Society

Wednesday

Charlie Walsham

Will the BBC own up to its Covid impartiality failings?

As Gary Lineker resumes his duties as the BBC’s highest-paid employee, it is worth appreciating that one of the Corporation’s greatest strengths is that its own journalists are willing and able to criticise the organisation in their coverage without professional repercussions. The broadcaster’s many critics should recognise this self-flagellation for what it is: a vital demonstration of transparency. Unfortunately, having worked at the heart of BBC News throughout the pandemic, I have learned that this readiness to admit errors publicly only extends so far. Impartiality should be the starting point of everything BBC News does. Instead, editors are working backwards when it comes to Covid. They are skewing contemporaneous coverage

Luke McShane

No. 743

Black to play. Ponomariov-Dragnev, Serbia 2023. Which move allowed Black to seize his chance on the queenside? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 20 March. 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 Rf8+ Kxf8 (or 1…Kg7 2 Rf7+) 2 Bh6+ Ke7 3 Bg5+ with a perpetual check. Last week’s winner Gladys Chadwick, Walton, Warrington, Cheshire

The Spectator

How often do banks fail?

Eyes on the ball Viewing figures for Match of the Day rose by 500,000 when Gary Lineker was suspended from the show for tweeting about the government’s asylum bill and his fellow pundits walked out on strike in support.  – First broadcast on the then new BBC2 on 22 August 1964, the show was initially controversial not because of the views of its presenter Kenneth Wolstenholme but because football clubs feared it would discourage fans from attending games.  – They need not have worried: the first episode, featuring highlights of Liverpool vs Arsenal, attracted just 20,000 viewers.  – Viewing figures rose sharply, however, after England won the World Cup in

Luke McShane

Varsity match

The great tradition of the Varsity match rolls on, ringing in the 141st edition earlier this month at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, London. Oxford were slight favourites, but the match finished on a knife edge. The game on board 2 was particularly hard-fought, with both sides having winning chances at different stages. This diagram shows the position after the advance 56 f4-f5, with Jan Petr (Cambridge) playing White. Striving to win the game, he has advanced his pawn to f5 instead of capturing the pawn on d3 (which led to a straightforward draw). Jan Petr (Cambridge)-Emil Powierski (Oxford) Varsity Chess Match, March 2023(See left diagram) White’s move

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Sexual politics is damaging young men

Masculinity has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember. The usual explanation is that post-industrial society doesn’t much care for brawn. We’re all office dwellers now, mutely churning out spreadsheets for other spreadsheet producers. The theory makes sense as far as it goes. But something else has changed much more recently: a rejection of the very concept of masculinity. The polling company YouGov found that just 8 per cent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. Males are routinely presented as inherently dangerous, aggressive and animalistic, incapable of controlling their own instincts. You

Douglas Murray

The overuse and abuse of ‘fascism’

I would be very happy if I never had to hear the name Gary Lineker again. He was a vague presence in my childhood thanks to his playing the game of football and his advertising of a brand of delicious, obesity-inducing crisps. But after more than a week in which his name has dominated every news bulletin, I have serious Lineker-fatigue. I feel as one might had we just had a fortnight of discussion and talk of the collapse of major institutions due to a political view expressed by Russ Abbot. To speak plainly, I do not care to hear the views of a retired footballer or crisp-seller on the

Ivo Dawnay

Tbilisi is a tinderbox

Never judge a country by its airport road. Georgia’s, from international arrivals to the heart of Tbilisi, is impeccable. The George W. Bush highway (yes, really) is smooth asphalt, with chic electric cars humming down avenues, punctuated by spanking new Lukoil petrol stations with fuel at dirt-cheap prices. It is impeccably clean. And when you reach the parliament building downtown, they have almost finished clearing up the detritus from three consecutive nights of protests, rubber bullets, tear gas and riot police. Tbilisi’s highway was built during the country’s most recent economic sugar rush, when a good-looking young president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was in his brief but glamorous heyday. As a Kennedy-esque

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why shouldn’t BBC staff express opinions?

There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went down well with the millions of black, disabled grime rap artists in south London who are listeners to Radio 4. The network was, in the same week, continuing its serialisation of Georges – ‘Testament’s bold new adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ tale of racial intolerance’. They are absolutely obsessed with racism at R4, in a kind

The Spectator

Letters: The problem with celebrity TV presenters

Channel anger Sir: I fear that in your leading article (‘Our duty to refugees’, 11 March) you find yourself in the same bind as the Labour party and at odds with majority opinion in the country. While people in the UK are vexed by the Channel crossers, this is only because it is the most obvious example of the failure of the political class to control immigration as a whole. The population of the UK is increasing fast: this is almost wholly as a result of immigration. Despite government propaganda about the necessity of migration to ensure an adequate supply of labour to support an ageing population, it remains very unpopular.

Peter Jones

The classical case for Stanley Johnson’s knighthood

Boris Johnson wants to give his father a knighthood. How very classical of him! Xenophon said that it was ‘the mark of a man to excel his friends in benefaction and his enemies in harm’ and no one was more of a friend than a man’s father. This mantra to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies was endlessly and publicly repeated (so litigation between family members and injustice against a relation caused great embarrassment). But how did one make friends beyond parents and kinsmen? Mutual benefit was the answer, the argument being prudential. Pericles argued that Athenians stood out from the crowd in this respect: ‘We

Cosmo Landesman

Confessions of a class tourist

Pundits writing for a young audience are always telling readers to ‘stop pretending to be working-class!’ and stop ‘fetishising the working class’. They seem more angered by the imitation of class than the iniquities of class itself. Singer Lily Allen and the rap star Yungblud have both been denounced on Twitter for – to paraphrase E.P. Thompson – the faking of the English working class. Personally, I don’t understand the fuss. For most of my youth I pretended to be working -class – and so did most of my middle–class mates (sorry, friends). And we were not alone. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the voices of youth all sounded working–class,

Mary Dejevsky

What striking doctors don’t like to admit

The more junior doctors have tried to justify their three-day withdrawal of labour over the past week, the more damage, or so it seems to me, they have done to their cause – whatever that cause may be. On the final day of their strike – in pursuit of a 35 per cent pay rise – reports are piling up of cancelled operations, postponed cancer treatments and more people pushed towards the private health sector.  Some of the striking doctors’ work is apparently being covered by consultants – to which I, and no doubt many others, would say: bring it on. For years, consultants have delegated far too much of

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 18 March 2023

Imagine you’re at an auction. As it begins, you turn to the other bidders and, with a few short words, scare them into remaining silent. Moments later, the hammer falls and you pick up a complete bargain. In real life, you’d need to use outright threats to stop people bidding. Not so in bridge – it happens all the time. It’s the power you wield when you’re ‘at favourable vulnerability’ – in other words, when your opponents are vulnerable and you’re not. Being at favourable means you can bid far more pre-emptively and aggressively than your opponents: you have less to fear from the double card. I’ve never forgotten the

Aidan Hartley

My conversations with Wilfred Thesiger

When Wilfred Thesiger arrived in the port of Al Mukalla after his foot crossing of the Empty Quarter desert with the Bedu in 1948, he wore only Arab clothes. My father lent him a pair of trousers and a razor so he could get cleaned up before going to dinner. A friend of mine this week just read Thesiger’s superb Arabian Sands and reminded me that the author claimed his razor and European clothes had been sent from Salala, with no mention of Dad’s kindness. Also this week in London, I met an old Yemeni friend whose family comes from the edge of the Empty Quarter and, while discussing the

Melissa Kite

The rise of the village poo-painters

After they banned horses from the village green and surrounding common land, I set about trying to find out why, for it seemed such a strange thing to do. Forbidding dark green signs saying ‘No Horse Riding By Order Of The Parish Council’ marked every track running through 30 acres of public land, while the bridleways in the nearby woods were almost permanently blocked with fallen trees. They knelt down and used tweezers to pick up the last fragments of horse manure One day, a girl did ride her horse across the green, leaving a dropping outside our house. We watched amazed as our neighbours, the vegans, came out and

Jeremy Clarke

Paper? Marriage? Ours? Ceremony?

‘They say they can’t do it tomorrow. The papers haven’t come.’ Catriona, just back from the village, was shouting up the stairs. ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Who can’t do what? What papers?’ ‘You know. Our marriage papers. For the ceremony.’ ‘Papers? Marriage? Ours? Ceremony?’ ‘Well, not exactly marriage. Of course not. It’s a civil partnership. For tax purposes.’ ‘With a ceremony?’ ‘A signing. Just our signatures, to be witnessed by the mayor and another. That’s all.’ ‘Ah. And who’ve we got?’ ‘I was thinking the foreign correspondent and Mel [his wife].’ ‘We’d better take a bottle.’ ‘Champagne.’ ‘To celebrate our marriage.’ ‘Our civil partnership.’ ‘For tax purposes.’ ‘Yes. For tax purposes.

Taki

How to break your leg in style

Gstaad Tom Sizemore, the American character actor who recently died near-penniless at 61, was one hell of a thespian. In films such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and Heat, he played tough soldiers and gangsters whose actions obscured a soft heart. Acting is not mugging à la Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. It’s conveying things subliminally, which is what Sizemore did. I never met him but he once rang me from LA with a question. It was back in the mid-1990s, the Cadogan Square days, and I had had a late one. The telephone rang at about 6 a.m. and an American voice came on. ‘Taki, this is

Mark Lehain

The true cost of the teachers’ strike

Here we go again. It’s term time but millions of kids across the country are being denied school as the National Education Union (NEU) has called its members out on strike once more. Forget the fact that children have already had three years of their education disrupted by Covid. Ignore the minor issue of school attendance being through the floor and that the average secondary school student on course to miss the equivalent of an entire month of lessons this year. Teachers can get their pay rises backdated; kids can never get back the time they’ve missed from school Following a national strike on 1 February and regional ones a

Tuesday

Winston Marshall

David Zweig: how and why the reality of Covid was censored

67 min listen

Winston speaks with Twitter files journalist David Zweig just as the Twitter files scandal goes to congress. They discuss the significance of the hearing, Big Tech/government censorship, what he uncovered when working on the story, the failure of journalists and government during Covid, myocarditis, mask-efficiency, and the link between free speech and bodily autonomy.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse a turning point for the markets?

What is it about March? October, the month of the 1929 Wall Street crash and the crash of 1987, is often cited as the most dangerous for investors. Yet in the past three crashes or bear markets it has been March which saw the worst. The FTSE bottomed out in March 2003, shortly before the Iraq invasion, then again in March 2009, just as the Bank of England began its quantitative-easing programme. Then it happened again in 2020 when markets sank due to Covid – they staged a miraculous recovery on the very day that the first lockdown began in Britain. Many investors will be asking whether SVB’s collapse has