Society

Drinking with The Chemist – and God

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The closest I get to a social life these days is when I sneak off into town for an hour or so to buy red wine, trying not to get caught by my wife and six children. I have found a place that sells a fantastic Sangiovese at €2.60 a litre which is dispensed like petrol from a cask behind the counter into one-and-a-half litre plastic bottles that once contained mineral water. I buy four bottles each time I go. Once home I smuggle them through my study window, then I enter the house through the main door as if I had come back from a hard

My parents prefer the NHS to me

The US marine left his long johns down the back of an armchair and the next guest complained that she had found ‘a pair of knickers’. I ran upstairs after she told me this, she and her male companion standing in the big Georgian doorway about to leave. I found grey thermals, of the kind you might wear under hiking trousers, completely hidden, dropped down the back of this bedroom armchair and camouflaged against the taupe coloured carpet. I cursed myself for not moving the chair, which I normally do, and bolted back down the main staircase to tell the guest it really wasn’t knickers, but their car was already

What has Nicky Henderson done to irritate the racing gods?

‘It may well be that true riches are laid up in heaven,’ declared the blues composer W.C. Handy, ‘but it’s sure nice to have a little pocket money on the way there.’ A good turnout can therefore always be relied upon for Newbury’s £155,000 William Hill Hurdle which last Saturday carried a prize of £87,218 for the winning horse. The richest handicap hurdle in Britain has been one of my favourite races since its inception as the Schweppes Gold Trophy (under other sponsors it has also been run as the Tote Gold Trophy and the Betfair Hurdle). I never attend without seeing in my mind’s eye the tilted trilby figure

Bridge | 15 February 2025

The World Bridge Tour had its first event of the year in combination with the wonderful Bridge Festival in Reykjavik. Only team Black, of the four British teams, made the play-offs, eventually finishing fourth, while the event was won by the American McAllister team with – who else – the Rimstedt twins on it. I don’t know who coined the term ‘Nutmeg’ (a football term meaning playing the ball through an opponent’s legs) – but I heard about it probably ten years ago and wrote it up in this column at the time. I heard it again in the break between matches in the WBT round robin. This was the

Roger Alton

Emperor Trump and the spectacle of the Super Bowl

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic law-maker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: ‘Fly me to New Orleans.’ Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays

Dear Mary: How do I get my cleaner to quit?

Q. How can we get our new unsatisfactory house cleaner to resign? There is a huge demand for cleaners in our neighbourhood (the going rate here is £30 an hour, cash), and it took us months to find her, but we are frustrated by her resistance to our direction. If we ask her to tackle specific areas, or to do specific jobs, she says it’s better for her to judge what needs doing. Incidentally we noted, when she had two weeks off, that we were able to do ourselves, in roughly half the time, what she does for us. We would like to dispense with her services, but she is

Tanya Gold

How to get a table at Audley Public House

The Audley Public House is on the corner of North Audley Street and Mount Street in Mayfair, opposite the Purdey gun shop where you can buy a gun and a cashmere cape, because the world has changed. The Audley is a vast pale-pink Victorian castle, and it meets Mayfair in grandeur and prettiness. If the Audley looks like it could puncture you with an ornamental pinnacle, it also seems frosted with sugar – but that is money. This is the tourist Mayfair of the affluent American imagination: the pharmacies and grocers have gone, replaced by fashion (Balmain, Simone Rocha) and the spirit of Paddington Bear. Woody Allen shot Match Point

Does Rachel Reeves know what ‘kickstart’ means?

To ‘kickstart economic growth’ is the first (‘number one’) of Labour’s five ‘missions’ to rebuild Britain. That is what the manifesto announced last year. The mission is not just economic growth, but kickstarting it. On 29 January, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech that she was ‘going further and faster to kickstart economic growth’. I can see that she might be going further, but it is not easy to see what ‘faster’ means here, although it is true that, since economic growth has slowed down since the election in July, there is more opportunity for going faster. I suppose the word kickstart was chosen because

The Spectator fights back against government excess

Britons used to be able to rely on their parliament to safeguard liberty and their wallets. Those who were sent to the House of Commons came not as petitioners for a larger government and greater state expenditure but as guardians of individual freedom and defenders of private property. It was self-evident to them that those who spent their own money would always spend it more wisely than those who took others’ money and spent it to please whom they may. During those times MPs, including even ministers, regarded restraint on executive power and tight control on public spending as unquestioned virtues, and the nation prospered. The United Kingdom was seldom

Charles Moore

Channel 4 shouldn’t get to decide the next Archbishop

Obviously, it is difficult to defend the leadership of the Church of England, and I am inexperienced in that art; but I do feel strongly that its episcopal appointments should not be controlled by Channel 4 News and Cathy Newman. This, in essence, is what is happening. First went Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, because Channel 4 News was determined to show that he had not reacted vigorously over the John Smyth scandal. (In my view, the Makin report failed to prove Welby’s culpability.) Next was the turn of the Bishop of Liverpool, John Perumbalath, forced out after Channel 4 News reported his alleged sexual assault against an unnamed woman

Portrait of the week: Andrew Gwynne sacked, Trump saves Prince Harry and a £30m refund over moths

Home Andrew Gwynne was sacked as a health minister and suspended from the Labour party for making jokes about a constituent’s hoped-for death, and about Diane Abbott and Angela Rayner. Oliver Ryan, a member of the WhatsApp group where the jokes were shared, had the Labour whip removed and 11 councillors were suspended from the party. Asked about 16,913 of 28,564 medics registering to practise medicine in Britain last year having qualified abroad, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said there was ‘no doubt’ that ‘the NHS has become too reliant’ on immigration. The government issued guidance saying that anyone who enters Britain by means of a dangerous journey will normally

Pride in Britain? It’s history

A poll out this week found that only 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 27 are proud to be British. Frankly I’m surprised the figure is that high. After all, if you add together the immigration of recent decades and the concerted effort to demoralise the population that has gone on, that is exactly the sort of result you would expect. It has been achieved in a remarkably short space of time. In 2004, some 80 per cent of young people in the same age cohort said that they felt proud to be British. So within 20 years we have managed to halve our sense of national self-worth.

Michael Simmons

How to stop the government splurging our cash

All too often, the Prime Minister recently lamented, Britain’s public servants are happy languishing in the ‘tepid bath of managed decline’. There is, however, one area in which Britain’s public servants are dynamic, innovative and world–leading: at spaffing gazillions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on wasteful projects which are variously inane, insane and indefensible. The British state makes the average drunken sailor look like a model of frugality. When William Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he earned notoriety for his pursuit of ‘candle end’ economies – no saving was too trivial if he could leave money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. His contemporary equivalents in the

My impossible task as ‘minister for efficiency’

I am delighted that The Spectator is launching a campaign to highlight the grotesque levels of financial waste in government. Of course public sectors worldwide have always defaulted towards profligacy – but we are in different territory now. Our GDP per capita is declining: through immigration, the population is growing faster than the real economy is growing. We have no more capacity to borrow – we are already paying 25 per cent more than the Italian government for ten-year debt. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves love to talk bullishly about growth, but they don’t understand that taxing the productive sector more and more and discouraging employment through onerous new regulations

Luck of the draw

‘Praggnanandhaa rallied to win the playoff’ is what I wrote last week, as though there were nothing more to say. That came after a humdinger of a final round at the Tata Steel Masters in Wijk aan Zee, in which ‘Pragg’ and world champion Gukesh Dommaraju both lost their final games but nevertheless shared first place with 8.5/13. That magnificent tragedy would have been a fitting conclusion to the tournament, but the modern way is to favour a playoff which determines a single winner. Fans want blood and sponsors want gold, so the thinking goes. A few weeks ago, Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi were widely pilloried when they agreed (with the organiser’s

No. 837

White to play. Gukesh-Praggnanandhaa, Tata Steel Masters tiebreak, 2025. Black’s last move, 35…Qd3-d6 was a blunder. Which move did Gukesh play to exploit it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 February. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1…Rxf4+ 2 Kxf4 stalemate. Not 1…Rd5+ 2 Be5 Rb5 3 Ra4+! Kh3 4 Ra2 and White wins. Last week’s winner Alex Newman, Shalford, Surrey

Spectator Competition: The big move

Competition 3386 invited you to submit poems about the domestic arrangements at the White House. The idea was to inspire some visions of what goes on behind the official scenes – oh to be a fly on the East Wing wall. MAGA hats off to Frank McDonald, Elizabeth Kay, Daniel Pukkila, Nicholas Lee, Tom Adam, Paul Freeman and others, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s final verse seems apt: It’s hard to read a mind in disrepair Or one as shiny and airtight as chrome: Two four-year tenants, signally aware That an official house is not a home. The £25 vouchers go to the winners below. Clean, baby, clean. That place is full