for wet wipes, by which I mean facial cleansing wipes and baby wipes. They block the drains and cost us £7,000 every five months in cesspit rebuilding costs. No amount of pleading to the punters not to put them down the loos has any effect. As a consequence we are going to have to close the park unless, Mary, you can think of a solution? — Name and address withheld A.

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

After visiting the Cherwell Boathouse, I might spare Oxford from burning

It is now two decades since I lived in Oxford. I was then a drunk and lonely puddle of a person, with only a gift for screaming; but no matter how low I sank, to paraphrase Alcoholics Anonymous literature, I never sank quite as low as to consider eating at the ’bab van (kebab van) outside Univ (University College) on the High (High Street); I preferred to dine in Hall (a hall). Oxford, you see, has its own native dialect, a sort of pidgin posh best worn with a depressed carnation and a giant inedible chip made of class terror. Perhaps the roots of my eventual redemption were in that

Toby Young Toby Young

The only way to survive as a cyclist is to behave like you’re suicidal

I wonder how many cyclists are killed in London during tube strikes? I had a 10 a.m. meeting in the West End on Tuesday that I couldn’t cancel so made the seven-and-a-half-mile journey by bike. It was hairy, to put it mildly. You’d think it would be safer cycling in London when the tube’s not running because the traffic is almost stationary. But it isn’t, thanks to the above average number of cyclists. I found myself constantly having to overtake people, most of whom were too cautious to weave in and out of the traffic like me. The danger came when they’d gingerly poke their noses out in between cars, completely

Dot Wordsworth

Why –y? The evolution of a suffix

Hitler was ‘dark, shouty, moustachioed’ in Churchill’s eyes, or rather, that was Jonathan Rose’s view of how Churchill saw Hitler, according to Sam Leith, writing in the books pages on 19 April. Shouty is not a word Churchill would have used in exactly this sense, for which no example is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 2001. It falls in the category of –y suffixes that connote condemnation, ridicule, or contempt, like catty, churchy or beery. There are plenty of entries for a rather different sense, ‘like a shout’, as Henry Coward noted in his Choral Technique and Interpretation (1914) of untrained voices that may be ‘shouty, throaty, cavernous,

The Spectator

A shameful U-turn at the National Trust

What has happened to Dame Helen Ghosh? Last October the director-general of the National Trust seemed prepared to stand against the green orthodoxy which exists in the public and voluntary sectors. She declared that she had an ‘open mind’ on fracking, while she rejected the case for wind farms on the Trust’s land. Her approach was entirely logical. The Trust’s job is to guard the aesthetic integrity of the landscapes which it has bought with its donors’ money, or been gifted, in order to preserve. Not to deface this land with 300 ft-high wind turbines that generate pitifully little electricity. This week, however, Dame Helen and the National Trust appear to

Sam Neill

Sam Neill’s diary: Back in Blighty, remembering drinking binges of yore

I am back in the UK for work. Great time to turn up — after the grim, grey grind of the British winter. Here in Manchester, people stroll in shirtsleeves or T-shirts, though it’s still only 15 degrees. They are, in truth, dazzlingly white. Their semi-nudity strikes me as a tad premature, but then I’ve only just left my Indian summery vineyard in New Zealand via Bondi Beach. I’m here at the behest of BBC2, for a second season of The Peaky Blinders. If you didn’t see the first season, you should. And if you don’t … I know where you live. And having played Chief Inspector Campbell, I know how

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 May 2014

Home The British economy grew by 0.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2014, disappointing hotheads who’d expected 1 per cent. It was 3.1 per cent bigger than a year earlier, but 0.6 per cent smaller than in 2008. Pfizer, the American pharmaceutical company, said it wanted to take over AstraZeneca, with a £60 billion bid that would make it the biggest ever foreign takeover of a British-based company. The Labour party said it was leaving the Co-op Bank and taking its £1.2 million overdraft elsewhere. UK Financial Investments, which manages the Treasury’s 81 per cent stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland, blocked a plan for 200 per cent bonuses. A film version of Dad’s

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes: Max Clifford’s conviction vindicates juries. But so did the acquittals

The conviction of Max Clifford for indecent assaults feels like a vindication of the jury system, as did the acquittal of the many other showbiz characters charged under Operation Yewtree. One reason I keep raising questions of justice about the current obsession with paedophilia is out of suspicion that those most zealous in their accusations are unhealthily interested in the subject. This was the case with Clifford himself and, of course, with the newspapers with which he did business. Celebrity culture is, in essence, a form of pornography which incites powerful people to exploit unpowerful people. It acquires an extra twist of perversion when it turns on those it has

Lavatch

2160: 18 Down

Six unclued lights are 18 Down from the same source (five are entitled to appear; the sixth appears regularly). Six cells initially contain between two and six clashing letters; these must be resolved to display thematic 18. Elsewhere, ignore three accents and two apostrophes.   Across   10    A Republican politician maintains British dealt badly with defence material (12, hyphened) 12    Marsh tree (5) 13    In speech, lifts poet’s handles (7) 15    Awkwardly got up on camel bred to travel (9) 16    Crack plus heroin – a drug (6) 17    Protecting money, American wealthy mostly lacking heart? (8) 21    With musical backing, orator’s clipped style

Lavatch

To 2157: Song X

If the grid were a TIMEPIECE (13/12), the six perimetric words (GRANITE, LIMESTONE, SERPENTINE, GREYWACKE, DALRADIAN and HORNFELS) might collectively suggest ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which song was RECORDED (22) SIXTY (19) years ago, on 12th April 1954, by Bill Haley & His Comets. HALEY (eighth row) was to be shaded.   First prize David Peachell, Bexley, Kent Runners-up J.E. Green, St Albans, Herts; E.C. Wightman, Menston, Ilkley, W. Yorks

Will Gore

Estate agents, Elton John, and free champagne – this is how you build a thriving community

To impress prospective homeowners most estate agents usually draw the line at getting their teeth whitened and buying the second cheapest suit Top Man has to offer. The people flogging flats and houses on the site of Battersea Power Station made a bit of extra effort last night by putting on a lavish bash, with a headline performance from Elton John, for those interested in, and rich enough, to live in the shadows cast by London’s most famous chimneys. Or as a spokesman for the Battersea Development Company, the good people behind the massive redevelopment of the dilapidated site, put it, this was a party for ‘the purchasers of homes, potential

Chris Walker

Labour’s rent control policy will not solve our housing problems

Labour’s decision to impose rent controls will do little to solve our housing problems. Rent controls are at best misguided and at worst could be counterproductive, longer term. Misguided because rents have not actually been rising that fast in recent years. ONS figures show that rents rose by only 1 per cent in England in the year to March (1.4 per cent in London), a real terms fall. Indeed, since the beginning of 2011 they have only 4 per cent. Misguided also because this doesn’t deal with the root problem; a lack of supply in the housing market. Put simply we need to build many more houses, for rent and home-ownership,

Steerpike Steerpike

The strange case of the missing novelist

Mr Steerpike was last night invited to the launch of Esme Kerr’s debut novel at Daunt’s in Holland Park. The author herself was nowhere to be seen. The organisers of the launch, journalists Emily Bearn and Claudia Fitzherbert, were as uncertain as Mr S as to Kerr’s whereabouts. ‘She’s definitely here somewhere. Look there she is,’ proclaimed Fitzherbert, pointing to Bearn who was also scanning the room for the elusive Esme. Mr Steerpike suspected some rum goings-on. Despite Kerr’s mysterious absence, the party was a great success. Several stalwarts of this parish attended: former Spectator editor Alexander Chancellor, journalist Mary Killen and biographer Piers Paul Read. The Glass Bird Girl is

Douglas Murray

Gerry Adams’s arrest is astonishing

In one sense the arrest of Gerry Adams for questioning in relation to the murder of Jean McConville is not a surprise. On the other hand it is astonishing. I cannot think how many times over the years the connection between Adams and the McConville case – appalling even by the standards trawled during the Troubles – has been raised. Yet, as the years have gone on, the possibility that Adams would ever actually answer questions on the murder seemed ever more remote. Adams has always denied any involvement in this crime, and has offered the police his assistance in their inquiries. Adams presented himself at a police station yesterday

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Britain’s masculinity crisis and Osborne’s Foreign Secretary aspirations

Is the British male in serious trouble? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington Diane Abbott discusses the topic of this week’s Spectator cover feature with Isabel Hardman. Why are boys written off more frequently than girls? Are males in trouble because females are doing better? And is it now more difficult to grow up as a young boy or girl? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss why George Osborne wants to take William Hague’s job and be the next Foreign Secretary. Does he risk lowering his profile and getting entangled in the sticky business of renegotiating our relationship with