Society

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Everything in Britain is broken

It is rare to find an example of public art which one can applaud, unequivocally, but I think I have found one in London. The educational group Black Blossoms is running a series of lectures as part of the Art on the Underground scheme making the case that – as I had long suspected – photography is racist. This is true of colour photography (can we not find a different name for that!) just as it is for monochrome photography, in which black is the domain of shadows, the dark and what we might call ‘otherness’. The history of photography is rooted in white supremacy and subjugation, according to Black

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Harry shouldn’t be invited to the coronation

The Duke of Sussex says that he and his wife can never return to live in the United Kingdom. They will never again perform royal duties. By the same token, surely, they should not be invited to the coronation in May. There has to be a price for publicly attacking the King, the Queen Consort and the heir to the throne, attacks in which he gave accounts of private occasions when he must know that the people he condemns can never give their version of the events. If the Sussexes were invited, that would imply that their behaviour was condoned, which would in turn imply that the manner and content

The Spectator

Why Britain’s space industry should be celebrated

The attempted launch of a rocket via a Boeing 747 from Spaceport Cornwall – the first such attempt in Europe – was not a giant leap so much as a giant plunge. While the plane took off and landed successfully, the rocket released from beneath its wing at 35,000 feet crashed and burned, taking with it the nine satellites it was supposed to launch into orbit. There is a lesson for the government in what happened at Spaceport Cornwall this week It is easy to imagine Vladimir Putin chortling at the news that Britain has failed to do something the USSR managed 66 years ago. Satellite launches have become routine,

Patrick Jephson

Does the royal family really have the moral high ground?

In Los Angeles this week, much of the talk was about the weather. Sunny California was copping a bomb cyclone of rain and snow, with the Sussexes’ home in Montecito in the path of the wild weather, though any witty meteorological metaphors fall flat in the face of such very real damage and suffering. One welcome side-effect of the storm was a westerly wind that blew my flight back to Washington ahead of schedule, so I was up bright and early to enjoy the appetising variety-pack that is American breakfast TV. Somewhere between news of a nurses’ strike and a six-year-old who shot his teacher, a public figure appeared, talking

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Harry’s confessions, house prices fall and Cornish space launch fails

Home Government ministers held short meetings with trade union representatives as strikes continued by ambulance drivers, teachers, bus drivers and driving test examiners. A bill was introduced to require some workers to provide a minimum level of service during strikes in the NHS, education, fire and rescue, border security, nuclear decommissioning and public transport. Evri, the courier formerly known as Hermes, said ‘Our service has not been as good as we would have liked’ as parcels were reported delayed or undelivered. James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, and Maros Sefcovic, a vice-president of the European Commission, held ‘cordial and constructive’ talks on Northern Ireland trade. Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen was suspended

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Cardinal Pell’s righteous fury at the Vatican’s theological direction

Cardinal Pell, a former head of Vatican finances, does not criticise Pope Francis directly in the piece he’s written for The Spectator. But it was the latter who instituted this ‘synodal way’ which, according to Pell, ‘has neglected, indeed downgraded the Transcendent, covered up the centrality of Christ with appeals to the Holy Spirit and encouraged resentment, especially among participants’. Pell states quite plainly that the whole process – which began with a ‘consultation’ of the laity in which only a minuscule proportion of the world’s Catholics took part – is in the process of being rigged. The synod’s participants will not be allowed to vote and the organising committee’s

The Spectator

2585: Happy anniversary – solution

Puzzle 2585 appeared on 10 December 2022, an anniversary of HUMAN RIGHTS DAY (at 1 Across) whose letters can be used to make the ten symmetrically placed unclued entries. The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10-12-48. First prize Kathleen Durber, Stoke-on-Trent Runners-up Dr Aidan Dunn, Newton Abbot, Devon; Ian Laming, Chippenham, Wilts

Pabulum

2587: Silver

Five of a kind (including two of two words) can be derived from the letters of 26/27, 40/41, 46/47, 3/34 and 10/39 (all real words). 32/12D suggests mispronounced praise of the theme. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.         Across    1    Soldiers drill in circle (5)    5    Knave less than chaste (3)     8    Rude Rastaman ignoring Mr T’s yoga pose (5)   12    Examiner Jeremiah shortened question (7)          13    Last old engineers preserving Troy (7) 14    Snakes go grey around central Assam (5)            16    Some clod I’m with? (6) 18    Fine Caledonian island they say (5) 19    Scot in a reel? (3) 22    Miserable Denis missing Italy yells for ever

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: cheerful poems for 2023 after Tennyson

In Competition No. 3281, you were invited to provide 16 lines of cheerful welcome to 2023 in the metre of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’. ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new,’ wrote the poet in ‘Ring out, wild bells’, part of ‘In Memoriam’. Hats off to all: it was a terrific entry – cheery but with the occasional gratifying sting in the tail. The winners take £25. Ring out wild bells for ’23,    Forget the country’s woeful state:   With luck, inflation will deflate,In time we’ll all be Covid-free. Ring out the old, ring in the new    As PMs come and PMs go,    Though all is blue, the wind may blow

Luke McShane

No. 733

White to play. Tartakower–Winter, Hastings, 1935. White’s next move required careful calculation, but William Winter resigned once he had seen it. What did Tartakower play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 16 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 Qh5! gxh5 2 Bxh7 mate Last week’s winner Ikenna Osuigwe, Carlisle, Cumbria

Cardinal George Pell

The Catholic Church must free itself from this ‘toxic nightmare’

Shortly before he died on Tuesday, Cardinal George Pell wrote the following article for The Spectator in which he denounced the Vatican’s plans for its forthcoming ‘Synod on Synodality’ as a ‘toxic nightmare’. The booklet produced by the Synod, to be held in two sessions this year and next year, is ‘one of the most incoherent documents ever sent out from Rome’, says Pell. Not only is it ‘couched in neo-Marxist jargon’, but it is ‘hostile to the apostolic tradition’ and ignores such fundamental Christian tenets as belief in divine judgment, heaven and hell. The Australian-born cardinal, who endured the terrible ordeal of imprisonment in his home country on fake charges of sex abuse

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I avoid being dragged on to the dance floor?

Q. One of the most widely adored people I know is a single man in his fifties. He is brilliant and charming but neurotic about money – all our mutual friends joke about his ‘dusty wallet’. I have just heard from one of these, who had him to stay for five days after Christmas. He had invited himself but, since he arrived with some indeterminate chesty illness, their youngest son moved out of his own bedroom so this guest could have an en suite and a television in his room. The family lovingly left trays outside his door etc till he was better. No present of any kind was forthcoming. The

Luke McShane

Staying the course

After a pause during the pandemic, the Hastings Chess Congress returned for its 96th edition in the days after Christmas, with renewed support from software company Caplin. A newly published book, The Chess Battles of Hastings by Jürgen Brustkern and Norbert Wallet (New in Chess, 2022), offers an enjoyable chronicle of the event’s rich history. Among the vignettes of congress luminaries, one anecdote caught my eye. One year in the 1980s, heavy snowfall caused the heating in the playing hall to fail, to which most players responded with an early draw offer. But grandmaster Murray Chandler persevered for five hours, he and his opponent ‘like two Eskimos, in woollen hats and

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The case for maths to 18

Recently Chinese 11-year-olds faced the following question in a maths exam. ‘If a ship has 26 sheep and ten goats on board, how old is the ship’s captain?’ Chinese social media lit up with parents furious at their little emperors being asked a question they could not answer. The BBC did find one Weibo user who had devised a plausible solution. ‘The total weight of 26 sheep and ten goats is 7,700kg. In China, if you’re controlling a ship with over 5,000kg of cargo you need to have possessed a boat licence for five years. The minimum age for getting the licence is 23, ergo the captain is at least

Dot Wordsworth

Where did Oil of Olay get its name?

‘Is it sponsored by the oil people?’ my husband asked as we drove into London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, past a sign: ‘ULEZ.’ Naturally his words reflected mental confusion, but I had some sympathy for his presumption that the acronym was pronounced to rhyme with the French verb culer, ‘make sternway’. By oil he was not referring to anything to do with engines but to what we both remember as Oil of Ulay. In different countries it was called Oil of Olay, Oil of Olaz or Oil of Olan. Suddenly, at the millennium it became Olay, just before Jif became Cif. Cif cleans the kitchen floor. Olay is for the

Bruce Anderson

My fall into sobriety

I am occasionally teased. In a column devoted to drink, which in practice usually means wine and often the products of Bordeaux to give one plenty of scope, I am accused of divergence towards the byways and wildernesses of vinous intellectual life. But as we approached glorious festivals, surely events themselves would impose their own disciplines and their own agenda. So what could possibly go wrong? What a foolish question to ask.  As with all human affairs, the answer is a simple one: anything you can think of. There is a great lady approaching her 90th birthday. A few weeks ago, she reported chatting with her friends and also a

Toby Young Toby Young

The trans rights conflict doesn’t add up

Last week, the Office for National Statistics published the data on gender identity in England and Wales, as revealed in the latest UK census. For the first time ever, the census included the following question: ‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?’ This was asked of those aged 16 and over and 45.7 million people, about 94 per cent of the total, answered. In total, 45.4 million (93.5 per cent) answered yes and 262,000 (0.5 per cent) answered no. The lobby group Stonewall welcomed the news. ‘It’s incredible to see the true size of the LGBTQ+ community,’ it tweeted. But it must have

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The genius of Adam Curtis’s TraumaZone

Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything about a yew bush that isn’t a swan, the topiarist creates a representation of that bird in living foliage. The topiarist’s swan is wondrous, but spare a thought for the clippings. Formless, meaningless to the human eye, they have meaning of their own. History is topiary. From a superabundance of data, the historian and his reader make themselves a story. The parts the narrative is constructed from stay: the rest, like foliage falling victim to the topiarist’s shears, is discarded. If one Wednesday morning W.E. Gladstone notices that a senior

Peter Jones

What the ancients would have made of Harry and Meghan

The antics of Harry and Meghan would not have gone down well in the ancient world, where the family and its future flourishing were an absolute priority. Harry’s proposal to marry Meghan would have been a matter of some negotiation – Roman orators argued that the paterfamilias (‘head of the family’, with absolute authority over it) should always be consulted on such matters, but ultimately it was wise to allow the son to have his way – but Meghan’s attitude would not have gone down well. The point is that the family was welcoming into its bosom a female outsider – a doubly dangerous moment – who had to learn