Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Have I cursed myself by drinking holy water?

The mountain spring that feeds our house froze during the first ground frost, and we had no water. The builder boyfriend filled a bucket from the fountain in the garden so we could flush the loo. This really is living in faded grandeur. I spent the evening worrying about how we had cursed ourselves by drinking and bathing in holy water We are waiting on various tradesmen to turn up and do things to the plumbing in our run-down Georgian pile. We know we might have to drop a bore hole. But until then the water coming out of our taps is from a ‘holy well’. The stream pools into

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 27 January 2024

The London Teams of Four was the first bridge tournament of the new year and was a very close affair. Kevin Castner finally prevailed against the opposition with his team of (partner) Phil King and teammates Sebastian Atisen and Stefano Tommasini – the last newly selected, with his regular partner Ben Norton, to represent England in the Open Teams in the European Championships later this year. Today’s hand features fierce bidding and even fiercer declarer play by Capt Kevin, who pulled off the hand of the day. Take a look at this beauty. Phil King’s 6♦️ may seem a bit of a stretch, but when 1♦️ was known to show

Luke McShane

The Candidates line up

Lobbing brickbats at Fide, the International Chess Federation, is always in fashion. The organisation celebrates its centenary this year, but Russia’s top player Nepomniachtchi tweeted a bitter New Year greeting: ‘Let 2024 bring Fide everything that it lacks: transparency, integrity, clear rules, unified standards, wise judges, attentive organisers, recognisable sponsors!’ To that litany of gripes, one could add that a democratic deficit is woven into the fabric of the organisation. Member countries, no matter how few constituent players they have, each get one vote, which inevitably distorts the incentives at election time. Fide’s current president, Arkady Dvorkovich, is a former deputy prime minister of Russia, which is ‘problematic’, as the

Luke McShane

No. 785

White to play. Blübaum-Pavlidis, Bundesliga 2024. Which move won the game for Blübaum? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 29 January. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postaladdress and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Re8! Rxe8 (or 1…Nxe8 2 f8=Q+) 2 Qxf6+!! Black resigned since Rxf6 3 fxe8=N+! Kg6 4 Nxc7 wins Last week’s winner Martin Dlouhý, Meziboří, Czech Republic

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Liz Truss follows the Yellow Brick Road

In Competition No. 3333 you were invited to submit a short story that features Donald Trump or another politician of your choice in a well-known fictional landscape. Joan Didion once observed that Ronald Reagan was the American politician to most fully embrace his own fictionality, making up stories in which he played the starring role. Didion put this down to ‘his tendency to see the presidency as a script waiting to be solved’. Needless to say, Reagan didn’t play a starring role in the entry; a medium-sized but impressive postbag was dominated by Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Competitors who shone included Sue Pickard, Nicholas Hodgson and Nigel Bennetton. The prize

Lavatch

2638: Capital fellow

Unclued lights (including one pair giving a name, and one of three words from a quotation) form three groups; the word that links them all must be highlighted in the grid.         Across    1    Make bourgeois rogue grin, yet to embrace female (8)    8    Small cover for head or neck (4) 11    A sailor pockets peso with original value (2,3) 14    Old Yemeni’s brief month in Israel (5) 15    Some poetry’s mood extremely humane (7) 17    Expert delaying old emperor (4) 18    Politician blocks great excuse (5) 19    A relative pens book having no life (7) 23    Fish in benign border of greenery (4,4) 24    Shearwater bird eats

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sturgeon’s missing WhatsApps and Trump’s latest victory 

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that, in taking part in a second American air attack on Houthi positions near Sanaa, Britain had ‘acted in line with international law, in self defence, and in response to an immediate threat’. This time the leader of the opposition had not been informed before the attack. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said: ‘We back this targeted action.’ Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary, set off to visit the Middle East. The Commons Procedure Committee decided to recommend that the Foreign Secretary should in general answer questions in the Commons by being summoned to the Bar of the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Would Jesus really be against the Rwanda Bill?

Sitting in the Chamber late on Monday afternoon for the Lords debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty, I was impressed by the standard of oratory. Most of the best speeches came from those – Lords Goldsmith (the Labour one), Kerr of Kinlochard, Anderson of Ipswich – who argued that the treaty was not, in itself, proof of the government’s contention, which the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to turn into law, that Rwanda is now a safe country. Not for the first time, I felt an unease about how the government has got itself into this tight corner. But then up popped the Bishop of Gloucester: ‘I will

Richard Dawkins

This week’s diary

Monday and Tuesday I gave over to two long conversations with Arvid Ågren, a Swedish biologist who wants to write a scientific biography of me. As the author of The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution, he knows the subject inside out. Disconcertingly, he seems to have read every word I’ve ever written, and has an almost telepathic familiarity with my entire stock of humorous anecdotes. I wouldn’t put it past him to divine what my mother, who died at 102, would certainly have said: ‘But I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to write a biography of you?’ He’s now going to start looking for a publisher, and she would no

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Starmer has got the culture war all wrong

I’ve decided that I would like President Trump to win the next American presidential election, solely because it will disappoint Hugo Rifkind. I realise that such a statement could only possibly come from a shallow, petty-minded individual and that what should concern all of us is the, uh, stewardship of the free world. But there will be plenty of columnists suffused with gravitas and import to argue those odds one way or the other, leaving me to plough my own rancorous and spiteful furrow. Hugo wrote a very Rifkindy piece for the Times about whether it was necessary, or otherwise, to report the US elections in an honest, truthful and

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Prince Edward has ‘gone on a journey’

Say what you like about Prince Edward, but he has never usually been one for stepping into the limelight – in contrast to his siblings and nephews. Yet, during the course of his two-day official visit to South Africa, the Duke of Edinburgh made some remarks that attracted international media interest. Speaking at the British High Commission in Pretoria on Monday, Edward – commonly acknowledged as the most low-key senior member of the Royal Family – said: ‘I know the world is not in a happy place at the moment. If I can be quite frank, men aren’t doing a very good job at the moment. So therefore I am

Rory Geoghegan

Why is the British Transport Police launching a bursary for British Africans?

Some of Britain’s police chiefs are in a total pickle when it comes to race, not least as a result of them rushing to embrace critical race theory and anti-racist ideology in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the United States in 2020. Whether actually captured, or simply pretending to be, they have committed policing to a political course that risks ending very badly. The latest development has seen a police force agreeing to fund a bursary for a law student, but only if they are ‘British African’. At a time when many of our public institutions are happy for you to identify however you like, something tells me

Tuesday

Ed West Ed West

Britain isn’t a free country

I’m old enough to remember when ‘it’s a free country’ was a phrase people used in conversation. It feels like it was the kind of thing they said regularly, either when someone asked permission to do something or when commenting on some particular eccentricity. Can I sit there? It’s a free country. You want to walk around dressed up as a pirate? Well, it’s a free country.   Perhaps it reflected a self-conscious British sense of themselves as freedom-loving people – which isn’t really true, or at least hasn’t been since 1914 – or maybe it was a Cold War thing. But I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase in at least 20 years,

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The age of outrage has arrived

It’s an outrage! The dictionary definition of ‘outrage’ in this sense is ‘something that is grossly offensive to decency, morality or good taste’, or resentful anger caused by this. The frequency of outrages these days seems to have gone up by multiples. But is that really the case? It often feels these days that there is simply too much mad stuff going on, day in day out. Let’s have a look at the last few weeks. As usual, something crazy happened every couple of hours. Jews were assaulted by a racist mob in Leicester Square, and the police took half an hour to show up, after ten 999 calls. This

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why the Tories should think twice about pre-election tax cuts

Are Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak asking the right question as they approach the spring Budget? For the Chancellor and Prime Minister, the key issue is ‘how can we cut taxes in a way that will get us credit with voters?’ But polling by YouGov for today’s Times suggests voters might want them to ask a different question about improving public services, with 62 per cent saying that the government should prioritise spending more on public services rather than cutting taxes. Hunt won that argument, but seems to have forgotten about it now he is Chancellor The curious thing is that Hunt used to make a similar argument when he

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why is Zelensky echoing Putin’s rhetoric?

Today is Ukraine’s Day of Unity which necessarily had to be marked with an expression of national pride. However, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to issue a decree ‘On the Territories of the Russian Federation Historically Inhabited by Ukrainians’ represented not simply that, but an open political challenge to Moscow, and one which strangely echoed Putin’s rhetoric. The decree begins castigating Russia for oppressing Ukrainians ‘in the lands historically inhabited by them,’ which is defined as the ‘modern Krasnodar, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk and Rostov regions’ – a large swathe of south-western Russia. From this, it demands the creation not just of ‘an action plan for preserving the national identity of

Annabel Denham

Why is measles on the rise?

Having endured months of restrictions on our freedoms to deal with Covid-19, we now face a major health threat entirely of our own making: vaccine hesitancy. Measles – a centuries-old contagious disease which can lead to serious complications – is on the rise. Hospitals in Birmingham are dealing with their biggest outbreak in years. Health experts are warning that, unless more children are vaccinated, more admissions should be expected. This should worry, but not surprise us. In some areas and groups in London, coverage of the first MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) dose is as low as 69.5 per cent. Approximately 10 per cent of children in the UK are unprotected from

Nicholas Farrell

Bologna is rebelling against the 30 kph speed limit

Ravenna You’re not supposed to mock the afflicted, I know, but I laughed when I read the news that the left-wing citadel of Bologna has introduced a 30 kph (19 mph) speed limit. Forcing the Italians – a nation of famously crazy drivers who make fabulous sports cars – to drive no faster than cyclists is to deprive them of an essential element of what it means to be Italian. Poor Italians. Is nothing sacred? Not even speed? Probably, thank God, not even globalisation can change the Italian psyche I’ve lived for so many years cheek by jowl with the Italians and their ins and outs that I must confess I

Harry Mount

Starmer is wrong to defend the National Trust

Keir Starmer is drawing up his battle-lines for the next election. First, he came for the public schools, pledging to whack VAT on school fees. Now he’s going for the traditionalist wing of National Trust members.  In a speech today, he accuses the Tories of ‘waging a war’ on charities and civic society. He claims the Conservatives have denigrated the National Trust by accusing it of pursuing a ‘woke’ agenda: ‘In its desperation to cling onto power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.’ The National Trust was once a byword for high-minded thought So