Society

Wednesday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I stop my wife from sleeping naked?

Q. Wealthy ex-pat friends came to stay and, despite being attended to assiduously by our major domo, they left without leaving him a tip. I concealed their faux pas by palming him €50 and pretending that they had given it to me to give to him. But I am annoyed at their lack of consideration, which I suspect is due to ignorance rather than forgetfulness. How do I inform them that it is customary for guests to leave a tip for their host’s staff? – Name and address withheld A. Not only may these people be unfamiliar with the convention of tipping, they may also need to be alerted to

Roger Alton Roger Alton

English cricket doesn’t travel well 

It’s a tricky old time for cricket. The collapse of England’s World Cup white-ballers – and how they have managed to run up the white flag with quite such aplomb – is one of the great sporting mysteries of our time. One day they are the best in the world and hot favourites; the next they have soured overnight, like a pint of milk left out for too long. Answers on a postcard please, as Ben Stokes admitted. English cricket has never travelled particularly well, which may have something to do with the conditions here being very different from those in nearly all the other top cricketing nations. England breeds

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

What do sugar and cocaine have in common?

Stephen Fry is a national treasure whom half the nation can’t stand. He drops his façade of loveability mid-chortle as soon as Brexit is mentioned. He threw a spectacularly pompous Remainer wobbly a few weeks ago and I remember thinking: is he determined to make the people he disdains actively hate him? If so, it’s working. Last weekend Fry was on John Cleese’s GB News chat show, talking about his former cocaine habit and its connection to his adolescent consumption of sugar. He mentioned the sweets in the shape of cigarettes that were sold at his school tuck shop. As he put it: ‘When I was a teenager, I had

Toby Young Toby Young

Why I’m optimistic about multiculturalism

Many of my conservative friends are beginning to catastrophise about the future of Britain in light of the pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted in our major cities over the past month. ‘I think you’re screwed,’ an American philosopher told me on Monday. ‘You should have raised the alarm about immigration from Muslim countries 25 years ago and now it’s too late. The fox is in the hen house.’ Such pessimism is coming to a head this weekend, with tens of thousands of protestors threatening to disrupt the Remembrance ceremonies which are taking place over two days owing to 11 November falling on a Saturday. If the two-minute silence is interrupted

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Are smartphones making us care less about humanity?

Generation Z were the first to grow up attached to smartphones. They spent their adolescence bathed in screen-light and now they’re depressed and anxious. Should we have seen it coming? Until very recently my parent friends were in determined denial. Z is the best generation that has ever lived, they said, free from prejudice and determined to recycle. I remember a piece by Caitlin Moran in which she insisted that her children were far more noble and caring than her contemporaries. No one picks up their iPhone to grapple with complex ideological truths Well, those optimistic days are over. The stats are now too stark. We daren’t take the kids’

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Be prepared to wait: how to make French onion soup like the French

Let me be clear: this week’s recipe is not a speedy little number. You can’t knock up a French onion soup for a quick supper. It’s not a 15-minute meal, or a roasting tray phenomenon that won’t require your input during its cooking. Just softening onions, despite what a lot of recipes tell you, takes up to 20 minutes in a pan. Caramelising them – really, truly caramelising them, bringing out their sweetness and complexity – takes literally hours. French onion soup is a labour of love. But if I lowball the cooking time, one of two things will happen: you won’t end up with the soup you signed up

Paul Levy

In defence of foie gras

Apoll shows that nine out of ten Brits want to ban the import of foie gras. Crumbs! Haven’t they got anything more important to worry about? The Times says about 200 tons are imported from Europe every year. I only wish some would come my way. Though the same article says Waitrose stocks this greatest of all delicacies, I can’t remember seeing it in our local branch. The trouble is that the campaign against these large, buttery duck livers (goose liver is rare) is based on Yahoo-worthy ignorance and antique disinformation, such as the fading photographs that used to circulate of webbed feet nailed to the shed floor. While I

Christopher Howse

How to speak London

Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling ‘Ge’ aah-a my pub’ is as fossilised as Eliza Doolittle. And what a shock it is today to hear the late Queen, aged 21, declare: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family.’ She seems to say devated, sairvice and end (for ‘and’). Now a study from the University of Essex has put the accents of London and the south-east into the laboratory and shown that three are dominant: Estuary English (replacing Cockney), Standard Southern

Matt Ridley

The Cenotaph was designed as a symbol of multi-faith (and atheist) unity

Every year I lay a wreath a week early, because Blyth, my nearest town, was a submarine port. Submariners were banned from the first Armistice Day parade in Whitehall by a bossy admiral on the grounds that they were pirates who targeted civilians. In response they adopted skull-and-crossbones badges and arranged their own celebrations on the Embankment in London, and in Blyth and Dundee, a week before the official ones. The tradition survives more than a century later. The Cenotaph deliberately puts the sacrifice of Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist and Christian on an equal footing. The veterans who a decade ago would have memories of chasing the Bismarck or

Peter Jones

Is AI the Greeks’ answer to ‘automatos’? 

Elon Musk has predicted that AI will prevent anyone needing to work and will raise worldwide incomes at the same time. But will it rustle up a quick lamprey à la Bordelaise at a minute’s notice, to be washed down with a vintage Ch. Bruce Anderson? Greek comic poets had far more satisfying fantasies. Perhaps encouraged by philosophers like Plato who dreamed up visions of past times when, for example, birds and animals were tame and conversed happily with men on a wide range of topics, comedians took to constructing a fantasy derived from the almost universal ownership of slaves; the point being that, although slaves should do everything you

The Spectator

Letters: Israel/Gaza isn’t the time for fence-sitting

Ill-judged Sir: Professor Carl Henegan’s authoritative demolition of the Covid Inquiry (‘The Covid whitewash’, 4 November) prompts the question of why judges are normally appointed to chair public inquiries. Lady Hallett has clearly had a distinguished law career, but has no apparent expertise in government, public health, epidemiology, medicine or science. Her first move on being appointed was not to remedy these deficiencies but to spend more than £100 million hiring other lawyers – and the only possible explanation for the inquiry’s behaviour is that they believe they’re in a court of law and having already stated their positive view of lockdown, see themselves as acting for the defence. Hence

Alan Hollinghurst

The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank

This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40 years of going on about Firbank, that not everyone who sees it will have heard of him. He falls into that intriguing and important category of blue-plaque subjects who are not household names, but whose work was path-breaking, and influence enduring. Each plaque that goes up is the result, first and foremost, of advocacy by a member of the public, and after that of strong support from the deciding panel, on which I sat for six years. We ended up each time rejecting the majority of the proposals, and it

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

TikTok teens have an anti-Semitism blind spot

How could anyone hate Lily Ebert? The 99-year-old from Golders Green dedicates her life to teaching younger generations about the Shoah. Lily survived Auschwitz, where her mother and two of her siblings were gassed, and she went on to found the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre. For her contributions to Holocaust education, she was awarded the British Empire Medal. One of the tools she uses to reach young people is TikTok. Her account, managed by her 19-year-old great-grandson Dov Forman, has 2.1 million followers, drawn to educational videos from a woman who has lived some of the very worst of history. Then, one month ago, when Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis in one

Melissa Kite

Have the Surrey busybodies followed us to Cork

‘We’re waiting for the llamas to turn up,’ said the lady selling lottery tickets from her car in the supermarket car park. She had accosted the builder boyfriend as he walked by, shouting: ‘I want a word with you! We’re all very worried about what you’re going to be doing to that old house up there…’ The BB assured her we don’t have the money to do anything. Aside from tidying it up, we have no fancy plans, and we like old houses. As for llamas, yes, she had that right in terms of what most English people would be putting on the land. But we had brought our horses.

Lawrence Osborne

Why foreigners can’t speak Thai

For 12 years now I have been learning Thai from my maid, Pi Nong, who has been employed in our building for decades. It’s a much misunderstood relationship. Here the maid is an obligatory fixture, integrated into daily life for foreigners and Thais over the age of 45 and over a fairly modest income level. For foreigners the maid is a linguistic go-between, a bridge between two worlds, a portal into a new language. While she is making me dinner she gaily informs me that farangs cannot eat Thai food even though she is making it for me now and that, even more mysteriously, they cannot speak Thai – even

Douglas Murray

Are you a creative or a destructive?

There is a stage direction in The Glass Menagerie in which Tennessee Williams describes a tune that will recur through the play. Like a piece of delicately spun glass, he says, it should summon the thought of ‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken’. The cleverer young people want to live lives of hope, not demanding solutions, but finding them I think of that line often. Not least this week when two young protestors from Just Stop Oil took their hammers to the ‘Rokeby Venus’ of Velázquez at the National Gallery. Last year their cohorts threw soup over Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. Others glued themselves to the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

When will those ‘marching for Palestine’ do the right thing?

Those of us who believe in freedom of expression have felt mighty lonely this week. We have watched as, one by one, our fellow opponents of cancel culture have given into the temptations of censorship. Many on the right in particular appear to have fallen under the spell of suppression. Gone is their devotion to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and in its stead comes a chilling cry for a literal police clampdown on speech they don’t like. The target of these overnight converts to cancel culture? Saturday’s ‘March for Palestine’ in London. For the fourth weekend running, tens of thousands of people will gather in the capital to rage against

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Charles’s debut King’s Speech was a triumph

The King’s speech was a damp squib – but for that we should blame Rishi Sunak rather than Charles III. Most of the announcements – from tougher prison sentences to cracking down on smoking – were already known about. But while the Prime Minister’s agenda was far from inspiring, today’s pomp and ceremony did give some cause for optimism: Charles’s speech showed that Britain’s monarch is doing a good job in his role. Even before he said a single word today, Charles looked thoroughly at home in the surroundings. It’s hard to believe that this was the first speech that Charles has delivered as ruler, so established does he now

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

What did we really learn from Dominic Cummings’s leaked WhatsApps?

It’ll be years before the Covid Inquiry reports back on what we can learn from the pandemic, but already there is one key lesson for us all: don’t write anything on WhatsApp that you wouldn’t want read out in court. The vividly-phrased WhatsApp messages published, and very memorably read aloud, as part of the inquiry have brought some much-needed mirth to our troubled times. There is something inherently very funny about posh people in court quoting bad language and repeating insults like ‘useless f*** pigs’. Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, is one of those who carries the air of the headmaster’s study around with him. He has