Society

Wednesday

Debbie Hayton

Is Sadiq Khan right about the UK’s LGBT rights regression?

Happy International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. The occasion has probably passed most people by – but the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was quick to wave the rainbow flag this morning. Khan said it was ‘unacceptable’ that the UK has fallen to 17th place in a European league table of LBTQ+ rights. ‘LGBTQ+ people’s fundamental rights are under attack around the world,’ he warned. Khan continued: ‘If we’re not vigilant, the progress that has been made in the past century can be reversed. I urge the Government to take the concerns of the LGBTQ+ community seriously. My message to the LGBTQ+ community in London and around the world

The Spectator

Why Britain is falling behind in the global universities race

Our country still excels when it comes to higher education. Britain has seven of the world’s top 50 universities. In spite of many claims that Brexit would lead to a reduction in the number of foreign students, the intake has never been higher. In 2021-22, there were 680,000 overseas students in higher education in Britain, an increase of 123,000 in just two years. That’s good news for the British economy. A report by London Economics estimated that one year’s intake of students would, by the time their courses had finished, bring in £29 billion in revenue from tuition fees and other income. Importantly, the benefits are spread all over the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Rise in sick leave, more rights for renters and moving mountains

Home The number of people not working due to long-term sickness rose to a record 2.5 million, many with mental sickness or back pain, according to the Office for National Statistics. Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said that income tax could be cut by 2p in the pound if Britons who had left the workforce during the pandemic returned to work. Pay growth in the public sector rose to 5.6 per cent, the highest rate since 2003. Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing union, said that the Health Secretary should ‘start off in double figures’ in pay negotiations. The Bank of England expected

Elif Shafak

Turkey is at an existential crossroads

The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside of, ‘under its roof’. Last week I lived under the roof of hope as the campaigns for the first round of the Turkish presidential elections drew to a close. This is an existential crossroads for Turkey, my motherland. The AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been in power for two decades. Although they started off on their journey with promises of liberal reforms, a democratic constitution, and plenty of rhetoric about joining the EU, they have become increasingly nationalist, Islamist, patriarchal and authoritarian with each passing year. Women’s rights have

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My verdict on Eurovision

I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in the United Kingdom watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Or perhaps the only one watching it voluntarily. A little later a Dutch presenter, when reporting her country’s scores, said: ‘Hello girls and gays.’ It wasn’t a slip of the tongue but an accurate summation of the audience – the one in Liverpool and the rest of us, sitting in front of our televisions. There was a merciful absence of all faux-seriousness and any song which got political didn’t do well Eurovision, like Crufts, has been a gay domain for the best

Alexander Larman

Meghan’s lecture on ‘service’ is hard to take

Since the publication of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare in January, Meghan has kept an unusually low profile by her standards. Her non-appearance at the coronation earlier in the month was widely interpreted as a snub to the Royal Family, whom she has missed no opportunity to castigate. Now the Duchess of Sussex is making a comeback – but her vapid speech at an awards ceremony in New York last night shows little has changed. Meghan was in town to accept a ‘Women of Vision’ award at the Ms. Foundation for Women’s 50th anniversary event. The Duchess declared that: ‘It’s just never too late to start. You can be the visionary

The Spectator

2602: Rolling Stones – solution

1D / 25D is a quote by 1A. Remaining unclued lights were all anagrams of gemstones: 15A sapphire; 16A ruby; 13D tiger’s eye; 14D garnet; 15D lapis; 23D moonstone. First prize Ann Moore, Lowestoft, Suffolk Runners-up Margaret Almond, Southampton; Neville Twickel, Tidmington, Warwickshire

La Jerezana

2605: Way to go!

Eight unclued lights can be followed by the same word. Their unchecked letters can be arranged to spell out ‘QUALIFY A REVUE’. Across 1    President cut short time in bathroom facility (5) 4    Order pie and mash with south-eastern accent (9) 10    Tired rut at sports ground (10) 11    Manual exercises for old girl (6) 12    Small northern men with beards regularly make tiresome bedfellows (7) 14    Attempt to grab wings of partridge using two feet (5) 16    University dons soon reviewed length of part of speech (6) 22    Finally buy spuds – they appear annually (8) 23    Husband edges away from jolly terse shouts (7) 25    Foot first of

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: stories inspired by Beatles songs

In Competition No. 3299, you were invited to supply a short story that takes as its title the title of a Beatles song. Haruki Murakami used Beatles tracks from the album Rubber Soul as names for both his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood and a short story, ‘Drive My Car’. But the Japanese writer has confessed that he was never ‘a fervent fan’. In high school and college, he says, he ‘didn’t buy a single record’ by the Fab Four. In a large and inventive entry, Ben Hale’s dystopian ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, with its echoes of the film Logan’s Run,caught my eye, and I was moved by Frank McDonald’s poignant tale

Luke McShane

No. 752

White to play. Shirov-Wedberg, Lundin Memorial, Stockholm 1990. Black has just played Rh6-h5, attacking the e5 pawn, but Shirov found a powerful response. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 May. 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 Qh3! Qxh3+ 2 Kg5. When the d6 pawn falls, the d5 pawn will decide. Last week’s winner Mark Richardson, Taddyforde, Exeter

Luke McShane

Four Nations Chess League

The Four Nations Chess League (4NCL) season concluded last month in a resounding victory for Chess.com Manx Liberty. The team from the Isle of Man won all eleven matches, thanks to narrow 4.5-3.5 victories against both of their closest rivals, Chessable White Rose 1 and Cheddleton. On the final weekend, the Manx squad was boosted by the inclusion of veteran elite grandmaster Alexei Shirov, who won the only decisive game in the match against White Rose. Shirov conjured a firestorm of tactics against Jose Camacho Collados, the 2022 Welsh champion who is a lecturer in computer science at Cardiff University. Alexei Shirov (Chess.com Manx Liberty) – Jose Camacho Collados (Chessable

Dot Wordsworth

There’s ‘the rub’ – but where did it come from?

‘So, are the Tories going to win the election?’ asked my husband after listening to the engaging psephologist Sir John Curtice. I’d been paying attention, but was distracted by Sir John’s phrase ‘the rub in the ointment’. Typical of extempore speech, this a metaphorical mixture of the fly in the ointment and the rub. Ointment might suggest a rub like Vicks VapoRub, which originated in America in 1905. The Oxford English Dictionary says such a rub is likely to be a liniment, though I can’t quite see the difference. I do remember Sloan’s Liniment, its label bearing an engraved portrait of the thick-moustached inventor, Dr Earl Sloan (another American, a doctor

Margaret Mitchell

The sex appeal of lobsters

The night before I moved a pet lobster into my flat, I ate agnolotti all’ aragosta for dinner. It was possible that my soon-to-be companion, Snips McGee – who I inherited from a friend – would outlive me (the oldest lobster on record was estimated to be 140 years old) and I wanted one last plate of lobster ravioli, hold the moral hang-ups. The French author Gérard de Nerval also owned a pet lobster, which he took for walks on a blue silk leash. ‘They are peaceful, serious creatures,’ he said. ‘They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I find out the truth about the family tapestry?

Q. I was lucky enough to marry into a family where everyone gets on well. One of my brothers-in-law was the only one with a big enough wall in his house to hang a family treasure of a fragile antique tapestry, but last year he too moved into a smaller house and the tapestry now lies in his attic. When one of us asks how the tapestry is doing he moans ‘ruined, no doubt – ruined by moths’ but refuses to discuss it further or let anyone else have a look. The tapestry may or may not be beyond repair, but this much-loved man has always preferred to keep his

Toby Young Toby Young

My search for a Matt Hancock impersonator

I’m trying to organise an event in Westminster with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott and it’s proving a bit of a nightmare. So many obstacles have been thrown in our way that we’re beginning to think it might be jinxed. But we aren’t about to give up. The original idea was for the two of us to have a conversation on stage in front of a live audience about Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. These are the messages – more than 100,000 in total, between the then health secretary and various politicians, civil servants and advisers – that he shared with Isabel when she was employed to ghost-write The Pandemic Diaries, Hancock’s

J. Meirion Thomas

How far would you go to get your sick child a kidney transplant?

Here is your dilemma. Imagine you have a university-age daughter who has developed kidney failure. She needs a transplant. You know that the best results are obtained when the operation is performed at a transplant unit with access to the best immunosuppressive drugs, when the kidney is taken from a living donor, and especially when that donor is young and from a similar ethnic background to the recipient. Like most parents, you will go to almost any lengths to help your child – but would you break the law? The £7,000 reward offered for the kidney was equal to four years of earnings for the donor Ike Ekweremadu thought that

Douglas Murray

How to fake it till you make it

Not to sound too much like Kamala Harris during one of her peregrinations on the nature of time, but the thing about the future is that it catches up with you awfully fast. For a while we have been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the special hazards of ‘deepfakes’. It seemed so futuristic when we saw a deepfake of Barack Obama some years ago, which demonstrated how easy it was to put words into someone’s mouth that they did not say. Well, now we have had an example in real time. Or at least the electorate in Turkey have. Personally I am not persuaded that Turkey’s election

Peter Jones

How the ancients handled old age

Research in the USA has shown that it is possible to do something about grey hair. But ‘grey hair’ stands for ‘old age’, and there is nothing we can do about that, except make it easier to live with. Modern medicine certainly helps. There was no such luck in the ancient world, where the playwright Sophocles described old age as ‘unregarded, powerless, unsociable, unfriended, where misery couples with misery’. Take Fronto, a close friend of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. He died at the age of 60, and many of his more than 200 letters mention his physical ailments. Almost every limb was in pain at some stage or other, while he

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Europe is turning against net zero

The contrast couldn’t be greater. In Britain a wealthy cabinet minister goes on television to boast of how he is installing a heat pump in his home – something his government is proposing to force on millions of British homeowners over the next few years in spite of them costing many thousands of pounds more than a gas or oil boiler. Meanwhile, in France, the President makes a speech calling for a ‘regulatory pause’ on green issues in order to push for the ‘re-industrialisation’ of his country. So far, Britain and the EU have moved more or less in tandem on climate change – which is not all that surprising