Society

Thursday

Robin Oakley

The Qataris are influencing every aspect of racing

Not having the odd £100,000 to spare, I had never before joined the world’s richest owners and their bloodstock agents at Tattersalls yearling sales. It was my loss. Sheikhs in tracksuits and princes in flat caps mingle with ruddy-faced, padded-jacket consignors. In the sales ring, auctioneers rattle through their machinegun patter: ‘What do you want to get her away?…Here’s a wonderful chance to buy into this family who rarely come up for auction, do I have 100,000?…280,000 will seal the deal…he goes right-handed now at 750,000, any more outside?…The hammer’s up, 280,000 will seal the deal.’ They work through 22 lots an hour (at an average price this year for

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 24 October 2013

It’s difficult for non-players to imagine the extent to which bridge hands can torment us. I’ve spent hours this week mulling over a fiendishly complicated slam, endlessly jotting down diagrams on bits of paper and snapping at my children whenever they interrupted my train of thought. I described it last time — it was played by Fulvio Fantoni and won Declarer Play of the Year. When I showed it to the manager of TGRs, Artur Malinowski, he spotted a superior line. See what you think: East had passed and then made a take-out double (vul), strongly suggesting a void in hearts. Fantoni won the ♣ lead and played a low heart

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan Aitken’s diary: My life as a Christian outreach speaker

The last time I wrote for The Spectator I was sitting in a prison cell. I sent the then editor a poem called ‘The Ballad of Belmarsh Gaol’. Instead of printing it in the poetry column, Frank Johnson put it on the magazine’s cover. It received what is euphemistically called ‘a mixed reception’ — so mixed that I have never again tried my hand at verse. In those dark days 14 years ago I was wrestling with my self-inflicted agonies of defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and jail. As I contemplated my non-future, its only certainty was that I would never again be in demand as a public speaker or as a

Toby Young Toby Young

Toby Young: It’s biological, I become a caveman when my child is sick

The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after school and hardly a rare occurrence so I didn’t think anything of it. The following morning, he still had a tummy ache. Not a good enough reason to miss school in my opinion, but Caroline thought otherwise. Before I left for a meeting I told him to eat some toast. ‘You’re probably just hungry,’ I said. By lunchtime the pain had become localised on the lower left-hand side of his stomach and Caroline decided to Google his symptoms. It sounded like it could be appendicitis so she took him to

The Spectator

How the Spectator helped blow the whistle on health tourism

In February, an NHS surgeon came to The Spectator’s offices to discuss a piece he felt it was time to write. He wanted to blow the whistle on health tourism. Professor J. Meirion Thomas knew he was taking a tough decision, given the hostile reaction of the doctors’ unions and civil servants to anyone who makes the slightest criticism of the NHS. But the Francis Report into the Stafford Hospital scandal had just come out, reminding GPs of their ‘statutory duty of candour’. The professor said that he would like to expose what he regarded as the systematic abuse of the NHS. His Spectator article was read at the highest

The Spectator

Barometer: How is the National Theatre like Tesco? 

National statistics Some lesser-known facts about the National Theatre: — 26 per cent of its income comes from box office sales on the South Bank, 33 per cent from commercial productions elsewhere and 20 per cent from government grants. — Attendances at the main Olivier Theatre have fallen year on year since 2008/09, from 402,000 to 342,000. — Overall attendances including touring productions rose from 817,000 to 1.48 million. — While Prince Charles likened the building, by Denys Lasdun, to a nuclear power station, Sir John Betjeman, not generally a fan of modern architecture, said he ‘gasped with delight’ when he first saw it. — Like Tesco, the National Theatre

Dot Wordsworth

The bare-brained youth of south London

‘Bare? Extra? What does it all mean?’ asked my husband, sounding like George Smiley in the middle of a particularly puzzling tangle of disinformation. My husband had just been reading about the Harris Academy in Upper Norwood (south London), which has banned its pupils (or students as they all seem to have become) from using a list of words including coz, ain’t, like, innit, yeah (at the end of a sentence) and basically (at the beginning). Those, he could agree, were annoying in the wrong context, but he couldn’t see why bare and extra should be singled out. As Veronica was able to explain to her father, bare is a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 24 October 2013

Home The government agreed a guaranteed price for electricity that persuaded a consortium led by the French-owned EDF Energy and including Chinese investors to agree to build the Hinkley Point C power station in Somerset. The strike price agreed was £92.50 per megawatt hour (compared with a current wholesale price of £45). Following an energy price rise by SSE of 8.2 per cent, British Gas said it was to raise prices by 9.2 per cent and NPower by 10.4 per cent. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that this was ‘extremely disappointing news’. Sir John Major, a former prime minister, helpfully suggested a windfall tax on energy profits. The Daily

Mr Magoo

2136: Howdunit

Six of the unclued entries (one of three words, three of two words and one hyphened; all in Chambers apart from one name; unchecked letters can spell ACTOR OR WOMEN ETC ARE CHIEF SUSPECT) share a connection which will allow the other two to be deduced.   Across   9 Apparently overdrawn, and without a leg to stand on? (4) 11 Metal band twisted into antenna on the top of a building? (10) 14 A poster in the capital of Vietnam’s summer palace (6) 16 Old saw (5) 17 Took great steps to abridge editor (5) 20 Old plants initially tossed into filthy ash-can (7) 21 Feudal tenant taking half-dollar

Mr Magoo

To 2133: FM

Initial letters of superfluous words in clues give titles of ALBUMS (29D) by FLEETWOOD MAC (39).  8A, 25, 33 and 34 are RUMOURS; 12 defines TUSK, and 1A defines MIRAGE; and TANGO IN THE NIGHT indicates 16 /17.   First prize M. Day, London N6 Runners-up Paul Davies, Reading, Berks; Hilda Ball, Belfast

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The ‘gangbusters’ economy

Tomorrow’s GDP figures are expected to show that the economy is no longer bouncing along the bottom but is now in steady recovery with a second successive quarter of robust growth. It is all very different from the start of the year when the country appeared to be on the verge of a triple dip recession. As I say in this week’s magazine, when in early February the Chancellor’s chief economic adviser Rupert Harrison told a crunch Downing Street meeting that the economy would be going ‘gangbusters’ by late summer, early autumn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn was so taken aback by the confidence of the prediction

Sebastian Payne

The HS2 fight back begins next week. But will it work?

Ministers are increasingly aware of an uphill struggle on HS2. Next week, they will try to make the case for the line again, in the face of increasing opposition, with the publication of the Department of Transport’s strategic case paper, which will respond to criticisms from the Public Accounts Committee and National Audit Office on the viability of the project. Giving up on trying to win the economic case for HS2 (which has been widely lambasted), the government hopes to turn the tide by instead focusing on the capacity arguments. As James reported last month, the DfT will attempt to shift the HS2 debate to why we need a new

Sebastian Payne

NHS whistleblower: health tourism crackdown is an ineffective ‘disaster’

Will the government’s plans to tackle abuse of the NHS by foreigners make any difference? The surgeon who first blew the whistle on health tourism, Professor J. Meirion Thomas, believes they aren’t going far enough and may even have a negative impact. He first spoke out in the pages of The Spectator and gives his verdict on this week’s View from 22 podcast. The independent report and proposals, particularly the levy on students and temporary foreign visitors, won’t make much difference says Thomas: listen to ‘Prof J Meirion Thomas on Britain’s health tourism ‘disaster’’ on Audioboo

Andrew Bridgen

HS2 is a grandstand project – and the sums just don’t add up

HS2 is a solution looking for a problem. Since its conception, HS2 has been a tale of shape shifting as first it was about time, then about bridging the north south divide, then about capacity before we are told it is simply the right thing to do. The reason the argument is shifting is because it is built of a poor business case which when scrutinised falls apart and reveals a tide of evasive evidence. Take for instance the principle argument when the HS2 scheme was unveiled by Labour. It was that 20 minutes could be saved on the journey time between London and Birmingham. Based on this, for Phase

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Co-op affair is a big smash

More attention should be paid to the failure of the Co-op Bank. It suggests that an ‘ethical’ motivation does not guarantee that the interests of the customer will be well served. Indeed, it may even serve those interests worse, because people who congratulate themselves on their motives are often more easily satisfied with poor results. The Co-op affair is a big smash. The mutual model is not a panacea. I find it encouraging, morally, that hedgies, the ‘vulture funds’ of capitalism, are sorting it out. This is an extract from Charles Moore’sSpectator’s Notes in this week’s magazine. Click here to read for free with a trial of The Spectator app for iPad and iPhone.

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 podcast: police vs liberty, health tourism and Westminster’s economic week

Are the police wasting too much time on Twitter instead of catching criminals? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Nick Cohen looks at what Britain’s fall in crime has done to policing methods. Is the fall responsible for the police’s heightened in what people say on social media? What does this mean for our civil liberties and freedom of speech? Consultant NHS surgeon J. Meirion Thomas also joins to explain how The Spectator helped blow the whistle on health tourism abuses. Will the government’s plans to tackle systematic abuses by migrants work? How much effect will the levy on students and temporary visitors have? Are the figures quoted by the Department of

Bruce Anderson

Drink: the romance of fall

The fall: one of the few instances where American English is superior to English English. ‘Autumn’ has a comfortable charm, but ‘fall’ captures the pathos of evanescence. This might seem curious, for in New England the fall is grandiloquent. Nature is rarely so glorious, so defiant. In Glen Lyon last week, there was more of a sense of fall. When the sun shone, the greens and yellows and browns still danced: mid-autumn spring. Outside my bedroom window there was a rowan tree, with an exuberance of blood-red berries. Yet there was an aura of transience — the natural world falling gently into winter’s grasp — and the hills were swathed

Johnnie Kerr

Notes on… Skiing in Austria

I have spent a week of every winter of my life with my family in Zürs, a small village in Arlberg, Austria. It isn’t at all the most famous resort in the region — with fewer slopes than Lech and a quieter nightlife than St. Anton — nevertheless, it possesses a quality that brings most who go there back, season after season. Part of the place’s attraction must be that it couldn’t exist at all without skiing, from which it derives practically its entire economy, and consequently great pride. Except for a few cattle it is entirely uninhabited during the non-season (rather like that hotel in The Shining), which effectively