Society

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

All not well with welfare cap

A tough message on welfare is one of the ways that both Labour and the Tories think they can win in 2015. Ed Miliband upset some on the left yesterday with his plans to freeze child benefit and dock jobseekers’ allowance from under-21s not in employment or training, while the Tories constantly trumpet the gains they’ve already seen in people coming off benefits as a sign that their reforms are working. But the suggestion today, in a leak to the BBC, that the Employment and Support Allowance is getting so expensive that the government could break its shiny new welfare cap, threatens to undermine the Conservative narrative on welfare. Iain

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Hat trick

For the second year running, 24-year-old Sergei Karjakin has won the Norway International, on both occasions ahead of Magnus Carlsen. The final scores, out of 9, were as follows: Karjakin 6; Carlsen 5½; Grischuk 5; Caruana and Topalov 4½; Aronian, Svidler, Kramnik and Giri 4; Agdestein 3½. Of the world elite, only Anand and Nakamura were absent. The former world champion Kramnik, now 38, was the early leader but faded towards the end. Karjakin, in contrast, achieved the feat of winning his last three games, against Giri, Kramnik and Caruana.   Giri-Karjakin: Norway Chess 2014 (see diagram 1)   With bishop against White’s rook, Karjakin had been defending tenaciously for many hours

Raymond Keene

No. 319

Black to play. This is a variation from Svidler-Carlsen, Norway Chess 2014. Failing to win this game cost Carlsen first place in the tournament. Black has a strong attack but his knight and rook are threatened. What is his best move? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 24 June 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 d8Q+ Last week’s winner Stewart Reuben, Twickenham, Middlesex

Taki

Coming soon: my engagement to Kristin Scott Thomas

As everyone who has ever joined a club knows, Pugs is the world’s most exclusive one, its members ranging from German nobility and Greek and Danish royalty to the British upper classes, Indian nobility and American and Greek aristocracy. Plus Sir Bob Geldof and Roger Taylor of pop music royalty. Club rules prohibit membership to exceed 21, hence a titanic struggle is taking place, as I write, to fill the last two spots. We are, at present, 19 members. Last week in London, the annual Pugs lunch took place and I flew over for it from New York, despite running a temperature and suffering from flu. Mind you, it was

Jeremy Clarke

An orgy of violence at the summer fête

After three days tête-à-tête (and sometimes tête-à-pied) I walked into town alone to get some air and see what the town was like and the people in it. In one direction, above the hills, the sky was black. Above the town, however, the sun was shining fiercely through a gap in the clouds. Approaching the outskirts, I heard African drumming and a man yelling with demented good humour into a microphone. A single strand of bunting strung between the lamp posts told that the town was celebrating its summer fête. The first person I encountered was a man of about 30. He was walking towards me carrying a plastic litre

Melissa Kite

To the eco-warrior on the moped…

‘Well,’ said my gay lawyer friend Stephen as I pulled over to drop him off at Sloane Square Tube, ‘it’s been a lovely evening. Absolutely lovely.’ And he opened the door and started to get out into Holbein Place, then stopped, as he always does, to have another little chat about how lovely the evening had been. ‘Yes, it’s been lovely,’ I said, leaving the car in Drive and fondling the gear stick ostentatiously to emphasise that I was not going to be parking. ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Absolutely lovely. What a nice evening.’ ‘Really nice.’ And I pushed the shift up into Park and then back down noisily into Drive

Alexander Chancellor

On being fired – and hired – as an editor

Last week was unusual. At the start of it, I was mooching about in the country in my customary way, doing little odd jobs and fretting over the fate of my poultry, which is once again under attack from foxes. I have yet to see a fox in Northamptonshire this year, but the farmer says there is a fox’s lair in an old barn in the park below my house. He sits there with his shotgun most evenings at dusk, but he never seems to get a shot at one. I have to admit there’s no evidence that foxes are responsible for the losses among my flock of ducks, but

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 19 June 2014

It takes a lot for me to give up on a ‘double-dummy’ bridge problem — i.e. one in which you are shown all four hands and told game or slam is possible but have to work out how. I tell myself to imagine that I’m locked in a cell and won’t be released until I get the answer: surely if I think long and hard enough, it will come to me. But solving bridge puzzles is not just a matter of thought power. Equally important is whether or not you’ve seen the type of problem involved before. It’s rather like trying to solve a cryptic crossword puzzle: even the most

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Islamophobia, breast-feeding and Bach

Rational fear Sir: An interesting contrast between the articles by Douglas Murray and Innes Bowen on Islamic influence in the UK (‘Save the children’, 14 June), and the one by Matthew Parris. Mr Parris sees no essential difference between faith schools. But Christians do not on the whole advocate holy wars against non-Christians, or demand that adulterous women be stoned to death, or that anyone who insults their religion should be beheaded. True, there was a time when the Church might have done all these things, but that was hundreds of years in the past and we are now more enlightened. Recent events in Syria and Nigeria, and now in

The Spectator

The bits of Magna Carta that David Cameron won’t want taught in schools

The not-so-great charter David Cameron wants every child to be taught about Magna Carta. Some bits he might want to leave out: — ‘If one who has borrowed from the Jews any sum, great or small, die before that loan be repaid, the debt shall not bear interest while the heir is under age.’ — ‘No one shall be arrested or imprisoned upon the appeal of a woman, for the death of any other than her husband.’ Foul play Is there a correlation between bad behaviour from a country’s football team and violence in the country as a whole? WORST-BEHAVED TEAMS IN EUROPE Homicides per 100,000 people Ukraine 4.3 Romania

Peter Jones

How ancient Athens beat tax avoidance

The taxman will soon be ordering those planning dodgy tax avoidance schemes to declare them beforehand and pay the full tax on them up front. Only if HMRC finally decides the scheme is legal will the tax rebate be allowed. This is a very Greek principle, which could help with the problem of bankers’ bonuses. The 4th century bc Athenian tax system was very progressive: only the richest paid any at all. In times of war, those with a certain value of declared property were liable for an emergency tax (eisphora), levied at 1 or 2 per cent. These wealthy Athenians — numbered in the thousands — were grouped into

Dot Wordsworth

Terrorists still can’t ‘execute’ anyone

During the sudden advances of ISIS in Iraq, one visual image stood for their brutality. As the Daily Mail reported it, there was ‘a propaganda video depicting appalling scenes including a businessman being dragged from his car and executed at the roadside with a pistol to the back of his head’. I’ve heard from friends in the press, though not at the Daily Mail, that this description enraged readers. It wasn’t the fact, but the use of the word executed. This, they pointed out, meant the commission of a sentence imposed by a court, which was certainly not the case here. To execute, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What’s the cure for a workshy teenager?

Q. I agreed to give (paid) gap-year work experience in my own large garden to the grandson of an extremely nice neighbour. I need the assistance and, in theory, a willing and able novice could learn a lot from me. The boy is due to start soon but now I’ve heard from someone who’s been in close daily contact with him that during his recent study leave for A levels, he was rarely seen off a sun lounger, where he was not even reading but was glued to an iPhone or some gaming device and constantly yawning. I don’t want to fall out with my lovely neighbour but nor do

Toby Young Toby Young

It’s time to face down the greatest intellectual threat of our era (oh, and Ed Miliband)

As you’re reading this, I will still be recovering from the dinner I’m due to attend this week to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank founded by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Earlier the same day, I’m due to appear on a panel with various conservative grandees to discuss whether the other side has won. Classical liberals emerged victorious from the battle of ideas in the 1980s, thanks in part to the work of the CPS, but it’s beginning to look as though we’ll have to have the same arguments all over again. One reason for concern is the hard left turn

Dan Snow

Dan Snow’s diary: Making World Cup history

Could there be a more timely advert for the Better Together campaign than on the field of sport? What the England football team manifestly need is the man who is now the best British player, an offensive winger with the speed of a cheetah and the tactical brain of Rommel — proud Welshman, proud Brit, Gareth Bale. My obsession during international sports tournaments is to find appropriate historic parallels for every game. Holland made it easy for me with a destruction of Spain reminiscent of the 1639 annihilation of the Spanish fleet at the Battle of the Downs off the east coast of Kent: a decisive clash that ended conclusively

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes: Diana’s bed, Boris’s dirty trick and Prince Philip’s mystery tie

On Friday night, I went to Althorp, childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales, to speak at its literary festival. My first duty was to appear on the panel of the BBC’s Any Questions? in a tent there. It was 30 years to the month that I had first been on the programme. Then it was at Uppingham School, presented by David Jacobs, and the panel included Roy Hattersley and Esther Rantzen. This time, it was presented by Jonathan Dimbleby, and the panel was George Galloway, Nigel Evans (the Tory MP who did not rape any men), and a beautiful woman called Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 June 2014

Home With war engulfing Iraq, Britain set about reopening its embassy in Tehran, closed in 2011. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, ruled out British military action. The government made it a crime to associate with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or al-Sham), the salafist armed movement known as ISIS. About 400 Britons were thought to be fighting on their side. The government can intercept Facebook, Twitter and Google without individual warrants, because they are based externally, the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism admitted in a law case. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, ran into heavy weather trying to prevent Jean-Claude Juncker being appointed president of the European Commission.

The Spectator

We won the Cold War – and then lost our way

It would have been easy enough to imagine the 25th anniversary of the Eastern European revolutions being marked with a conference on liberty held in honour of Lady Thatcher — a conference which was held this week. But that is just about the only thing which could possibly have been foreseen from the vantage point of a quarter of a century ago. Who could have predicted then that the stream of Eastern European migrants flooding westwards in the hope of a better life, so welcomed then in their Trabants, would come to be seen so negatively that the desire to keep them out caused the rise of a fourth party

Doc

2167: Groupies

The unclued lights are of a kind and are listed together in Chambers 2011. Solvers should highlight two normally clued solutions which together form another theme-word.   Across   1    Ties series of games with instrumentalists (11, two words) 7    Small county’s struggle (3) 11    Clog has lost its tip – repaired clog (6) 16    Young lad from Nantwich, rising (5) 17    Number one difficulty in the Big Apple (6) 18    Old count makes school on time (5) 20    Dazed state from formal protest? Not half (6) 21    Salesman’s patter at station 13 (5) 22    Publishing what the petitioner is doing