Society

Thursday

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 1 August 2013

I haven’t played rubber bridge for a few years now (the demands of young children), but recently I’ve been hearing the siren call again — and decided to pop into my old haunt TGRs. I wanted to watch for a while, rather than play (I’m too rusty), and what great timing it turned out to be. The club’s manager, the brilliant Artur Malinowski, had just landed in a grand slam:   West led a trump. Artur (South) drew trumps in two rounds. If spades break 4-4, then one spade ruff will provide four discards for the losing clubs. Artur saw an additional chance. He cashed three top spades: West discarded

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 August 2013

Home Barclays decided to issue £5.8 billion in shares to meet capital reserve requirements from the Bank of England. Lord Howell of Guildford, a former energy secretary, who does not speak for the government but happens to be George Osborne’s father in law, asking a question in the Lords about fracking for shale gas, said: ‘There are large and uninhabited and desolate areas. Certainly in part of the north-east.’ He later apologised. Vicky Pryce, the disgraced former wife of Chris Huhne, the disgraced former Cabinet minister, had her companionship of the Order of the Bath ‘cancelled and annulled’. A third Army reservist who took part in an SAS selection training

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language: The springs before the Arab Spring

Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (published 1747), he had written of gales (presumably lesser ones, scarcely registering 8 on the Beaufort scale) that seemed ‘redolent of joy and youth’ and able ‘to breathe a second spring’. The phrase second spring was picked up by John Henry Newman, in 1852, to describe the re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy under Cardinal Wiseman. This was ‘a national commotion, almost without parallel, more violent than has happened here for centuries’, he declared. ‘It is the coming in of a

Columba

2124: Pack

Seven unclued lights are words that may be regarded as 13 18.  The remaining unclued light supplies the material with which, in normal clue order, the 18 are 13. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across 4 Rags, acceptable kind, around revolving stand (9) 10 Mind being occupied by time in places where ships are repaired (10) 12 Yellow element, not black, in scarf (7) 14 Hope stirred by right class of magistrates (5) 15 Chance to hold Anglo-Norman goblet (5) 16 So, after expression of surprise, getting theme (6) 22 Dependant from different era, inert (8) 23 Foolery new in form following revolutionary craze (7) 24 Case that is about

Columba

Solution to 2121: Take Care

All the unclued lights mean ‘Goodbye’.   First prize Alan Donovan, Croydon, Surrey Runners-up Mary Varela, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex; Geoffrey Telfer, Shipley, West Yorks

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Twitter abuse wars, Theresa vs Boris and Egypt’s Arab winter

Will online abuse and trolling ever be stopped? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Hugo Rifkind discusses his Spectator column on the subject with Helen Lewis of the New Statesman. They ask if trolling has got better or worse? What, if anything, can or should be done about ‘morons’ who mindlessly attack people? And should politicians — like Stella Creasy — be influencing the moderation policies of social networks like Twitter? James Forsyth and Toby Young discuss the next Tory leadership battle: Theresa May vs. Boris Johnson. James reports that these two top Tories are jostling to succeed David Cameron, even though the PM is expected to be in

David Blackburn

New working peers announced

Here is the list of new working peers. It features a number of donors and cronies, which is not remotely surprisingly. And yesterday’s party hacks get gifted a tomorrow – Annabel Goldie being the most conspicuous example. There are one or two interesting names, though – Doreen Lawrence and Daniel Finkelstein, for instance. No UKIP peerages, you’ll note.   Conservative party Richard Balfe – former MEP and Conservative Party Envoy to the Trade Unions and Cooperative movement Sir Anthony Bamford DL – Chairman and Managing Director of JCB Nicholas Bourne – former Leader of the Conservative Group in the National Assembly for Wales Matthew Carrington – former Conservative MP Daniel Finkelstein OBE – Associate Editor of The Times and former Head of Policy for the Conservative

Michael Hanlon

Why soon we’ll all be vegetarian

I know some lovely vegetarians but could never imagine joining their ranks. Something about a life fuelled entirely by plants fills me with dread. The veggie’s world is a pale planet, an insipid facsimile of the real thing. Think of the fear all true carnivores have of finding out at a dinner party that veggies are present or, worse, in charge; the wondering if at least there will be cheese, the troubling knowledge that those who deny the flesh often go the whole hog (mustn’t think of hogs… can always have a bacon sarnie when we get home) and so there possibly won’t be wine either. Vegetarians have often been

Bruce Anderson

When Glyndebourne is the most perfect place on earth

Glyndebourne. There is no single quintessential example of English scenery, but this is one of the finest. The landscape is  old, and verdant. There has been tillage and pasturage here for millennia, and the outcome is harmony, as if tamed nature has embraced man’s gentle mastery. On a sunny summer evening, earth has not anything to show more fair Figaro. Anyone reading the libretto might conclude that earth had not anything to show more absurd. What is this nonsense: a Feydeau farce mitigated by a bit of carpentry? There is a simple answer: the best of all comedies, apart from Shakespeare — and more easily, more continually laughter-worthy than even

Simon Hoggart

August Mini-Bar

Mark Cronshaw at The Wine Company of Colchester has helped me assemble half a dozen luscious wines. They are pricier than our normal range, but by golly they’re good, and generously discounted. You can buy by the case of six, or get a sampler with one of each wine. You will not be remotely -disappointed. First is a Champagne from a small grower, Michel Guilleminot (1). It’s non-vintage but tastes to me fuller and richer than most of the famous brands. Unsurprising, since it’s a blanc de noirs, made from the insides of Pinot Noir. French people tend not to buy the grandes marques that fill our shop shelves; they

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Sorry, but internet trolling will be with us forever

This is not to be a column about Twitter. Can’t abide columns about Twitter. I’ve written a few, I know, but this is not to be another one. I promise. Time was, though, it was actually quite hard to find out what people thought, if they weren’t you. I mean, you could go out and ask them, but the process always ended with you being in a supermarket car park, and them being mental and not knowing what the Working Time Directive even was anyway. Twitter is a pipe of views coming straight to your screen. So explicitly not writing about it can feel like going out into the world

Lucy Vickery

The new black

In Competition 2808 you were invited to invent a new addition to the genre that already includes Tartan Noir and Nordic Noir. This was another invitation to leap aboard the latest literary bandwagon. The new noirs stretched from Devon to space via Middle Earth and Antarctica. You didn’t allow yourselves to be pinned down by geography, though. Basil Ransome-Davies is the proud progenitor of Expat Noir and pockets £30, while the rest of the winners earn £25.   Commissaire Lemaître studied the transcripts, baffled and despondent. With all their blogging and emailing the English seemed obsessed by mundane grouches, and for ever in need of advice or consolation. Requests for

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Losses hit Lebedev, the man of letters

Some years ago, soon after he ploughed £30 million into the Independent titles, Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev proclaimed: ‘I’m taught to be more Marcus Aurelius than Caracalla if you know your Roman history.’ He said even nicer things about his new employees: ‘If we’re lucky to find somebody like Mark Twain, who used to be a reporter, or Ernest Hemingway or Anton Chekhov, then we have something completely new.’ Well, times have changed. There is uproar at Indy Towers, where staff members are reacting to the giant axe that has been taken to the arts and culture pages of the Independent on Sunday. Let’s hope any undiscovered literary giants, lurking

Sebastian Payne

The government’s latest High Speed 2 argument: we need more capacity

40 u-turns and counting, the coalition has a habit of dropping difficult policies. One notable exception is High Speed 2, which is still being keenly promoted. Today, members of a new HS2 growth task force have been announced. The advocates are an  impressive selection of council leaders, academics, businessman and trade unions. Their job will be to counter the view that HS2 does not make financial sense. As Janan Ganesh pointed out in the Financial Times yesterday (£), the government’s enthusiasm for HS2 is in marked contrast to its dithering over airport capacity. But, the public doesn’t share this enthusiasm. The last YouGov poll suggests that 46 per cent are

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Cyclists, why are we paying for your bikes?

My best mate revealed to me that his bicycle was wrecked. I asked if he would be buying a new one. He said yes, via the government’s Cycle To Work scheme. What the hell’s wrong with Halfords, I thought silently to myself. Apparently the government will let you pay for a bike tax and NI free, and in instalments. Did you know that? Why am I paying for my friend to have a new bike through my taxes? Why am I subsidising the process whereby a perfectly decent human being is transformed into an arrogant, self-righteous, lycra-clad sociopath with homicidal intent towards people like me, ie pedestrians? At the very

Tuesday

David Blackburn

The “bedroom tax” judgment has implications far beyond bedrooms

The High Court has rejected the “bedroom tax” claimants’ case. In a ruling issued earlier this morning, Lord Justice Laws said that ‘the PSED [Public Sector Equality Duty on the benefit reforms] was fulfilled; and the effects of the HB [Housing Benefit] cap were properly considered in terms of the discipline imposed by the requirement of proportionality.’ On the point of the government providing additional help for disabled people affected by the cap, the judge wrote: ‘provision of extra funding for DHPs [‘discretionary housing payments’] and advice and guidance on its use cannot be said to be a disproportionate approach to the difficulties which those persons faced.’ Laws added that certain arguments of the claimants

Monday

David Blackburn

Pope Francis: who am I to judge?

Pope Francis I’s statement about homosexual clergymen remains extraordinary; no matter how often one reads it. ‘If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?’ He also said: ‘The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains this very well. It says they should not be marginalised because of this (orientation) but that they must be integrated into society…’ And there was more, perhaps a little less extraordinary in tone and content: ‘The problem is not having this orientation. We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the

Vernon Baxter

The NHS must improve its approach to costing if the market is to work

News that one of the health service’s largest operators of the non-emergency 111 helpline is to pull out of the market will have raised very few eyebrows in the health sector. NHS Direct, which ran the telephone helpline that preceded 111, is on track to record a deficit of £26 million this financial year and, along with other providers, has attracted criticism for a host of operational and qualitative mishaps. NHS Direct’s unsustainability and 111’s myriad problems have been all too apparent. Like the service itself, the reasons for 111’s many failings are complex. What it does illustrate, however, is a more fundamental issue regarding the application of market principles to