Society

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Would the real Matt Hancock please sit down?

‘Politics,’ as the old quip has it, ‘is showbusiness for ugly people.’ That quote was minted in the good old days when there was, at least implicitly, some clear blue water between the two things: it intended to draw an arch point of comparison between two quite different spheres of activity. Politics was momentous, solemn, and consequential; showbusiness was vain, silly and inconsequential. The quip points to a sneaking sense that, secretly, those in the former realm were actuated by less high-minded concerns.   These days, there is less and less sense, either among the general public or the practitioners of either art, that any such distinction exists. Both are now simply vehicles to attain the infinitely fungible currency

Sunday

Julie Bindel

Rebel Wilson and the problem with surrogacy

When the Australian actor Rebel Wilson announced the birth of her daughter Royce Lillian, she added the small detail that she had been born by a ‘gorgeous’ surrogate. Wilson expressed her gratitude to the woman who had carried the child for nine months before giving birth to her: ‘Thank you for helping me start my own family, it’s an amazing gift. The BEST gift!!’ A child is a human being, and obviously not a ‘present’ – although Big Fertility would have us think differently. Wilson, who had tried IVF three times without success, said that her desire to have her own baby was ‘overwhelming‘. So overwhelming that she thought borrowing

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Why Remembrance is a privilege as much as a duty

It was exceptionally cold, that strange Armistice day. I was used to spending the two minutes silence squinting into the winter brightness at college memorials or in English country church yards. Mid November is rarely freezing cold in the UK: it is often cold and crisp, the temperature is just enough time to stand outside whilst sunlight dances on stone memorials. Prague, however, where I spent that strange Armistice day a decade ago, is very different. Eleventh November is the feast day of St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers and the Czechs have a saying which alludes to the typical Central European weather on Armistice day: ‘St

Friday

Anna Arutunyan

The best way to stop Russian trolls is to ignore them

Almost from the moment the polls closed in the 2016 US presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, accusations emerged of Russian interference in the election. Now it appears to have been confirmed from the horse’s mouth: Russian trolls recruited by the Putin-linked businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin have meddled in multiple US elections. Prigozhin, known for supplying catering contracts to the Kremlin, openly admitted as much.   ‘Gentlemen, we interfered, we are interfering and we will interfere,’ he boasted on the eve of Wednesday’s US midterm elections. He had been asked to confirm findings published by US social media analysis firm Graphica that showed Russian operatives had posted racist cartoons and

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

In praise of Just Stop Oil

As a child in the 1960s, all I wanted to do was get to London: to be rich and famous, yes, but also to go on demos. As I watched the attractive young adults having seven bells knocked out of them by the boys in blue for protesting outside the American embassy against the Vietnam War, I yearned to join the struggle. But as I was eight years old, this seemed highly unlikely at any time in the immediate future. Instead I sought out and found images of the American civil rights marches: men in suits, nuns and priests, dignified black and white students. Then the suffragettes: delicate Edwardian women

James Jeffrey

Poppy day is about more than remembrance

Every Remembrance Day, the anti-poppy naysayers pop up to criticise those who commemorate our war dead. As a former soldier, you might think you can guess my view on these people. But, in fact, I do have some sympathy with those who are uncomfortable about the way we mark 11 November. Some years ago, shortly after leaving the army, I happened to be on Whitehall as the remembrance ceremonies were in full swing. I tried to watch but couldn’t: memories of the death and destruction I encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan flashed back. The smart uniforms and neat drills of those gathered at the Cenotaph struck me as a disingenuous commemoration that

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Britain’s economy shrinks again as recession looms

September was always going to be a tough month for economic growth. The additional bank holiday added for the Queen’s funeral, combined with much displaced activity for the days around it, created a consensus amongst economists that we’d see economic contraction that month. And indeed, we have. New figures published by the Office for National Statistics this morning show the economy shrank by 0.6 per cent in September. This was mainly driven by a fall in services – roughly half of the economy’s contraction is attributed to business closures due to the events of that month. But it’s not September’s figures that are most worrying this morning. The problem facing

Thursday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

The NHS is at breaking point – and it’s about to get worse

Last month, the number of twelve-hour waits in A&E departments in England exceeded 40,000 for the first time ever – an increase of 11,000 in one month. Waiting lists for consultant-led treatment have grown by some 70,000 patients, having passed seven million in September. Ambulance response times, too, are back up over an hour on average. The latest NHS statistics come a week after ONS figures revealed that, on average, the number of excess deaths is currently higher than during the pandemic. This is at least in part due to treatment delays during the pandemic – delays which show no sign of improving anytime soon. Now the Royal College of Nursing has

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The ultimate American comfort food: how to make meatloaf

Meatloaf has some obstacles to overcome: it has an unprepossessing appearance, and an uninspiring, slightly off-putting name, which it shares with the famous singer. And it wasn’t a compliment when it was given to him: the singer’s father took one look at his newborn son and said he looked like ‘nine pounds of ground chuck’, before persuading the hospital staff to put the name ‘Meat’ on his crib (which is real commitment to a joke). I can’t speak for baby Meat Loaf, but when it comes to the dish, the name is at least an extremely accurate description. Meatloaf is made up of ground meat (often beef, sometimes pork, occasionally

Justin Marozzi

My 6,000-mile adventure of a lifetime

‘Oh, you’ll hate it, Julia. It’s men talking about cars all the time. Really, really boring. You drive all day, it gets incredibly hot, you’ve got no air-conditioning and then – if and when you make it to your hotel – the men start talking about cars again. It’s awful. Never again.’ This is not the kind of pep talk I’m hoping for on the eve of our 6,000-mile expedition to the Syrian border with my wife in Frieda, our 1956 Bristol 405. Our friend, the novelist Raffaella Barker, knows what she’s talking about. Her husband, who sells classic cars for a living, comes to my rescue. ‘Zip it!’ he

Wednesday

The Spectator

2578: Torture – solution

The word is ‘rack’. In the order of the headwords in Chambers, their meanings are indicated by: FRAMEWORK (41), VENGEANCE (4A), DECANT (15D), BONES (1A), GAIT (25), MIST (17), DRINK (42) and SKIN (24). RACK in CRACKED (13) was to be shaded, Title: a further meaning of rack1. First prize Paul Elliott, London W12 Runners-up Victoria Sturgess, Wimborne, Dorset; Neil Mendoza, Oxford

Lavatch

2581: In the balance

The unclued lights are three sets of three words of a kind, all linked by a theme word represented by one clued answer which must be highlighted.         Across    1    Where pupils are receiving gentle hugs (8)    8    Finished structure erected in triumph (4) 11    Goal to renovate new hotel figures in Levantine region (5,7) 12    Fulminating, bottling tree secretion (5) 16    Reversing truck, beginning to indicate in case (4) 18    Repeat welcoming son is flipping tender? (6) 22    Elegist with reportedly appropriate colour (5,4) 23    Mostly love to put on underwear that’s warmer (7) 24    Journalist penning book rejected break (6) 25    Have enticement to make material

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Toe-curling analogies

In Competition No. 3274, you were invited to supply toe-curling analogies. Bad writing has attracted some high-brow fans. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis revelled in the overwrought prose of the ‘uniquely dreadful’ Amanda Kittrick Ros, and used to take it in turns to read aloud from her work to see which of them could last longer without laughing. Some competitors accompanied their entries with apologetic notes, commiserating with me for having to judge this challenge, but it was a hoot. The winners earn a fiver per analogy. His hand slid up her thigh like a string of partly defrosted sausages that had been imbued with lascivious intent, inexpertly animated, but

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 November 2022

I was very sad to learn last week that Dinah Caplan has died. She was 90, and had been a hugely popular and respected player on the bridge circuit for as long as any of us can remember. But more than that, she was an inspiration to anyone who worries that they’ve left it too late to make their mark. Having joined her family’s clothing business at just 15, she juggled the demands of a job and motherhood for much of her life, and it wasn’t until 2011 that she decided to get more serious about bridge. She entered the England women’s trials (with Lizzie Godfrey), ended up winning, and

Melissa Kite

I have been locked out of my pension

With only five to ten more years to work out how to log in to my pension plan I need to get a move on. The Fidelity website is so impenetrable to someone like me that, aged 50, I fear I will have run out of time to get access to ‘planviewer’ by the time I am 65, never mind 55. They write to me all the time, asking me to verify this or that by scanning a QR code and entering a reference, along with my National Insurance number, but it never works. ‘Sorry, we are unable to find your details in our system. Please make sure you have

Jeremy Clarke

I dropped a morphine capsule in my Moscow Mule

A dear friend came to stay for two nights. Could I be persuaded, wondered he and Catriona, on the first morning, to venture out to a restaurant for lunch? Descending the stairs to welcome guests these days takes a bit of effort. Bare feet, boney ankles, flapping pyjama bottoms; the guests look up in fascinated horror as the anchorite wobbles down the creaking wooden steps attended by importunate flies with his revelry face on. They have even stopped insisting how well I look. I might last an hour in an armchair in the sitting room, refusing alcohol, before exercising an ague’s privilege, excusing myself, and returning to the horizontal upstairs.

Luke McShane

No. 728

Black to play. Fedoseev-Carlsen, Fischer RandomWorld Championship, 2022. 1…Qd3, 1…Qc2 and1…Qh2 all create deadly threats, but only one ofthese wins. Carlsen chose wrongly. Which move should he have chosen? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 November. 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 Rg6+! fxg6 2 Qh8+! Kxh8 3 Rxf8# Or 1…hxg6 2 Qg7# Last week’s winner G. Pierbattisti, Grantham

Taki

The roots of America’s unhappiness

New York An American columnist whose writing I used to enjoy until his bosses signalled to him that activism is more important than journalism recently reported that Americans are unhappier now than they have ever been. Especially in places that voted for The Donald. Apparently, a pollster found that Trump got the most votes in places where people felt the unhappiest. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t people vote against the status quo when misery levels are rising? Mind you, it could also be that those who ask the questions have a vested interest in the answers they get. Invent a misery level where voters are for Trump, then

Luke McShane

Syntactical error

The chess lexicon has adopted a useful word from German, fingerfehler, fehler meaning mistake or error. Sometimes, the hand does not obey the brain. Imagine that you are busy contemplating A, followed by B and then C, and engrossed by the consequences of C. Meanwhile, the hand is eager to get involved, and picks up the piece to make move C. Standard competition rules are that once you’ve touched a piece, you must move it, so even if you catch yourself before executing the move, the damage from picking up a different piece may be terminal. Mercifully, I don’t recall ever doing this, but I’ve come close enough to know that the phenomenon

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Advertising’s false picture

An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an ‘imbalanced power dynamic’. The poster showed a white prison guard (or ‘screw’ as I believe they are known) and a black prisoner. The ASA concluded that the advert was ‘likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race, by reinforcing negative stereotypes about black men’. It would have been OK if the prisoner had been white. I am not sure what the views of the ASA would have been if both men had been black. The fact that both of the people in the ad were men also negatively