Society

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Unmasking the truth about Covid

You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes. So much of what we were forbidden to say about Covid has turned out to have had considerable substance It’s an actual fact that nobody who lives north of Stamford, Lincs, has ever knowingly eaten cucumber. I watch the northerners sometimes in the Tesco at Chester-le-Street, shuffling hurriedly past the vegetable section, eyes averted, nervous lest a pak choi reach out and grab them. There are even tomatoes

La Jerezana

2594: Dotty + Nosey

Eight unclued lights spell out the second half of a poem: ‘8 (4,5) 37; 1D (6,4); 39 (3,6) 40; 10 (3,5,2) 24 25.’ The title cryptically suggests its author.         Across    1    Gossipy quartet of bridge players play at last (5)    4    Accompanying Ford, Maggie’s oddly withdrawn (9) 11    Duty of French king after a month (6) 12    Looking happy, retired setter’s invading pitch (7) 14    Benders in Tyneside perhaps captured in Loach film (5) 15    Nirvana composer (5) 16    Ten silent guards store food for livestock (6) 22    Ale discombobulated the sailors of Morocco, perhaps (8) 23    Old lady heard someone munching sorbet (7) 27    Invent an absolutely

The Spectator

Which countries produce the most vegetables?

Striking out An England vs Wales rugby match was nearly called off after Welsh players threatened to go on strike over the terms of their new contracts. Although rare, industrial action is certainly not unheard of in the sporting arena. – In June last year the Canadian men’s football team went on strike demanding they share at least three quarters of World Cup prize money, rather than the 40 per cent they were being offered. A friendly against Panama was called off. – In August 2020, shortly after the BLM protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, US basketball, soccer and baseball teams went on strike in protest at the

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: sonnets on embarrassing ailments

In Competition No. 3288, you were invited to supply a sonnet on an embarrassing ailment. To make space for as many winners as possible, I’ll keep it brief: in an amusing and accomplished entry, the sonnets below nosed ahead of the pack and earn their authors £15. They flee from me that sometime did me seekOr make excuse to end our conversation;They turn away when I begin to speakOr greet me with a look of consternation.I wondered many times about the causeNor could I fathom why I should feel shame;I asked myself why I got no applauseWhen I said something, but no answer came.And then one day a visit to

Emily Rhodes

The tyranny of World Book Day

‘Dear parents, a reminder that we are dressing up for World Book Day! Don’t forget your child should come to school in costume as their favourite character tomorrow…’ It’s the email every parent dreads receiving. (Or one of them, anyway.) It tends to be opened at eight o’clock the evening before World Book Day, to be met with feelings of exasperation, desperation and guilt. Dressing up is, in fact, the antithesis to reading for pleasure How is it that the charity World Book Day, founded by Unesco in 1995 with the laudable mission ‘to promote reading for pleasure’, has morphed into yet another occasion for parents to buy stuff? An

Luke McShane

No. 741

White to play. Vallejo Pons-Santos Latasa, Leon 2018. The choice is between 1 Ke6 and 1 Rh8+. White calmly played the wrong one and Black resigned immediately! But which move wins the game? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 6 March. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include an address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qg8+ Kxh8 2 Rf8+ Kh7 3 Rh8+ Kxh8 stalemate Last week’s winner William Loveday-Smith, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire

Luke McShane

Bot moves

Can ChatGPT play chess? A few weeks ago, when the AI chatbot was making headlines, someone had the cute idea of getting it to play a game against the popular chess engine Stockfish. At the start, it followed a standard line of the Ruy Lopez opening. But soon the illegal moves began – ChatGPT tried to castle before its bishop was out of the way. Later, it added pieces to the board from nowhere, queens jumped over knights, and rooks teleported magically around the board. I repeated this experiment myself, with similar phantasmagorical results, all while the bot supplied nonsensical explanations for its moves. Indeed, ChatGPT cannot play chess, and it was

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The decline and fall of Matt Hancock

When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God. Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior to the pandemic – before we came to know and love Hancock, in those innocent days before his weeping, before his red-hot doorway loving, before his gulping of blended sheep vagina – he did not inspire confidence. Hancock had that Alan Partridge joke of a branded app for a start. Then there was his unprepossessing

Dot Wordsworth

What do biscotti and macaroni have in common?

‘Only one biscotto!’ exclaimed my husband, grabbing a little packet labelled ‘Biscotti’ at the station coffee stall. It fell from his agitated fingers and broke into two. ‘There you are, darling, two biscotti,’ I said cheerfully, to his annoyance. But singulars and plurals for foodstuffs are seldom simple. Take macaroni. It is an obsolete form of maccheroni in Italian, ‘tubular pasta’. But Italians hardly think of talking of one maccherone. It’s a funny word anyway. An origin is seriously proposed in the Greek makarios, ‘blessed’, and aionios, ‘eternal’, which together named a funeral chant. I suppose macaroni was consumed after the funeral, as we do ham sandwiches. In the Spectator

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: a Hamilton Russell exclusive from Private Cellar

I don’t know how Laura Taylor does it. Private Cellar’s marketing director has managed – after a similar coup with the previous vintage – to snare an elusive and handsome parcel of 2022 Hamilton Russell Vineyards Chardonnay and Pinot Noir especially for readers of The Spectator. You cannot buy these anywhere else yet. These are wines of the highest order and greatly sought-after and we are blessed to be so honoured. Indeed, as Anthony Hamilton Russell himself said to Laura: ‘Your allocation is more than many countries get!’ It helps, of course, that Laura knows the estate – in South Africa’s Hemel-en-Aarde Valley – well, and that she visited it

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I deal with my colleague’s revolting perfume?

Q. I work part-time with a lovely girl (aged 27) in a tiny office. She is very nice and not too woke. But she wears cheap scent that has a ghastly, acrid smell and I feel like I’m ingesting poison. Mary, what do I do? – Name and address withheld A. Why not borrow a friend’s asthma inhaler and bring it to the office? Make a show of using this and splutter that ‘I was just about to ask you what that divine scent is, but now I fear it may be triggering my allergy…’. Q. I was widowed last year and I am missing female company very much. In

Toby Young Toby Young

Is it time to get rid of my beloved DVDs?

The problem with being a film collector is that the technology on which films are preserved keeps changing. I’m not talking about abandoning my DVD library – although I’ll come to that – but my collection of LaserDiscs. LaserDiscs were a forerunner of DVDs. They were the same size as LPs and you often needed two to capture a long film like Spartacus. The quality was significantly better than VHS and I held screening parties at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush for films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I thought the fact that hardly anyone else had the technology was part of its appeal. But the failure of the

Toby Young Toby Young

The brilliance of Lime Bikes

I was disappointed to learn that the authorities are planning to crack down on dockless bikes and electric scooters. Westminster City Council says it intends to fine the rental firms if vehicles are ‘abandoned’ on pavements, while the Department for Transport is planning to introduce a licensing scheme. This is partly in response to lobbying from disabilities charities, which claim the vehicles are a safety hazard. ‘They need to be stopped, docked and locked,’ a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind told MailOnline. I knew it couldn’t last. The sudden appearance of dockless bikes and e-scooters on the streets of England’s cities in 2021 – they’ve yet to

Alexander Larman

Could Meghan and Harry’s eviction overshadow the coronation?

With the coronation a mere two months away, the ‘will they, won’t they’ speculation about the presence of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at the ceremony has taken on a new twist. If they come to London, they will not have anywhere to stay: officially, at least. It has been revealed that Frogmore Cottage, Harry and Meghan’s wedding gift from the Queen, has been withdrawn from them. In a classic case of adding insult to injury it has been offered to Prince Andrew instead, on the understanding that he will in turn give up his larger residence of Royal Lodge, the 30-room, 98-acre mansion in Windsor Great Park that

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why trans kids are now ‘coming out’ as animals 

It was announced last week that another gender has been added to the list: nominalgender. Most news sites reported this in the sort of proud way a zoo might announce the birth of an exciting animal, a baby Komodo dragon maybe – as if the gender had somehow hatched and was waiting to be adopted. You are nominalgender ‘if your gender is so much just you that no one else can even experience it’, I read. You’re xenogender if you feel more akin to animals or plants or foods than humans A gender no one else can experience? That sounds almost appealing. I might be tempted to come out as

Ben Farmer

South Africa’s energy crisis is becoming a political one

Cape Town South Africa is falling apart. Blackouts of up to ten hours a day are bringing businesses to a halt, making teaching harder and turning traffic lights dark. Food is rotting in warm fridges. There were more than 200 blackouts last year and they have continued every day so far in 2023. ANC strategists question whether any party can survive the public anger over the mismanagement of the grid A country that once saw itself as Africa’s industrial powerhouse is now regularly without power. The cause is a debt-ridden and run-down fleet of power stations, which have been starved of repairs and regularly break down. Electricity supplies have to be

Peter Jones

The ancient relationship between comedy and politics

Our brave comedians spend much of their time fearlessly attacking politicians, to little or no effect. So did the comic playwright Aristophanes (5th century bc), but he also attacked his audience too if, when meeting in assembly as the dêmos (cf. dêmo-kratia, ‘people-power’), they were in his view too easily persuaded by politicians he hated, such as Cleon, to make bad decisions. In one comedy (424 bc), Aristophanes imagined the Athenian state as a household, headed up by Dêmos (‘The People’). Dêmos is served by two slaves (= politicians), who are fed up that a foulmouthed new slave Paphlagon (a thinly disguised Cleon) has taken total control of their master. But they

The Spectator

Letters: Should Christians in politics leave their faith at the door? 

Beyond belief Sir: Tim Farron (‘Church and state’, 25 February) repeats many of the common errors made by those of faith. He starts by equating secularists with atheists, yet they are quite distinct. To be an atheist is simply not to believe in the existence of a God. That’s it. You can be an atheist and almost anything; communist, fascist, socialist, liberal, conservative. A secularist believes in the separation of church and state, as many people of faith do as well as atheists. This separation is enshrined in the secular US Constitution, in one of the more religious countries in the West. Secularism is actually the only possible guarantor of religious freedom,

Douglas Murray

Thomas Jefferson and the death of wisdom

In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there seemed to be a tremendous optimism. One of the biggest causes for this was the nature of information technology: specifically, the internet. Imagine if someone had said to you then: ‘We are heading into a world where almost anything can be read at the click of a mouse. Almost all the great books will be