Society

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

A nose of wet chihuahua: the rich vocabulary of wine

Some decades ago, there was a Tory MP called John Stokes: eventually, and deservedly, Sir John. He had no interest in holding ministerial office, which was just as well, because he would never have been on any whips’ list for preferment. John was a right-winger: a very right-winger. I once told him that he was the Right Pole: impossible to move any further. He took this as a compliment. He had many uses, not least of which was in teasing the snowflake tendency among Tory intellectual lefties (or at least, Tory lefties who regarded themselves as intellectuals). ‘John thinks’, I would say: this was before John Major’s eminence. My interlocutor

Dan Hitchens

The ebb and flow of life on a houseboat

In the spring of 2021 I took a man to a pub in Hackney and bought him a drink. Perhaps he should have been doing the buying, since I had just handed him a large sum in return for his narrowboat. But I was in an exultant mood. No London flat, I reasoned, could ever be as cosy as that low-ceilinged, teak-panelled interior with its coal-burning stove and narrow cabin bed. And outside it lay a pathway to adventure through the hidden districts of the capital, their parks, nature reserves, railway bridges, gasholders, locks, warehouses and waterside pubs. Such thoughts, amplified by a sub-genre of YouTube and Instagram accounts, tempt

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Barbie Kardashian and Ireland’s trans madness

Why are politicians so incapable of answering basic questions about biology? Yesterday it was Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s turn. A journalist asked him a yes or no question: ‘Do you believe that Barbie Kardashian is a woman?’ Barbie Kardashian, whose birth name was Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile, is a violent man who identifies as a woman. Last week he was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail – a women’s jail – for threatening to torture, rape and murder his own mother. He is, as the journalist who cornered Varadkar put it, ‘a violent biological male with a penis’. So what was Varadkar’s answer to this easiest of questions? This was a straightforward query

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Ofsted’s zealous overreach

Obviously it is not the fault of Ofsted that a headteacher, Ruth Perry, killed herself after her school, formerly rated ‘outstanding’, was downgraded to ‘inadequate’ by its inspectors. Suicide is, by definition, the decision of the person committing it. It is also true that second-rate schools and teaching unions detest inspections precisely because they keep them up to the mark. Nevertheless, Ofsted does need to think carefully about the impact of that word ‘inadequate’ when linked, as it was in the case of Ms Perry’s school, with another word, ‘safeguarding’. I saw what happened when the same charge was laid against Ampleforth College. ‘Safeguarding’ is a word that contains many

Harriet Sergeant

Ghost children: the pupils who never came back after lockdown

‘There was this guy in my year who never came back to school after lockdown,’ a 14-year-old girl at a comprehensive in the Midlands says. ‘Then one day my friends and I saw him by the shopping centre. He was, like, sitting on a piece of cardboard by the side of the road, looking a bit homeless. Other kids recognised him and bought him food and clothes. He’d always been popular. Then someone told a teacher and a couple of days later he came back to class. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry, and then one day he just upped and left for good.’ That

David Hare

Musicals are killing theatre

This has been an agonising time for those of us who love Julian Sands. On 13 January, he went for a one-day hike up Mount Baldy, 50 miles from Los Angeles, and hasn’t been seen since. No one who knows Julian can believe he’s dead. He’s the very epitome of the free-spirited actor. You never know where Julian will be turning up next. As soon as he lands in the UK, he always telephones to tell me about, say, playing a paedophile in the terrifying Czech film The Painted Bird or going to help Mike Figgis on his latest project in Hong Kong. If it’s Terence Davies, he’ll do it.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris on trial, SNP in crisis and Rupert Murdoch’s fifth marriage

Home Boris Johnson appeared before the Privileges Committee, publishing in advance a 52-page defence of his actions while Prime Minister regarding Covid regulations. He said that ‘the House of Commons was misled by my statements’ but they were ‘not intentionally or recklessly’ misled. Before the hearing he was reselected as the Conservative candidate for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. The review of the behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police by Baroness Casey of Blackstock found ‘institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia’ in the force. London no longer had a ‘functioning neighbourhood policing service’, she said. Commissioner Mark Rowley of the Met said he was not willing to use

The Spectator

The Boris distraction

Boris Johnson should not be forgiven for his handling of lockdown. He needlessly criminalised everyday behaviour when voluntary guidelines would have sufficed. Nannies were prosecuted for delivering birthday cards to children; friends were apprehended for meeting up in the park. Meanwhile, the officials who had created these rules flouted them regularly. Johnson wrongly denied that his staff were having parties. But compared with everything else that went wrong during that period, his false denial is trivial. It is surprising, then, that the House of Commons seems obsessed by it, rather than by the collapse of the democratic apparatus during lockdown, or the fact that the government was allowed to deploy

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Childcare: an inconvenient truth

Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in the claims that a rapist is a woman, or when they are truly stupid – such as it being OK for a black actor to play a white role but not for a white actor to play a black role. These are not simply the ‘clothes of a season’, we are told, but the inevitable

The Spectator

How healthy do we think we are?

Beyond a joke Is it time to rewrite an old joke? A letter published in Time in 1963 suggested that heaven would consist of French chefs, British police, German engineers, Italian lovers and Swiss bankers, while hell would consist of English chefs, German police, French engineers, Swiss lovers and Italian bankers. British police, however, have sunk in the world’s estimation – a poll last year revealed that only 44% of people trust them, which puts us behind France and Germany. The most trusted police are in Denmark and the Netherlands, where they are trusted by 58%. The good news is that British chefs are no longer staffing hell’s kitchens. According

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How to lose friends and ghost people

In Elizabeth Day’s new book about the fragility of friendships, annoyingly but memorably entitled Friendaholic, there’s a gripping chapter on ‘ghosting’, the process of turning a friend into an ex-friend without explaining why. It culminates in the act of cutting them dead in public. I’ve always found it a haunting experience when someone does it to me, and I hope my ex-friends feel the same way when I do it to them. It can be a difficult trick to pull off, especially at a big party. I worry that the person hasn’t noticed that he or she is dead to me, and so after my initial snub I move awkwardlyaround

Mark Mason

The secrets of Highgate Cemetery

Things are hotting up at Highgate Cemetery. Or they’ll need to if the grander tombs are to survive. During one cold spell last year, the huge mausoleum to Victorian banker Julius Beer froze on the inside as well as the outside, breaking some of the glass tiles. Lead lettering is another weak point – water gets into cracks, expands as it turns to ice, and forces letters off. So electric heating is being considered. The charity that looks after the cemetery admits this seems bizarre, ‘but it could save us a lot of money’. The cemetery dates from 1839, one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’, which were opened to cope with

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: six moreish Riojas from Honest Grapes

Mrs Ray can’t stop humming. She loves this time of year. It might be sheeting down and there might be a massive leak in our roof which none of five different builders has managed to fix, but all she notices are the daffs in full bloom, the fluffy pink cherry blossom and her treasured magnolia bursting into life. I suspect that Mrs R’s high spirits might have been somewhat enhanced by the dozen or so bottles of Rioja from Honest Grapes that we’ve just tasted, especially as we didn’t trouble the spittoon quite as much as we should have. But, heck, the wines were just so moreish, perfect with the

Dot Wordsworth

Can you read Charles Dickens’s handwriting?

‘Can you read Dickens’s handwriting?’ asked a blogger. Underneath was a picture of his manuscript for chapter 23 of Oliver Twist. It looked easy enough to read: ‘If the village had been beautiful at first it was now in the full slow and luxuriance of its richness.’  No, slow couldn’t be right. Must be flow. But no. The published text tells me it is ‘full glow and luxuriance’. I should have seen it the first time, for even in one paragraph of Dickens’s writing, it is obvious that he made his gs like a descending s or a barless f. When a g was joined to the preceding letter, he

The Spectator

2594: Dotty + Nosey – solution

The second half of Résumé (ODQ, 8th edition), by Dorothy (‘Dotty’) Parker (‘Nosey’), reads: ‘Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.’ First prize Peter Berridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire Runners-up Liz Knights, Walton Highway, Cambs; Peter King, Oxford

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop people telling me about their holidays?

Q. American clients emailed saying they were coming to Europe this spring and inviting us and another couple on a fantastic-sounding boat trip in the eastern Mediterranean which we rather shamelessly accepted. Last week I got a further email saying, as the holiday was approaching, it was time to sort out the financial side of things, ending up with some terrifying figures that we would owe them. Looking back at the email chain, I found an attachment to the original invitation, which we hadn’t opened, showing a breakdown of the costs as shared between the three couples. There is no way we can afford it but, for professional reasons, cannot

Fieldfare

2597: A couple

Five unclued lights are connected with one partner, four with the other. Another links both. Across 1    Nervous about yarn being threadbare (6)11    She intervenes, announcing press deceptions (9)12    Currency heretic returns (5)14    Saviour’s foul-up: I take fright, losing head (9)16    Switch middle of tracks for competitions (6)21    ‘Estimates’ (6)22    Joins college team with backing (6)24    New serum transformed little Oz birds (3,5)26    Track aircraft losing pressure (4)27    Detailed plan for fish (3)28    NZ native a little like Australian (3)29    Some Nigerians find one chief a bit off (4)32    Not free to resort to special water additive (8)34    Wit has energy to spar (6)35    Killing some way out to sea

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Shall I compare thee to a Stilton? 

In Competition No. 3291, you were invited to provide a profile of a well-known person in which their qualities are compared to items of food or drink. A commendation to Chris O’Carroll for his gastronomical portrait of Jeremy Clarkson – ‘…the scorching sarcasm he deploys in lieu of wit manages to combine the sadistic fire of Ghost Peppers, Carolina Reapers and the like with the sorry shapelessness of a bland swede mash or a gummy tangle of damp pasta…’ – and £25 to the winners. Mr Lee Anderson is a giant cock-on-a-stick, Goose Fair’s abiding sweet treat, a sticky Nottinghamshire delicacy with a bit of bite – not something to

Toby Young Toby Young

Who owns your child’s image?

On Monday, a bill was passed by the National Assembly in France that will give courts the power to prevent parents posting pictures or videos of their kids online. The courts will decide, based on the child’s age and maturity, if the consent of both parents is needed, or whether the child’s approval is sufficient. In certain circumstances, if posting the image ‘seriously affects the child’s dignity or moral integrity’, not even the consent of both parents will be enough. The proposer of the bill, Bruno Studer, says the new law is intended to show young people that their parents don’t have an ‘absolute right’ over their image. I feel