Society

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Sunak struggles on ambulance wait times

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions saw Keir Starmer launch his strongest attack on Rishi Sunak so far. The topic was the same – the NHS – but the technique new. He opened by asking the Prime Minister to tell the Commons how long someone who called for an ambulance now would have to wait before it turned up. This was slightly blunted by him saying ‘it’s three minutes past 12’, and a Tory heckler shouting ‘well done!’ to chuckles around the chamber. But then the Labour leader went on: ‘If somebody phones 999 now because they have chest pains and fear it might be a heart attack, when would the Prime

Mr Magoo

2588: Necessary evils

All the unclued lights can be followed by the same word. Elsewhere, ignore three accents. Across 12    Positive Belgian forward cutting in has chances (10)13    Nabs informer admitting pressure (6)18    Memorial to fish-keeper ignores a question about Frank? (9)19    Flap about a kid whose name maybe on TV? (9)20    This monster turns 22, nearly (4)21    Blade that’s regularly perplexed (4)27    In home, navy lamps may be so called (6)30    Boring experience providing inspiration for smoker (4)32    Ready reckoning when many are watching (5,4)34    Ordinary one I help to get drunk? (9)39    Meet the surge (6)40    Tragically he has the last word in favour of metal clothing (10)41    Cycling path demonstrates

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: short stories narrated from an unusual perspective

In Competition No. 3282, you were invited to submit a short story narrated from an un-usual perspective. The seed for this challenge was Kim Stanley-Robinson’s cli-fi novel Ministry For the Future, described by the New Yorker as ‘both harrowing and heartening’. One of its chapters is narrated by a carbon atom, another by the market; a literary device informed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (the idea that non-human entities have agency). Honourable mentions go to Bob Pringle, Joe Bogle, Martin Leigh, C-A Herstedt and Frank Upton. The winners, printed below, are awarded £25 each. When first I began to clear, Haggie realised he was – somehow – still alive. Very

Luke McShane

No. 735

White to play. Emory Tate-Alexander Shabalov, Curaçao 2006. With his next move, Tate brought his attack to a crisp conclusion. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 23 January. 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 Bxb7! If 1…Rxb7 2 Rxb7+ Kxb7 3 Qg2+ Kb8 4 Rb5+ Kc7 5 Qb7+ Kd6 6 Rd5# Or 1…Qxg3+ 2 Bg2+ Rb7 3 Rxb7+ Ka8 4 fxg3 Nxc5 5 Rb5+ wins. Last week’s winner Ilya Iyengar, London SW15

Luke McShane

Emory Tate

Internet bogeyman Andrew Tate, recently detained in Romania on trafficking and rape charges, is a chess fan. Disciples who visit his ‘The Real World’ website in search of the influencer’s insight will encounter a logo featuring a cobra entwined with a chess knight. ‘King Cobra’, as he was known during his days as a professional kickboxer, is a competent chess player, as he showed during a recent interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Their verbal sparring concluded with a game of chess, in which Morgan left his queen hanging and Tate didn’t hesitate to capitalise. Afterwards, Tate praised chess as a game which fosters absolute self-reliance, a lesson he learned from his

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Is it time to replace Scotland’s sporting anthem?

‘Flower of Scotland’ is the unofficial national anthem north of the border but soon enough we may never hear its like again. Jim Telfer, one of the country’s most celebrated rugby coaches, has called for the song to be dropped at sporting events in favour of an alternative that ‘shows us standing for something rather than against something as a country’. His plea has been echoed by former Scotland international Jim Aitken, who wrote to the Times dismissing the song as an ‘anti-English dirge’.  Telfer’s complaint prompted Lord McConnell, a former Labour first minister, to urge a more ‘positive’ musical number, while Scottish Tory MSP Murdo Fraser deemed the current

Dot Wordsworth

John Donne and the emergence of ‘emerging’

In 1625 John Donne said: ‘As Manna tasted to every man like that he liked best, so doe the Psalmes administer instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion.’ I’m not sure where Donne got this idea about manna, but I wonder whether C.S. Lewis had it in mind when he wrote in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe about Turkish delight that was enchanted, so ‘anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves’. Anyway, when Donne spoke of an emergency he did not mean something

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I avoid getting short-changed when my coupled-up friends split the bill?

Q. A very good friend, who has been incredibly generous in the past, is feeling the financial squeeze, particularly with the inflation we are all suffering. I would like somehow to contribute regularly to his monthly expenses but can’t think of a way to do this without offending him or getting a refusal from him. His passion is hunting and I was wondering if I could set up an association for impoverished sportsmen. Do you have any ideas, Mary?  – Name and address withheld A. It would be simpler to inform your friend, in a businesslike manner, that your will is in preparation and it includes legacies for a handful

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: a bin-end bonanza from Mr Wheeler

Mrs Ray can be so sneaky. I thought that Dry January was all about spousal solidarity and mutual encouragement; she thought it was all about catching me out. It kicked off when she busted me sucking dry the liqueur chocolates I’d squirrelled away at Christmas and had come to rely upon. I said they didn’t count; she said I was an idiot. ‘Do grow up!’ she wailed. As a result, Dry January is now deemed to have started on 6 January. Still, sobriety has its rewards, and I can plan this year’s drinking with a clear head. I’ve rotated the stock in the cobwebbed cupboard under the stairs that serves

Peter Jones

What the Romans would have made of ChatGPT

Google provides information easily, which the ancients did as best they could. But what would they have made of ChatGPT? Ancient education drew on information about the past to help deal with the problems of the present. Take the Romans. Future statesmen were taught to scour sources – both myth and history – for learning military strategy as well as how to win political and legal arguments. The cultural elite (poets) learnt the basics of poetry – i.e. verse composition – at school and then ransacked the masterpieces of ancient Greek literature to hone their skills. But that was a long and arduous process, and Google-like reference works eased the

Melinda Hughes

The dumbing-down of BBC Radio 3

In March, Alan Davey will step down as the controller of BBC Radio 3. His role over the past eight years has been huge. Not only has he overseen programming and strategy for Radio 3 and BBC orchestras, but he has also championed access to contemporary music and focused on forgotten past composers, many of whom are female. All very impressive. But there’s no escaping the fact that under his watch there has been a general dumbing-down of programming. Each year, the BBC Proms finds a new way to diversify its output, from proms based around video games, to rap, to an ‘Ibiza-style’ dance party. Even more egregiously, two years

Scarlett Maguire

The art of darts

I don’t watch television, which – given I’m a TV producer – is a little unusual. I suppose, just as professional chefs so often confess to living off cheese toasties, there is little joy to be had in bringing the office home. I make only one exception: the darts, which I am confident in saying is television in its purest and highest form. What makes it so compelling is that it is, fundamentally, a character-driven sport. The players choose their own walk-on songs, outfits and nicknames. And while not every player will go the full Peter ‘Snakebite’ Wright (who coordinates wacky outfits with his multi-coloured mohawk for every game), many

The Spectator

How many people are injured by dogs?

Duke out Will the Duke and Duchess of Sussex be invited to Charles III’s coronation? The royal family faced a similarly tricky decision over the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII, at Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Documents released by the National Archives in 2007 reveal that the matter was handled by the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, who contacted the Duke in November 1952 and ‘advised’ him not to attend, adding that the Prime Minister would tell the press that ‘it would not be consistent with usage for coronation to be attended by any former ruler’. That such advice was necessary suggests that the Duke might have been

Owen Matthews

Boris Bondarev: Why more Russians aren’t defecting

Boris Bondarev’s Twitter profile sums up his past, present and future in three short phrases: ‘Russian diplomat in exile. Stop the war. The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ – a quote from Wilfred Owen’s 1918 denunciation of patriotic hypocrisy. Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 42-year-old Bondarev quit his job as an arms control expert at Russia’s diplomatic mission to Geneva in protest. None of his colleagues in Geneva, or anywhere else, followed suit (at least not publicly). Does that make Bondarev the only Russian diplomat with a conscience? ‘It’s not about conscience,’ Bondarev tells me by Zoom from an undisclosed Swiss location where he now

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The strikes have lost their power

The dead went unburied and the rubbish piled high in Leicester Square. Then a suntanned Jim Callaghan arrived back at Heathrow from a summit in Guadeloupe to tell reporters, in words fairly paraphrased in the Sun headline: ‘Crisis. What crisis?’ The Prime Minister said that he didn’t think the rest of the world, looking at Britain, would see a country going down the tube. The folklore of the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 is ingrained in the nation’s collective memory. It was the final act of a miserable decade of three-day working weeks and power cuts. Some are suggesting that we are facing a second Winter of Discontent. Certainly, look

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Your child isn’t trans, she’s just a tomboy

When the mist lifts and we can see clearly the carnage caused by the trans madness, and we blink and wonder what in God’s name we did to our kids, I hope we recognise the true heroes of the saga. By this I don’t mean the Jordan Peterson types or even J.K. Rowling, so much as the parents who somehow found the courage to stand up to their own children. Any child who makes the fashionable decision to identify as another gender is instantly surrounded by a supportive gang of fellow trans travellers – a ‘glitter family’, they call themselves – who’ll insist that it’s ‘literally dangerous’ for them to

Daniel Johnson

The faith and the fury: my father Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson – who was a columnist for The Spectator from 1981 to 2009, and who died last week – did not merely write history: he helped to make it. His first book, The Suez War, published in 1957 with an introduction by Nye Bevan, documented the evidence that eventually led to the resignation of the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden. In Buckingham Palace six decades later, Prince William startled him by asking about Suez. Afterwards my father asked: ‘Who was that well-informed young man?’ A demonstration against the government over Suez was also the occasion for him to get back together with the brilliant and beautiful Marigold Hunt, whom

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The joy of a modern house

We have been in our new home for four months and although getting here was hell, the living is almost heaven. I am rather surprised to be in a modern house after 40 years of living in ones built centuries ago. How would I feel without any nooks and crannies, twisting staircases, elm floors and beams, not to mention the Aga? Well, how do I now feel without the draughts, rattling windows, uneven floorboards and energy bills the size of the national debt that come with every old house, plus the responsibility of too much land? We have only moved five north Norfolk miles but into another world, nearer the

Douglas Murray

If not Biden, who?

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States. And this year it was most memorable for two events. The first was the unveiling in Boston of a new sculptural tribute to the civil rights hero. Unfortunately, depending on the position from which you view this inept work of public art, it resembles either a man holding his head in despair or some people holding aloft a giant turd. The second incident was Joe Biden doing what he does best. The President was careful not to politicise the day – apart from attacking the Republicans. But during his remarks he also noted that it was the birthday of