Society

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Brighton rock bottom: How the Greens nearly destroyed the city I love

When you’re short-sighted, everyone seems attractive; for this reason, I don’t often wear my glasses, as I think myopia has a felicitous effect on my attitude to life. However, after a whopping 28 years living in Brighton & Hove, it’s dawning on me that this has coloured my view of my adopted hometown too. I love living in Brighton and wouldn’t dream of moving anywhere else. But I am privileged to do a thing I love for a living, when and where I want; for people who need to get around it on a daily basis, Brighton is an increasingly unpleasant place to be. A good deal of this is

Ed West Ed West

National service is a bad idea that won’t go away

My father did National Service and was lucky enough to end up in Trieste, which was probably the best posting around. He was assigned to the intelligence corps, his job to track down former members of the Croatian Ustaše, a pro-Nazi collaboration regime known for bloodthirstiness so extreme that even visiting Gestapo were shocked by their inhumanity. I’m not sure if dad managed to get any Nazis brought to justice, but it inspired a love of Yugoslavia which led him to move to Sarajevo and become fluent in Serbo-Croat, and for the rest of his life he was obsessed with the Balkans – always a healthy pastime. Not everyone was so lucky;

Friday

Nigel Jones

Why is Germany riddled with Russian spies? 

Yet another suspected Russian spy has been arrested in Germany – the third such case in recent months.  The suspect – named only as Thomas H. by the Geman media for legal reasons – is an employee of the department of Germany’s army, the Bundeswehr, responsible for procuring defence technology.  The country that produced the Gestapo and SS has always had a healthy distrust of spies He is said to have approached the Russian embassy in Berlin and its consulate in Bonn in May and offered to provide secrets connected to his work. The arrest follows similar cases late last year when an agent of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND,

Thursday

Debbie Hayton

Mhairi Black needs to grow up

When 20-year old Mhairi Black was elected in 2015, she became the youngest MP for over 300 years. Eight years later, it seems that the ‘baby of the house’ has yet to grow up. Speaking at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Black has likened gender critical campaigners to white supremacists, and suggested that they were funded by ‘fundamental Christian groups in America, Baptist groups [and] anti-abortion organisations.’ It’s doubtful whether Black reached even the ad hominem level of debate as she dismissed those who disagreed with her in the febrile row over transgender rights. When asked if she believe that someone with a different philosophical view to her could still be

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Prince Harry could learn from the Japanese royals

Plain old Harry Windsor, as he is now, is in Japan for the International Sports Promotion Summit and a few low-key engagements before moving on to Singapore for a polo tournament fundraising for AIDS. The relaxed and happy looking former prince was welcomed with enthusiasm and characteristic courtesy by well-wishers as he arrived alone, wearing an Archewell branded cap, at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. Winningly, Harry flew commercial and didn’t use the VIP pathway to navigate the airport. ‘It’s good to see you again’ he said to reporters and added he’d be ‘happy to live here if you’d have me’ and actually looked as though he meant it. This is Harry’s

Peter Hitchens

Real cyclists don’t use e-bikes

An impossible 45 years ago, I decided the moment had come to get back on my pushbike. I had long hated the way the motor car was taking over the world and wanted to play my part in changing this. I also had a more selfish reason. After two years on the Fleet Street diet of lunchtime excess, I could already see my first heart attack was not far off. I was in my late twenties and getting almost no exercise. I knew of people in the newspaper business who did so little walking that the uppers of their shoes wore out before the soles did. Something had to be

Linden Kemkaran

Testosterone transformed my life. Why won’t GPs prescribe it?

Last summer, I became a participant in a covert drugs deal. I have never considered doing anything illegal, but I was desperate. This is how it happened. I was on a weekend away with friends, some of whom were women in their forties and fifties. I discovered that one friend, who lives an ex-pat life in a Middle Eastern country with fantastic private healthcare, had recently been given testosterone gel as part of her HRT medication. She had noticed a sharp and very welcome improvement. She reported feeling more alert, less forgetful, more able to get up off the sofa and be active and less likely to anxiously sweat the

Robin Oakley

Tom Marquand was the star of Goodwood

On no course in Britain does jockeyship count for more than at undulating, tricksy Goodwood and although Frankie Dettori was able, on his final appearance there, to treat the expectant crowd to a couple of flying dismounts after victories on Epictetus and Kinross, the week’s top rider was clearly Tom Marquand. One racing sage told me during the week, ‘Racing will desperately need another Frankie to engage the public’s attention’ – and when I proffered Tom and his wife Hollie Doyle as a twosome who could do so together, the rejoinder was: ‘Of course Tom’s got the ability but he’s just too nice.’ He meant that you simply couldn’t imagine

Bruce Anderson

Port is fashionable once again

I once drank some excellent port at Ted Heath’s table. The invitation came as a surprise, but it almost certainly had nothing to do with the monstre (un)sacré. The dinner took place during a Bournemouth party conference at the Close in Salisbury. Ted had an unofficial PPS, a then Tory MP called Robert Hughes. Rob had a sense of fun and mischief. There would have been little scope for either while he was enduring the sullen maunderings of the Incredible Sulk. Anyway, he was given a chance to amuse himself when asked to organise a dinner party. He included me. The young are being encouraged to drink port and even

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: The Crooked House fire, Liz Truss’s honours and a Commonwealth Games flop

Home The first of about 500 asylum seekers were taken to live on the Bibby Stockholm barge on the Isle of Portland, north of the prison and linked to the mainland by one road. The arrival of 339 migrants by small boat across the Channel at the weekend brought the year’s total to 15,071. The government declared it would increase enforcement action against lawyers who ‘coach illegal migrants to lie’ in making claims. Fines were to be tripled for employers and landlords who allow illegal migrants to work for them (up to £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach) or rent their properties, the Home Secretary announced. The 18th-century

The Spectator

Why do the Tories force asylum seekers to live on welfare?

Over decades of service as a floating hotel, the Bibby Stockholm has accommodated all manner of people. It has housed workers for a Swedish wind farm and for the new Shetland gas plant; homeless people in Hamburg, asylum seekers in Rotterdam. It was briefly considered as a ‘high-end’ barge for students: with 222 en-suite rooms, a restaurant, TV room and gym, it was touted to Irish universities as a floating hall of residence. It makes sense, then, that the government considers the vessel a suitable place to house asylum seekers – given that Britain has so few large residential spaces available. But the mooring of the Bibby Stockholm in Portland

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Will Keir Starmer condemn Greenpeace?

Sir Keir Starmer’s piece in the Times on Monday was presumably constructed round the front-page headline Labour wanted – ‘Just Stop Oil tactics are contemptible, says Starmer’. Behind the headline, and therefore unnoticed, was his argument that the Tories are wrong to allow new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, and Labour is right to allow only old drilling. This wedge between the two main parties is relatively trivial, since both are still committed to getting rid of all new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and therefore on course to create what Sir Keir, speaking of Just Stop Oil, calls ‘chaos for working people’.  Will Sir

William Moore William Moore

The covert campaign against field sports

If a general election is held, as is rumoured, in November next year, Labour could return to power exactly 20 years after the Hunting Act was passed, and there is the very real possibility of field sports being finished off altogether. Then, the government’s assault on hunting was a long, bloody, open conflict. Today, the campaign against countryside pursuits is more covert – a gradual process of lawfare. Over the past two decades, more and more regulation has crept in. Field sports and the rural economy that surrounds them are suffering. The groups set up to protect rural England often now work against the interests of both gamekeepers and farmers,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why ‘affirmative action’ doesn’t work

This week’s truism: all top-down attempts at leftie social engineering end up causing rather more misery and injustice than the misery and injustice they were designed to alleviate. This is chiefly because they come up against that most un-leftie of things, reality – but also because liberals are incapable of looking at actual outcomes and are able only to wring their hands in despair and wish for stuff. The world is not an ideal place and attempts to pretend they can make it so are always misbegotten. When you politicise a crime, all kinds of problems occur The most obvious example of this is in that most explicitly iniquitous of

Anthony Horowitz

Why on earth did The Spectator support Brexit?

The temperature has hit 40°C in Crete, where I am writing this, and although there have been no fires, nothing is quite how it ought to be. I can’t work out whether this is a great opportunity to get a tan or, effectively, the end of the world. My 60-year-old taxi driver tells me that unfeasibly hot summers were a regular occurrence when he was young and that there’s nothing to worry about. But, he adds, he’ll be dead soon anyway so why should he care? Right or wrong, this is the paradox at the heart of the climate change debate. Older people, who could be held responsible for the

The Spectator

2614: Monkey Business – solution

The key word is GIBBON (highlighted). 1A, 1D and 28D are types of gibbon; 16D is by 18A 29A Gibbon; 32D Gibbon wrote The History of the 13A 38A of the Roman Empire. First prize Anne Clements, Bromley, Kent Runners-up Janet Baines, Winchester, Hants; L. Malone, Dumfries

Doc

2617: Enzed scorers

The 12 thematic unclued lights form the second half of an alphabetical list, one solution finally and another first and last. Across  4    Kitty stewed apricots as single snack (6,5) 11    Saw English animals (7) 13    Around Tyneside Freddie New established new credentials (9) 21    Forty winks before beginning to exercise back of neck (4) 23    Incident is described in poem (7) 24    Up to no good, after end of shift (4) 25    Disentangle one French theme word here (7) 31    Assumed name I omitted, sadly (4) 32    Actor just refusing lead on All Saints’ Day (7) 34    Thank you note for collection of pictures (4) 37    Otherwise, one fine

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: songs for a parliamentary songbook

In Competition No. 3311, you were invited to submit a song suitable for inclusion in a parliamentary songbook. In an entry in which most scored pleasingly high on singability, W.S. Gilbert rubbed shoulders with Simon & Garfunkel and the Kinks. An honourable mention to Emily Matthews, but leading the winners below, who take £30 each, is Bill Greenwell’s twist on ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. The Speaker’s here, the Speaker’s there,His breeches tight against his Chair –He may name and shame you, so he’s rarely second-guessedFor he’s a venerated model of dispassionAnd when you catch his beady eyeHe calls you up, voice extra-dryListening to your subtext and by politesse obsessedFor he’s

Luke McShane

No. 764

White to play and mate in two. Composed by Sam Loyd, Lynn News, 1859. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 August. 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 Rf8+! Rxf8 2 Qh8+! Kxh8 3 exf8=Q mate. Black tried 2…Kf7 but was soon mated after 3 exf8=Q+ Last week’s winner Daryl Jones, Abingdon, Oxfordshire

Luke McShane

Funding matters

Three cheers for last week’s news leak, indicating government plans to support English chess. According to Dominic Lawson, the president of the English Chess Federation (ECF) and The Spectator’s former editor, his conversation with Rishi Sunak, setting out the significant role played by chess players in the wartime codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park, proved particularly compelling. The plans include expanding chess in schools and public parks, as well as £500,000 of funding over a couple of years for the ECF to develop the men’s and women’s international teams.  As I wrote in April, chess has been starved of funds due to not being officially classified as a sport.  In the