Society

Wednesday

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 1 April 2023

The idea of going to a bridge tournament where you have to sit in a separate room to your partner, and play with tablets instead of cards, sounds like a dystopian nightmare. But that’s exactly what’s planned at the next US Nationals. The idea is to eliminate cheating between partners via unethical hesitations and mannerisms. But most of us love the feel of cards in our hands. And we want our partners in the same room! As Zia says: ‘The day bridge is no longer played with cards is the beginning of the end.’ Luckily, at the recent Nationals in New Orleans, there wasn’t a tablet in sight, and Zia

Melissa Kite

My pony has an astonishing digestive system

The pony grabbed the bag of carrots and ran across the field with it in her mouth, tail in the air, munching on the entire thing, including, of course, the plastic. She was so pleased with herself there was no way I was getting near her. She ran around in circles, bucking and cavorting and flinging the bag about in her mouth, stopping occasionally to chew, as I ran one way, then another to try to catch her. Mothers nowadays do notapprove of their children beingflung about like rag dolls ‘No no no no no! I can’t take any more!’ I begged her, because the spaniel is under the vet

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of a hospital honeymoon

The morning after we were wedded, I went to hospital in Marseille. The oncologist wanted to assess the pain level and find the right daily morphine dose. I went down in the back of a taxi and from the taxi to the cancer ward in a wheelchair. A nurse with a form checked me into the single-occupancy room, asking me my name, address, date of birth, occupation, etc. Then: ‘Are you married?’ ‘Yes. We married only yesterday as a matter of fact.’ The dear soul could not have been happier for us, though she was probably mystified as to who on earth would want to marry a mummy with the

Taki

The art of the politically correct literary adaptation

Never paraphrasing the classics was a given until woke sensibilities became a must. This was brought to mind by the BBC’s adaptation of Great Expectations, in which the convict Magwitch knocks the Empire and Miss Havisham takes opium on the side. What they should have done is have Pip hustling coke for a fellow convict of Magwitch named Escobarian, bringing it daily to the addicted old lady, and Estella sniffing – no pun intended – out the plot and giving young Pip hell. Never mind. Woke rules supreme, and because of that the scope for future reworkings of the classics seems unlimited. Let’s start at the beginning, with Homer’s Trojan

Robin Ashenden

Who is torching Russia’s military recruitment centres?

The last twelve months or so in the post-Soviet sphere have been, among other things, the year of the Molotov Cocktail. Who can forget those clips, amidst the outbreak of war last February, of Ukrainian women calmly packaging up bottles with petrol, rags and grated polystyrene, as though at a local sewing bee? Or of the boxes of Molotov cocktails loaded up for different areas, as if they were cases of Beaujolais Nouveau? In the recent protests in Tbilisi, Molotov cocktails also featured prominently, in battles between protesters and police. But less well known is the resurgence Molotov’s DIY incendiary bomb has enjoyed in Russia of late. They have been

Tuesday

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

Rishi Sunak is pulling the rug out from under renters

Rishi Sunak is having a busy week. After announcing his crackdown on anti-social behaviour over the weekend, he set out a slew of new promises yesterday to ban laughing gas, increase fines for littering and give police powers to ‘move on’ what he deems ‘nuisance’ beggars.  Among them was a proposal that would allow landlords to evict tenants with just two weeks’ notice if they are disruptive to neighbours through noise, drug use or damage to property. This would apply to all new private rental tenancies. Apart from the fact that two weeks is a very, very short amount of time for a tenant to find a new home, these

Steerpike Steerpike

Gary Lineker scores a victory over the taxman

The good news just keeps coming for Gary Lineker. The Match of the Day host has won his appeal against HMRC over a £4.9 million tax bill. The taxman claimed Lineker was an employee of both the BBC and BT Sport – and that, as a result, he owed them money. But a judge ruled that Lineker was a freelancer and threw out HMRC’s case. Lineker’s tribunal victory comes after he emerged victorious from his scrap with the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie over his tweets. The TV host was taken off the air after criticising the government’s asylum policy. But he returned to the show a week later after his fellow football

Debbie Hayton

The tragedy of the Nashville school shooting

Three children and three staff have been shot dead at a school in the United States. The pupils who died at the Covenant School in Nashville were all just nine years old. The attacker was Audrey Hale, a 28-year old transgender ex-pupil, who was armed with three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle. Hale was shot dead by police during the incident yesterday morning. America’s tragedy is that such appalling incidents just keep happening. Only last week, a 17 year-old wounded two support staff at a high school in Denver; in February, three students were fatally shot at Michigan State University; in January, two teenagers were killed in a ‘targeted shooting’

David Cohen

New Zealand has much to learn from the treatment of Posie Parker

A promotional clip for New Zealand uploaded to social media the other day looked like the usual decorous fare churned out by the country’s tourism agency: all deep-blue skies, golden sands and soaring mountains. The words were another matter. There was no come-hither voice enjoining visitors to experience ‘pure New Zealand’. Rather there was the miserable sound of Auckland this past weekend as the women who gathered to hear the biological sex campaigner Posie Parker were confronted by a much burlier mob determined to ‘turf the Terfs’, as one of their placards had it.  New Zealand’s record tallies with Parker’s view of it being ‘the worst place for women’ she had

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The very British Kinks

It’s been 60 years since Muswell Hill brothers Ray and Dave Davies – then 19 and 15 respectively – formed The Kinks. What is now known as the ‘catalogue’ division of record companies love an anniversary, particularly when fans of the band are likely to be edging into pensionable disposable-income territory. And so, a new compilation titled The Journey has arrived, with 36 tracks curated by the brothers from across The Kinks’ 30 years of active service, which have been scrubbed up to sound better than ever. It’s fitting that a band which sang a lot about heritage and preservation – very unusually for the young men that they were at the time – should, in turn,

Mary Dejevsky

In defence of Rishi Sunak’s crackdown on beggars

When Rishi Sunak presented the latest attempt by a prime minister to get tough on anti-social behaviour, it wasn’t the graffiti-cleaning or the ‘gotcha’ fly-tip cameras or the labelled jumpsuits that caught my eye. It was the inclusion of begging.  Admittedly, you had to go pretty far down his pledge list before you found it. Perhaps someone with a longer institutional memory than the current Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, had warned him of the drubbing John Major received from the great and the good – and many well-meaning liberals – when he launched his drive against ‘aggressive’ begging in 1994.  It will be made an offence for criminal gangs to organise begging networks for

Monday

Samuel Rubinstein

Dan Snow is the ultimate midwit historian

Dan Snow, the TV historian, is anxious about his ‘privilege’. One of many ‘nepo babies’ in the British media, Snow’s debut came when he was 23 years old, fresh out of Oxford, co-presenting with his father Peter. Having benefited from his well-heeled upbringing, Snow now excitedly foresees the end of ‘inherited monarchy’ and ‘organised religion’. In an interview with the Times, Snow makes a confession: ‘Yes, I myself am a privileged white guy who went to Oxford and read history. Once upon a time the world was made for English-speaking white guys like me — the challenge is how I act now.’ Snow appears to express disappointment that Prince Harry,

Nicholas Sheppard

The Posie Parker mob has embarassed New Zealand

New Zealand has, until recently, dwelt in splendid isolation during the culture wars. Kiwis have typically been reluctant to discuss social issues, the raising of which usually causes a kind of social static and brings down the mood. The antipathy, tribalism and performative outrage of identity politics hasn’t been much of a problem Down Under. But, in the last few years, things have changed. During the first Covid lockdown, when the country’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern was, in the eyes of the global media, an almost ethereal entity visited benevolently upon these shores, the country was united and sincerely committed to leading the way in the response. By the second

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The BBC has ruined Great Expectations

The insanely irritating advertisements for BBC Sounds – 30 seconds to make the spirits sink – have recently included one exhorting us to watch the new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations – by the man who brought us Peaky Blinders! It’s a real achievement to lose every vestige of humour in Great Expectations Poor Dickens can’t pull in the punters on his own; it seems it takes Stephen Knight to draw a contemporary audience. Yep, the Stephen Knight who brought us A Christmas Carol, which should have made the Corporation think twice before letting him near Great Expectations, the first episode of which aired last night. This is no adaption; it’s

Sunday

Ivo Dawnay

The Great Caucasian Game

Stroll around the elegant capitals of Georgia and Armenia and you could be almost anywhere in Europe. The grand boulevards, familiar luxury brands, fast-food outlets, smart restaurants and gridlocked traffic suggest that you might be in Hungary or the Czech Republic. Only the cruciform shape of the domed and ancient churches place you elsewhere; that, and in Georgia’s Tbilisi at least, the ubiquitous anti-Russian, anti-Putin graffiti. The Ukraine conflict has meant large numbers of Russians have arrived in Georgia – not to everyone’s delight. ‘What makes them so maddening is their arrogance,’ my hostess said one night. ‘A friend of mine lent a Russian refugee family her flat – for free. But when she went round with home baked bread to welcome

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The shameful persecution of Posie Parker in New Zealand

This is what it must have been like when women were marched to the stake. Yesterday in Auckland the British women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker found herself surrounded by a deranged, heaving mob. She had tomato soup and placards thrown in her face. She was doused with water. Huge men screamed insults and expletives in her face. The shoving of the crowd became so intense that Parker feared for her life. ‘I genuinely thought that if I fell to the floor I would never get up again’, she said. ‘My children would lose their mother and my husband would lose his wife.’ It was a truly chilling spectacle. The mobs’

Matthew Scott

Eco-cultist lawyers are undermining the rule of law

A group of 120 ‘top lawyers’ have signed a ‘declaration of conscience‘ stating they will not prosecute ‘peaceful climate change protestors’ and will ‘withhold [their] services in respect of supporting new fossil fuel projects.’ Predictably the tax specialist and founder of the ‘Good Law Project’ Jolyon Maugham KC is amongst the signatories, although the practical effect of his conscientious objection is limited. I’m pretty sure he has never prosecuted a criminal case in his entire career, and it would be remarkable if the CPS now decided to instruct him to prosecute a climate change protestor. The same can be said, it appears, for the vast majority of the signatories, who

Toby Young Toby Young

How necessary is Ofsted?

The teaching unions never let a good crisis go to waste. Following the tragic death of Ruth Perry, the headteacher of Caversham Primary School in Reading, who took her own life after Ofsted told her it was going to downgrade her school from ‘Outstanding’ to ‘Inadequate’, the NEU has called for the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills to be replaced by a body that’s ‘supportive, effective and fair’. As the co-founder of four free schools, I feel ambivalent about Ofsted. On the one hand, Ofsted has been kind to my schools, ranking three of them ‘Outstanding’ and one of them ‘Good’. But on the other, there

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Don’t get too excited about the return of high street shopping

Until the turn of the year it was taken for granted that Britain would descend into recession in the coming months. The Bank of England saw a long downturn lasting into 2024; the IMF thought we would do worse than even Russia. Now, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) thinks we might avoid recession altogether, and today comes more evidence to back that up: retail sales volumes rose by 1.2 per cent in February, month on month. The Office of National Statistics also revised its estimate for retail sales volumes in January, from 0.5 per cent (which itself was received as a pleasant surprise) to 0.9 per cent.    No-one should get too

Debbie Hayton

Why did it take Seb Coe so long to see sense over transgender athletes?

World Athletics has decided to protect women’s sport by restricting it to females. From 31 March, transwomen will not be allowed to compete in elite female competitions if they have gone through male puberty. Following yesterday’s meeting of the World Athletics Council, Seb Coe – the governing body’s president – explained that the decision was ‘guided by the overarching principle which is to protect the female category’. That decision should be welcomed by everyone, but why did it take them so long? Swimming’s world governing body came to the same conclusion last summer; world rugby got there in 2020. Athletics, meanwhile, dithered and fiddled with rules based on the level