The Battle for Britain | 22 April 2023
Society
Wednesday
The ‘public humiliation diet’ is very effective
As another summer approaches, I’ve embarked on yet another attempt to lose weight. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson by now – what goes down, must come up – but it turns out yo-yo dieting is actually good for you. At least, that’s the conclusion of a team of researchers at Oxford University who analysed 124 trials involving 50,000 people trying to lose weight. They lost an average of between five and ten pounds and regained it at a rate of less than a pound a year. According to Professor Susan Jebb, co-author of the study, it took the participants in the study between five and 14 years
We are losing the war to save red squirrels
Two years ago I watched a red squirrel climbing a pine tree at my home in Northumberland. I fear it may be the last time I have that thrill. Twenty years ago they were everywhere in our woods and regular visitors to my bird table. Then in 2003 we saw the first grey squirrel. Almost at once the reds became scarcer and today there are few left. Volunteers work hard to cull the greys, killing around 600 a year, and occasionally this works well enough for a brief revival of the reds. But we are losing the war. It’s a strange fact of biogeography that Europe has only one species
The truth can’t be racist
You can’t please all of the people any of the time. But a core part of my job is ensuring that I don’t consistently displease a majority of them. Last week a radio show had a phone-in asking listeners to debate whether I’m a racist. I thought about calling in as Margaret from Fareham, to suggest the Home Secretary take courage from another Margaret’s words: ‘I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.’ The pursuit of truth is a good lodestar for the right policies. If we are to
2598: By any other name – solution
The unclued lights are the former and current names of various products: 2/8A, 12/36, 16/32, 17/34, 13/22. First prize David Caldecott, Bowerchalke, Salisbury Runners-up Elizabeth Feinberg, Rancho Mirage, CA, USAPearl Williamson, Dungannon, Northern Ireland
2601: Men of note
The unclued lights are of a kind. Two solutions are initials. Across 1 Officers’ training school – place to write music – cello arrangement with two notes (5,7)10 Fertile Spanish plain, say, in Virginia (4)12 Moorland bird that pesters the female? (3-7)14 Rules regularly presented author’s initials (3)15 Clear control of former NZ live news website (8)22 Seating for cowsheds (6)24 Almost imperceptibly moves lips (5)26 Smartest agent’s not all there – most dubious (9)27 Work in gold, say, running off with the ring (9)29 On reflection some present-day Aussie cricketer (5)31 King in a French shack, not harmed (6)34 Got rid of Times boss? (6)36 Agricultural companies note sign,
Spectator competition winners: comically appalling final paragraphs to the worst of all possible novels
In Competition No. 3295, you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. From time to time, I set a challenge that owes a debt to the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton – who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in his day, before falling out of favour – and to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Brian Murdoch’s entry opens with a nod to the notorious first sentence (a favourite of Snoopy) of Edward B-L’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. The winners, below,
No. 748
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, The Musical World, 1859. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 24 April. 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 R1xd4! cxd4 2 Be6+ and 3 Qxg7 mate. But not 1 Be6+ Nxe6! or 1 Rxg7+ Kxg7 2 Bh5+ Kh8 3 Bxe8 Ne2+ Last week’s winner George Katsugias, Bradford, W. Yorks
Drama in Astana
As I write, six of 14 games of the world championship match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren have been played in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the score tied 3-3. By the time you read this, events will have moved on, so any prognosis would be futile. One ought, so to speak, to wait until the bread has risen. But the games in Astana have been so compelling that a quick peek is irresistible. Four out of six have been decisive – an extraordinary volume of bloodshed by the standards of recent world championships. Initially, Ding looked listless, as if overwhelmed by the occasion. ‘Nepo’ won game two, but by game
How to find the Holy Grail
If you visit Valencia Cathedral, you will find, in the old chapter house converted into a chapel, the Holy Grail, made up of a humble agate stone and kept safely behind glass. But if it is really the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper (and the Vatican recognises the possibility that it is), why are so many people still searching for it? Christopher Dawes believes he might have the Grail at home on his mantelpiece in Brentford There are too many theories about its true location to keep track of. Could it be in the Basilica of San Isidoro, León, given as a present to the King of
The pointlessness of renaming the Brecon Beacons
Putting out fires The Brecon Beacons National Park Authority said it was renaming the park because the word ‘beacon’ implies carbon emissions and ‘does not fit with the ethos’. — Many hills in Britain carry the name ‘beacon’ thanks to chains of fires which were lit up to warn of approaching invasion. In Devon alone, 39 beacon sites have been identified. Most famously, beacons were lit in July 1588 to warn of the approaching Spanish Armada after it was spotted off Land’s End, although there is no record of how many fires were lit nor how quickly it took the message to reach London. — Not that the name of
Why WhatsApp could quit the UK over the Online Safety Bill
WhatsApp, Signal and five other messaging services have joined forces to attack the government’s Online Safety Bill. They fear the bill will kill end-to-end encryption and say, in an open letter, that this could open the door to ‘routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages’. The stakes are high: WhatsApp and Signal are threatening to leave the UK market if encryption is undermined. This intervention comes as the Lords begins their line-by-line committee stage scrutiny of the Bill today. Encryption provides a defence against fraud and scams; it allows us to communicate with friends and family safely; it enables human rights activists to send incriminating information to journalists. Governments and politicians even
Ireland’s violent men of peace
It was from the Northern Ireland conflict that I first learned how language – like everything else – can be warped utterly. Take the late Martin McGuinness, not to mention his still-living, libel-hungry comrades. For almost three decades they put bombs in public places, shot random people in the head and tortured others to death. After 30 years of this they received a wonderful career-end bonus. They became ‘men of peace’. Suddenly McGuinness and co were not to be criticised. Instead they were applauded for laying down their weapons. Before long they were travelling the world talking about ‘conflict resolution’. They won elections by pushing aside all those who had
Meet the aristocrat plotting Macron’s downfall
Vitry-le-François Can a modern revolution emanate from the political centre or, more unconventionally, from the heart and mind of an aristocrat who places republican values above factional allegiance? This was the question that propelled me more than a hundred miles east of Paris – while another day of mass demonstrations unfolded in the capital and across France – to the post-industrial town of Vitry-le-François to meet Charles de Courson, the French parliamentarian descended from Norman nobility who nearly succeeded in bringing down the government of President Emmanuel Macron with a no-confidence vote on 20 March. The interparty revolt led by De Courson’s small group of nonaligned deputies in the National
How the junior doctors’ strike could have been avoided
Easter and Passover coincided this year, so we’ve been in America visiting my in-laws. Four years ago, in the spirit of the holiday of liberation and exodus, we had all travelled to the Ukrainian village outside Lviv from which my father-in-law’s family emigrated. In just a few short generations during the 20th century, people there found themselves labouring under the Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Nazi and Soviet yokes. The disastrous human consequences are laid bare in Bernard Wasserstein’s poignant new history, A Small Town in Ukraine. Now Russian missiles intermittently rain down, partly enabled by sanctions busting and dirty money. When President Zelensky addressed the British parliament a couple of months ago,
I shed a tear for the SNP
For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers. Gloating in such a manner is odious and juvenile and so I simply shook my head sadly and even shed a tear when I heard that the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie, had been arrested. In fact I spent most of the day beneath a shroud of tears, having learned that the mega campervan parked outside Peter Murrell’s
How to lose sales and alienate people
In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward off mice, the parent website urges shoppers tired of corporations latching onto fashionable left-wing causes to dramatise their displeasure through product boycotts. The idea is a bit goofy. Yet the app could appeal to a far more than niche market. Only 8 per cent of the US public self-identifies as far left. That leaves a
Letters: The reincarnation of Anne Boleyn
Pension point Sir: I have just read Kate Andrews’s article on junior doctors’ pay (‘Sick pay’, 15 April). While not wishing to get drawn into the rights or wrongs of their strike action, may I point out that in respect of the NHS pension scheme, for the sake of balance, the employee’s pension contribution also needs to be taken into account? The employer may well pay a 20 per cent contribution, but a junior doctor on a salary of either £29,000 or £37,000 (both figures quoted in the article) will pay 9.8 per cent of salary with a consequent reduction in take-home pay. John Etherington Wilsden, West Yorkshire Coach trip
The problem with St Paul
On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for a world religion. In online posts beneath my column came hundreds of comments from Christians protesting that I’d misunderstood the Crucifixion’s meaning, which was (they said) the ultimate victory. Triumphantly, Jesus redeemed our sins. Or ‘atoned’ for them. Along with atonement and redemption, expressions like ‘ransomed’, ‘forgiven’, ‘pardoned’, ‘paid for’, ‘healed’ and ‘washed away’ recurred, as well as ‘sacrifice’ – Jesus’s blood-sacrifice to expiate the world’s sins: a kind of reparation. The notion of release – from slavery, debt or imprisonment – suffuses these responses. In the context of human
Bridge | 22 April 2023
I have played the Easter Guardian in one event or another for the past 20 years. It is the perfect Easter tournament and everybody has fun, particularly in the mixed pairs. I wasn’t interested in finding a slightly more exotic alternative; the Royal National Hotel in Russell Square was where I most wanted to be. This year was different. I went on a mini-break to Italy (no card playing of any sort) but I kept a sharp eye on the EBU’s results page, and felt a pang of envy. After all how can sun, sea and food compete? The Swiss Teams was won by team ‘SUSHI’ (Shashou – Sandqvist, Bucknell
