Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: record inflation, record NHS waiting lists and the return of Trump

Home Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said, ‘We’re all going to be paying a bit more tax’ as he polished up his Autumn Statement. ‘The number one challenge we face is inflation,’ said Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister. The annual rate of inflation rose to 11.1 per cent from 10.1 per cent the month before. Regular pay increased by 5.7 per cent in the year to September but its real value fell by 2.7 per cent because of inflation. In a survey of grocery prices, the consumer group Which? found Heinz tomato ketchup had gone up 53 per cent in two years and Anchor spreadable butter by 45 per

The Spectator

2579: Destructive plot – solution

The theme was MURDER SHE WROTE, the long-running TV series starring ANGELA LANSBURY as JESSICA FLETCHER in the corpse-strewn CABOT COVE. The theme could also describe AGATHA CHRISTIE and DOROTHY L. SAYERS. First prize R.A. Towle, Ilkeston, Derbyshire Runners-up M.F. O’Brien, London N12; John M. Brown, Rolleston-on-Dove, Staffordshire

Andrew Sullivan

The Trumpists have gone full Nagasaki

You may not have had the pleasure of reading one Kurt Schlichter over the years. He’s a Trumpist blowhard columnist who writes popular dystopian novels about the looming red-blue civil war after a Democrat takeover, in a country where ‘all the sugary cereals that kids actually like’ are banned and ‘there is simply one deodorant, called “Deodorant”, which smells like wet cardboard and stains your shirt, blouse, or burqa’. He has replied to hostile tweets with the number ‘14’ – a white supremacist code for the 14 words: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’ One column was simply titled: ‘Buy Ammo.’ I’ve

La Jerezana

2582: Chief whip

3 28 40 1D 8 37. Two other unclued entries were involved. Ignore accents.         Across    1    Austrian novice without much flesh (8)    5    Gift of story books (6)    9    Man of uncertainty begins here, uncertainly (10) 14    Jenny perhaps was and is uninitiated (3) 16    Unruffled, drive GTi out of African national park (6) 17    Lustre of European mineral seen from behind (5) 18    People regularly taking part in sport make you sick (5) 20    Sculptor for example goes round scraping away (7) 22    Port of New Orleans (7) 24    Boy said yes after girl’s first seductive glance (4,3) 25    Drug ring finally fleeing Jamaica (5)

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A course in Rod Liddle studies

As someone who has always had a grotesquely inflated sense of his own importance, my experience speaking at Durham University again last week almost tipped me into fully blown, delusional megalomania. On the way to the venue a student informed me that in the big hall nearby several hundred people were crammed into a debate about whether Rod Liddle should be allowed to speak at Durham. Yes, only a matter of yards from another building where Rod Liddle was actually speaking. I had, for a moment, a wonderful daydream about an entire university given over to studying Myself, or listening to Myself, three-year courses on the subject of Rod Liddle

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Deluded politicians in the style of Lewis Carroll

In Competition No. 3275, you were invited to follow the format and formula of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Mad Gardener’s Song’ and supply a poem entitled ‘The Deluded Politician’. The same challenge was set 15 or so years ago, and on that occasion Tony Blair hogged the limelight. This time around, you were rather more spoiled for choice. Here’s a snippet from Hugh King: He thought he saw ahead of him A glittering career, But soon his mediocrity Became entirely clear, And he, a crass celebrity, Cried ‘Get me out of here’ Entries were uniformly excellent and it was painful whittling it down to just the five below, who take £30

Dennis Duncan

The whimsy – and casual cruelty – of the memoir index

It’s that time when publishers flood bookshops with celebrity memoirs. We all know a sleb autobiography is rarely the work of the celebrity, but the ghostwriter is not the only anonymous voice at work – an indexer can play a quietly subversive part too. One of my favourite index moments is in Shaun Ryder’s autobiography (Twisting My Melon – of course!), towards the end of the S’s: ‘sinus problems, 2; splitting up with Denise, 63; splitting up with Felicia, 320; splitting up with Oriole, 295; splitting up with Trish, 246-7; sunburnt in Valencia, 141-2; teeth, 327-8; thyroid problem, 320, 326; UFOs seen, 33-4.’ Teeth, UFOs, hypochondria, and failed relationships on

Dot Wordsworth

What do Ukrainians mean when they say they’ve liberated a ‘settlement’? 

The Ukrainians have been giving numbers of ‘settlements’ that they have recovered. A friend asked whether the word used by English-speaking broadcasters was influenced by the Pale of Settlement of Czarist times. I was surprised and tried to find out. As a starting point, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth established the Warsaw Confederation in 1573, giving religious liberty to Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews and Muslims. This developed after 1791 (when Russia took over Poland and Lithuania) into a system by which Jews, principally, could live under restrictions only in territory on the marches of Russia. The Pale of Settlement took in much of today’s Ukraine, with White Russia (Belarus), Lithuania and Bessarabia

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: mix and match, magnums and more from FromVineyardsDirect

I can ignore it no longer. Christmas is on its way and I’m plunged into gloom. I’m just going to drink buckets and hope it all goes away. I’ll certainly be tucking into some of these bottles from FromVineyardsDirect, all chosen with this time of year in mind. The 2021 Fremondo Falanghina del Sannio (1) was a big hit when we offered the previous vintage in the summer and this is just as fine. Made by La Guardiense co-operative deep in the Sannio Hills of Campania, Italy, it’s fresh, floral and fruity. There’s a lemony touch to it too and a long, crisp finish. It makes a great aperitif. £9

Luke McShane

No. 729

Black to play. Schwetlick-Lecroq, 32nd Correspondence World Championship. White’s last move, Qd1-b3, is a blunder that can’t have been endorsed by a computer. What did Black play to force resignation? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 21 November. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1…Qh2! wins. Carlsen’s 1…Qc2 (or 1…Qd3) allows 2 Re7+ Ka6 3 Ra7+ Kxa7 4 Qe7+ Ka6 5 Qa7+ Kxa7 stalemate. Last week’s winner David Grant, Ludlow

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: is it disloyal of me to watch The Crown? 

Q. Last week I was a ticket-paying guest at a charity dinner. After the first course, the main fundraiser stood up and gave a speech. I didn’t know the man on my right but I suspect he was some sort of VIP. He never stopped talking about himself to me throughout the speech and I was aware of disapproving glances in our direction. I didn’t want to be rude and ignore him but we were obviously an annoyance to others. What would you have done, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. You might have gripped his arm and said: ‘Did you hear? I think she/he just mentioned your name.’ That

Luke McShane

Lengthy Correspondence

‘In fact it is now conceded by all experts that by proper play on both sides the legitimate issue of a game ought to be a draw…’ Those words were written by Wilhelm Steinitz, who became the first world champion after beating Johannes Zukertort in 1886. But their 20-game match saw 75 per cent decisive games, a quantity of bloodshed that would be unimaginable in the 21st century. By comparison, Magnus Carlsen has played five world championship matches, in which less than 25 per cent of the classical (slow) games were decisive. It is not a matter of style, but rather of skill – the fact is that modern players make far fewer

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Rugby’s new golden age

This column may have been somewhat negative about the future of rugby recently – so how cheering to report a spate of magnificent matches, across both codes and both genders, that provided not only brilliant entertainment but also, as young people like to say these days, ‘learnings’. The best game of all was the women’s World Cup final at Eden Park, Auckland, when after 80 minutes of spine-tingling rugby union England lost by just three points. Forget any snooty talk you might have heard about women’s rugby. This match had everything: athleticism, a real sense of adventure and far fewer of those interminable caterpillar rucks and reset scrums which clog

Toby Young Toby Young

Gary Neville’s fairweather morality

Should England be participating in the Qatar World Cup? On the face of it, the case for a boycott is pretty compelling. Much of the infrastructure – including eight stadiums, an airport expansion, a new metro system and multiple hotels – has been built by migrant workers who are notoriously poorly treated by their Qatari employers. Women still have to obtain permission from their male guardians to marry, study abroad on state scholarships and receive certain reproductive health care. Muslim women who have sex outside marriage can be sentenced to flogging. Homosexuality is against the law and punishable by imprisonment. Freedom of expression and of the press leave a lot

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

There’s nothing magic about magic mushrooms

For about six straight hours after taking magic mushrooms – psilocybin – I had visions of a vast, skeletal shark coming at me out of the watery gloom, mouth open, teeth inches from my face. It wasn’t a hallucination – I only saw the shark when my eyes were shut – but even with my eyes stretched wide I felt dread, the same blank terror I had felt the year before when in the spirit of happy enquiry I’d taken acid. I deserved the shark, I suppose. What sort of a dolt has at the psychedelics again when LSD has already given them the abdabs? The trouble was, I’d bought

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 19 November 2022

The EBU’s Premier League (eight teams in Division 1 – seven 16-board matches each weekend) took place over three weekends, and after the second we were leading. Only one problem – I didn’t play the second weekend, which meant that to qualify I had to play five of the remaining seven matches which, naturally enough, gave my teammates a collective panic attack. Playing with my regular partner Artur Mali, we guzzled down 64 boards on Saturday and 16 on Sunday, won them all, and left the four professionals to finish the final two matches. I’ll skip lightly over match six but after match seven we had won… with a bit

Peter Jones

The Greeks’ curiosity extended far beyond the cerebral

These days technology rules the roost and robots take questions in the House of Lords. In the West at least, the Greeks (as ever) got there first. Like the Romans, they were fascinated by hydraulics, springs, pistons, gears, sprockets, pulley-chains – and experimented with them to produce a whole range of lifting, digging, and propelling devices, especially for military purposes. A breakthrough happened when some Ancient Greeks, observing that the earth and heavens revolved in predictable circles, mimicked them in hand-cranked, bronze mechanisms consisting of complex, linked cogwheels to replicate and predict that movement – the first analogue computers.  The single recovered example is the Antikythera machine (2nd century bc),

Aidan Hartley

The energy of the world is shifting south

Kenya Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth, promising to send shiploads of bananas to feed her subjects after ‘following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain’. Now that you rival Burkina Faso in the number of times you’ve changed your leaders recently, I’m going to move out of the sunshine, take a swig of cold beer and show some sympathy once more. For a long time, those of us the British Empire left behind when you pushed off a few decades ago sniggering into your pith helmets sometimes wondered if we’d made a mistake. ‘No

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Why do patients need to know they’re dying? 

Old people are being stranded in hospital, diagnosed with terrible diseases but unable to recover enough to go home. Dr Adrian Boyle, the new president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, has said that NHS hospitals ‘are like lobster traps… easy to get into but hard to get out of’. Might it not be better for some if they’d never gone, or at least never been told exactly what was wrong? In C.P. Snow’s 1951 novel The Masters, the Master of a Cambridge college is ill. People seeing his bedroom light on night and day wonder how long he has left, but the question never occurs to him because