Society

Thursday

Dumpynose

Solution to 2113: Recycling

The ‘circular chain’ (or RING CYCLE) of items was: RING CYCLE (anag of RECYCLING), GLYCERINE, GENERICAL, CAREENING, TANGERINE, ARGENTINA, WAGNERIAN, NORWEGIAN, ANGLE IRON, LOHENGRIN, RHEINGOLD, RE-FOLDING, GLORIFIED, FILIGREED, SIEGFRIED, REGICIDES, ISENERGIC, RECOGNISE, CONCIERGE, CRYOGENIC.  WAGNER, whose bicentenary fell on 22 May, replaced the answer WAURST at 46 across.   First prize Dr John Stabler, Fakenham, Norfolk Runners-up Chris Butler, Borough Green, Sevenoaks, D.G. Tallis, Oxford

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Pay: the next big Tory row

‘This has done for our pay rise, hasn’t it?’ one MP muttered earlier this week after the lobbying scandal broke. I suggested on Monday that yet another row over politicians behaving badly will make it even more difficult for David Cameron to endorse a pay rise for MPs. This is a row that is just waiting in the wings to join the Central School of Conservative Drama, so here’s how things are likely to play out. Ipsa is currently compiling its recommendations on MPs’ pay. It was expected to report this month, but I hear there is a delay, and publication could be much closer to the start of Parliamentary

Charles Moore Charles Moore

How Equality will do for the Right in the end

As the Same Sex Marriage result shows, the doctrine of Equality now carries all — family, religion, tradition, freedom — before it. Lots of Conservatives prate in favour of it without realising that Equality is the most essentially left-wing of all doctrines and will do for them in the end. Watching the Derby on television on Saturday, I found myself treated to ten minutes of how wonderful Emily Davison was for throwing herself under the King’s horse at Epsom 100 years ago. Dr Helen Pankhurst, of the suffragette dynasty, was interviewed at the racecourse by Clare Balding. She praised the racing establishment for putting its ‘tribute’ to Davison on the big

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Judgement day, rumour-mongering in the Twitter age and long-awaited dirty tactics from No.10

Shakespeare once wrote ‘kill all the lawyers’, and as Harry Mount describes in this week’s Spectator cover feature, you could be forgiven for thinking Chris Grayling has made a similar suggestion. As a former barrister himself, Mount argues the Justice Secretary is right to reform legal aid, and his changes don’t even go far enough. On the latest View from 22 podcast, Mount argues paying top dollar to barristers to deal with trivial tasks needs rethinking and goes head-to-head with Greg Callus, a pupil barrister and legal blogger, on the core purposes of his profession. Are lawyers still worth the huge fees they demand? Are too many lawyers now involved

Simon Hoggart

June mini-bar

I was lucky enough to attend the 650th anniversary dinner for the Vintners’ Company last month. Some of the greatest winemakers in the world (Edouard Moueix, Aubert de Villaine of Romanée-Conti, Patrice Noyelle of Pol Roger — wow!), the most distinguished merchants, the most feted wine writers. As the silly phrase has it, I felt proud and humbled to be there. And as Jancis Robinson said, the wines we drank were far, far better than they would have been back in 1363. It’s a guess, but I suspect none of the stuff imported then would have made it into a modern supermarket, including their two for £3.99 range. Even over

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Why you shouldn’t believe the green attacks on Ben Fogle

Just because the environmentalists have been proved so epically wrong about global warming doesn’t mean they’re right about everything else. Ocean acidification, overpopulation, species loss… you’re going to hear a lot about dire and urgent threats like these in the coming months as the greenies establish a fallback position after the collapse of their climate change scam. But it’s the same old toxic mix of misanthropy, religious dogma, control freakery and anti-capitalism, repackaged with different labels. Let me give you another example. A couple of months ago, you may have noticed the amiable TV presenter Ben Fogle being monstered in the lefty press for environmental crimes he’d apparently committed on

Bruce Anderson

Taste Ranald Macdonald’s wines, and you can forgive his ancestors for allying with the Vikings

The Macdonalds of Clanranald are one of the oldest families in the world. Their lineage comfortably predates the Scotland of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Descended from the Macdonald Lords of the Isles and sea kings of Dalriada, the Clanranalds emerge from the mists, myths and archaeology of the Dark Ages. But they were guilty of a misjudgment. Just as Robert the Bruce started life as an Anglo-Norman noble, the Macdonalds had to navigate the violent uncertainties of pre- and early medieval Scotland. They also had to reckon with the Vikings. (A Viking longship arrives at a beach, and the bosun divides the crew into three squads. ‘You lot, burning and slaughtering. You,

Harry Mount

Take it from a former barrister: Chris Grayling is right to reform legal aid

Shakespeare took it a little far in Henry IV, Part II, when Dick the Butcher said, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ Chris Grayling hasn’t made the same proposal but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, listening to the howls of anguish and indignation coming from the Inns of Court. Grayling, the first non-lawyer to be made Lord Chancellor since the 17th century, has simply said he wants to make some savings in the legal aid bill. To the lawyers, unaccustomed to having their privileges and subsidies challenged by anyone, this means war. Already, 90 millionaire QCs — poor, impoverished Cherie Blair among them — have written a letter to

Johan Norberg Johan Norberg

Why Sweden has riots

  Stockholm  ‘All of them should have been very happy,’ Robert A. Heinlein begins his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon. The material problem has been solved on this future earth, poverty and disease have been eradicated, work is optional. And yet parts of the citizenry are not enthusiastic. Some are bored, others are preparing a revolt. Why should that be, in such a utopian world? A similar puzzlement has been the dominant reaction from commentators after riots broke out and cars and buildings were burned in heavily immigrant-populated suburbs of Stockholm in late May. Sweden? Since the standard interpretation is that violence is the only weapon the marginalised have against

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

How social media helps authoritarians

Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said a ‘sensational affair’ between ‘high profile figures’ close to Cameron had ‘rocked’ No. 10, did you have the faintest idea what it was talking about? I did, but then I’m a journalist. Friends in the lobby filled me in on a story which had been doing the rounds for months. I even know which law stopped the Mail on Sunday  following the basics of journalism and giving its readers the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘whens’, ‘whys’ and ‘hows’. (Although with most affairs the ‘whys’ are self-evident. It is the ‘whos’ and, for

Douglas Murray

Chen Guangcheng – the brave Chinese activist who David Cameron refused to meet

How did a blind Chinese dissident scale the walls of his house while under house arrest, evade government surveillance, travel hundreds of miles to Beijing, seek asylum in the American embassy and in the process shine attention on a horror the world has grown used to? The questions for Chen Guangcheng are legion. Last week I met up with him in London. Chen, who is 41, has been blind since childhood and wears smart dark glasses. At our meeting place in central London — the headquarters of a Christian organisation which has helped arrange his visit — he sits upright, suited and tied, occasionally repositioning himself by feeling the corners

Lucy Vickery

#SuchTweetSorrow – Spectator competition winners summarise 12 literary greats – in a Tweet

In Competition 2800 you were invited to reconstitute a well-known work of literature as a tweet, i.e., text of up to 140 characters, including spaces. A few years ago Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, two students from the University of Chicago, embarked on a mission to make the great works of literature more palatable to a 21st-century audience afflicted by an ever-dwindling attention span by recasting them in the vernacular of our time: the voice of Twitter. Their endeavour prompted John Crace to have a go in the Guardian. Somewhat impressively, while Aciman and Emmett’s boiled-down classics were rendered in a series of tweets (up to 20), Crace managed it

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

To save the High Street, sack Mary Portas and slash business rates

On my way to chair a town meeting, I was chuckling over Phillip Warner’s cartoon last week headed ‘Mary Portas reinvigorates the High Street’. First, TV’s sharp-tongued queen of retail holds forth in front of a row of abandoned shops; then townsfolk dance in the street at the news that she has ‘buggered off in a taxi’. Call me an old cynic, but I think turning stars into tsars is a sign of Downing Street desperation: witness Alan Sugar’s lame stint as ‘enterprise champion’ in the dying days of Gordon Brown, and wince at James Caan from Dragon’s Den tackling social mobility. What I heard from the people of my

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why does anyone drink wine?

You will be scandalised by the suggestion, of course, especially those of you who spend several hours every week drinking it, reading about it or discussing it. But most wine is actually rubbish. I’ll let you off the hook if you drink wine only with food. But wine drunk on its own is often a terrible drink, usually consumed for appearances’ sake, or because the drinker lacks the confidence to complain, or for want of any alternative source of alcohol. Our judgment of wine is also notoriously flaky — influenced as much by the appearance and weight of the bottle as by its contents. One winemaker sent the same wine

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Check my privilege? I have, thanks. You’re still wrong

This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for. So right now the big thing for people who consider themselves warriors against nasty isms and phobias (of the sexism and homophobia varieties, not the Blairism and arachnophobia varieties) is to undermine each other constantly via accusations of intrinsic privilege. ‘I am a feminist!’ declares somebody, via a book or blog or Tumblr or tweet. ‘Aha!’ retort others, ever vigilant for this sort of thing. ‘But have you canvassed the views of Somalian refugees who are weekending female impersonators in Anglesea?’ ‘Um, no?’ replies our proto-feminist. ‘Check

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Pippa Middleton to write for Vanity Fair

There is some shock in Fleet Street tonight, following news that Pippa Middleton is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The magazine was the last of the late Christopher Hitchens’ haunts; that’s a very long way for a bottom to have wiggled in such a short space of time. On hearing the news, a friend of mine put down his glass and remarked, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive Graydon Carter his foolish ways.’ Then he turned a reddened eye to your humble correspondent and declared, not without a clear note of resentment, ‘You’re responsible for this!’ He was referring, I believe, to Pippa Middleton’s two outings in these pages. You can read Pippa

Steerpike Steerpike

Dear Laurie Penny, please explain this

Mr Steerpike has checked his privilege, and he’s a radical feminist. Middle class, self-loathing and instinctively liberal, how could he not be? A devotee of feminist blogs, I was intrigued to read MadamJ-Mo saying that she felt ‘cheated’ by Laurie Penny’s Meat Market, a pamphlet published in 2011. And MadamJ-Mo has a point. Compare this passage from page 62 of Penny’s pamphlet: ‘Judith Ramirez, co-ordinator of the Toronto-based International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation (INTERCEDE) insists that there is no simple solution to what she calls “a modern day variation on the slave trade” – hiring a nanny or a housekeeper is really a question of women trying to fend for

Tuesday

John O'Neill

George Osborne is on course to hit his NewBuy housing target — in 2058

The latest figures for NewBuy, one of George Osborne’s prop-up-the-housing-market schemes, have been published. Mercifully, perhaps, they continue to be underwhelming. To recap: inspired by the American success story of providing mortgages to those that can’t afford them, the scheme provides a guarantee backed by the government and house-builders (who commit 5.5 and 3.5 per cent of the purchase price of a property, respectively) to lenders. Buyers put in a deposit of 5-10 per cent, but the extra money means they can get a higher loan-to-value mortgage than they could otherwise afford. Houses have to be newly built and costing £500,000 or less. It has to be the buyer’s main

Nick De Bois

We have an A&E crisis: Jeremy Hunt should suspend all hospital downgrades until it’s over

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is correct to say that there was a ‘dramatic fall in confidence’ in alternatives to Accident & Emergency units. He says that this has built up steadily since GP contract changes in 2004. He is right of course, and who can blame him for making the obvious political point that Labour government negotiations have helped fuel this present mess? They may have caused it, but he is in power to help solve it. As a group of NHS Trusts has warned that casualty departments could collapse within six months as a result if ‘huge pressure’, any long term strategy will frankly not alleviate today’s problems. Patients

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Government the easy way: blame the people, not the system

There’s something about taking on a government role that makes even the most sensible man fancy himself as a vicar. It’s easy to get confused: you find yourself lurking around Parliament, which looks a bit like a church, you can give speeches that drone on a bit like sermons, and in the Commons, prayers are held at the start of each sitting. You end up preaching a little bit, not about how you want to reform the system, but about how people should run their own lives. The confusion even seems to extend to those unelected ‘tsars’ that modern governments love appointing, with James Caan starting his job as social