Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Christmas rail strikes, Lady Hussey’s resignation and Indonesia’s sex ban

Home The RMT union decided to add a couple of rail strikes just before and after Christmas to those planned. Nurses, ambulance workers, driving test examiners, baggage handlers at Heathrow and bus drivers joined in. Postmen hoped to fit in another six strikes before the end of the month; Currys stopped using Royal Mail parcel delivery. ‘This is a time to come together and to send a very clear message to Mr Putin that we’re not going to be divided in this way,’ said Nadhim Zahawi, chairman of the Conservative party. ‘Our message to the unions is to say this is not a time to strike.’ Conor Burns had the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Windsors are warring over their womenfolk

Wouldn’t it be amusing to see an actual fly-on-the-wall job about Netflix’s new Harry & Meghan documentary? Imagine the scenes behind-the-scenes. The Duchess rehearses her crying face in consultation with her make-up specialist. The Duke glares at himself in a mirror. ‘I had to protect my family,’ he repeats over and over as he fingers his apricot beard. The lighting team try to coax along the impossibly capricious royals only to suffer their own nervous breakdowns after Meghan accuses them of disregarding her mental health. Or maybe that’s not the entertainment people want. Television these days is all about ‘structured reality’ – or rubbish glossed up as revelation. It’s up

The Spectator

2582: Chief Whip – solution

The numbered unclued lights reveal that ‘Lester Piggott won the Epsom Derby nine times’. Empery (10) and Nijinsky (21) were two of his winning horses. First prize Stephen Smith, Messing, Colchester, Essex Runners-up Andrew Dymond, London SE24; Belinda Bridgen, London NW8

Tina Brown

The Sussexes’ ‘extinction burst’ is coming

From the point of view of New York City, where I live, everything is going Meghan and Harry’s way. News items about their folly vs the worthy Waleses are a standard trope of the US home page of the Daily Mail, but they are the wrong side of America’s zeitgeist. True, no one could have expected a weaponised lady-in-waiting to sink the strenuous efforts to update the House of Windsor brand, but it is also true that to anyone with a modicum of PR smarts, the where-are-you-really-from flap involving Lady Susan Hussey – a Cretaceous-era courtier often glimpsed beneath a flower-pot hat riding beside the late Queen in the car

Cheesecracker

2585: Happy Anniversary

An anniversary (1A, three words) today offers ten unclued entries, all of whose unchecked and cross-checking letters spell out HAHA! DRY GINS ASSURING TRASHY ANAGRAMS. Across 9    State welcome hosted by Oscars (4) 11    Stanza in excessive, unending Ave Maria delaying mass (6,4) 12    Bash old boy, a grass (4) 18    Pulling evenly, stripped part of a bone (5) 20    Chap trouble is concerning trousers (7) 21    Goddess harbouring worry about mistress (7) 24    Hint of allspice lacking in sausage ragout (5) 25    Reluctant Liberal associated with profanity (5) 30    Grave talk about a collector of filth? (4,3) 32    One avoiding bulk of Mauritian wild buffalo (7) 36    Acceptable English recipient

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: lessons in citizenship from Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse

In Competition No. 3278, you were invited to supply a well-known writer’s response to the question what makes the perfect citizen? In 1970, as part of a school project, a ten-year-old wrote to Charles M. Schulz to ask him a similar question. But the boy asked what makes a ‘good’ rather than ‘perfect’ citizen, and this is how the Peanuts creator replied: ‘I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen than it has ever been before. Certainly all any of us can do is follow our own conscience and retain faith in our democracy…’. Fifty years on, with our democratic institutions looking distinctly

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The march of the local council dictators

I was impressed with the passion Sir Keir Starmer managed to whip up within himself when presenting Gordon Brown’s interminable plans for constitutional reform to the British people. He almost sounded engaged with the project. Apparently Gordon has been beavering away, working by the light of a low-wattage electric candle, at this stuff for a couple of years – but frankly, all anyone took from it is that Labour plans to abolish the House of Lords and devolve lots of powers to ‘the regions’. Remarkable, isn’t it? Confining residents to one area of a city and punishing them if they stray If I were PM, I’d embrace the House of

Luke McShane

Puzzle

White to play and mate in two. Composed by van Beek & Wurzburg, 1909. This is one of the problems solved by Nunn at the 2019 World Solving Championship. Please note that because of the Christmas printing schedule this is not a prize puzzle. Last week’s solution 1 Qxd3 and Black resigned: Qxd3 2 Rf7+ Nxf7 3 Rxf7+ Rg7 4 Rxg7+ Kh8 5 Rd7+ wins the queen. Last week’s winner John Dove, Acharacle, Argyll

Luke McShane

World Senior Championship

English grandmaster John Nunn was the top seed in the over-65 section at the World Senior Championship, held in Italy last month. A series of crisp attacking games put him in the lead with 6.5/7. But an uncharacteristic miscalculation in round eight saw him lose a miniature against Danish grandmaster Jens Kristiansen. Going into the 11th and final round, Nunn still trailed by half a point, so his fate was no longer in his hands. As the games unfolded, Kristiansen had the draw well within reach, but succumbed to a neat endgame zugzwang against Jose Luis Fernandez Garcia. Meanwhile, against Valentin Bogdanov, Nunn spun a slim advantage into gold with a leisurely

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: a Christmas treat from Corney & Barrow

So this is it folks, the last offer of the year. James Franklin of Corney & Barrow and I worked tirelessly to bring you the tastiest, most Yule-appropriate wines we could at the best possible prices. Indeed, so fine and so well-priced are they that I barely bothered the spittoon while tasting them and will certainly be nabbing a case or so myself as I cower from Christmas in my bunker. The 2021 Maison Azan Picpoul de Pinet (1) is as decent a P de P as you’ll find. From vineyards on the banks of the Bassin de Thau in the Languedoc, it’s made by Olivier Azan, the first in

Dot Wordsworth

‘Quite’ has gone quite wrong

Something has gone wrong with the use of quite. Someone wrote in the Telegraph: ‘Beating Brazil at a World Cup? Quite the experience.’ Then I heard: ‘It’s been quite the dreich day.’ The annoying part is the the. An idiom does exist with quite the, but the meaning is different. If my husband displayed his portly figure in a snug piece of fashion, I might be tempted to say: ‘You’re quite the Beau Brummell this evening.’ But if the afternoon is sunny, then it’s ‘quite a sunny afternoon’. Quite, as an adverb, possesses two main contrasting senses: ‘completely’ or ‘comparatively’. Quite exhausted could mean ‘utterly exhausted’ or ‘fairly exhausted’. The

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop my partner’s argumentative children ruining Christmas?

Q. I’m dreading Christmas because my darling partner’s two middle-aged children (both unmarried) are coming to stay and they don’t get on. I don’t want to seem inhospitable by not offering them plenty to drink, but drink does always seem to be the trigger for their rows. What do you recommend, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. Change the thrust of the visit into a spa-themed break rather than a festival of gluttony. See if you can book visits from massage therapists who do not celebrate Christmas and therefore may welcome the work. Your partner should communicate with his children that you have begun to worry you may have

Isabel Oakeshott

The truth about Matt Hancock

Matt Hancock and I have almost nothing in common. For starters I’m terrified of spiders and hopelessly squeamish. I physically retched as I watched him eating unmentionables in the Australian jungle. Far more importantly, we fundamentally disagree over his handling of the pandemic. The passage of time has not left me any less angry about lockdowns. My blood still boils when I think of the unnecessary suffering: the broken homes and broken businesses; the lost last moments with loved ones; the missed cancers and operations; a generation of children scarred forever. This country paid a catastrophic price for what I see as a reckless overreaction to a disease that was

Douglas Murray

Britain doesn’t need reinventing

What is the most hubristic line ever written? Against some very stiff competition I would say it is that famous line of Thomas Paine, from the February 1776 appendix to his pamphlet Common Sense: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ One of the problems of the line is that even just typing it or reading it brings goose bumps. Not just because it is perfectly phrased, but because it appeals to such a basic emotion. It is an emotion similar to the one which always makes me well up at the end of Peter Grimes: ‘Turn the skies back, and begin again.’ It’s moving,

The Spectator

Will the World Cup final be better attended in 2022 or 1930?

Final countdown Could fewer people watch the 2022 World Cup final in the flesh than watched the inaugural 1930 contest? The first World Cup final, won 4-2 by Uruguay, was held in the Estadio Centario in Montevideo on 30 July 1930. The stadium officially held 93,000 people. That is more than the present Wembley stadium and 4,000 more than the capacity of the venue for this year’s final, the Lusail Stadium in Qatar. There are conflicting accounts of how many attended the 1930 final, however, with some sources saying it was full and others giving an official attendance of 68,346. A Brexit blow? Is it true that trade with the

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

What Trump really wants

Over the years, I’ve received my share of green-ink author’s mail. You know, from folks who’ve discovered an exciting variety of textual special effects: lurid colours, freaky fonts, creative insertions of upper case, frenzies of inverted commas around standard vocabulary and lashings of exclamation marks. Calling these letters ‘fan mail’ would be a stretch. They are universally hostile, and their authors are crazy. Rule of thumb: DO NOT ‘respond’! Trump wants to run, but he wants to lose – and throwing the contest should prove a cinch But how do you ignore green-ink communiqués sent to the world at large from a former president of the United States? Especially one

James Heale James Heale

Inside Team Truss’s tussle for titles

In the final hours of the Liz Truss regime, a key question was obsessing advisers: who would get a seat in the House of Lords? Her inner circle was divided as to whether, after just 49 days in office, such privileges were even appropriate. As a few aides tried to convince Truss that honours would be a mistake, her chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, was adamant a select few would become the lords and ladies of tomorrow. A prime minister determined to appoint a peer will almost always get his man As a former prime minister, Truss has the right to put forward a list of ‘resignation honours’. The jury

The Spectator

Letters: Brexit is indefensible

When the wind blows Sir: Matt Ridley’s article ‘Blown apart’ (3 December) highlighting the wind-farm delusion touches only lightly on the planning process. Where he does focus on planning in England, he states that there is no ‘ban’ on onshore wind farms, only the standard planning requirements that they are confined to areas designated for that purpose, with community support a vital component. In Scotland decisions on wind-farm developments under 50 megawatts are taken by the local planning authority. Major developments over 50 megawatts are determined by Scottish ministers.  Assessment of both scales are based on interpretation of planning regulations, which is a subjective matter. Two planning officers looking at

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 10 December 2022

Like many people, I assumed that online bridge would fade away once people began playing face-to-face again. I’m so glad I was wrong. The social aspect of the game is, of course, largely lost online, but on the other hand, quite apart from the convenience, it’s a great way to improve; I always replay hands afterwards and compare what others did. Best of all – for me, at least – is getting the opportunity to play against legends of the game like Jacek Kalita and Simon de Wijs in the invitational online tournaments (I’m lucky enough to be on Jonathan Harris’s team). Name me another sport where that can happen!