Society

Thursday

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Why should the hunt for the next Archbishop of Canterbury be ‘inclusive’?

On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton and Howley. Justin Welby announced he was vacating the throne of St Augustine on 12 November last year; it took until 28 May even to assemble the committee who will discuss the names of his potential successor. It will be a miracle if we know the name of the new Primate of All England by

The Spectator

Letters: Why we need libraries

NHS origins Sir: Your leading article ‘Wes or bust’ (5 July) credited Labour with founding the NHS. In fact, the NHS was founded during the second world war by the Labour, Liberal and Conservative coalition. The speech with the famous line ‘free at the point of use’ was in fact made by Winston Churchill. He made it because he was PM and it was his job. For Labour to claim to be the initiator is somewhat disingenuous. Edward Hirst Aston, Sheffield All aboard Sir: Michael Gove is quite right (‘Tracks of my tears’, 5 July): the retirement of the royal train is sad news for those of us who like

Madeline Grant

I’ve got Donald Trump to thank for my unusual middle name

Never make a drunken bet. At about 3 a.m. one fateful morning, pre-pandemic and several bottles down, a friend and I made a wager on the outcome of the 2020 US election – he for Joe Biden, I for Donald Trump (who, at the time, looked like a sure thing). Then came lockdown, spiralling inflation and unemployment – and the rest is history. This wasn’t a bet for money. Instead, it was stipulated that whoever lost would legally assume a new middle name. Being gamers of a certain vintage, we drew from the Nintendo canon. If my friend had lost, he’d have become James Edward Bowser Price. Should I lose,

Toby Young Toby Young

My sober assessment of the fat jabs

It was my friend Alex who tipped me the wink. I bumped into him at a party earlier this year and to my astonishment he’d lost about two stone and was nursing a glass of fizzy water. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, draining a goblet of red wine. ‘You’re usually about three sheets to the wind by now.’ He explained he was on Mounjaro, the slimming drug, and one of its side effects was to suppress his desire for alcohol. He’d had a couple of glasses earlier in the evening, but had then lost interest. ‘You should try it,’ he said, eyeing my unsteady gait. After a particularly heavy

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Salad cream is more than a poor man’s mayonnaise

Salad cream makes me feel oddly patriotic. It’s one of those products that is so distinctively British that it has not travelled. Elsewhere, it is eschewed as a poor man’s mayonnaise. Its chief ingredients are hardboiled egg yolks, English mustard, vinegar and thick cream, and it was, in fact, the first product that Heinz produced exclusively for Great Britain, in Harlesden, north-west London, from 1914 onwards. The Heinz version is, frankly, a wartime mayonnaise, constrained by shelf life and made with the cheaper ingredients available at the time, a little looser and distinctively sweeter than its mayonnaise equivalent. It really came into its own in the second world war during

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why driving at 80mph won’t save you time

The device you see on this page is called a ‘paceometer’ and was devised by behavioural scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel. It features in their scientific paper ‘Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed’. Study it carefully, because as many people have confirmed to me, it will ‘change the way you drive forever’. Nassim Taleb described it as ‘mathematically trivial, but completely counterintuitive’. The inner digits show speed in the conventional way: in this case miles per hour. In other words, how far you travel at some velocity in a given time. The small digits around the outside are the paceometer: they show the same information but

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do we handle staying with friends with very different political views?

Q. We are going to stay with some old friends who we haven’t seen for a couple of years as they have been working in the US. I happen to know that they now have widely different political views to my husband’s ‘far-right’ opinions. How I can stop any potential conversations getting out of hand, as my husband tends to dig his heels in? – B.D.V., Northants A. Collude with your husband to pre-empt possible catastrophes. Tell the couple that he has agreed to imminently take part in a village debate to raise funds for charity. Unfortunately he has been assigned the argument ‘President Trump is a good man’. He

Bruce Anderson

Wine to pass the cricket Test

What to drink while watching cricket? Beer or even Pimm’s for the village green, but I think that a Test match on television demands wine. What a series we are having: likely to go down in the record books as a great example of the greatest of games. Cricket incites memories. The current Indian side have a claim to be world champions. In this last Test, they thumped England even though they rested Jasprit Bumrah, probably the best bowler in the world today. But I recall earlier days when they were usually easy victims in England, with one exception: Sunil Gavaskar’s match. This was in 1979 at the Oval and

Dot Wordsworth

Are Reeves and Starmer really in ‘lockstep’?

‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘In the past, there have been examples – I won’t give any specific – of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.’ ‘Sounds like you and me,’ said my husband sarcastically. But I was wondering whether the Prime Minister was aware of the connotations of his claim about being in lockstep. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the meaning ‘in perfect or rigid, often mindless, conformity’. An image might be the scene in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), where the overalled workers change shift, their heads bowed, their

Rachel Johnson

My night at the Spectator summer party

The first rule of the summer party is do not hold your summer party on the same night as The Spectator. It’s social fight club. You can only lose. This is a rule, however, that our Prime Minister, among others on ‘the left’, ignored to offer competing attractions. Zarah Sultana MP went to the most extreme lengths. She chose the same evening (3 July) to launch a new political party with Jeremy Corbyn, by posting something on X at 8.11 p.m. before her party even had a name, or indeed, Jeremy Corbyn. It was Jezbollah minus Magic Grandpa. Total success, as my father says whenever something goes badly wrong. The

Melissa Kite

Our B&B has found its niche

A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, which was occupied by a couple from West Virginia on a romantic road trip. The door rattled again as I stood there. I realised the big old key was turning and returning in the lock and the handle was rattling but the door was not opening. I ran back into our bedroom and shook the builder boyfriend awake. ‘The people in room 4 are stuck in their room!’ He stirred and when I wouldn’t stop shaking him he got

Aidan Hartley

Are my cattle ready to compete?

Kenya My cattle sensei Mark revealed that my Boran bulls aren’t gaining enough masculine growth after weaning because they’re only just surviving on the droughted, brittle pastures of my farm at 6,000ft in Laikipia. They’re also starved half the time, since the perennial threat of armed cattle rustlers mean they must overnight in a stone and thornbush zeriba – and this year we’ve had one bitch of a lioness constantly harassing the livestock, even jumping into the stockade at night to kill or injure animals. I’ve put all my bulls on to a protein and bran supplement, but sadly I have selected only three very young beasts to enter the

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 July 2025

The city of Poznan in Poland became heaven on earth last month, swarming as it was with hundreds of fellow bridge addicts and most of the world’s top players. It was the 11th European Transnational Championships, and I went to play in the Mixed Teams with a wonderful group: Sebastian Atisen, Andrew McIntosh, Sara Moran, Paula Leslie and Gunn and Fredrik Helness (wife and son of the legendary Tor). We named our team Contract Killers, which we thought was great until we suddenly realised it might sound like we butchered our contracts rather than nailed them. In any case, we did well to get to the round of 32 before

Luke McShane

UzChess Cup

The team of young talents from Uzbekistan, who sensationally won gold at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, continue to develop apace. The strongest, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, is in the world top 10, and Javokhir Sindarov is at no. 25. They tied for first at the strong UzChess Cup, held in Tashkent in June, competing against elite players like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Arjun Erigaisi and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. The latter also tied for first and won the playoff, though he was on the losing side of the most spectacular game of the event (perhaps the most beautiful of the year so far). R. Praggnanandhaa-Richard RapportUzChess Masters 2025 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3

Luke McShane

No. 858

White to play. Abdusattorov-Rapport, UzChess Masters 2025. The a-pawn seems bound to promote before the h-pawn. Which move allowed Abdusattorov to win the game anyway? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 July. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Kxd7! Then 1…Kh5+ 2 Be6#. Against 1…f3 or 1…Nf3, also 2 Be6# Or 1..Kf5 2 Bf3# Last week’s winner Paul Carter, Lancaster

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Between the lines

For Competition 3407 you were invited to write about a historical event euphemistic-ally. This challenge was a little vague; Private Eye code was the inspiration but from the tone of the entries it could have been 1066 and All That. The standard was very high, with too many runners-up to name names, and the £25 vouchers go to the following. Life grew rather complex in 1789 when France experienced a regime malfunction. The financially embarrassed commoners, who kept popping their clogs due to nutrition deficiency, took against royals and aristocrats who did not rate highly on political awareness. Paying an unscheduled visit to the Bastille, the monarchy-resistant mob significantly devalued

Gila

2711: Homework

Unclued lights give two lines of a poem, their author and a relevant location. Across 1    Magnificent place featured in dispatch papers (8) 15    Wrongdoer relinquishes first secret (5) 16    Cut some garlic (5) 17    Stomachs filled with endlessly bad, bad feelings (6) 18    Young lad bored by love before long (4) 21    Housing activity on course to increase (7,2) 22    To become stronger, senator takes time away from work (7) 26    Blue uniform accepted by a cleaner, possibly (9) 30    Advance payments – one way to eke out a living (7) 32    Misguided negotiator dismissing one ordinary form of crowd control (4,5) 34    Left in charge, do a runner

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The unspoken truth about 7/7

Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something called 7/7, apparently. I read a long report on the BBC’s website about this tragedy but remained entirely unclear as to who killed the people on those trains and bus. The report said ‘bombs were detonated’ on the Tube, as if the bombs – anxious to fulfil their purpose in life – had blown themselves up, without the aid of any external agency. Nowhere in the report did it mention who brought the bombs down from Yorkshire and then set them off. Nowhere in the entire article were the words

The Spectator

2708: On the shelf – solution

Bertrand RUSSELL, whose surname is hidden in the final column, said, ‘There’s a BIBLE on that shelf there. But I keep it next to VOLTAIRE – POISON and ANTIDOTE.’ The other four unclued lights are two synonyms each of ‘poison’ (VENOM, TOXIN) and ‘antidote’ (MITHRIDATE, SERUM). First prize  Rhiannon Hales, Ilfracombe, Devon Runners-up  Paul Harrison, Wilpshire, Blackburn, Lancs; Matthew Wright, Topsham, Devon