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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
This month’s mini-bar is from the estimable Yapp Bros, who specialise in fossicking out first-rate wines, often from small vineyards, in the Loire and the Rhône. These are subtle and sophisticated bottles — serious wines some might say — which you will not find in supermarkets. Nor offered by those allegedly value firms that sell vast quantities of mediocre booze at knockdown prices. If you see a wine advertised at £4.95 a bottle, reduced from £7.50, believe me you’ll be lucky if it’s even worth £4.95. And Yapp’s have kindly knocked £1 a bottle off every selection which, with free delivery, makes for a handsome saving. St Pourçain is in the geographical
Australia One of the odd things about bushfires as we know them in Australia is the unlikely truces declared between species normally very keen to inject toxins or tear out each other’s throats. When the state of Victoria burnt and 173 people died in 2009, one young woman from the picturesque hamlet of Marysville found shelter in a large drainage pipe, where she was soon joined by a dog, a tiger snake and a wombat. The foursome endured each other’s company without protest as all but a handful of homes in a town of 400 souls was turned to ash, along with 32 of its citizens. At one point, the
For 17 years I have been reporting on one of the most haunting tragedies of our modern world — the ruthless persecution of the last survivors of the original inhabitants of southern Africa, the bushmen, by a policy seemingly designed to wipe them from the earth. Those responsible are not wicked white colonialists but the government of Botswana, which, thanks to its vast diamond reserves, is per capita the richest country in Africa. We in Britain, however, should take a special interest in this story because through most of that time our Foreign Office has given full support to the policy which created this tragedy, in breach of a solemn
How should we describe the people who allegedly abducted that little girl in Greece, after a neighbour claimed that they actually paid £850 for her to a passing Bulgarian? It is a minefield we are entering now, having asked this question. Clearly the terms which hitherto some of us may have employed, not always affectionately — pikey, gyppo, tinker — are likely to get you into trouble with the police these days. Probably more trouble than if you, for example, dug up the road to remove a few hundred yards of fibre optic cable, or declined year upon year to pay your taxes. So those three are out. Gypsy, we
First World, Third World, East, West, North and South; every few years economists come up with yet another supposedly more acceptable way of slicing humanity into manageable chunks. Mostly these great divides are riven by wealth; sometimes (RIP Second World) by ideology. But I think it’s time to name a new divide, a more fundamental, more puzzling one — a split between worlds that will define the 21st century much as the Iron Curtain defined the 20th. I am talking about the morality gap. It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On
I’d never noticed that there aren’t any tits on Facebook. The place always seems brimming with right tits to me. But no. According to this week’s mumbling bien-pensant scandal, the world’s largest social network has decided to allow newsy videos of murder and beheading and all the rest, but still not tits, and this is an outrage. Strangely enough, it’s mainly regarded as an outrage by the sort of people who are normally to be found slamming publications such as men’s mags and the Sun because they minimise the proper news and have tits all over the place. Honestly. Anybody would think these people just like to be cross, or
Nashville, TN All the drama coming out of Washington in the last few weeks has obscured some seriously good news: federal government spending is falling. And not at a trickle: think the White Cliffs of Dover. Not since the economic boom following 1945 have Americans seen such a rapid decline in the government’s claim on the nation’s resources — falling by a welcome $94 billion over two years. You need to go back to the end of the Korean war to find a time when US government spending has actually declined over two years. If Republicans in the House stick to the sequester and future caps already built into current
Prediction, as Mervyn King once observed, is ‘a stab in the dark’. Who can say with confidence where the wholesale price of electricity will be in ten years’ time, let alone 45 years hence at the end of the contract struck by Energy Secretary Ed Davey with EDF of France for the building of the £16 billion Hinkley Point nuclear station? We can be pretty sure the price will be a lot higher than today’s and it’s not mad to think it might have doubled by 2023, which is the starting assumption of the EDF deal. David Cameron might be right that energy costs will be ‘lower than they might
Someone in New York told me this story. I admit that I didn’t believe it when I first heard it. But a little online research seems to confirm that it is true. It concerns a group of people who had bought early versions of the Tesla Model S, a $90,000 high-performance electric car much loved by Silicon Valley’s rich set. The earlier versions of these cars behaved slightly differently from a standard petrol vehicle. In particular there was no ‘creep’. For the benefit of European readers irrationally wedded to the stick shift, I should explain that ‘creep’ is a feature of almost all cars with automatic transmission. It means that
What, one wonders, will John Eliot Gardiner be chiefly remembered for? Perhaps, by many who have worked with him, for his notorious rudeness to performers and colleagues. At one point in his marvellous new book on Bach he refers to the master ‘losing his rag with musicians’ (as a corrective to the ‘Godlike image’ of Bach that posterity has tended to prefer), and one senses a not entirely veiled sympathy: one struggling director excusing another, admittedly greater, but in that respect at least no different. For while Gardiner doesn’t, as far as I know, compose, he has been and remains beyond question one of the most influential performing musicians of
In Competition 2820 you were invited to supply a postscript to any well-known novel. This challenge was suggested by a reader who drew my attention to Barbara Hardy’s neo-Victorian gem Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth Century Postscripts, which includes afterwords to Little Dorrit and Mansfield Park. I hoped it might appeal to anyone who has ever wondered whether Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy lived happily ever after. Peter Ridley, Josephine Boyle, Rob Stuart and Adrian Fry were strong runners-up. The winners pocket £25 each and this week’s top dog is D.A. Prince, who takes £30. Ralph winced as the man, porphory-faced and fleshy, seized his hand. ‘Jack,’ he said.