Society

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Empty seats give the wrong message about who the Olympics are for

Remember that great scandal that rocked the Olympics, G4S? That pre-Games row has been completely eclipsed, at least for now, by the rows and rows of empty seats at supposedly sell-out Olympic venues. It turns out that those seats, often situated below the masses of people who shelled out a pretty penny for their own seats, belong to sponsors, who have either failed to fill them, or who have given the tickets to people who just haven’t turned up. Locog has launched an investigation, which it needs to conclude and find a solution to the problem as soon as possible. Those forlorn rows of seats are giving out the wrong

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

Keeping children in their place

It won’t surprise many people to learn that the British Olympian selected to carry Team GB’s flag at the opening ceremony tomorrow went to a private school. Triple gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy attended George Watson’s College, a Scottish independent school established in 1741. Annual fees are a fraction under £10,000. Earlier this month, the Prime Minister complained that a third of the athletes representing Britain at the Games were privately educated and blamed state schools for failing to encourage sporting excellence. As several commentators pointed out, that was a bit rich given that the last Conservative government did little to discourage comprehensives from selling off their playing fields. In

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 28 July 2012

Dr Armand D’Angour (Jesus College, Oxford) has composed a brilliant Ode in ancient Greek to welcome the Olympic Games to London. It is called a ‘Pindaric’ Ode, but as Dr D’Angour knows very well, the ancient Greek poet Pindar (518–438 bc) wrote very differently.  Pindar was commissioned to compose Odes that celebrated winning: not the winning athletes but those wealthy patrons who had sponsored them. The Odes were sung after the event, by a choir to musical accompaniment. They celebrated the patron’s family, wealth and other wins; unfolded moral or proverbial reflections on the meaning of victory; and introduced a myth of some relevance to the occasion, often with a

The Spectator

Summer of discontent

The ninth of August will mark the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the credit crunch: the day in 2007 that the banks found themselves frozen out of the debt markets, leading to the Northern Rock collapse and on to the more general banking crisis of 2008. By this stage of the Great Depression, western economies were not only growing again; they had surpassed the level at which they had peaked in the late 1920s. Unemployment was falling and the banking system had regained some solidity. It is no longer accurate, therefore, to describe the economic crisis as the ‘worst since the 1930s’. On some measures it is worse than

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 28 July 2012

Well, I found the Adulis restaurant and my online date was there. She didn’t muck about, and neither for once did I, and when we parted at noon the next day, I was very tired. So I was relieved to be checking in later at a spa hotel on the north Cornish coast called the Scarlet, to write a travel piece about their two-day organic wine-tasting break called ‘Naturally into wine’. It was the perfect opportunity to recuperate, I imagined. A gentle swim, perhaps, a stroll on the beach, then a glass or two of Peasant’s Varooka in the evening to see me out. A cheerful woman called Cherie checked

Taki

High life | 28 July 2012

Gstaad  Purity in a sport does not mix with popularity, and defending the former is anathema to the hucksters, crooks and profiteers who make up the latter. In this I do not include the sportswriters of serious newspapers, with whom I actually sympathise. They see what’s going on, but they have to report on sport and there are, after all, libel laws to protect the guilty. In the birthplace of sport — where else but Greece — football is as rotten as anywhere on earth, except in places like Thailand, where betting comes first and sport second. When my father ‘owned’ a premier division team during the early Seventies —

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 July 2012

‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is advice to be taken literally as well as metaphorically, and so, as I walked up from the station after a particularly Olympics-cursed visit to London, I was soothed by the sound and smell of mowing coming from our little fields. Haymaking should have taken place almost two months ago, but the wet made it truly impossible until this week. Should the sudden kindness of the weather and the excitement of the approaching opening ceremony make one get all nice about the Olympics? Well, yes, as far as the hopes of the athletes and the pleasure of the spectators go, it should. It is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 28 July 2012

Q. Time is running out, but I hope you might be able to offer some last-minute help. An indulgent godmother is lending my 18-year-old son her immaculate mews house in London for the autumn while he ‘works’ on his gap year. He has no idea how to keep a house clean and tidy and any attempts made by me over the last few months to encourage/bully him to smarten up have met with failure. I do not want this extremely generous offer to spoil a special relationship but I fear he is going to mess up the house within minutes of arriving there. —Name and address withheld A. Incentivise the

The Spectator

Potrait of the week | 28 July 2012

Home The nation was divided between those who moaned about the Olympic Games and those who didn’t. Some immigration staff decided to hold a strike, then called it off an hour before the government was due to go to court to seek an injunction against it. Another 1,200 troops joined the 3,500 deployed to cover security deficiencies. Campanologists agreed to ring bells across the land at 8.12 a.m. on 27 July. Boris Johnson recited an ode composed in ancient Greek that in English ended: ‘Now welcome to this sea­-girt land,/ With London’s Mayor and Co at hand./ Good luck to all who strive to win:/ Applaud, and let the Games

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A study in pink

Brasserie Zédel is the pinkest restaurant I have ever seen. It is pig pink, Barbie pink, icing-sugar pink and tongue pink. It is so pink that I photograph the napkin, and look at the napkin many times to remind myself that such a pink restaurant exists where it does, in a district reminiscent of cracked heads and bilious fear and tramps set alight: west Soho. I love west Soho. East Soho upsets me, because you can buy posh ­whisky, smart cheese and a leather dog collar for £300, to prove you went to Soho, saw the tarts and the House of Karl Marx, and came back to Notting Hill without

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 July 2012

On your marks…get set…bah humbug! They can keep their Olympic traffic lanes and their Olympic copyright laws preventing me from cooking five fried eggs and placing them in an interlinking pattern on my breakfast plate — although I just did, so there. I also arranged the apples into Olympic ring formation in the fruit bowl, now in a prominent location in the window of my front room. My plan was to call the London 2012 authorities to turn myself in and become an Olympic martyr but I didn’t have time to hang on the phone, so if you are reading this, 2012 people, please contact me to let me know how

Dot Wordsworth

Eurogeddon

Collins dictionaries have invited people to send in a word for inclusion in its English dictionary. ‘If it’s accepted,’ the publishers say, ‘your word will be published on collinsdictionary.com within a few weeks, and your name will appear on the definition page where you will be recorded forever.’ Forever (usually written as two words in British English, except in the sense ‘incessantly’) is pitching it a bit strong. Eternity is an over-confident prediction of the internet’s durability, let alone that of Collins dictionaries. It’s all nonsense of course. They just want publicity. The people at Collins do evaluate each word submitted, considering whether it is widespread and ‘how long it

The Spectator

Letters | 28 July 2012

Divisive he stands Sir: Finally, a western European publication questions whether Barack Obama can be re-elected (‘No he can’t’, 21 July). Before Jacob Heilbrunn’s article I have seen nothing save lame re-writings of pieces from the New York and Washington media, which is still in thrall to Obama.  Heilbrunn’s analysis is compelling: the President’s campaign is one of divisiveness, pitting supposedly forlorn and disaffected separate constituencies against ‘capitalism’. Sadly, this has been a traditional tactic of left-wing candidates in the US for a long time (e.g., John Edwards’s ‘Two Americas’) but now it has been turned into a high form by the President’s re-election team. A candidate may honourably lose

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 28 July 2012

Looking back, there was a moment right at the start when the coalition government could have asserted its authority, and changed the political weather. As soon as they took office, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne should have said, quite truly, that they were dealing with the catastrophic economic inheritance of the previous government, that austerity was the order of the day, and that a symbolic start would be made with the coming London Olympics. These would be drastically reduced in size and scale, with some venues scrapped, and ‘non-events’ ejected altogether. Synchronised swimming isn’t sport, it’s kitsch, and beach volleyball is simply soft porn: the only ‘sport’ whose

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 28 July 2012

Ofcom, the body that regulates the communications industry, says that for the first time people in Britain prefer texting or sending emails to each other to talking on the telephone. Telephone use fell by an amazing 5 per cent in 2011, while over 150 billion text messages were sent in the same year, more than double the number four years earlier. This is a dramatic change, but one that nobody seems to have particularly wanted. Young people — those between 16 and 24 — told Ofcom that they would prefer to discuss things with others face to face, but somehow they don’t do so; instead, 96 per cent of them

Raymond Keene

No. 228

White to play. This position is from Arkell-Wall, Hastings 1995. What is the most effective way for White to use the discovered check that is at his disposal? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 31 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 … Qxe3+ Last week’s winner Graham Baker, Campsea Ashe, Suffolk

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 28 July 2012

The longer I play this game, the more convinced I am that the single most important quality required to be a great player is mental discipline — the ability to push your concentration to the limit. My own concentration, I should add, is decidedly erratic: when trying to work out probabilities and contingency plans, I often find myself giving up and hoping for the best. The mind is a muscle, and I don’t exercise it nearly enough. An example of a player with a real six-pack of a brain is the Swedish international Gunnar Hallberg. Being a former world champion doesn’t stop him trying to improve his game constantly: he’s

Raymond Keene

Midway

The 99th British Championship in North Shields is reaching its midway point. The favourites are grandmasters Gawain Jones (my personal tip for the top), David Howell, Keith Arkell, Stuart Conquest and Stephen Gordon. This week a game by three-times British champion Harry Golombek in his favourite English Opening. Golombek-Wood: British Championship 1947; English Opening 1 c4 e5 2 Nc3 Nf6 3 g3 d5 4 cxd5 Nxd5 5 Bg2 Nb6 6 d3 This game features the white development with Nh3 – a plan pioneered by Golombek. Another example of the move Nh3 is the following: 6 Nh3 Nc6 7 d3 Be7 8 0-0 0-0 9 f4 Bxh3?! 10 Bxh3 Bc5+ 11

Doc

2073: Yonkers bonkers

The unclued lights (one of two words), individually or as a pair, are of a kind. Solvers are called upon to highlight another unclued light which forms three quarters of a clued solution. Across 11 Scribbled notes recalling fine state (7) 12 Continue with drama with small jackets (6) 14 Starkey’s pair of spectacles? (5) 16 Isolated common (5) 19 Saucy Scottish lass with her flames (7) 21 Oil spilt round dish (4) 23 Organic compound having outstanding high quality (7) 25 Go out with me – it’s such vanity! (7) 30 Brush off finishing soup (7) 31 Birds caught away from rock hollows (4) 32 Great Italian novelist didn’t

Doc

2070: nothing special

Each unclued light (or the pair at 3/19D) is a heraldic ORDINARY, as shown in Brewer 17th edition, page 662. First prize Mrs D. Crichton, Golant, Fowey, Cornwall Runners-up R.B. Briercliffe, Isle of Man; Hugh Schofield, Paris