Society

Thursday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A taste of 1997: Pizza Express reviewed

As the government withers this column falls to ennui and visits Pizza Express. As David Cameron, who left the world stage humming, said of Tony Blair: ‘He was the future once.’ So was David Cameron, and so was Pizza Express: I bet they meet often. It was founded in 1965 by Peter Boizot, who shipped a pizza oven from Naples and a chef from Sicily and opened in Wardour Street. That branch closed in 2020. Boizot grew up in Peterborough but lived in continental Europe for a decade, and he learnt three things: an Italian restaurant must be bright; good pizza must be slightly charred (burning food is underrated); children

Roger Alton Roger Alton

If you thought Lord’s was rowdy, get ready for Leeds

Shouldn’t we all just calm down a bit after Lord’s? Once prime ministers decide to intervene, you know things have gone too far. Rishi Sunak has made it clear he wouldn’t want to win a match that way apparently, which feels very much like Tony Blair’s decision to wade into the case of Corrie’s jailed heroine Deirdre Barlow. Mark you, that really was important. So… was Jonny Bairstow out after being stumped by sharp-eyed Australian keeper Alex Carey? Undoubtedly. Should the Australians have withdrawn their appeal? Possibly, because Bairstow had good reason to think the over was finished when he moved out of his ground. But had England gone on

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The insincere NHS tributes at PMQs

The birthday of our sacred NHS was celebrated at PMQs. Appropriately enough there was a lengthy waiting-list of MPs ready to pay insincere tribute to the medics who care for the sick once they’ve finished painting rainbows on their faces and rehearsing dance-moves in the corridors. Rishi Sunak ducked the session altogether. He was at a church service packed with grandees offering thanks to God for supporting the NHS (from time to time) during the 75 years of its existence. To some, the PM’s church visit looked a little rum. Our Hindu prime minister kneeling in Westminster Abbey and simultaneously worshipping two gods he doesn’t believe in: Jesus Christ and

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Andy Murray and the unstoppable rise of the sporting bores

When I was a girl, sportsmen were amiable dolts. If they were old-school, they liked blokes and beer; if switched-on, they liked boogieing with blondes at Tramp and dreamt of opening boutiques. But with both, you could rely on them never to let you know what they were thinking about the three-day week or the situation in Cyprus.  There’s nothing like the sight of men earning £100,000 a week for doing the thing they love lecturing us about colonialism to remind us of our privilege When Andy Murray declared his support for Just Stop Oil this week, he joined that ever-burgeoning brigade of what I think of as the Schlock

Gary Lineker and Andy Murray
Charles Moore Charles Moore

We’re finding out the price of net zero

Now that the cost of net zero has become a pressing political matter, I have been re-reading the prescient words of Matt Ridley in the House of Lords when, in 2019, he was one of very few who opposed the government’s ‘net zero by 2050’ pledge. ‘I was genuinely shocked,’ he said, ‘by the casual way in which the other place [the Commons] nodded through this statutory instrument, committing future generations to vast expenditure to achieve a goal that we have no idea how to reach technologically without ruining the British economy and the British landscape. We are assured without any evidence that this measure will have, “no significant… impact

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The fine art of French rioting

Marseille One of the benefits of holidaying during a riot is you feel remarkably safe. Ruffians have no interest in you while they can be having fun at the expense of a much more exciting foe, the police. And besides, there are Lacoste stores to be raided: they have no time for your wallet. The other major benefit is you can get a table anywhere. We had the best seat in France last week: the first-floor balcony of La Caravelle, an old-school bar overlooking Marseille’s historic port and the perfect vantage point for taking in the fine art of French rioting. The choreography unfolded in fits and starts. The police vans

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Why Europe riots

Montpellier A spectre is haunting Europe. In France, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and even Switzerland, the rule of law is being challenged by the rule of gangs. Disaffected young people cut off from society feel nothing but nihilistic contempt for it. Higher temperatures and social media are creating a heated summer. Judging from recent events in Paris and Stockholm, this year could be the worst so far. The rise of gang violence is associated with immigration. Europe has shown itself incapable or unwilling to control the influx of migrants, some of them genuine asylum seekers, others simply opportunists. Nor have European politicians succeeded in dealing with the problems created by immigration,

Henry Blofeld

In defence of Australia

What a week it has been for cricket. It began with that scalding ICEC report on the ‘racist, sexist and elitist’ state of the game in England. This report was commissioned by Ian Watmore, briefly the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, as a kneejerk reaction to Azeem Rafiq’s accusation of institutional racism. The report was presided over by Cindy Butts, who has been an activist for Black Lives Matter and perhaps has an axe to grind. As it stands, the report is devastating for English cricket, but much more needs to be known about the way in which it was put together and about the credentials of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Teachers strike, French riot and dire news for Diet Coke

Home The Financial Conduct Authority questioned banks about savings rates lagging behind the rising cost of mortgages. Andrew Griffith, the City Minister, was also asked by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to look into cases of bank customers who reported their accounts being closed because of their opinions on such things as LGBTQ+ policies. Petrol retailers were blamed by Harriett Baldwin, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee, for not passing on the benefit of a 5p cut in fuel duty. A group of 25 MPs, calling themselves the New Conservatives, published a plan to cut net migration from 606,000, last year’s figure, to 226,000, the figure for 2019. In

The Spectator

Biden shouldn’t turn his back on Britain

You can tell a lot about a president’s politics by his foreign visits. Joe Biden’s decision to skip King Charles’s coronation in favour of a fly-by visit to Belfast and three days in the Republic of Ireland gave an indication of his priorities. Biden presents himself at home as an Irish-American with a charmingly unserious hostility towards Britain: ‘The BBC?’ he told a reporter after his election victory in 2020. ‘I’m Irish!’ But it’s not all lighthearted. As President, Biden’s reflexive anti-Britishness seems to have coloured his foreign policy. He’s shown a striking reluctance to reciprocate Rishi Sunak’s attempts to refresh Britain’s credentials as America’s great ally. Part of this

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What’s the cure for writer’s block?

Q. Do you have a solution for writer’s block, Mary? A friend is the best company in the world, but I haven’t been able to speak to her for months. I know she reads her emails but they bounce back with the generic reply that she cannot respond until she has completed an urgent piece of writing work. I suspect she is blocked because this piece of writing is important to her on an emotional level but she is also the authority on the subject and only 5,000 words are required. — W.M., London W3 A. In writing it is often much easier to correct something bad than to begin

The Spectator

2609: Hard work – solution

The literary scholar F.S. Boas used the term Problem Plays (9D) to refer to a group of Shakespearean plays which seem to contain both comic and tragic elements: Measure for Measure (12/36), All’s Well That Ends Well (39/1) and Troilus and Cressida (21/22). First prize J. Bielawski, Southport Runners-up Alastair Aberdare, London SW13; Jeffrey Frankland, Storth, Milnthorpe, Cumbria

La Jerezana

2612: Grounded

The eight unclued lights are, or were, of a kind.         Across    1    Daily column about introduction of alternative fuel (8)    5    Cold, and damned unpleasant (6)    9    Tumbledown hut in barbarous realm (10) 16    Drink is finally within reach (6) 17    Joins female on Med, perhaps (5) 18    Unclothed Yanks fled joint (5) 20    Shamefaced bishop found in boozers west of Slough (7) 22    Harry in pursuit of tripe, symbol of Britain (7) 24    Capone perhaps poised to import hard liquor (7) 25    Confirmed last of resources exhausted (5) 26    Run over someone stepping back (5) 28    Married friends cycling round old country (7) 33    Endless niceness aroused anger

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems about procrastination

In Competition No. 3306, you were invited to submit a poem about procrastination. Procrastination looms large in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s hilarious account of his attempt to write a study of D.H. Lawrence, and it struck me as an excellent topic for a competition. As Samuel Johnson wrote, the tendency to put things off is ‘one of the general weaknesses’ that ‘prevail to a greater or lesser degree in every mind’. The assignment did indeed strike a chord, attracting a large entry that was witty and technically adroit. Commiserations to Alex Steelsmith, C. Paul Evans, David Silverman and Frank McDonald who missed out on a spot in the

Luke McShane

No. 759

White to play. Petursson-Damljanovic, New York Open, 1988. Which move decided this battle of passed pawns in White’s favour? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 10 July. 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 Bf5! gxf5 2.Kc5 soon leads to mate or a decisive skewer, e.g. 2…f6 3 Kd6 Rg8 4 Ke6 Kf8 5 Kxf6 Ke8 6 Ra8+ wins. Last week’s winner Eric Lander, Bradworthy, Devon

Luke McShane

Sorcery

Magnus Carlsen broke into a smile while pondering his 64th move. Vishy Anand grinned back at him, both players revelling in the tension and complexity of their game from the Global Chess League, held in Dubai last month. They were down to less than a minute each, and India’s five-time world champion had just pulled a rabbit out of a hat, with a sacrificial promotion which seemed to ensure a draw by stalemate. Carlsen paused before summoning some even more powerful sorcery, which left Anand only the narrowest chance of escape. In the first diagram below, 59…b4 looks promising, but 60 Nf1+! wobbles the Black king off its ideal spot, and 60…Kd3

Dot Wordsworth

Curiouser and curiouser: what does it mean to go ‘down the rabbit hole’?

Radio 4 has just run a series of programmes called Marianna in Conspiracyland made by its disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring. Prefatory remarks for one episode asked: ‘Do you know someone who’s fallen down the rabbit hole?’ I think this phrase has changed its connotations recently. The reference to Alice in Wonderland is evident. The podcast reinforced it by quoting a phrase from the book, ‘curiouser and curiouser’. In Wonderland, Alice had mixed feelings: ‘I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit hole – and yet – and yet – it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!’ The OED, finding a first usage for it from 1938, defines

Toby Young Toby Young

How do you solve a problem like debanking?

As I sat down to write this column, an old friend let me know he’d just been ‘debanked’. That is, he’d received a letter from his high-street bank notifying him it was closing his accounts. ‘Following a review, we’ve made the decision that you will not be able to bank with us any longer,’ it said, not even bothering to put the word ‘difficult’ before ‘decision’. It contained no detail about this ‘review’ or why, on completing it, the bank had decided to close his accounts. The only thing he can think of is that he used to be a high-ranking member of the Brexit party. He was told he

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The narcissism of Gavin Newsom

Back in the late 1990s, when I lived in Dallas, Texas, I became fascinated by television evangelists. They were hucksters to a man, offering healing or ‘financial blessings’ in exchange for donations – usually a very specific sum that the Lord had revealed to them. ‘Sow a $73 seed into my ministry, and you will be rewarded a hundredfold. Hallelujah.’ What interested me was how they had the brass neck to do it, to take cash from the poor and spend it on mansions and NetJets, and it was a while before I understood. They genuinely believe their own hype. That’s the secret. They think of themselves as chosen, and