Society

My high-speed bus chase

My youngest daughter and her husband moved to New York last October. Three days after they arrived, she tripped on a step and broke her ankle. ‘So annoying, I was wearing such a good outfit, Mumma.’ They didn’t know anyone. In a boot and on crutches she tackled umpteen flights of stairs in search of permanent accommodation, avoided crazy people in the street and faced up to taciturn bank and phone-shop employees. The unfriendliness of the city upset her more than the pain and inconvenience of the break. I couldn’t afford to visit then – so when a friend, American Cathy, who’s got a second home near me in Provence,

The Airbnb guest from hell 

‘Is there a secret passageway behind that door?’ said the weirdly difficult Kiwi as she eyed a door marked ‘private’ leading off the central staircase. ‘Yes, sort of,’ I said. Behind that door is the rear part of the house, unrenovated. So if you open it, the secret is you fall into a gap in one of the smashed floorboards, trip over a box of books or ten, fall against a stack of mattresses and tumble down a rickety staircase that lands you in the boiler and machinery room, where you will find the unfathomable clutter that is the builder boyfriend’s tool collection, the vast water tanks, groaningly driven by

Bridge | 3 May 2025

A few years ago, Sally Brock – women’s world champion many times over – told me she’d like some coaching in declarer-play from Artur Malinowski. Artur, she said, just seems to make more contracts than other people. And it’s true: he has extraordinary table presence. He relies on ‘reading’ his opponents as much as he does on playing the odds. I was reminded of this during a recent TGRs Super League match: West led the ♥️8. The obvious line is to cash the ♥️KQ, play the ♦️A, ruff a diamond, draw the last trump, play a spade to the ♠️A and cash the ♦️K. If the ♦️Q falls, you claim.

Freestyle

Magnus Carlsen’s run of nine straight wins at the Grenke Freestyle Open was, even by his own standards, extraordinary. The world no. 1 is a zealous advocate for freestyle chess, in which the pieces on the first rank are placed in one of 960 possible configurations at the start of the game. The format has been tested in a series of elite events, but the Grenke Open – held in Karlsruhe over the Easter weekend – was one of very few freestyle events open to players of all levels. Based on the standard of Carlsen’s opposition (which included seven grandmasters), he would have expected to score 7/9 in normal chess

The EU is luring Starmer away from Brexit

Throughout Keir Starmer’s life, a recent fawning profile ran, he has ‘worked to safeguard the value of justice and democracy’, from fighting the death penalty in Caribbean courts as a young human-rights lawyer, to taking on Vladimir Putin by representing Alexander Litvinenko’s widow. ‘Those same principles,’ the profile gushes, ‘have guided him since he became the UK’s Prime Minister.’ The author of these words? Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President, who had the dubious honour of penning the Prime Minister’s entry for Time’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people. She is glad, she claims, ‘to have someone with Starmer’s dedication and strong principles as a

Portrait of the week: power cuts, local elections and the Pope’s funeral

Home Sir Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, attacked current net-zero policies, saying that ‘any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail’. Pay review bodies recommended rises for public-sector workers (4 per cent for teachers; 3 per cent for NHS employees) that are higher than the 2.8 per cent budgeted for by the government. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, in applying last month’s judgment by the Supreme Court, said that in places like hospitals, shops and restaurants ‘trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men (biological

Spectator Competition: In out, in out

For Competition 3397 you were invited to recast the ‘Hokey-Cokey’ in the style of a poet of your choice. An appreciative nod to Tracy Davidson’s William McGonagall: ‘And the whole body should feel the vibration/ As your waggling appendage commits oscillation.’ High fives also go to David Blakey, Max Gutmann, J.S. White, Peter Smalley, Tom Adam, Bob Newman and Elizabeth Kay. The prizes go to those below. They fuck you up, these outs and ins,The more so if you’ve had a drinkAnd can’t tell low from upper limbsOr right from left; it’s hell, you’ll think. But then you’re told to shake aboutAnd lose such focus as you’d got,This dance is

Bring on the Trump protests

The coming week will see the last major commemoration of a second world war anniversary – 80 years since VE-Day – which a handful of surviving veterans will attend. It is unjust that VJ-Day in August will attract much less attention, but so did the Far East campaigns, much to the contemporary chagrin of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma. One of Bill Slim’s soldiers was George MacDonald Fraser, whom I knew and adored, as did millions of fans of his Flashman books. In his fine memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George described how one May day in 1945, as his company lined out to attack a Japanese-held village, a green

Charles Moore

Mark Carney owes his victory to Trump

Congratulations to Donald Trump. It is almost solely thanks to his exertions that Mark Carney, the incarnation of Davos man, is now victorious in Canada’s general election. The Euro fanatic now wins on a ‘sovereignty’ ticket. If Trump had not intervened to lay claim to Canada, almost as if America were Russia and Canada were Ukraine, it would have gone Conservative. The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the ‘honour to be a friend’, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come

2701: Mix and Match

Solvers may find it helpful to Mix and Match the 12 unclued entries. Across 12    Wild West films rate so badly (6) 13    Head over after a 1960s/70s space programme (6) 14    Nucleus of eruption in jail occupying volunteer officers at first (7) 17    Shed set back on eastern end of The Oval (7) 18    Good line from centre dropping one classical reference (6) 21    Danced on light display, swallowing ecstasy (6) 22    Pulling off and on skinned part of a bone (5) 23    Mysteriously, Turkish currency backing European unknown banks (6) 25    Cut down crime outside Ecuador’s capital (4) 30    Aniseed drink barely equates to another (4) 31    What

The creeping Dubai-ification of London

In December 2023, a TikTok influencer called Maria Vehera opened a packet of ‘Dubai chocolate’ in her car and filmed herself eating it. Since then, 124.6 million people have watched her swallowing this pistachio-based gloop. Oh Maria, what have you done? A butterfly flaps its wings – or an influencer eats some chocolate – and soon people are setting their alarms for 5 a.m. to queue outside Lidl for the ‘drop’ of LIDL’S OWN DUBAI CHOCOLATE. Guess what? M&S made one too (£8.50). Morrisons then had the bright idea of creating a pistachio cream Easter egg. Waitrose’s Dubai chocolate was so popular it had to ration it to two bars

2698: au pairs – solution

The seven unclued pairs are BENSON/HEDGES, COUNTRY/WESTERN, TIME/TIDE, MUSCAT/OMAN, TWEEDLEDUM/TWEEDLEDEE, DUMFRIES/GALLOWAY and BITS/BOBS. First prize Roland Rance, London E17 Runners-up Daniel Angel, Twickenham, Middlesex; Heather McLaren, Seaford, East Sussex

Rod Liddle

The worst thing Kneecap did? Apologise

Going to Glasto this year with your little tent? I only ask because the average age of people who attend this extortionate smugfest is now not terribly distant from that of people who read this magazine. So it is possible that some of you are off to watch good old Neil Young, Nick Lowe and Gary Numan (the average age of headliners has almost tripled since the festival began in 1970) – and, of course, Kneecap, the British band who affiliate themselves with the Provisional IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. But more about those lovable bhoys in a moment. The festival was truly counter-cultural for a handful of years. At that

Americano Live: Trump’s first 100 days

As a subscriber-only special, get exclusive access to our Americano Live event with Freddy Gray, The Spectator’s deputy editor and host of the Americano podcast, and special guest Lionel Shriver, as they discuss Trump’s first 100 days. It can be hard to keep up with Donald Trump’s ‘breakneck’ pace in his second term in the White House. What to make of his headline-making, eyebrow-raising executive orders? Will his tariffs derail the US economy or usher in the ‘golden age’ he has promised? Is he going to achieve ‘peace through strength’ – or mire the US in yet another endless conflict in the Middle East? Watch Freddy and Lionel discuss all of the above and

Does the National Theatre really need ‘international reach’?

The new boss of the National Theatre has a big job on her hands. The combination of Covid, funding cuts and rising costs has left it struggling financially. Audiences remain stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels, with plenty of theatregoers complaining about high ticket prices for mediocre productions. Bubbling away is the eternal question of the National’s role as the country’s pre-eminent stage venue in helping to tell the nation a story about its cultural and political life at a time of growing fragmentation. There will be rap adaptations (why?) of Greek tragedy. There will also be a show involving Stormzy, the chart-topping rapper What then can be gleaned about this and more

Lloyd Evans

Is Starmer more afraid of Badenoch or Farage?

We have two leaders of the opposition. Labour can’t decide which is the larger threat. Prime Minister’s Questions opened with a botched query from Labour backbencher Dan Tomlinson. He asked Sir Keir Starmer to comment on a possible pact between the Tories and Reform. An amazing spectacle. An MP so clueless that he can’t ask a question without being ruled out of order. ‘The Prime Minister has no responsibility for any of that,’ said the Speaker. Tomlinson sat down, unanswered. But the timing of the question, at the start of the session, indicates that Sir Keir’s team are terrified of an anti-Labour alliance. We have two leaders of the opposition. Labour

Voters won’t be fooled by Yvette Cooper’s human rights gimmick

Keir Starmer’s government has grudgingly accepted publicly something it has privately known for months: voters are deadly serious about what they see as uncontrolled immigration. Despite the best attempts of the Prime Minister to make vacuous promises to “smash the gangs”, they can no longer be fobbed off. Labour’s real problem is that on immigration and human rights it has painted itself into a corner This realisation has led to a flurry of announcements from the Home Secretary. Yvette Cooper has said that serious sex offenders will be automatically denied asylum. To prevent undesirables avoiding deportation on unmeritorious human rights grounds, Cooper has also promised “a stronger framework,” that would