Society

Wednesday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Home truths: the crushing reality of the mortgage crisis

In December Jeremy Hunt hosted a mortgage summit, attended by lenders and the Financial Conduct Authority, to discuss rate woes. At the time, the numbers were at least moving in the right direction. During Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership, the FCA expected interest rates to rise to 5.5 per cent, an increase which was forecast to put 570,000 people into mortgage payment difficulty. Once Rishi Sunak and Hunt undid Truss’s mini-Budget, things looked calmer: a 4.5 per cent peak was expected, and 356,000 people were due to be in difficulty. Hunt was still struck by the figure. Horribly high, he thought. The Chancellor used the meeting to lay the foundation for

Luke McShane

No. 757

White to play and mate in 4 moves, composed by Theodore Herlin, 1845, Le Palamède, 1845. The solution has just a single line of play. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 26 June. 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 axb4! Qxa1+ 2 Kd2! Qxh1 3 Qxc6+ bxc6 4 Ba6# Last week’s winner William Jolliffe, Oxford

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

It’s becoming ever clearer that climate change is a class issue

It’s not news that we live in a New Medieval age of Magical Thinking, when the Enlightenment is seen as the start of hate-speech, feelings must always overrule facts and ‘transubstantiation’ has taken on a whole new meaning. Men can become women simply by wishing it so, the BBC instructs its staff that there are 150 genders and teachers call students ‘despicable’ and ‘homophobic’ when they understandably ask a fellow classmate ‘How can you identify as a cat, when you are a girl?’ Deranged posh girls who would have happily been curtseying to a cake a few generations back now throw excrement and soup around in order to get attention Those who identify as young while having one

Luke McShane

Great discoveries

David Hodge is the 2023 British Chess Solving champion, after winning the Winton British Chess Solving Championship in Nottingham last month. Hodge is now a two-time champion, having first won the event in 2019. Above left is a position which caught my eye, taken from the Category B event, which is aimed at less experienced solvers. The problems are slightly less formidable than those in the main event, though still replete with beautiful ideas. This is White to play and mate in 4, composed by Chimedtseren (Probleemblad, 1973). If you don’t want to see the answer, skip forward a couple of paragraphs. One approach is to arrange a mating pattern

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris locked out, mortgage misery and Titanic submarine search

Home Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, was ritually buried by the House of Commons voting by 354 to seven to approve the Privileges Committee report that found he had lied to parliament about observing coronavirus regulations. He would have been suspended for 90 days had he not left parliament; as it was, his pass to enter the Houses of Parliament was withdrawn. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, having remembered an important long-standing engagement, was among 225 MPs who were absent or abstained. David Warburton, an MP who sat as a Conservative until last year, said he was leaving the House. In the King’s birthday honours, Sir John Bell, Ian

The Spectator

Why Europe’s shift to the right may cost the Tories

On her recent visit to Washington, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves presented herself as the perfect candidate to be the next chancellor in the modern mould: an environmentalist, interventionist and protectionist similar to Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz. Reeves champions what she calls ‘securonomics’, a sister of Bidenomonics with an environmental twist. But the trouble with Reeves’s approach is that just as she makes plain her direction, much of Europe is heading the other way. Take Finland. Until recently the country was led by Sanna Marin who, with New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, became the face of the international centre-left. Marin was voted out in April’s general election and as of this

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The trouble with teachers

A teacher once told me that he couldn’t stand Pakistanis ‘because of the smell’. I was 13 at the time and it was during a classroom debate about immigration: he was very much agin, I was for. It struck me, suddenly, that he was very stupid – an astonishing realisation, as I was accustomed to believing teachers to be full of wisdom, a delusion inculcated in me by my parents. This all took place in a very large comprehensive school in the north-east of England – a good school by and large, but almost entirely white. Of the 1,800 pupils only one was not: a quiet lad of Chinese Malay

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: a delectable summer selection from FromVineyardsDirect

I confess to feeling a trifle delicate when tasting the dozen or so wines from FromVineyardsDirect for this offer. A late night at the Academy Club had turned into early morning at the Experimental Cocktail Club and neither Mrs Ray nor I were at our best. Indeed, Mrs R decided it was all too much and retired to bed blaming me for everything while also inquiring as to when I might be planning to grow up. It was a strange question that I refused to dignify with an answer. Anyway, the point is that I was not in the best of health when I first sampled the wines, yet I

Tom Holland

How to plan the ultimate English road trip

Huge excitement last week, as archaeologists announced the discovery in Southwark of the best preserved Roman mausoleum ever found in Britain. I heard the news on the radio while driving with a friend, and both of us – living as we do south of the river – cheered. Shortly afterwards, I was invited on to the World Service to talk about Roman London. No sooner had the presenter introduced me than he was demanding to know about the mausoleum. I felt a lurch of horror. I realised I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the mausoleum beyond what I had heard on the radio. ‘What did it look like?’ the presenter

Dot Wordsworth

How to spot a terf

At dinner the other night I was wedged between two friends of my husband’s, with another facing me. They had made their living as university academics and were, frankly, old men. None of them, I was surprised to find, knew what a terf was, despite its frequent discussion in The Spectator. Feminists of my acquaintance believe that everyone in the world knows what a terf is. In the past five years, terf wars has turned from a joky headline into a standard reference to permanent hostilities. Since I wrote about terf here in 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary has given it an entry, and its earliest citation for the word

Ali Kefford

There’s still little hope that the Titan will be found

The thought of laying eyes on the wreck of Titanic has tantalised the world since the ship’s rediscovery in 1985. Now the five people aboard the submersible Titan, currently lost in the Atlantic, will almost undoubtedly end up paying the ultimate price for their desire to see the sunken liner on the ocean floor.   Superpowers spend billions, largely in vain, to track each others’ nuclear deterrent submarines through far shallower waters Having joined nuclear submarines at sea myself, I feel physically sick thinking about what is probably playing out aboard OceanGate Expeditions’ stricken vehicle. Realistically there is the slenderest of chances that the five people onboard will be rescued before their oxygen runs

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What’s the etiquette of bumping into someone in a doctor’s waiting room?

Q. I own a flat and have rented two rooms out to friends from university. Now they have fallen in love. This means the three of us are often in the kitchen at the same time or watching television together at close quarters. They never stop kissing and cuddling and declaring their love – in front of me. Of course I am happy for them but even if I had my own boyfriend, I would consider PDAs TMI. How can I get them to stop without coming across as bitter?  – Name and address withheld A. This phase will probably not last long but you are right – Public Displays

Toby Young Toby Young

How should schools handle ‘furries’?

Last weekend an audio recording emerged of a 13-year-old girl being called ‘despicable’ by her teacher at a school, run by a Church of England trust, in East Sussex for refusing to respect a classmate’s decision to identify as a cat. The teacher told her she would report her to a senior colleague and she would no longer be welcome at the school if she continued to express the view that ‘if you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy’. A sixth former at a school in Wales answers every question posed to her ‘catself’ by meowing  The Department for Education (DfE)

Peter Jones

Lady Hallett and a Socratic enquiry

SOCRATES: I was walking through the agora after having had a discussion with an impetuous young man who argued that a good orator could win a debate on any subject, even though he knew nothing about it. This left me rather baffled, so it was a pleasure to fall in with the lawyer Lady Hallett, on whose good sense one could always rely… SOCRATES: Good morning, Lady Hallett. Whence, whither, and wherefore? LADY HALLETT: From home, O Socrates, to chair the inquiry into the Covid pandemic. S: Clearly, then, you are an expert in pandemics. LH: Far from it, O Socrates. S: Then where is your expertise? LH: In carrying

Douglas Murray

The diversity trap

If anyone reading this ever bought shares in the diversity racket, then I would suggest you start dumping them now. Not that I would blame you for having bought them in the first place. ‘Diversity’ has been the great mantra of our age. Like ‘equality’, it is one of those words set up to be impossible to oppose. What even is the opposite of diversity? Enforced sameness? Monotony? It is hard to say. Nevertheless, everyone was encouraged to go along with the diversity racket. It didn’t matter who was in charge – Labour or the Conservatives. Diversity was said to be one of the defining virtues of Britain. Almost the

Mark Mason

How instant communication killed conversation

We live in an age of instant communication. But communication has never been less certain. Once in a while, WhatsApp takes several days to deliver a message to me. The first I know that someone contacted me on Friday is when my phone pings on Tuesday. Like when a friend let me know he and his partner were getting engaged. ‘Congratulations,’ I began, before noticing he’d sent the message four days previously. So then I had to add an apology to my response. Text messages can also fail. Another friend recently changed phones, and realised after a few days that some (though not all) of his contacts’ texts were going

Louise Perry

The men who fell to earth: the tragedy of Sheen’s stowaways

Early one Sunday in 2012 a man fell out of the sky over Sheen, an affluent suburb of south-west London, and landed in the middle of a quiet residential road. ‘I heard a monstrous bang. I thought someone had been hit by a car,’ one resident told a local newspaper. ‘Two fellows going to church said there’s a dead body in the street.’ The man was José Matada, a 27-year-old from Mozambique, although it would take several months for the police to discover his identity. Matada had a small sum of cash in his pocket and a mobile phone. The only message the police were able to extract from it

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Should we ban drones from our national parks?

I have a plan for my old age. Now that we all might live for a century or so, feeling redundant and bemused, it’s important to prepare and I have. In my eighties I will be a destroyer of drones. All drones will fall within my remit but my speciality will be hobby drones, the remote-control quadcopters that whine over the English countryside, up and down the coast and round and round above our national parks. To any passerby I will seem innocuous; just your average rambling octogenarian. But tucked away beside my Freedom Pass will be a catapult and the case containing my varifocals will be heavy with 6mm

The Spectator

Has anyone had so little time to enjoy an honour as Martin Amis?

Shortest knight Martin Amis was knighted the day before he died last month. Has anyone else had so little time to enjoy an honour? Wilfred Stamp, 2nd Baron Stamp, officially holds the record as the shortest-serving peer. He died with his father, Josiah, the 1st Baron Stamp, when their home in Beckenham, Kent was bombed in April 1941. Because no one could be sure in which order father and son had died the law decreed that Wilfred has survived a split second longer than his father. It meant that he would forever be remembered as Lord Stamp – but forced his family to pay death duty twice. By the by