Society

Thursday

Paola Romero

Evita meets Thatcher: the woman fighting Venezuela’s autocracy

Maria Corina Machado is showing the world how opposition politicians can fight an autocrat. When President Nicolas Maduro tried to thwart her campaign by banning her from taking domestic flights, she drove between her rallies on a motorcycle. When he then banned her from running as a candidate in Venezuela’s presidential election, which takes place this Sunday, she found a retired diplomat to run as her proxy. Without even being on the ballot, she may bring down Maduro’s socialist regime. Machado mixes the crowd-pulling allure of Evita Peron with the politics of Margaret Thatcher Venezuela is used to left-wing populists whipping up crowds by railing against America, the rich and

Max Jeffery Max Jeffery

Olympics on steroids: the millionaire behind the Enhanced Games

Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. ‘Before Peter had kids, we’d go on these holidays around the world. Small group of us. Gay, tech, venture capital, founder-types,’ says D’Souza, an Australian businessman. ‘It’s quite a close-knit little community.’ Lately, because of the kids, they’ve partied at Thiel’s place, an $18 million compound on a man-made island off Miami’s turquoise coast. In December 2022, days before Thiel’s annual party, D’Souza came up with the idea of an ‘Enhanced Games’. The Olympics – but all the athletes dope. ‘That’s what I do over

The Spectator

Letters: You can grow to hate Wagner

Disappearing England Sir: Rod Liddle’s reference to Labour’s intention to build 1.5 million new houses (‘The great bee-smuggling scandal’, 13 July), even though there is not a shortage, leads one to worry where they will be located. The green belt was introduced for London in 1938 and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 extended powers with local authorities for self-designation. In 1937, John Betjeman wrote for one of his BBC talks: ‘England is disappearing and there is growing up, where the trees used to be and where the hills commanded blue vistas, another world that does not seem to be anything to do with England at all. This

Hannah Moore

The rise of the ‘divorce influencer’

On Woman’s Hour recently, Anita Rani and her guests set out to celebrate the positive sides of a woman’s midlife. Forget the crisis: your forties and fifties could instead be a time for change, a refresh. You could take up a new hobby, they said, or a new exercise regime. Or you could get a divorce! What’s alarming is that this sort of discussion isn’t unusual. I regularly spot articles in newspapers and on social media that talk about divorce as if it’s just the latest wellness trend. They usually go like this: a middle-aged woman walks out on a long marriage and insists that she’s never been happier, that

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why Elon Musk is right to leave California

Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for him in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shirt undone two daring buttons, sleeves rolled up, silver hair gelled just so. Newsom, who is now being mentioned as Kamala Harris’s running mate, models himself on Bill Clinton. People who’ve worked with him say he practises Clintonian gestures in the mirror, though the look he’s achieved is more Harley Street gynaecologist. How can Gavin Newsom sleep knowing he’s encouraged children to think of their parents as the enemy? ‘If Donald Trump succeeds, God help us, we will roll back the last half-century,’ Newsom told

Peter Jones

What Plato could teach Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil is complaining about laws preventing their particular form of antisocial protests. It is all part of a feeling that our world is sinking under the weight of legal rulings. Even Plato had doubts about what laws were for. In his perfect state, Plato made education the key to everything. Its purpose, he claimed, should be to inculcate habits appropriate to age that would last a lifetime, e.g. as small children, being silent in the presence of their elders, giving up their seats to them, keeping themselves looking neat and tidy. But the last thing that was needed was to make laws about them. So too when it

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

My shameful shortcut to perfect pesto

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been… too long since my last confession. Picture the scene. I am in the kitchen, almost literally spinning plates. I should have been focusing, prioritising the bits that needed to get done, keeping an eye on the clock. Instead I’ve been mucking about, making an unnecessary batch of cookies, re-testing some buns that almost certainly didn’t need it, but I fancied baking. And I’ve lost track of time. Emerald, gleaming with oil, slightly textured and bursting – bursting – with flavour I’d volunteered to do lunch earlier in the day when my husband had mentioned that he was in back-to-back meetings

Toby Young Toby Young

The intersectional feminist rewriting the national curriculum

The appointment of Becky Francis CBE to lead the Department for Education’s shake-up of the national curriculum is typical of Labour’s plan to embed their ideology across our institutions – or rather entrench it, since the long march is almost complete. On the face of it, Professor Francis is ‘unburdened by doctrine’, to use Sir Keir Starmer’s phrase about how Labour intends to govern. As former director of the Institute of Education and current CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, she has the outward appearance of a technocrat. But scratch the surface and, like so many Labour appointees, she emerges as a long-standing adherent of left-wing identity politics. After earning

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Why Keely Hodgkinson is the one to watch at the Olympics

The Olympics have been creeping up on us through the forest of top-class sport this summer. But now they’re here, the third time the summer Games have been held in Paris. The first was in 1900, and reflect what a very different place the world was then. There were old favourites such as track and field athletics and cycling, but less probably croquet, firefighting and fishing and – one to scare the pants off the woke warriors of today – live pigeon shooting, making its one and only appearance at the five-ringed circus. Indeed an Olympic historian, reflecting on the fate of the luckless pigeons, said: ‘This disgusting event marked

Luke McShane

A sense of danger

I have a pet theory, based not on hard data but on insights from postmortem chitchat. My theory says that novices and experts, when facing evenly matched opponents, make roughly the same number of screw-ups in a game. The difference is that the novice’s oversights will be far more significant. The novice walks into checkmate, where the grandmaster hangs a pawn. One blunders a bishop, where the other concedes a softening of the pawn structure. Strong players rely on their well-honed sense of danger to avoid the most egregious errors. After studying hundreds of thousands of tactical motifs, one just knows when a situation looks sketchy – perhaps there are a couple of undefended

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I keep my phone safe on the beach?

Q. My husband and I have just been on a wonderful long weekend abroad to a friend’s 60th birthday. We met lots of lovely new people over the three days and we would really like to keep in touch, but it seemed a bit presumptuous to go around asking for everyone’s numbers. What should I have done? – A.E., Pewsey, Wilts A. Many people of your age have already got too many friends and have no room on their ‘books’ for more. However it is quite unthreatening to ask for people’s numbers so that you can ‘stay in touch through Wordle’. Wordle is ideal since – unlike with a Scrabble

Luke McShane

No. 811

White to play. This is a variation from Mirkovic-Gluzman, Belgrade 1991. Which move allows White to gain a decisive material advantage? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 29 July. There is a prize of £20 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…Bd4+ 2 Kxd4 d2 and the pawn can’t be stopped, because the Nd5 is pinned. Last week’s winner Rodney Beddows, Torquay

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Jeremy King has done it again: The Park, reviewed

The Park is the new restaurant from Jeremy King, and it sits in a golden building to the north of Hyde Park, just off Queensway. This is an interesting district compared with Knightsbridge – it is still capable of reality – but isn’t every-where interesting compared with Knightsbridge? The Park is Art Deco of course: the presiding aesthetic of familiarity, snatched joy and inevitable doom. It looks like an exquisitely appointed cruise ship of the mid-20th century King is a specialist in grand cafés. He opened the Wolseley in Piccadilly and the Delaunay on the Aldwych, though he lost them to his feckless backers in 2022, and has begun again

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Pitch battle

In Competition 3359 you were invited to present an account of a historical event as football commentary. There were enough Battles of Hastings and Waterloo to fill a page but it seemed necessary to include some other deciders. Since so much footballese relies on war metaphors, it all gets quite confusing. I was sorry not to have room for Brian Murdoch’sentry in which ‘the French WAGs back in the fanzone at Bayeux are already embroidering their win’. The following receive £25. 25 September 1066. Welcome to Stamford Bridge, where England face Norway. The winners will meet France at Hastings, knowing a win there would make the team of ’66 national

Doc

2664: First name terms

The unclued lights, two of which accommodate two theme words, can be sorted into four trios of related words, each forming a reducing chain of 6, 5 and 4 letters. Across 11    Disentangle one French composer (7) 14    Department having some bargain dresses (5) 16    Annoying children – crazy right through (5) 19    Surfer returned French hooter at 1.10 (7) 21    Something penned by Lehar, I assume? (4) 23    A US politician entering top educational surroundings (7) 25    Old sovereign’s glittering fishes (7) 30    Severe criticisms of VAT, say (7) 32    Road to nowhere (4,3) 35    Still moving about on climbing frames (7) 37    Black market trader’s location (5) 40   

Dot Wordsworth

The hidden depths of ‘deep dive’

My husband has taken to crying out or braying ‘Haar, ha!’ at the wireless whenever he hears something particularly foolish, which is quite often. His bray was even louder than usual when one of those endless trailers invited us all to ‘dive deeper’. Like a tornado, this figure of speech has thickened into reality within the lifetime of most of us. No example earlier than 1986 has been found by the Oxford English Dictionary, which quotes a New York Times review of a television programme of that year, ‘a deep dive into nostalgia’ with the help of ‘old newsreel and movie clips’. The metaphor is intended to convey the sense

The Spectator

2661: Spectrum – solution

The unclued lights are French words or phrases which include a colour: 2, 10/32, 21A/7D, 21D, 28/8, 36/11, 37/8 and 38/15. Bleu at 8 does double duty, and ‘noir’ and ‘noire’ are the two forms. First prize Jeremiah Carter, Cambridge Runners-up Ian MacDonald, East Grinstead, W Sussex; C.R. Haigh, Hassocks, W. Sussex

The Spectator

After Rwanda: what will Labour do now?

Keir Starmer is advertising for someone to head his newly created Border Security Command. The salary is higher than his own: the person in charge of stopping the boats would earn between £140,000 and £200,000. According to the ad, the job of patrolling the English Channel can be done remotely from any one of 12 cities, including Edinburgh and Belfast. It will require coordination with the Home Office, parts of the navy and even MI5. Never mind that this goes on already, with no discernible effect. The key requirement for the job, it would seem, is to be the fall guy, someone ready to take the blame for a policy

Michael Wolff

The mystery of Melania Trump

While everybody at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was preoccupied with Donald Trump’s triumphal story after the assassination attempt and the prospect of near-certain victory in November, I dwelled on that low-rumble question of the 2024 election: where’s Melania? She had not made one campaign appearance, nor been at her husband’s side for his myriad courtroom dates. A theme of the proceedings was the adoration of Trump family members for their patriarch. From the stage, his sons and their wives extolled him as the greatest family man of all time. But no Melania. Finally, at the last moment on Thursday, when her husband had already left the VIP box,