Society

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Forget about ‘rewilding’: we should be focusing on the species that we do still have

The buzzword of the moment seems to be ‘rewilding’. George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and environmentalist has a new vision for the countryside, which he wrote about in the magazine two weeks ago. Instead of covering our green and pleasant land with sheep, what we ought to be doing, he argues, is re-introducing all of the species which we humans killed off hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. The process, which he describes as ‘a mass restoration of ecosystems’, would involve repopulating Britain with the elephants, lynx and bison. ‘We live in a shadow land’, he argues in the ‘animated guide’ to rewilding. But instead of thinking about reintroducing

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

In defence of Silvio Berlusconi

Ah Italia! Such a great place to get your head round great art and great women but what a crappy little country. How else can you describe a place that condemns a 76-year-old man to seven years in jail and bans him for life from public office for a crime that both he and his victim deny — a crime to which there were no witnesses and for which there is no evidence? That is what has just happened in Milan in the infamous Bunga Bunga trial at which three women judges (and no jury) found the media tycoon and three times prime minister guilty on Monday of ‘prostituzione minorile’

The Spectator

Letters: My cuts are real, says Francis Maude

We’ve only just begun Sir: In Ross Clark’s article ‘Cuts, what cuts?’ (22 June), he suggested that I was boasting about saving the taxpayer £5.5 billion. It’s true: I’m proud of my department’s Efficiency and Reform Group and the work of civil servants across Whitehall who have sliced out wasteful spending. But the figures he used were 12 months out of date. Last year we saved the public purse £10 billion — 80 per cent up on the figure he quoted. That increase — which doesn’t include the savings from tackling fraud, error and uncollected debt — rather put pay to the Audit Office’s concern that our earlier savings might not have been

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Cicero on tax havens

David Cameron wants the international community to do something about big business avoiding paying tax. If only it were as simple as that. Ancient philosophers, beginning with Aristotle (4th C BC), made a distinction between man-made law, which was peculiar to a state that made it and derived its validity simply from its adoption by that state, and natural law, which was universally valid. One could say that the former was right because it was law, the latter was law because it was right. Cicero (1st C BC) called this universal ‘world’ law ius naturale, identified it with divine reason and associated it with another concept, that of the ‘law of nations’, ius

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 27 June 2013

Jane Austen is a ‘contingency character’, we have just learnt. In his last appearance as Governor of the Bank of England before the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons, Sir Mervyn King explained that the great novelist rather slightingly so described stands in reserve to feature on any of our bank notes if too many people succeed in counterfeiting the current occupants. She is also in the running for the ten-pound note when Charles Darwin relinquishes it. This is a hot issue, because the notes do not feature enough women, we are told — despite the fact that since 1952, 100 per cent of them have featured a

Taki

Taki: Robin Birley’s lifesaving nightclub

What was that about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe had it all wrong. I felt at home all last week, at Loulou’s, on Gerald Road, and in deep Oxfordshire. Let’s start with Gerald Road, where the Bismarcks gave a Pugs dinner to celebrate Bob Miller’s 80th birthday, Bob being the Duty Free billionaire who — surprise, surprise — is as nice, down-to-earth and sporty a man as

Jeremy Clarke

Low life: Brief encounter aboard the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’

Many years ago I met a woman in a train on the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’ line. She was seated opposite me in the compartment, next to her husband. The three of us had the compartment to ourselves. It was early in the morning. I’ve forgotten what the sleeping arrangements had been the night before. I think perhaps the husband and I had bedded down together and she’d rejoined him in the morning. Her husband had then left the compartment to go to the lavatory or dining car, and she and I had begun to talk. She’d met and married the husband after a whirlwind romance a year before,

Melissa Kite

“Welcome to BT. If you are calling about sending a monkey to the moon, please press 1…”

Once upon a time, it was perfectly possible to ask British Telecom to do something in return for money. You would ring an 0800 number and someone in India would politely accept the premise that if you paid them, say, £70, they would send an engineer to your home to carry out repairs. This used to be true of Sky TV as well, before they decided that there was virtually nothing about their £50 a month service they would fix other than by giving you instructions down the phone to make you fix it yourself. ‘But the box has blown up into a million pieces!’ ‘Yes, madam, and we are

Alexander Chancellor

Long life: Watching the opera Peter Grimes on the beach was cold and uncomfortable — just as it should be

The Martello Towers — that chain of 103 little fortresses built in the early 1800s along the south and east costs of England to repel a feared Napoleonic invasion — were condemned by William Cobbett at the time as a huge waste of public money; and so they turned out to be, for the British victories at Trafalgar and Waterloo ensured that Napoleon would never invade. And in fact, during the 200 years of their existence, no gun has ever been fired from any of them, with the one exception of the Martello Tower at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, the northernmost of them all, which was used by anti-aircraft gunners during

Raymond Keene

Age shall not wither

The Israeli grandmaster Boris Gelfand celebrated his 45th birthday last Monday (24 June) with outright victory in the Tal Memorial elite super-tournament in Moscow. Given that Gelfand has recently tied first in the Alekhine Memorial in Paris, this means that over a total of 18 games against the world’s best in these two competitions, Gelfand has won 5 and drawn 13 while losing none. With such youngsters as Carlsen and Karjakin, both in their early twenties, pushing rapidly to the fore, it is a remarkable feat by a man over twice their age to be performing at such a high level. The idea that brain power can increase with age, if

Raymond Keene

puzzle no. 272

Black to play. This position is a variation from the game Nakamura-Gelfand, Tal Memorial, Moscow 2013. White’s king is in danger. How can Black exploit this? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 2 July 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 Qd2+ Last week’s winner Terence Marlow, Wellingborough, Northants

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 27 June 2013

What a week! Ostend by the sea was host to this year’s European Championships which kicked off with two mixed events (pairs and teams). I arrived on Friday and went straight to the playing area. Who was the first person I ran into? My favourite column buddy, Susanna! For the next week we hung out like teenagers, with teenagers, laughed, drank, stayed up late — and played bridge. What could be more thrilling? Of course the mixed events are always a rollercoaster of emotions, and this year was no exception. One of the best players in the world walked out when his wife let through 3NT! Sadly, too much partying

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 27 June 2013

Q. Is there a tactful way to speed the departure of someone who has come for drinks only, but fails to leave when dinner is announced? Chatting to punters during my recent NGS open day, I made the mistake of boasting that a certain household name, who had been spotted in the area, was actually staying with me. One of these punters, a local and a friend of a friend, begged to meet her ‘absolute idol’ and proposed herself for drinks before dinner. Local and idol got on famously but local, having declined my wife’s suggestion that she stay on to dinner, showed no sign of leaving. She was not

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Food: Scott’s, the scene of the crime

Scott’s, Mount Street, Mayfair: the scene of the crime or, for those who do not read newspapers, the place where Charles Saatchi throttled his wife Nigella Lawson in the smoking section, and stuck his finger up her nose. (The Spectator food column, or News Kitten as her husband calls her, is rarely first with a story, but she gets there in the end). I suppose I want to know whether, if I throttle A, fellow diners will intervene or simply assume that domestic (or, rather restaurant) violence does not take place in Mayfair, and I am sticking my finger up A’s nose through love, consideration and sexual desire; rather than,

Toby Young Toby Young

Do Americans really want more Piers Morgans?

An American journalist called David Carr wrote an amusing piece for the New York Times earlier this week about the latest British invasion. To hear him tell it, we’ve captured the commanding heights of the US media, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and, of course, the New York Times itself, which is run by former BBC director-general Mark Thompson. The latest citadel to fall is The Daily Show, with a Brummie comedian having temporarily taken over presenting duties from Jon Stewart. The article produced mixed feelings in me because I spent the years 1995–2000 trying to ‘take’ Manhattan, all to no

Dot Wordsworth

Women

Unaccountably, people have begun to pronounce women ‘women’, if you see what I mean. For centuries we’ve been pronouncing it ‘wimmin’. The new version has the first syllable rhyming with room and the second like men. I heard that Green MP Caroline Lucas say it when addressing a committee at Westminster. What makes it all the odder is that some feminists had in the past 30 or 40 years adopted the spelling wimmin because it did not include the element –men. Its pronunciation didn’t include the element ‘men’, but now it is being made to. In origin, woman does not come from womb-man, but from wife-man. In that compound, man

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 27 June 2013

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined cuts of £11.5 billion from departmental spending for the tax-year beginning in 2015. David Gauke, a Treasury minister, gave a ‘firm commitment’ in a letter to backbenchers to introduce a transferable tax allowance of £750 between spouses and civil partners paying tax at the basic rate. This would benefit them by £150 a year at most, and not before the next election. Sir Mervyn King, retiring after ten years as governor of the Bank of England, was to be created a life peer. Mark Harper, the minister for immigration, broke his foot by falling off a table while dancing with his wife

Dumpynose

2119: Filial request

‘14/7’ (four words in all) is part of a quotation from 29/1D in ODQ and is what the remaining unclued lights do in slightly different ways. The title of the relevant work will appear in the completed grid and must be shaded. Elsewhere, ignore an apostrophe and an accent.   Across   1    Mate nautical jester heckles (14) 9    Ancient sage twice accepted shares (4) 11    Be very surprised when earl appeases mob? (10, three words) 17    Menial treasure scrubbing third floor … (5) 18    … complete surface is thoroughly clean (5, two words) 20    Philosopher in deep thought crashed car (7) 21    Yard to sing about in London borough