Society

Wednesday

Luke McShane

Drama in Astana

As I write, six of 14 games of the world championship match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren have been played in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the score tied 3-3. By the time you read this, events will have moved on, so any prognosis would be futile. One ought, so to speak, to wait until the bread has risen. But the games in Astana have been so compelling that a quick peek is irresistible. Four out of six have been decisive – an extraordinary volume of bloodshed by the standards of recent world championships. Initially, Ding looked listless, as if overwhelmed by the occasion. ‘Nepo’ won game two, but by game

Revd Steve Morris

How to find the Holy Grail

If you visit Valencia Cathedral, you will find, in the old chapter house converted into a chapel, the Holy Grail, made up of a humble agate stone and kept safely behind glass. But if it is really the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper (and the Vatican recognises the possibility that it is), why are so many people still searching for it? Christopher Dawes believes he might have the Grail at home on his mantelpiece in Brentford There are too many theories about its true location to keep track of. Could it be in the Basilica of San Isidoro, León, given as a present to the King of

The Spectator

The pointlessness of renaming the Brecon Beacons

Putting out fires The Brecon Beacons National Park Authority said it was renaming the park because the word ‘beacon’ implies carbon emissions and ‘does not fit with the ethos’. — Many hills in Britain carry the name ‘beacon’ thanks to chains of fires which were lit up to warn of approaching invasion. In Devon alone, 39 beacon sites have been identified. Most famously, beacons were lit in July 1588 to warn of the approaching Spanish Armada after it was spotted off Land’s End, although there is no record of how many fires were lit nor how quickly it took the message to reach London. — Not that the name of

Matthew Lesh

Why WhatsApp could quit the UK over the Online Safety Bill

WhatsApp, Signal and five other messaging services have joined forces to attack the government’s Online Safety Bill. They fear the bill will kill end-to-end encryption and say, in an open letter, that this could open the door to ‘routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages’. The stakes are high: WhatsApp and Signal are threatening to leave the UK market if encryption is undermined. This intervention comes as the Lords begins their line-by-line committee stage scrutiny of the Bill today. Encryption provides a defence against fraud and scams; it allows us to communicate with friends and family safely; it enables human rights activists to send incriminating information to journalists. Governments and politicians even

Douglas Murray

Ireland’s violent men of peace

It was from the Northern Ireland conflict that I first learned how language – like everything else – can be warped utterly. Take the late Martin McGuinness, not to mention his still-living, libel-hungry comrades. For almost three decades they put bombs in public places, shot random people in the head and tortured others to death. After 30 years of this they received a wonderful career-end bonus. They became ‘men of peace’. Suddenly McGuinness and co were not to be criticised. Instead they were applauded for laying down their weapons. Before long they were travelling the world talking about ‘conflict resolution’. They won elections by pushing aside all those who had

John R. MacArthur

Meet the aristocrat plotting Macron’s downfall

Vitry-le-François Can a modern revolution emanate from the political centre or, more unconventionally, from the heart and mind of an aristocrat who places republican values above factional allegiance? This was the question that propelled me more than a hundred miles east of Paris – while another day of mass demonstrations unfolded in the capital and across France – to the post-industrial town of Vitry-le-François to meet Charles de Courson, the French parliamentarian descended from Norman nobility who nearly succeeded in bringing down the government of President Emmanuel Macron with a no-confidence vote on 20 March. The interparty revolt led by De Courson’s small group of nonaligned deputies in the National

Simon Stevens

How the junior doctors’ strike could have been avoided

Easter and Passover coincided this year, so we’ve been in America visiting my in-laws. Four years ago, in the spirit of the holiday of liberation and exodus, we had all travelled to the Ukrainian village outside Lviv from which my father-in-law’s family emigrated. In just a few short generations during the 20th century, people there found themselves labouring under the Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Nazi and Soviet yokes. The disastrous human consequences are laid bare in Bernard Wasserstein’s poignant new history, A Small Town in Ukraine. Now Russian missiles intermittently rain down, partly enabled by sanctions busting and dirty money. When President Zelensky addressed the British parliament a couple of months ago,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I shed a tear for the SNP

For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers. Gloating in such a manner is odious and juvenile and so I simply shook my head sadly and even shed a tear when I heard that the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie, had been arrested. In fact I spent most of the day beneath a shroud of tears, having learned that the mega campervan parked outside Peter Murrell’s

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

How to lose sales and alienate people

In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’ Research is launching the free service ‘Woke Alerts’, which texts subscribers news of companies ‘putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers’. Using iconography reminiscent of adverts for those high-frequency plug-ins that ward off mice, the parent website urges shoppers tired of corporations latching onto fashionable left-wing causes to dramatise their displeasure through product boycotts. The idea is a bit goofy. Yet the app could appeal to a far more than niche market. Only 8 per cent of the US public self-identifies as far left. That leaves a

The Spectator

Letters: The reincarnation of Anne Boleyn 

Pension point Sir: I have just read Kate Andrews’s article on junior doctors’ pay (‘Sick pay’, 15 April). While not wishing to get drawn into the rights or wrongs of their strike action, may I point out that in respect of the NHS pension scheme, for the sake of balance, the employee’s pension contribution also needs to be taken into account? The employer may well pay a 20 per cent contribution, but a junior doctor on a salary of either £29,000 or £37,000 (both figures quoted in the article) will pay 9.8 per cent of salary with a consequent reduction in take-home pay. John Etherington Wilsden, West Yorkshire Coach trip

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The problem with St Paul

On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for a world religion. In online posts beneath my column came hundreds of comments from Christians protesting that I’d misunderstood the Crucifixion’s meaning, which was (they said) the ultimate victory. Triumphantly, Jesus redeemed our sins. Or ‘atoned’ for them. Along with atonement and redemption, expressions like ‘ransomed’, ‘forgiven’, ‘pardoned’, ‘paid for’, ‘healed’ and ‘washed away’ recurred, as well as ‘sacrifice’ – Jesus’s blood-sacrifice to expiate the world’s sins: a kind of reparation. The notion of release – from slavery, debt or imprisonment – suffuses these responses. In the context of human

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 22 April 2023

I have played the Easter Guardian in one event or another for the past 20 years. It is the perfect Easter tournament and everybody has fun, particularly in the mixed pairs. I wasn’t interested in finding a slightly more exotic alternative; the Royal National Hotel in Russell Square was where I most wanted to be. This year was different. I went on a mini-break to Italy (no card playing of any sort) but I kept a sharp eye on the EBU’s results page, and felt a pang of envy. After all how can sun, sea and food compete? The Swiss Teams was won by team ‘SUSHI’ (Shashou – Sandqvist, Bucknell

Melissa Kite

My proof that God exists

We had planted a cluster of daffodils on the spaniel’s grave, but after a few days the weather battered them down. Sadly, the little yellow flowers began to curl up and wither in the force of the wind and hail that was pelting the small wooded copse where we laid Cydney to rest. I chose daffodils because her official name was Byrecoc Cinnamon Jonquil. I went to the farm shop and bought a large pot of the variety sometimes called narcissus, sometimes jonquil, a lovely old-fashioned name. For two days they bloomed on the spot, and then they faltered. But on the fourth day when I visited, I realised, walking

Jeremy Clarke

What I’d give for a glass of water

It took five firemen or pompiers to lift me out of bed, carry me down three narrow flights of stairs and down a rocky path, then to shove me into the back of their van. When I cried out in pain the sweating firemen joked that I was a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Henceforward they humorously addressed me as sheikh. It had to be pompiers because my legs don’t work. The educated guess is that a tumour is pressing against my spine, gradually paralysing me from the toes up. The old legs feel amputated: just colourless slabs of cold meat. ‘Can I perhaps have a glass of water?’

Taki

America is no longer the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave

New York The fact that a sailor on leave cannot whistle at a pretty girl’s legs is scientific proof that America is beyond help and finished for good. That also goes for hard hats, who along with sailors were among the whistlers back in the good old days before woke ruined men, women and the country in general. Already radical activists have destroyed the notion of womanhood as well as that of biology by using words such as ‘cis’ and expressions like ‘gender assigned at birth’. All women athletes want is to compete against one another. Is it too much to ask? The castrating atmosphere that prevails over here does

Stephen L. Miller

The end of the Fox-Dominion circus

Now that Dominion Voting Systems has settled for $787.5 million (£633 million) – less than half the $1.6 billion (£1.3 billion) they were asking for in damages from Fox News – the circus must pack up and move elsewhere.  There’s nothing the media likes to cover more than itself, and there is no media target juicier than Fox News. Fox was suckered into the vacuum left by Donald Trump that Joe Biden’s presidency was never going to fill. The media needed a villain and Fox, led by Tucker Carlson, scratches that itch for them.   Fox News did itself no favours by slingshotting back and forth from being the first network to accurately call

Tuesday

David Abulafia

Why is Netflix pretending that Cleopatra was black?

‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’ So asserts a trailer for a new Netflix ‘docuseries’ looking at the lives of powerful women in history. Alas for the speaker, an American of African descent, her grandmother’s idea of historical truth was highly subjective. It was built on an absurd generalisation about all Africans being black, and the regrettable assumption that skin colour is an important criterion for judging people’s merits. No one denies the awful legacy of slavery among African Americans, and the wish to find female African heroines is understandable – but it is also vital to

Andrew Tettenborn

The EU is alienating eastern Europe

For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders to its vassals, into an organisation based on broad consensus between elected governments, it is likely to find itself side-lined or even facing a continental schism. If you were looking for the most inept way to run an organisation like the EU, this comes close The latest illustration of this arises from a sudden glut

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Why is Just Stop Oil targeting the snooker?

Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed – to glue herself to the other table. Both have been arrested. Meanwhile, enraged snooker fans everywhere are trying to work out what on Earth their sport has got to do with climate change. We could speculate. The tournament is sponsored by online used-car dealer Cazoo, which is perhaps particularly complicit in the defilement of