Society

Friday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why the BBC couldn’t see any serious problem with its huge pay-offs

‘Corruption’ is a subtle word, because it describes a process rather than an event. It does not merely mean bad behaviour: it means behaviour that becomes rotten out of something which was once good. That is why it often afflicts high-minded organisations more than ordinary businesses. People who think they are collectively moral are more self-deceiving than the average market trader. Hence the current embarrassments of the BBC about huge pay-offs. The reason that the Trust and executives are now publicly blaming each other over the issue is not because one side was in the wrong and the other in the right, but because, at the time, no one involved

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Lord of the flies

It is often said that the great chessboard artist, Polish Grandmaster Akiba Rubinstein, was afflicted during tournament play by an imaginary fly, which he sought in vain to swat away. As is the nature of imaginary beings, a case in point is the A Bao A Qu, the first entry in the bible of such entities, The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, they remain undetectable to the uninitiated. The A Bao A Qu, of course, lived invisibly on the stairway of the Tower of Victory in Chittor, Rajasthan, imperceptible to all but those who had attained perfect Nirvana. It was not widely seen.   Similarly, the offending

Raymond Keene

No. 283

Black to play. This position is from Rotlewi-Rubinstein, Lodz 1907. This is the conclusion of one of Rubinstein’s most famous masterpieces. What is the quickest route to victory? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 17 September 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 shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 Qh5+ Last week’s winner T. Marlow, Northants

The Spectator

Letters | 12 September 2013

Tories and Italians Sir: Roger Scruton must be laughing, or more likely crying, to hear his Meaning of Conservatism described as the ‘Bible of the Tories’ (‘Italians for Maggie’, 7 September). Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Farrell, ‘Italians believe that only the state can bring freedom.’ But that’s closer to Scruton’s position than the ‘freedom’ Farrell imagines him to be defending. According to Scruton, ‘conservatism is not about freedom, but about authority, and freedom divorced from authority is of no use to anyone — not even to the one who possesses it’. He wrote the book, he tells us in the preface to the third edition, because:

Peter Jones

Herodotus in Sochi

As a result of Russian laws against propagating homosexuality, there are calls to boycott the 2013 Winter Olympics in Sochi and 2018 Fifa World Cup due to be held there. The West’s first historian Herodotus (5th century bc) would not have sympathised. Herodotus’ magnificent Histories of the wars fought between the Persians and the Greeks (491-479 bc) regularly digress into lengthy discussions of the culture and customs of the peoples with whom the expanding Persian empire came into contact. The subject thrills him. He is amazed at the discrepancies beween different cultures. Sex and marriage are of especial interest. Babylonians, for example, gather all girls of marriageable age in the

Taki

Taki: My perfect afternoon? Getting drunk with Spectator readers

To London for a brief visit to meet Spectator readers, as nice a reason as I can think of for getting on an airplane, except for an assignation with Rebecca Hall, my latest obsession among the fairer sex. Our digs in Old Queen Street remind me a bit of my schooldays, not that The Spectator’s building is ivy-covered and red-brick, but more in the sense of a mystical communion with the past. Who knows what goes on in one’s brain, especially when lots of booze and no sleep are the main ingredients left in that tired old sponge. Many of us were raised with a certain image of dignity, nowadays

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: How to cheat at a pub quiz without even knowing it

One evening last week, I trotted over to the caravan site’s clubhouse to use the wifi and pick up emails. One email was from a friend who reported that someone had described me, after meeting me for the first time, as an ‘intellectual’. Unsure whether to be flattered or appalled by this misjudgment, I ordered a hot panini (cheese and red onion) to save cooking dinner back at the caravan and running the battery down on the smoke detector, which was going off so often when I cooked that I’d begun using it as a timer. As I rammed the panini into my face, an elderly man, with what was

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite: My horse show shame

‘Congratulations! You’ve qualified for The Sunshine Tour!’ beamed the lady judge, as she pinned a rosette to my horse’s bridle. I don’t know what The Sunshine Tour is, but it sounds like it has nothing to do with equestrian pursuits and everything to do with putting old people on a bus and taking them on a day trip to the seaside. Whatever it is, it must be very undiscriminating because I qualified for it by coming last at my local horse show. It was my first attempt at ‘showing’ and wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t put in so much effort. The Builder Boyfriend and I had got

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: Pursued around the world by a thousand books

It is exactly 40 years since my elder brother John gave up a successful career as a publisher to set up in business on his own as an antiquarian bookseller. He lived at the time in a fine 18th-century house on Kew Green next to the botanical gardens, and perhaps for no reason other than its location he decided to specialise in botanical books. The business, conducted from his home, went quite well; but various events led him in due course to move to New York, where Kew Books, as the business was and still is called, established itself grandly in Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. This proved

Robin Oakley

Robin Oakley: Henry Candy’s brilliant bargains

Cape Peron was my easiest choice for our Twelve to Follow. When Henry Candy smiles his gentle smile, as he did after Cape Peron won the Park Hill Hospital Handicap at Newbury in early May, and tells you ‘this one could be pretty good’, you take notice. Cape Peron has run twice since and hasn’t won yet, but he will. Both at Royal Ascot and Goodwood, the ground was too firm for him, yet at Goodwood only a brilliant tactical ride by the champion jockey Richard Hughes on the Richard Hannon-trained Wentworth denied Cape Peron victory in the Betfred Mile. Entering the straight, Dane O’Neill was well positioned, ready to

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 September 2013

In any sport, a sense of elation is a dangerous thing. When a player does something good, he can’t afford to enjoy the moment: however dazzling the goal he’s scored or the ace he’s served, he can’t relax until the match is over. And so it is in bridge. It’s hard advice to follow: I’ve often lapsed into a smug reverie mid-hand upon doing something clever — and the next thing I know, everything’s fallen apart. Last week, Artur Malinowski, manager of TGRs, showed this hand he’d played to a couple of experts at the club, concealing the East-West cards: South’s double promised four spades. West led the ♥J. East

Toby Young Toby Young

Toby Young: Why do so many people want me to take on Andy Slaughter?

I was at a surprise birthday party for a member of the cabinet last week when a Conservative minister spotted me walking past and grabbed my arm. ‘You must do it,’ he said. ‘Do what?’ ‘Become the Conservative candidate in Hammersmith. If all you manage to do is defeat Andy Slaughter and then spend the rest of your life on the backbenches you’ll still have achieved far more than most of us in politics. He’s ghastly, that man, -ghastly.’ This has been a common reaction to my disclosure in The Spectator that I’m thinking of embarking on a political career. Slaughter may have a majority of 3,549 but he’s far

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: The rules of wearing a dressing gown

Q. What to do when you are an unwilling eavesdropper in a train carriage in which people you know assume they are alone and start talking very indiscreetly about someone else you know and you have left it too late to alert them to your presence? — Name and address withheld A. Ideally you will have access to earphones and some sort of electronic device and can walk through the carriage dopily, as though looking for a newspaper. Wrench out the headphones theatrically on seeing the talkers. In the absence of headphones, duck your head down, walk backwards to the nearest connecting doors and, when they wheeze open, walk through

Simon Schama

Simon Schama’s diary: The British divide? Proms vs ‘Am I bovvered’

‘Wider still and wider, may thy bounds be set,’ the ecstatic throng sang at the Last Night of the Proms. They were partying like it was 1902, even though it seemed like the moral territory occupied by hope (not to mention glory) was growing narrower. Perhaps it has been ever thus, but it seems apparent that there are two versions of Britain on offer right now: Britannia Promlandia and Tate Britain, as in Catherine Tate: the commonwealth of ‘Am I Bovvered?’ Promlandia’s celebrations were cued up this time by David Cameron’s St Petersburg impersonation of Hugh Grant, schoolboyishly ticking off all things Bright and British — footie, Shakespeare and, er,

The Spectator

How to save the BBC? Privatise it

Three years ago, our columnist and former editor Charles Moore was summoned to Hastings Magistrates’ Court to pay £807 for refusing to pay his television licence. He was protesting against the BBC’s ‘gross violation of its charter’ by broadcasting obscene phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. The court did not have much time to hear his case, or anyone else’s. That day, 560 others would have been prosecuted for not paying their dues to the BBC. Now it has risen to 700 a day, accounting for an extraordinary one in ten of English court cases. We now know why

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language: the dark side of squee

Oxford Dictionaries have been adding some rather silly words to their online resources, such as phablet (‘a smartphone with a large screen’, a portmanteau word, from phone and tablet) or jorts (‘jean shorts’, another portmanteau word). I can’t see much future in them, nor could I in squee, until I had a conversation with Veronica. Squee is an exclamation of delight, or the related noun or verb. I mentioned to Veronica that it reminded me of Mr Smee, the genial pirate in Peter Pan, ‘a man who stabbed without offence’, as Barrie chillingly puts it. Veronica explained that Squee was a character too, who originally appeared in Johnny the Homicidal

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 September 2013

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the British economy was ‘turning a corner’, with ‘tentative signs of a balanced, broad based and sustainable recovery’. Unemployment fell to 7.7 per cent for the quarter May to July from 7.8 in the previous quarter. Jaguar Land Rover is to create 1,700 jobs at Solihull, where it is planning production of aluminium chassis. The Highways Agency published details of a new 25-mile stretch of toll-road on the A14 bypassing Huntingdon. Churches on the Isle of Sheppey held prayers of thanksgiving that no one was killed in a crash in the fog involving 130 cars on the bridge to the

The Spectator

Barometer | 12 September 2013

Trust us The National Trust opened the Big Brother House at Elstree Studios at the weekend. Some other less grand National Trust properties: — 575 Wandsworth Road, Lambeth. 19th-century terraced house that was home to Kenyan-born civil servant Khadambi Asalache who, to keep out the damp, decorated the walls with elaborate panels made from pine salvaged from skips. — Birmingham Back-to-Backs. A 19th-century courtyard of artisans’ dwellings which survived slum-clearance. — Mr Straw’s House. 1920s semi in Worksop kept just as the day it was built. — 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool. 1950s council house that was the childhood home of Paul McCartney. Trust me George Osborne said he had been

Columba

2130: Elusive

Each of 23 clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter. Each of 13 clues is of the same type, but includes two extra letters, next to each other within the jumble. The extras spell a 13-word assertion (in ODQ) by an unclued light. Concealed in a straight line in the grid is a definition (an eight-letter word) which, according to the quotation, would elude any of the other unclued lights; this word must be highlighted. Two unclued lights consist of two words each.   Across   6    Lydia is young descendant of Fatima (6) 12    Indigenous plant bin