Society

Thursday

Douglas Murray

My tips to avoid arrest by the Met

An interesting event occurred in London at the weekend. A young man who goes by the name of Montgomery Toms attended a Pride parade. But he did not attend in order to dress in bondage gear while shouting ‘Love is love’ and ‘Free Palestine’. Instead he went with a sandwich board which had a trans flag on it, followed by an equals sign and then the words ‘mental illness’. This is a tactic pioneered by an American man known as ‘Billboard Chris’, because his name is Chris and he wears a billboard. Chris’s schtick is to walk around with a sign saying things like ‘Children cannot consent to puberty blockers’.

Roger Lewis

The slow delights of an OAP coach tour

Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad. There will be cream teas, along with river cruises, coastal excursions, scenic drives and jaunts on steam railways. I am a devotee of these charming holidays, as invented by Wallace Arnold, even though when one first catches sight of one’s fellow travellers it’s a frightening vision of what’s up ahead: the sticks, walking-frames, mobility scooters,

Patrick Kidd

Does AI belong on the tennis court?

The evidence was clear, the official had dropped a clanger. At 4-4 in the first set of the women’s match at Wimbledon last Sunday, the British player Sonay Kartal should have had her serve broken when she hit a backhand long. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova saw the ball land well out of court, as did those watching the replay, but the line judge remained mute. ‘Replay the point,’ the umpire said, leading the Russian to complain that ‘they stole the game’. This nameless offender – let’s call him Hugh after Hugh Cannaby-Serious, the official who used to wind up John McEnroe – was napping. It turned out that Hugh had been switched

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

How governments gaslight

The posters now plastered around German public swimming pools are so hilarious that you may have seen them already. Keeping up my entertainment end of things, I’ve forwarded the pictures to multiple correspondents myself. See, news stories have been accumulating – and many similar stories doubtless remain unreported – about Muslim immigrants harassing and sexually assaulting native Germans trying to cool off. In response, some helpful bureaucrat has generated a series of images whose crudely drawn cartoon format makes light of the problem while wilfully, defiantly misrepresenting it. Below ‘Schubsen ist nicht lustig!’ (‘Shoving is not funny!’), a white boy and vaguely brownish boy push a terrified black girl towards

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Why should the hunt for the next Archbishop of Canterbury be ‘inclusive’?

On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton and Howley. Justin Welby announced he was vacating the throne of St Augustine on 12 November last year; it took until 28 May even to assemble the committee who will discuss the names of his potential successor. It will be a miracle if we know the name of the new Primate of All England by

The Spectator

Letters: Why we need libraries

NHS origins Sir: Your leading article ‘Wes or bust’ (5 July) credited Labour with founding the NHS. In fact, the NHS was founded during the second world war by the Labour, Liberal and Conservative coalition. The speech with the famous line ‘free at the point of use’ was in fact made by Winston Churchill. He made it because he was PM and it was his job. For Labour to claim to be the initiator is somewhat disingenuous. Edward Hirst Aston, Sheffield All aboard Sir: Michael Gove is quite right (‘Tracks of my tears’, 5 July): the retirement of the royal train is sad news for those of us who like

Madeline Grant

I’ve got Donald Trump to thank for my unusual middle name

Never make a drunken bet. At about 3 a.m. one fateful morning, pre-pandemic and several bottles down, a friend and I made a wager on the outcome of the 2020 US election – he for Joe Biden, I for Donald Trump (who, at the time, looked like a sure thing). Then came lockdown, spiralling inflation and unemployment – and the rest is history. This wasn’t a bet for money. Instead, it was stipulated that whoever lost would legally assume a new middle name. Being gamers of a certain vintage, we drew from the Nintendo canon. If my friend had lost, he’d have become James Edward Bowser Price. Should I lose,

Toby Young Toby Young

My sober assessment of the fat jabs

It was my friend Alex who tipped me the wink. I bumped into him at a party earlier this year and to my astonishment he’d lost about two stone and was nursing a glass of fizzy water. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, draining a goblet of red wine. ‘You’re usually about three sheets to the wind by now.’ He explained he was on Mounjaro, the slimming drug, and one of its side effects was to suppress his desire for alcohol. He’d had a couple of glasses earlier in the evening, but had then lost interest. ‘You should try it,’ he said, eyeing my unsteady gait. After a particularly heavy

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Salad cream is more than a poor man’s mayonnaise

Salad cream makes me feel oddly patriotic. It’s one of those products that is so distinctively British that it has not travelled. Elsewhere, it is eschewed as a poor man’s mayonnaise. Its chief ingredients are hardboiled egg yolks, English mustard, vinegar and thick cream, and it was, in fact, the first product that Heinz produced exclusively for Great Britain, in Harlesden, north-west London, from 1914 onwards. The Heinz version is, frankly, a wartime mayonnaise, constrained by shelf life and made with the cheaper ingredients available at the time, a little looser and distinctively sweeter than its mayonnaise equivalent. It really came into its own in the second world war during

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why driving at 80mph won’t save you time

The device you see on this page is called a ‘paceometer’ and was devised by behavioural scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel. It features in their scientific paper ‘Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed’. Study it carefully, because as many people have confirmed to me, it will ‘change the way you drive forever’. Nassim Taleb described it as ‘mathematically trivial, but completely counterintuitive’. The inner digits show speed in the conventional way: in this case miles per hour. In other words, how far you travel at some velocity in a given time. The small digits around the outside are the paceometer: they show the same information but

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do we handle staying with friends with very different political views?

Q. We are going to stay with some old friends who we haven’t seen for a couple of years as they have been working in the US. I happen to know that they now have widely different political views to my husband’s ‘far-right’ opinions. How I can stop any potential conversations getting out of hand, as my husband tends to dig his heels in? – B.D.V., Northants A. Collude with your husband to pre-empt possible catastrophes. Tell the couple that he has agreed to imminently take part in a village debate to raise funds for charity. Unfortunately he has been assigned the argument ‘President Trump is a good man’. He

Bruce Anderson

Wine to pass the cricket Test

What to drink while watching cricket? Beer or even Pimm’s for the village green, but I think that a Test match on television demands wine. What a series we are having: likely to go down in the record books as a great example of the greatest of games. Cricket incites memories. The current Indian side have a claim to be world champions. In this last Test, they thumped England even though they rested Jasprit Bumrah, probably the best bowler in the world today. But I recall earlier days when they were usually easy victims in England, with one exception: Sunil Gavaskar’s match. This was in 1979 at the Oval and

Dot Wordsworth

Are Reeves and Starmer really in ‘lockstep’?

‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘In the past, there have been examples – I won’t give any specific – of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.’ ‘Sounds like you and me,’ said my husband sarcastically. But I was wondering whether the Prime Minister was aware of the connotations of his claim about being in lockstep. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the meaning ‘in perfect or rigid, often mindless, conformity’. An image might be the scene in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), where the overalled workers change shift, their heads bowed, their

Rachel Johnson

My night at the Spectator summer party

The first rule of the summer party is do not hold your summer party on the same night as The Spectator. It’s social fight club. You can only lose. This is a rule, however, that our Prime Minister, among others on ‘the left’, ignored to offer competing attractions. Zarah Sultana MP went to the most extreme lengths. She chose the same evening (3 July) to launch a new political party with Jeremy Corbyn, by posting something on X at 8.11 p.m. before her party even had a name, or indeed, Jeremy Corbyn. It was Jezbollah minus Magic Grandpa. Total success, as my father says whenever something goes badly wrong. The

Melissa Kite

Our B&B has found its niche

A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, which was occupied by a couple from West Virginia on a romantic road trip. The door rattled again as I stood there. I realised the big old key was turning and returning in the lock and the handle was rattling but the door was not opening. I ran back into our bedroom and shook the builder boyfriend awake. ‘The people in room 4 are stuck in their room!’ He stirred and when I wouldn’t stop shaking him he got

Aidan Hartley

Are my cattle ready to compete?

Kenya My cattle sensei Mark revealed that my Boran bulls aren’t gaining enough masculine growth after weaning because they’re only just surviving on the droughted, brittle pastures of my farm at 6,000ft in Laikipia. They’re also starved half the time, since the perennial threat of armed cattle rustlers mean they must overnight in a stone and thornbush zeriba – and this year we’ve had one bitch of a lioness constantly harassing the livestock, even jumping into the stockade at night to kill or injure animals. I’ve put all my bulls on to a protein and bran supplement, but sadly I have selected only three very young beasts to enter the

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 July 2025

The city of Poznan in Poland became heaven on earth last month, swarming as it was with hundreds of fellow bridge addicts and most of the world’s top players. It was the 11th European Transnational Championships, and I went to play in the Mixed Teams with a wonderful group: Sebastian Atisen, Andrew McIntosh, Sara Moran, Paula Leslie and Gunn and Fredrik Helness (wife and son of the legendary Tor). We named our team Contract Killers, which we thought was great until we suddenly realised it might sound like we butchered our contracts rather than nailed them. In any case, we did well to get to the round of 32 before

Luke McShane

UzChess Cup

The team of young talents from Uzbekistan, who sensationally won gold at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, continue to develop apace. The strongest, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, is in the world top 10, and Javokhir Sindarov is at no. 25. They tied for first at the strong UzChess Cup, held in Tashkent in June, competing against elite players like Ian Nepomniachtchi, Arjun Erigaisi and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. The latter also tied for first and won the playoff, though he was on the losing side of the most spectacular game of the event (perhaps the most beautiful of the year so far). R. Praggnanandhaa-Richard RapportUzChess Masters 2025 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3

Luke McShane

No. 858

White to play. Abdusattorov-Rapport, UzChess Masters 2025. The a-pawn seems bound to promote before the h-pawn. Which move allowed Abdusattorov to win the game anyway? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 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 Kxd7! Then 1…Kh5+ 2 Be6#. Against 1…f3 or 1…Nf3, also 2 Be6# Or 1..Kf5 2 Bf3# Last week’s winner Paul Carter, Lancaster