Society Archives

Wednesday

12 Apr 2023

Question of sport

Is chess a sport? Naively, I once considered that to be a philosophical question. Physical strength or dexterity – nope. Feeling of exertion and elevated heart rate – yes, at least if you’re doing it with soul. Global competition and recognition – yes, emphatically. It was no accident that Louis Vuitton’s ad campaign last year pictured Messi and Ronaldo playing chess. A better question would be ‘Does chess deserve government funding?’ For a game with obvious cognitive, educational and cultural benefits, the answer ought to be an unequivocal yes, and in a great many countries, including within western Europe, the game does indeed receive meaningful government support. Alas, in the UK

Steerpike

Listen: BBC reporter caught out by Elon Musk on Twitter hate speech

Earlier this week, Elon Musk caused a fit of the vapours inside Broadcasting House when his social media site labelled the BBC Twitter account as being ‘government funded media’. The Beeb insists it is ‘publicly funded’ – even though not paying the licence fee is a criminal offence backed by the state – and duly kicked off about the change. As a result of the kerfuffle the BBC’s North America tech reporter, James Clayton, was granted a surprise interview with Musk yesterday, which took place at Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco and broadcast live on Twitter Spaces. Mr Steerpike wonders if the BBC might have regretted not being able to have editorial

Peter Jones

The Scottish solution to the refugee crisis

Refugees and asylum seekers are always with us. In the ancient world too, exiles, criminals, refugees, sometimes whole communities were on the move. There were three main conventions in place to help them. For an individual there was the act of supplication. If you knelt before someone – no Greek would willingly wish to appear so helpless – perhaps touching their knees, you would expect to be offered hospitality. Likewise, if there was a shrine nearby, putting yourself in contact with that would make you inviolable under the gods’ protection. Finally, one could appeal for asylum, derived from the ancient Greek word meaning ‘freedom from seizure’. There were even bilateral

Mark Mason

Why I’ve built my own coffin

I have inadvertently built my own coffin. I’m rather chuffed with it. It wasn’t meant to be a coffin. It’s actually a boat. My son found a YouTube video on how to make one, and although these videos are normally created by practical men for other practical men (I am the world’s most impractical man), I watched it and thought: ‘Even I could do that.’ It’s essentially an open-top plywood box, eight feet by two feet by one foot, with a 45-degree angle at the front to make it look slightly less like a box. Needless to say, my son got bored after the third nail, but I soldiered on

Mary Wakefield

Lessons in parenting – from the French

I am actively contributing to the decline of the West and to the collapse of our civilisation. I realised this last week when I found myself standing behind a metal turnstile in the French Alps watching my smallish son, on the other side of the turnstile, step into a bubble lift going up the mountain to the nursery slope. He was with an instructor from the French Ski School, the ESF, surrounded by other children and entirely safe. He’s just turned seven, yet I behaved like a distressed cow watching her calf hauled off to market. I weaved and bobbed trying to keep him in my line of sight; craned

Douglas Murray

In defence of Picasso

‘Well, they can’t cancel Picasso.’ That was my optimistic take some months ago when a friend in the art world said: ‘Watch out, they’re coming for him next.’ It doesn’t really matter that, like Paul Johnson – late of this parish – I don’t feel unadulterated admiration for Pablo Picasso’s work. The late period seems to me a commercial art factory that would have made Andy Warhol blush. But the fact he was a cast-iron genius is beyond doubt, proven by the fact that no one who came after him could go around him. Like Stravinsky in music, you couldn’t continue afterwards as though nothing had happened; Picasso had happened,

The Spectator

Letters: The C of E has become too broad a church

Too broad a Church Sir: I am not implacably hostile to Justin Welby; I share Christian empathy with the Archbishop’s earnest struggles to attract a spiritually dead nation back to the Church of England as described by Dan Hitchens’s article (‘The lost shepherds’, 8 April). However I cannot agree with his strategy. A liberal church is doomed to failure because it’s selling something that we already have. I ask our bishops: what is the Church’s USP? What does it offer that we can’t get elsewhere? The Church used to stand apart as a bastion against a hostile world, but if all it does is follow along behind modern secular fads

Nicholas Farrell

Why Giorgia Meloni is key to ‘stopping the boats’

Ravenna, Italy Whatever Rishi Sunak does to ‘stop the boats’, the fight to prevent illegal immigration to Britain and Europe will not be won or lost in the English Channel. It will be decided in the sea between Italy and Africa. At a recent EU summit in Brussels, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s new right-wing Prime Minister, warned that if the crisis-torn dictatorship of Kais Saied in Tunisia falls, then there will be ‘an invasion’ of Italy this year of ‘up to 900,000 migrants’. Tunisia has become a new major departure point for migrants coming to Europe. An Italian secret service report, meanwhile, warns that another ‘685,000 migrants’ are ready to cross

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 15 April 2023

Working out ‘safety-plays’ is pretty tedious, but can be vital when playing rubber bridge or teams. Unlike matchpoint pairs, guarding against bad breaks to secure your contract is far more important than trying for overtricks. That said, it can be difficult to work out safety-plays quickly at the table, especially as they’re often counter-intuitive. Far better to familiarise yourself with them from books. Zia, for instance, always shuts himself in a room for an hour before a big tournament to memorise the more obscure ones. But if you lack the time or patience, you can always follow Janet de Botton’s typically funny and forthright advice: ‘Just play the card you

Niall Gooch

Can the spiritual element of the coronation survive?

Almost as soon as Charles III acceded to the throne last September, we began to hear whispers and speculation about what exactly his coronation would look like. Many of these stories were alarming to traditionally-minded people. The King wants a slimmed-down ceremony, with less flummery and fewer fancy costumes, insisted those ever-available knowledgeable insiders. Others fretted about his long-ago musing that he would like to be Defender of Faith, not Defender of The Faith (an important definite article, that). A few months ago, it was reported that the coronation procession would feature NHS key workers and representatives of the ‘Windrush generation’, those two mythic cornerstones of the implied national refounding

Melissa Kite

How to outsmart a mouse

‘Mr Mouse’s days of fine dining are over,’ said the builder boyfriend as he put the finishing touches to his rodent anti-climbing device in the larder. This was a slice of cardboard, gaffer-taped sideways to the shelf to prevent the mouse who has been lodging with us from accessing it after climbing up the metal grille at the back of the fridge, which he has been using like a ladder. His ingenious contraption the BB called ‘the ratinator’. The mouse is so fat from eating our supplies that he is as big as a rat. He has been climbing up the fridge ventilator on to an electric cable trunking which

Jeremy Clarke

My world has shrunk to my bed

I was discharged from hospital into local taxi driver Gilles’s brand-new metallic blue Skoda, of which he is intensely proud. I’d been in for more than a week. My pain level had been assessed and the daily morphine dose adjusted, and a new and different species of analgesic prescribed; also lignocaine patches, to be stuck on my breasts each morning. Humming, as he does when in a cheerful mood, Gilles collected me from the ward in a wheelchair and transferred me on to the back seat of his pride and joy. ‘So how are you?’ he said. I told him I thought I was more or less finished. Gilles wasn’t

Taki

The death of style

New York Just as I finished complaining last week about the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realised that they make up for it by being the worst dressed people this side of Ukraine. J. Crew has been in the news lately because the company has changed hands, with hacks waxing nostalgically about preppy style and all that 1960s stuff. All I can say is: how can they tell? Hacks wouldn’t know what style is. They thought that Gianni Agnelli’s unbuttoned button-down shirt was the result of carelessness. The last American newsman with style was Joe Alsop, now long gone, a cousin of Roosevelt and a

Ian Williams

China is forcing its chatbots to be socialist

So now it’s official, Chinese chatbots will have to be ‘socialist’ and woe betide any tech company that allows its AI creation to have a mind of its own. While the communist party wants to lead the world in AI, it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own ‘Content generated by generative artificial intelligence should embody core socialist values and must not contain any content that subverts state power, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites splitting the country or undermines national unity,’ according to draft measures published Tuesday by China’s powerful internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). To this end, tech companies will

Tuesday

11 Apr 2023

Kara Kennedy

Did palace officials joke that Prince Harry had Stockholm syndrome?

An ‘archetype’ is a ‘universally understood term or pattern of behaviour, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned or emulated.’ Throughout her podcast series of that name, Meghan Markle analysed and condemned different ‘labels that hold women back’: ‘crazy,’ ‘diva,’ ‘bimbo.’ Perhaps next season she’ll switch gears to assess her own husband’s pattern of behaviour. Welcome to Archetypes episode 13 where we will be discussing Stockholm syndrome, my special guest today is Prince Harry… It’s an expression that has been thrown around a lot when discussing the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — and it’s clear why. Prince Harry went from the fun-loving naughty royal, known for Nazi costumes,

Matthew Lynn

The CBI has outlived any useful purpose

The director-general has been forced to stand down amid allegations of misconduct. There are allegations against others inside the organisation of harassment and even rape. And a culture of bullying and misogyny has been revealed. It is just possible that the CBI could be in worse shape. It could have been engaged in satanic rituals, perhaps, or turned out to be funded directly by Vladimir Putin, or short-listed Nigel Farage as its new boss. But it could not be a lot worse. For an organisation that is meant to represent British business, the last few weeks, culminating in today’s dismissal of Tony Danker, are about as bad as it gets. As a new boss

James Kirkup

Women are being ignored again in the surrogacy debate

Just over five years ago, I wrote an article here about sex and gender and the issues raised by policies and practices allowing people to self-identify in the gender of their choice. Then, the topic was obscure and marginal to a great many people: my decision to write about it was regarded by many friends and contacts as eccentric and perhaps self-harmingly misjudged. Today, with the sex/gender debate firmly established on the political agenda, I’ve largely left the conversation. Where once there weren’t enough people in politics paying attention, I sometimes think there are now too many. Would it really do any harm to ask a surrogate mother to affirm

David Loyn

Joe Biden’s shameful excuses for the Afghan withdrawal fiasco

It is an iron law that if governments put out important documents just ahead of a long holiday weekend there is something fishy about them. So it was with President Biden’s decision to release a report on America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday, before the Easter weekend. The White House press corps had about ten minutes to read it before a briefing where the first questioner, channelling Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern major-general, described it as the ‘very definition of a modern major holiday news dump.’ Biden may be the only person in the world who does not see the withdrawal from Afghanistan as being a critical failure of his

Gavin Mortimer

Is Giorgia Meloni stoking Britain’s migrant crisis?

In the last week, more than 1,000 migrants have crossed the English Channel, which is twice the number of people that the government’s barge can house on the Dorset coast. This was unveiled last week as the latest wheeze to address Britain’s migrant crisis: a floating barge with 222 rooms to house up to 500 migrants as their asylum applications are processed. It might be an idea to put in an order for a few more. According to Frontex, the European Border Agency, 5,622 migrants landed on the Kent coast in January and February this year, an increase of 82 per cent on the same period in 2022.

Monday

10 Apr 2023

Fraser Nelson

Elon Musk is right about BBC funding

The BBC has today been using its various news platforms to protest against being described as ‘government funded’ by Twitter. It has instructed Twitter to remove this insult ‘as soon as possible’ and its journalistic contacts have found a direct link to Elon Musk himself who, we are told, is a ‘fan’ of the BBC. So perhaps a quiet word with the right person in power can overcome this little hiccup. Radio Four even had a ‘debate’ which just featured one interviewee: Mary Hockaday, a former BBC executive. ‘As a BBC journalist, I care about accuracy,’ she said, ‘the simple fact is that to describe on Twitter the BBC as