Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

No. 860

Black to play. So-Keymer, Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, Las Vegas 2025. Keymer’s next move forced So to resign. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 28 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 Bf1! trapped the queen.  Firouzja tried 1…Rb5 but 2 Qxb5 Qxe3+ 3 Rxe3 axb5 4 Bxb5 was easily winning for Gukesh. Last week’s winner Ray Fisher, Shepley, W. Yorks

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: Family matters

For Competition 3409 you were invited to submit parental advice courtesy of famous writers. Kurt Vonnegut’s father’s advice to his son gave me the idea for this challenge: ‘Never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect.’ Your entries were witty and imaginative and there were many more potential winners than we have space for. Congratulations all round, and a special mention to George Simmers’s Georges Perec, Joe Houlihan’s Truman Capote, David Silverman’s Shakespeare and Max Ross’s Wordsworth. The following take the £25 John Lewis vouchers. We assume today that an adult’s duty is to keep children entertained. This assumption can only

Pabulum

2713: Outdressed

Clockwise round the grid from the square between 6 and 7 runs a quotation which could have referred to the three unclued lights, and its source (7,2,3,3,5,3,3,7,4,3,2,5,5). Across 9 Top part is the place to go in ships (5) 10   Wild party girl cycling (4) 11   Ex-president twice cut back tropical plants (5) 12   Unbounded profusion bewildered lunatic (7) 13   Article on devilish debonair Michael Gove? (10) 15   Microstate near heart of Burundi hoards gold (5) 18   He might steal object inside present (8) 19   But for squaddies we may serve mocktails (6) 21   Rebecca’s boy, second in hunt after sea snakes

The Spectator

2710: The clash – solution

The four anagrams were 1A TROUNCES (defined by 7 BEATS), 12 COUNTERS (27 PARRIES), 21 CONSTRUE (10 INTERPRET) and 25 RECOUNTS (13 RELATES) First prize Lisa Bramley, Shaldon, Devon Runners-up Nick Huntley, Darlington; Lewis Osborne, Newton Mearns, Glasgow

The Spectator

Recognising Palestine isn’t a path to peace

The children of Gaza are enduring horrendous suffering. The control of aid has been restricted. Innocent lives have been set at nothing. Ruthlessness well beyond the terms of realpolitik has put hundreds of thousands at risk. The people responsible deserve global condemnation. But instead it seems they are to be rewarded. It is Hamas which is responsible for the suffering in Gaza. The terrorist organisation has, for years, used its thugs to control international development assistance to enrich its leaders and subdue the population. Its murderous – indeed, genocidal – intent was made manifest on 7 October 2023 when it unleashed an assault on innocent Israelis which resulted in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Epping protests, votes at 16 and Ozzy Osbourne dies

Home Six people were arrested during a protest by 1,000 outside the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, which houses asylum seekers; an asylum seeker had earlier been charged with sexual assaults in the town. The Conservative leader of the council said: ‘It’s a powder keg now.’ The number of migrants arriving in England in small boats in the seven days to 21 July was 1,030. The Lionesses, the England women’s football team, decided not to take the knee before winning their semi-final Euro game, after a player, Jess Carter, had been inundated with racist abuse on social media during the tournament. The Chief Constable of Northumbria Police ordered the removal

Cleo Watson

The nostalgic joy of Frinton-on-Sea

For the recent heatwave, it was my mission to escape our little Wiltshire cottage, where it hit 35°C. It has one of those very poor structural designs unique to Britain that, like plastic conservatories or the Tube, is useless in hot weather. First, we went to stay with friends in Frinton-on-Sea with our English bulldog, who was born in nearby Clacton and is shamelessly happy to be back among his people. Some years ago I lived in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, a living museum of America’s pre-revolutionary settler history. Frinton doesn’t go quite that far – there are no ersatz yeomen milking doleful cows – but to visit is to enter

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The best deer deterrent? Radio 4

Behind the latest push for recognition of a Palestinian state – even though there is no agreement of what it is that might be recognised – is a sort of impersonation of the story of Israel. Palestinian activists want their own Balfour Declaration. President Macron wants France and Britain to come up with their own Sykes-Picot agreement, but pro-Palestinian. You might think that the clamour would have been shamed into silence by the massacres and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. On the contrary, these have somehow empowered the mimicry in wilder and more horrible ways. The genocide, we are now told, is being committed not by Hamas,

Gus Carter Gus Carter

How private equity ruined Britain

What has happened to Britain’s rivers isn’t a mistake. The fact that serious pollution is up 60 per cent on the year, or that only one in seven rivers can be called ecologically healthy, is the result of corporate tactics. It is effluent from the murky world of private equity. Some 2.5 million people in the UK now work for a business that is ultimately owned by private equity. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Britain has become a prime target for takeovers, driven by low company valuations, favourable exchange rates and a pliable regulatory environment. Everything from Bella Italia to the Blackpool Tower, Travelodge to Legoland, the AA to Zizzi,

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

James O’Brien has disgraced himself

For a man who wrote a book called How To Be Right, James O’Brien sure gets a lot wrong. Consider the message from one of his listeners that he read out on his LBC radio show yesterday. It said Jewish kids in the UK are taught to loathe Arabs and see them as ‘cockroaches to be crushed’. This is not only untrue, it is grossly libellous and possibly dangerous. Will Mr Right fess up and apologise? It’s 2025 and people are still spreading libels about the Jews What possessed O’Brien to so solemnly read on air a blatant falsehood about Britain’s Jews? The message came from someone called ‘Chris’ from

Michael Hann

What I saw at Ozzy’s last gig

Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath did something British groups had not done before. Before them, the British Invasion groups – from the Beatles, the Stones and The Who down to Herman’s Hermits and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – had taken American music and sold it to the British public as the American dream, as exotica. And when they exported it back to the States, the Americans – most of whom had never heard the music the groups began by copying – heard in it something fresh and exciting and joyful. Sabbath instead sold the American nightmare back to the United States, filling arenas across North America, a much bigger

Dominic Selwood

Ozzy Osbourne, the accidental rock star

To conjure an image of England on Thursday 16 October 1969 you could do worse than compressing all of Withnail and I into one day. The country was crippled by strikes. The bubble-gum pop track ‘Sugar Sugar’ was number one. And the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus had just aired.  At Regent Sounds Studios in London’s Denmark Street four musicians from Birmingham recorded seven songs in 12 straight hours then went to the pub. Their name had been Earth, and before that The Polka Tulk Blues Band. When the album hit the streets the following year, on Friday 13 February, they were Black Sabbath. On the microphone was 20-year-old John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne.

Druin Burch

I work in the NHS: the government cannot accept doctors’ pay demands

Junior doctors are set to strike this week, despite winning little public sympathy with their demand for a 29 per cent pay rise. Doctors in their self-righteous mode – as many recently have been over this row – are insufferable. I sympathise with their situation, but they should do themselves a favour – and get back to work. I will be one of the consultants covering shifts for the juniors on Friday, and I am looking forward to doing so. Never having worked in an elective speciality, weekends and public holidays, like evenings and nights, have always been part of my working life. My speciality never closes its doors or

Hugh Thomson

Tim Davie isn’t fit to lead the BBC

Those within the BBC might be afraid to say so, but an ex-producer like me has no such qualms: Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director-General, isn’t cut out for the job. For the good of the BBC, Davie must go. The last few weeks have been painfully bad for Davie. The Masterchef saga, which led to the departure of not one, but both main presenters, is the final nail in the coffin, after blunders over Glastonbury and Gaza. Never has the BBC needed to have a visionary in post more to survive. Never has it had someone so clearly inadequate for the job A review of the BBC’s February documentary Gaza:

Alexander Larman

The trouble with Gillian Anderson

Imagine, for a moment, that a respected middle-aged British male character actor – Jason Isaacs, let’s say – had been cast in the lead role of a sex therapist in a popular, Gen Z-focused Netflix series, called something like Love Lessons. Then imagine that Isaacs had become seemingly so obsessed with blurring the lines between himself and his character that he had not only edited a book about men’s sexual fantasies, anonymously including one of his own in there, too, but had begun a secondary career appearing on podcasts in which he encouraged men to freely discuss their peccadilloes and penchants, however taboo they might seem. Why is Gillian Anderson

Tuesday

Madeline Grant

Boredom is Rachel Reeves’s secret weapon

When French General Bosquet watched the 600 men of the Light Brigade charge helplessly into the Russian heavy artillery at Balaclava he muttered ‘c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’. Well, history repeats first as tragedy then as farce. And so today, those words came to mind as I watched Rachel Reeves prepare to charge into the grapeshot offered by the House of Lord’s economic affairs committee. Only without the ‘c’est magnifique’ bit. Perhaps Reeves’ plan is to bore the markets into submission: after all, the stock exchange can’t crash if everyone’s asleep Behind the Chancellor sat a boy in a lanyard bearing the legend ‘work experience’. One got

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions are under attack

The war for Ukraine’s future is being fought not just on the battlefield, but also within its democratic institutions. Today, one of those battles was lost. The parliament passed a bill that destroys the independence of Ukraine’s key anti-corruption bodies. If signed into law, it would effectively dismantle their ability to investigate all senior officials in the country without interference. The new legislation will allow Ukraine’s prosecutor general to take control over National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu) and Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (Sapo). Volodymyr Zelensky appointed Ruslan Kravchenko to this post just a month ago, and now he will be able to access case files of any criminal proceedings on high-level

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Farage is right: our police must be tougher

A few years ago, I was encouraged to apply for a role within the College of Policing for an advisory body on a revamped code of ethics for police officers. When asked what sort of qualities the code should embody, my answer was succinct: ‘moral and physical courage.’ I didn’t make the cut, of course, and was sent a rejection letter that said the days of insolent corner boys like me were over, thanks very much. I was put in mind of this yesterday when Reform announced its new agenda on crime and policing. The party’s leader Nigel Farage said that thousands of new police officers will fill the streets,

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show should have been axed long ago

Things are not going so well with left-wing comedian talk show hosts over the water. Last week came the news of the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert by CBS/Paramount. And Ellen de Generes, whose daytime chat show was chopped back in 2022, revealed this weekend that she’s moved permanently to the Cotswolds, where she is currently farming chickens (she was keeping sheep too, but they kept running away from her). Both of these developments are being attributed to the reelection of one Donald J. Trump as President. Colbert’s firing by Paramount came very soon after his outburst on his show about the company settling a lawsuit by

David Shipley

The women of Epping don’t need Tommy Robinson’s help

The people of Epping have a message for Tommy Robinson: stay away. The far-right activist is currently mulling joining protestors in Essex who have taken to the street outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers. While there have been violent clashes between police and demonstrators – and a number of arrests – many of those who have gathered have done so peacefully. They deserve to be listened to. Yet the arrival of Robinson would make it easy for politicians to cast these locals as far right – and ignore them. The people of Epping have a message for Tommy Robinson: stay away Even Robinson doesn’t seem able to make