Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

QPR’s downward spiral

Charlie, my 17-year-old son, was hopeful about QPR’s chances this season. True, we managed to avoid relegation only by the skin of our teeth in 2024-25, but we’ve just appointed a new manager: a Frenchman called Julien Stéphan, who won the Coupe de France in 2019 with Rennes, beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final, and getting into the last eight of the Europa League. In addition, we’ve had what football fans call a ‘good window’, recruiting several promising young players in the summer transfer period, including a much needed striker in the form of Richard Kone, a 22-year-old Ivorian who scored 21 goals for Wycombe Wanders last season. ‘I think

Madeline Grant

The ADHD racket

In 1620, in the Staffordshire market town of Bilston, a teenage boy decided he didn’t much fancy going to school. Rather than resort to conventional methods, 13-year-old William Perry claimed that he was possessed by a demon. His symptoms included reacting with spasms to the reading of the first verse of St John’s Gospel and peeing blue urine. Thousands flocked to Bilston to witness his supposed possession. King James I, who wrote a book on necromancy and black magic, took a personal interest in the case. It was only when the Bishop of Coventry had the bright idea of reading him the equivalent scriptural passage in Greek – a language

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Good riddance to the traditional sports bar

They used to be places that reeked of testosterone, sweat and male egos, their floors sticky with lager spilled by big boys with big biceps. Well, that’s all changing. As the Women’s Rugby World Cup powers through its early stages, the latest spin-off from the rise and rise of women’s sport is women’s sports bars. As such innovations tend to, this one started in America when, according to the Economist, a former chef called Jenny Nguyen opened the Sports Bra (ho ho!) in Portland, Oregon in 2022. She did so after having to watch a top women’s basketball match in a traditional sports bar with the sound on mute, presumably

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I get a Lycra-wearing cyclist to dress for drinks?

Q. A good friend often cycles over when I invite him for drinks. The trouble is he insists on turning up slightly sweaty in Lycra, and it makes things awkward when other guests are in jackets and dresses. Mary, how can I steer him towards something more civilised without causing offence? – B.H., London SW3 A. Begin a tradition of taking a group photograph in front of your grandest backdrop. Mention casually on the invitation: ‘We’ll take a quick photo when everyone has arrived.’ Few men will risk posterity, or indeed Instagram, in Lycra. Your friend will find himself spontaneously smartening up his act without your having to intervene. Q.

The Spectator

Is Angela Rayner pushing up house prices?

By George There is a popular movement to fly St George’s flags from lampposts. The St George Cross was used as an emblem of Henry II of England and Philip II of France during the Third Crusade in 1189. From 1218 it was used as the flag of Genoa, and in 1348 became a flag used by the English royal family. Some others using it today: — Georgia: national flag incorporates a large St George’s Cross with a smaller one in each quadrant; Sardinia: St George’s cross with a Moor’s head in each quadrant; Barcelona: St George’s crosses in two quadrants, with stripes in the other; naval flags of Bahamas,

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A fictional Edwardian waif’s hungry fantasy: Fortnum & Mason’s food hall reviewed

I like a picnic weighted with history and class terror, which means Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly, which is historical re-enactment with dreaming. I have written about this for years or tried to: food is never just food, only fools say that. You can learn almost everything about people from the food they want. And here is St Narcissus in the form of a department store that works more powerfully as an idea than a mere shop, though it is a very effective shop. Fortnum’s sells a Great Britain that never was, designed for people who no longer exist, if they ever did. It has much to say to Brexiteers

Dot Wordsworth

What should you call a ‘boy cow’ and a ‘lady dog’?

‘That’s a boy cow,’ said a woman in the train to a little girl, adding in an aside to an adult companion: ‘I didn’t use the other word because it’s too much like…’ The other word must have been bullock and the word it too much resembled was bollock. Bollock used to be spelt ballock. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce introduces the question of whether ballocks is the only example of the dual number in English. In Irish English it is certainly used in the plural form with singular concord. Ballocks was in standard use up to the 17th century, after which it was

The Spectator

Letters: Bring back the hotel bath!

Moore problems Sir: Many years ago a colleague warned me that I was so impossibly uncool that one day I was bound to become hip. Has this moment arrived? Charles Moore (Notes, 23 August) informs me that there is a ‘currently fashionable conservatism’ which is ‘militantly against Ukraine’. By this he presumably means not regarding Ukraine as a sort of lovely Narnia, full of birdsong, democracy and honesty, which – as it happens – it isn’t. Even so, I wonder where this ‘fashionable conservatism’ is to be found? After more than a decade of suggesting the Ukraine issue is not as simple as many believe, I have – as far

The Spectator

The risks of Reform

In 1979, XTC sang: ‘We’re only making plans for Nigel/ We only want what’s best for him.’ The song is from the perspective of two overbearing parents, confident that their son is ‘happy in his world’ and that his future ‘is as good as sealed’. Nigel Farage is making plans for his own future but it’s doubtful it’s as good as sealed. This week, he announced Reform UK’s proposal for mass deportations, ‘Operation Restoring Justice’. Some 600,000 illegal migrants will be removed, he promised, should his party win the next election. Britain will leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) so we can return people to countries such as

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

The coming crash: the markets have had enough

‘The problems of financing our deficits have seriously hampered progress in achieving our goals,’ wrote Labour’s chancellor Denis Healey in 1976 in his letter to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Half a century on, little has changed. Britain’s numbers still don’t add up. Our demographics are the problem: we’re an ageing population with too few taxpayers. As births struggle to replace deaths, liabilities funded from today’s taxes become harder to sustain. If the picture looks bad now, the next few years will be disastrous. A crash seems almost certain. For years the government has spent more than it raises through taxes. It financed that gap through the kindness of others,

Sean Thomas

America’s obsession with British decline

As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mum. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices so that you exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking. On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammone. No one wants to be that guy. And to avoid it, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings. So it is with American

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Reform’s migration crackdown, South Korea’s school phone ban and Meghan Markle misses Magic Radio

Home Nigel Farage, launching Reform’s policies on illegal migrants, said: ‘The only way we’ll stop the boats is by detaining and deporting absolutely anyone who comes via that route.’ A Taliban official in Kabul responded: ‘We are ready and willing to receive and embrace whoever he [Mr Farage] sends us.’ The government sought to appeal against a High Court ruling which temporarily forbade the housing of asylum seekers in the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex. Protests against asylum hotels and counter-protests continued in several places. The government said it would introduce a panel of adjudicators instead of judges to hear migrants’ appeals in the hope of speeding up the asylum

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Angela Rayner and the spite of Labour

As a snapshot of our country, you’ll be pressed to find anything quite so resonant as the one which depicts a leading member of our Skankerati sitting in an inflatable off the southern coast of the UK with tattoo and vape in attendance. There has been much debate of late about the very large numbers of other people bobbing about in the English Channel – and the possible value they might be to our benighted economy. We could ask the same question about Angela Rayner. On paper she is a huge cost to the Exchequer, one which would easily outstrip even a fairly successful Albanian drug dealer. Henceforth, then, it

Jonathan Sumption

Why France hates Macron

One of the pleasures of spending the summer in France is that I can turn aside from our national problems and concentrate on those of our neighbour. They are similar but gratifyingly worse. You have to know someone quite well before they will open up about their own politics to a semi-outsider. I used to feel the same way when our own politics were chaotic in the aftermath of the EU referendum and French friends would approach me with that characteristic note of smug condescension to ask what on earth was going on. Emmanuel Macron is the ablest President of France since Charles de Gaulle. Yet he is hated across

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Britain is having its own gilets jaunes moment

‘I heard you want your country back. Ha, shut the fuck up!’ So yelped rap-punk duo Bob Vylan on stage at Glastonbury in June. That televised set became notorious for other reasons – for Vylan’s chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’, which cost the group their agent, a string of shows and, presumably, another Glasto appearance. But part of me thinks that Britain wouldn’t have faced such a restive summer, rocked by grassroots patriotic protests, were it not for that cretinous tirade against the nation. That and the triumphant return of Oasis, who aren’t afraid of a flag. Everything that has happened since has felt like a defiant middle

Luke McShane

Botched brilliancy

In one sense, everything went right for Nodirbek Yakubboev at the Rubinstein Memorial, held in Poland earlier this month. The 23-year-old grandmaster, who was part of Uzbekistan’s gold medal winning squad at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, scored a convincing tournament victory with four wins and five draws and pushed into the world’s top 50. And yet, it could have been even better. In the penultimate round, Yakubboev conducted a sparkling attack, only to blow it at the crucial moment and let his opponent, Matthias Blübaum, escape with a draw. It began with an enviable flash of optimism in the diagram position. Older, wiser heads would surely just castle kingside,

Luke McShane

No. 865

Black to play. O. Bronstein – L. McShane, World Blitz Team Championships, London, 2025. Bronstein sacrificed a knight for a kingside attack, but here I missed a chance to decide the game in my favour. Which move should I have played? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 1 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution David Marsh, Gurnard Last week’s winner 1 Qh8! Then 1…Kd4 2 Rf4# or 1…d4 2 Qh1# or 1…g3 2 Qh4#. Any move by Re5 is met by 2 Nc5#

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: Ad it up

For Competition 3414 you were invited to provide an extract from a well-known literary work rewritten to include appropriate product placements. Honourable mentions, in a top-notch entry, go to Max Ross, Ralph Goldswain, Hamish Wilson, John O’Byrne and Paula Cameron – and to Matt Quinn and Nick Syrett for a pair of excellent twists on Betjeman. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 John Lewis vouchers. The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea In an opulent Ovington boat, They took some money and Rouse Runny Honey Wrapped up in a Burberry coat. The Owl looked up to the stars above And sang to a Gibson guitar, ‘O lovely

Doc

2718: Caged

The unclued lights (one hyphened and one of two words) each bear a common feature. Across 7 Rodent, second seen in store (6) 12    Old Scottish borrowers who show respect about sons (9) 13    Rookie driver owns leading assets capital (5) 16    Bedcovers obtained from Chester’s shopping arcades lacking a touch of elegance (6) 20    Broadcast with singer heard at Brize Norton or Cosford (3,4) 21    An animal doctor admitted company – turned up with bird (6) 22    He has a dog but is driving without a conductor (3-3) 26    Not long until graduates leave one in the woodwind (4) 27    Chess grandmaster reflects his homeland somewhat (3) 28    Fresh