Society

Wednesday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The remarkable story of how Justin Welby discovered the truth about his father

Jane Portal, as she was when she worked for Winston Churchill, died last week, aged 93. Lady Williams of Elvel, as she much later became, had an extraordinary life. I encountered her story by chance. In 2015, near us in Sussex, I was told that ‘of course’ (people love saying that when telling you a surprise) Jane Williams’s son, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was not the offspring of Gavin Welby, as the Archbishop believed, but of Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s last private secretary. Of course he wasn’t, I said. I made further inquiries, however, and saw letters and heard testimony which began to persuade me. I also noticed

Rachel Johnson

In defence of ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees

When someone asks ‘How are you?’ you have to assume your interlocutor is only being polite.Anyone who returns a ball-by-ball commentary about their aches and pains, work-life balance and reduced chances of summer fun thanks to the heat storm should immediately be sent to Coventry for the rest of time. That said, I am just back from wintry New Zealand where I have been in a Channel 4 series called Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins. Despite my pledge that I’d never do any more shows with the word ‘celebrity’ in the title, this one brought out the Bond Girl manquée in me and I couldn’t resist. I can’t say any

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: By-elections, dangerous dolphins and Djokovic’s £6,000 smashed racquet

Home Ben Wallace said he would cease to be the Defence Secretary at the next cabinet reshuffle and would not stand again for parliament. The Conservatives endured three by-elections – at Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Selby and Ainsty and Somerton and Frome. The left-wing mayor of North of Tyne, Jamie Driscoll, resigned from the Labour party after a rival was selected to stand for the newly created mayoralty of the North East. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said he would not reverse the Conservative limit on claiming child tax credit or universal credit for more than two children. On universities, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Our young people

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The BBC’s biggest problem

As I write this, the director-general of the BBC is being quizzed on the corporation’s future by people who were around when Sir John Reith kind of set the whole thing up. A cheap crack, I know – and I have nothing against the House of Lords. Anything which mediates our dangerous experiment with democracy is to be welcomed – the peers, the royals, the judges etc. I have been dipping in and out of the event and have yet to hear Tim Davie asked if he plans to bring back It’s That Man Again or whether or not the injunction ‘sod off’ is suitable for post-watershed viewing. If only

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How investors could benefit from the cooling housing market

There are, of course, many people struggling with their mortgage repayments. There are first-time buyers who have been especially hard hit, but also the buy-to-let investors who fooled themselves into thinking that ultra-low interest rates would last indefinitely and have over-borrowed.  Few will feel a lot of sympathy for the latter group, many of whom have been forced to sell up, according to anecdotal evidence. But their plight shouldn’t distract from the fact that, for all the talk of a house price crash, property has not been a bad investment over the past twelve months. This morning, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its two monthly indices, on house prices

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Will we even notice if AI replaces screenwriters?

We are edging into the third month of the strike by the Writers Guild of America, called because of shrivelling residual royalty payments from streaming movies and TV, as well as concern about AI such as ChatGPT being used to generate story ideas – and indeed to write scripts. Hollywood’s screenwriters have now been joined by the 150,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, which was demonstrated very visibly by the cast of Oppenheimer walking out of its UK premiere last week. ‘We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,’ said union president Fran Drescher. Susan Sarandon has said of AI: ‘I would hope that

Lavatch

2614: Monkey business

Unclued lights (one of three words and one of two words, singly or paired) form three groups. Group 1 is three words of a kind; group 2 is two names and a title; group 3 is a name and part of a title. The word that links them must be highlighted in the grid.         Across    8    Water sprite cut seaweed (4) 11    Man with publisher, old fool (5) 14    College has zero Asian money (5) 15    Laziness in Leeds is awful (7) 17    Welshman’s harp overturned (4) 19    Love poetry Auden’s beginning abroad (7) 23    Expelled journo pens adventure story (7) 24    In particle, track nucleus (6) 25    After dog, get a

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: great value picks from Argentina’s Penedo Borges

Well, crikey, that was fun! The recent inaugural Spectator tour of Champagne, that is. We had a hoot, visiting five producers and enjoying two first-rate dinners courtesy of Taittinger and Pol Roger. We learned lots, laughed lots, drank lots and I don’t think a single spittoon was sullied during the entire trip. Bravo! Oh, and hats off to Peter Brown who came top of the rigorous end of tour examination and who got a bottle of Pol for his troubles. Well done, Peter! After a week of fizz, though, however swanky the wines (and some were very swanky), it’s a joy to encounter some tasty still wines of great value

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: short stories after Walter de la Mare

In Competition No. 3208 you were invited to submit a short story whose first or last line is: ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ The given line opens Walter de la Mare’s slippery, haunting, much-anthologised ‘The Listeners’ and many entries echoed the 1912 poem’s supernatural theme. An honourable mention to George Simmers and David Shields, and £30 each to the prizewinners below. ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller. ‘“Asked” would be better.’ ‘Or “enquired”?’ ‘Too ornate. Keep to your authorial voice.’ Laura. Sacked from her academic post for the unacceptable views in her paper ‘Narrative Queerness – A Neostructuralist Critique’ and reduced to giving Creative Writing courses to

Luke McShane

No. 761

White to play. Rapport-Caruana, Grand Chess Tour Rapid, Zagreb 2023. Caruana’s last move, 61…Bd6-e7, was a decisive mistake. Which move allowed Rapport to take advantage? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 24 July.There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Bg6! e.g. 1…Ra8 2 Bf8#, 1…Ra7 2.Bg7# 1…Ra5 2 Bg5# etc or 1…Kh2 2 Bf4#. But not 1 Bg7 Kh2! Last week’s winner Andrew English, Abingdon, Oxon

Dot Wordsworth

A condensed history of ‘vape’

Last year, Oxford Languages’ word of the year was goblin mode. Apparently 300,000 voters decided upon it, but I haven’t heard anyone use it. It rocketed into view after someone posted online a fake headline about the break-up of Julia Fox and Kanye West after a month together. ‘He didn’t like when I went goblin mode,’ it read. Fox later made it clear she had said nothing of the kind. It means ‘self-indulgent, lazy, or greedy behaviour that rejects social norms’. I suspect goblin mode is a vogue term that will disperse like the morning mist. Talking of mist, vape has made another advance in establishing itself in the language.

Luke McShane

Blitz

Nine wins in a row. What are the chances? That’s how Magnus Carlsen began on the first day of blitz (fast) chess at the the Zagreb Grand Chess Tour. My guesstimate is that Carlsen wins no more than half of his blitz games against the standard of opposition that he faced in Croatia, where his toughest rivals included Alireza Firouzja, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi. So I think you would be more likely to see a coin land on heads nine times in a row than for Carlsen to repeat that achievement. (In slower games, where decisive games are less frequent, his chances would be lower still.) Of course it

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The pleasures of pebble-spotting

P-p-pick up a pebble. Feel its weight in your palm. Roll it over under your thumb. Any good? Not sure? Shuck it back on the shingle. Plenty of fish in the sea and more pebbles still on the shore. In The Pebbles on the Beach: A Spotter’s Guide, Clarence Ellis, pebble-spotter par excellence, opens with the words: ‘Most people collect something or other: stamps, butterflies, beetles, moths, dried and pressed wildflowers, old snuffboxes, china dogs and so forth. A few eccentrics even collect bus tickets! But collectors of pebbles are rare.’ We are not talking about the common or garden or indeed communal garden collector of pebbles – the sort

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Should I tell my boss I swiped his champagne?

Q. I have got myself in a pickle. My boss was given a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal by a client. It came in a very smart presentation box. I thought it would be funny to open it and replace the champagne with a bottle of fizzy water. My boss duly took it home and I waited several days, expecting him to come in one morning laughing and saying: ‘Where is it?’ Alas, silence. So in passing I nudged him with a grin on my face and said: ‘How was the champagne?’ He then told me he had fallen out with a childhood friend and they had not spoken since

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why your summer holidays might be doomed

The first LNER train I booked on Sunday from Durham to London was cancelled due to ‘action short of a strike’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, but I instantly admired it. It’s so impressively confusing. With a strike, you know whose side you’re on. You can look up the salary of a train driver, for instance, discover that it’s £70,000 after only a few years of training, and become icily indifferent to their plight. But action short of a strike? What is it? ‘Action short of a strike’ turns out to be an ingenious way of screwing your boss while still getting paid Action short of a strike, ASOS,

The Spectator

Where have the world’s highest temperatures been recorded?

Swing when you’re winning What are the biggest UK by-election swings? — The 1983 Bermondsey by-election saw a 11,756 Labour majority turned into a 9,319 majority for the Liberal party – a result widely attributed to the Labour candidate, Peter Tatchell, coming out as gay during the campaign. The Labour party under Michael Foot was also extremely unpopular – and had its then biggest defeat in a general election four months later. — The Clacton by-election of 2014 saw a 12,068 Conservative majority overturned into a Ukip majority of 12,404, with the Conservative share of the vote falling from 53% to 25%. However, it was unusual in that the Ukip

Douglas Murray

Canada’s assisted dying horror story

My favourite Martin Amis novel was his 1991 book Time’s Arrow. It is a pyrotechnically brilliant work in which all time goes backwards. On publication it was criticised in some quarters because the novel includes a reverse version of the Holocaust and some thought Amis was using the Holocaust as a literary device. As so often, these transient critics didn’t get the point. It is hard to say anything new about the Holocaust or find any new angle on it. Europe, like Canada, does not believe in the death penalty for criminals. Only for victims But Amis managed, because towards the end of the novel (that is, at the beginning

The Spectator

Letters: Biden is alienating Britain

Joe Shmoe Sir: Your piece ‘Not so special’ (Leading article, 8 July) was right. Joe Biden doesn’t like us and a brief 45 minutes with Rishi Sunak last week doesn’t change that. In Saudi Arabia last year, Biden compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Britain’s past in Ireland. This was outrageous – what about the US historical treatment of Mexicans, Cubans and Filipinos, and Biden’s friendliness towards IRA terrorists? Britain enjoyed excellent relations with the US under Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, all of whom had Irish ancestry, and it is self-indulgent and a dereliction for this President to make his chosen personal background an issue, as he does. Britain stood