Society

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The ever-shifting language of ‘culture wars’

‘Come on, old girl,’ said my husband as though encouraging a cow stuck in a ditch, ‘you must know.’ It was because I’d asked him in the far-off days of last week what woman meant, just after Rishi Sunak had said: ‘We must be able to call a mother a mother.’ Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch then tussled in a hate-crime triangle on television over who said what, when about people self-identifying in a gender. Such matters are said to belong to culture wars, which we had thought an American phenomenon. Culture wars acquired their name only in the 1980s. Since then we have grown used to language

Jeremy Clarke

The global elite and me

Here come the global elites. They love it here. Their spiritual second home. The heat, the rosé, the food, the service, the quaint and deserted villages. One way and another I get to meet some of them. Catriona manages holiday villas and those renters she likes she asks up to our place for a drink. The day Boris resigned a couple of these elite social-equity fanatics floated up to the house speechless with ecstasy. Post-Trump, Boris was their Satan, prince of lies. Now he’d resigned. Or as good as, if princes of lies can ever be believed. One last heave and they’d done it. Got the bastard out. Thankfully, a

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why I won’t have a Covid booster

In the news recently, we’ve heard from multiple Britons who’ve lost family members or sacrificed their own health to Covid’s not-really-vaccines. But anecdotes lack statistical heft. Sceptical viewers might too easily dismiss individual stories of the harms caused by the biggest inoculation rollout in history as freakish aberrations, mere coincidence (could relatives who happened to have been recently vaccinated really have died from something else?) or put it down to the cost of doing business at scale. An official UK government report recently said that more than 2,200 Britons may have been killed by vaccine-induced injuries, but there’s plenty more hard evidence in governmentally collected databases that these fatalities are

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Who can read Penny Mordaunt?

Whitehall is telling ministers that this is a ‘caretaker’ government and so, by convention, cannot take decisions. This is not correct. A caretaker government is one in which an acting prime minister is in charge following a resignation. But Boris has not resigned: he has merely said that he will resign once his party has chosen a new leader. Until then, he remains Prime Minister. Obviously it would be wrong for him to introduce policy changes which would commit his successor, but officials should not twist convention to prevent ministers from using their usual discretionary powers in individual cases. This bogus invocation of propriety is related, I think, to the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The hidden benefit of an electric car

Hello, and welcome to episode one of What’s in My Frunk?, the first in an occasional Spectator series of news and advice for the electronic motorist. In this edition we’ll be discussing one of the unexpected benefits of owning an electric car. The space under the bonnet vacated by the engine often provides a small but usable secondary storage area. This is the ‘frunk’, a portmanteau word combining ‘front’ and the American word ‘trunk’. Now that even Land Rover Defenders have carpeted boots, your frunk is great for transporting anything wet or dirty – wellingtons, charging cables, takeaways or body parts from your last hit. My Mustang Mach-E even has

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The death of bad-taste humour

The recent heatwave inspired many people to bring out their stories of the summer of 1976. I have a memory of it which has nothing to do with the temperature, but which I think could be even more relevant to our times. It happened in the baking, crammed, nicotine-steeped ballroom of a holiday camp. I was eight. The campers were gathered for the night’s fun, provided by the camp’s resident comic. On the dot of 8 p.m. he told the audience it was time for the kiddies to head to bed. We were handed over to the care of a redcoat (about 20, unvetted, just some bloke – there is

The Spectator

Letters: What William Blake meant

Procurement profligacy Sir: In response to Susan Hill’s query ‘Who allows the profligacy in NHS hospital procurement to continue?’ (‘Best medicine’, 16 July), it seems the national scale of public sector bureaucracy is just too great. Given the size and spending power of the NHS, no one should come close to achieving equal efficiencies in economies of scale, nor gain better prices from suppliers. But this is not the case. As a non-clinical procurement professional in the NHS, having come from the private sector, I’ve been surprised to consistently find the national purchasing authority of the NHS (formerly ‘NHS Supply Chain’, now ‘SCCL’) to be the worst pricing option available

Hamish Badenoch

My life as a political spouse

When I was a teenage Tory activist in the mid-1990s, I hoped one day I’d be part of a leadership election campaign team. The energy and the intrigue looked so exciting. Eventually, I did end up right in the thick of it – but as a political spouse. These races have changed a lot since then. Michael Portillo’s plan to run against John Major was rumbled when his allies were found to have installed dozens of phone lines in a campaign headquarters: that was how you did it back in the 1990s. Now, it’s all done in WhatsApp groups. Kemi and I joke about what we would have made of

Toby Young Toby Young

My brief career as a marijuana farmer

The latest heatwave reminded me of my brief career as a marijuana farmer. This wasn’t in the summer of 1976, when I was 13, but three years later, by which time my family had moved to Devon. My father had been commissioned to write the biography of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, the founders of Dartington Hall, a utopian community in South Devon, and wanted to be nearer the archives and the couples’ friends and colleagues whom he was planning to interview. Having been brought up in London, I was terrifically snobbish about how behind the times the local teenagers were – still wearing flares and listening to Status Quo, gawd

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Sack Heathrow’s boss? No, put him on the front line

Airports are on my mind, since I’ve just stepped off an on-time early-morning flight from East Midlands to Bergerac – yes, Ryanair, efficient as ever. But what a relief not to be battling through Heathrow, where such anarchy has taken hold that the Civil Aviation Authority and Department for Transport have given chief executive John Holland-Kaye an ‘ultimatum’ to sort it out – after he capped passenger numbers at 100,000 a day, forcing innumerable flight cancellations. As the airport that used to be Britain’s gateway to the world becomes a global embarrassment, attention turns to the question of whether the man in charge should resign or be fired. I had

The Spectator

2562: Clear view… – solution

The title resolves into CL RVW which suggests the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The unclued lights are seven of his compositions: 1A, 1D, 8D, 11A, 15D, 19D/3D and 21D/39A. First prize Julian Prouse, Redditch Runners-up James Bristol, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire; Caroline Arms, Ithaca, NY

Doc

2565: 3 x 2

The unclued lights (two single words, one a proper noun, four pairs and one trio) share a certain feature.   Across 4 Insightful patient, ever worried (11) 11 Report of joints at hideout in London suburb (7) 12 Instruction to massage deep’s not hard (6) 16 Fears one is concealing crime (5) 19 Escape from hospital, heading off to shelter (7) 23 Alien resident in El Salvador producing ipecac and suchlike (7) 25 Goes easy on the French in tears (7) 30 I came from Rome, my lad, for game (7) 32 Effective contact with cricketer Plunkett (not married) and one child (7) 34 = f…. (4) 35 Theresa demolished

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: a postcard from Airstrip One

In Competition No. 3258, you were invited to submit a postcard sent while on holiday in a well-known fictional destination of your choice. The enforced concision of postcard–writing sometimes produces little master-pieces. Alongside the clichés and forced jollity, you find lyricism and poignant detail. It’s a shame that people rarely send them these days. So hooray for your dispatchesfrom locations that ranged from H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness to KirrinIsland. An honourable mention goes to Susan Firth for her reflections on Ambridge (‘I’m surprised to find how many people have been involved in crimes!’); to Peter Mullen, writing from Nirvana (‘There is not even a boozer where you could crash

Luke McShane

No. 712

White to play and mate in two. Composed by Philip Hamilton Williams, British Chess Magazine, 1895. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 25 July. 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 Nd6! wins. If 1…Qxd6 2 Nf7+ or 1…cxd6 2 Nxc6+ Kd7 3 Nxb8+ Last week’s winner Guy Herbert, London NW1

Luke McShane

Wetware

Modern chess computers, like the program ‘Stockfish’, are treated as oracles. Plug in a position, start the engine, and within a fraction of a second it will identify the best move and its numerical evaluation (+1.27 pawns!). So it is a natural misconception that an ambitious player must commit to endless clicking and memorising. On that theory, grandmasters are simply the ones who have set upon this treadmill with unusual fervour. I have done my share of gawping at the screen, but in wiser moments, I remember that when Stockfish is running, my brain goes to sleep. The firehose of answers is unmemorable if you don’t articulate any questions. The

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 23 July 2022

I was very sorry to learn of the death of the legendary American player and author Eddie Kantar – he was still writing articles with such youthful vigour that I had no idea he was 89. Kantar was considered to be the greatest player-teacher-writer of all time. The clarity of his writing, combined with his self-deprecating humour, brought him legions of fans from across the world. I have an entire row of his books on my shelves – including classics like Complete Defensive Play and Bridge For Dummies – which I’ve been thumbing through for 20 years. As the English player John Cox put it: ‘To many of us, his

Robin Oakley

Horse racing’s invisible heroes

President George W. Bush used to quote his fellow Texan Robert Strauss who famously declared: ‘You can fool some of the people some of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.’ Listening to the economic arguments of most of the candidates for the Tory leadership last week, they clearly take a similar view. If it’s honesty you want, stick to horse racing. In Newbury’s baking heat last Saturday, Grocer Jack, an expensive 700,000-guinea purchase from Germany for Prince Faisal bin Khaled, led all the way at a sometimes extravagant pace to win the Listed bet365 Stakes by nine lengths in the hands of Tom Marquand.

Taki

In praise of Spectator readers

Michael Beloff, QC and past president of Trinity College Oxford, has just had his memoir reviewed in The Spectator, and it brought back memories. Here’s this really good man, the type who does the work, believes in the system, plays by the rules and subscribes to the old graces of courtesy and politeness, but the sort we never read about. Instead, what is shoved down our throats are today’s politicians selling their snake oil on TV, or those untalented but self-entitled celebrities boasting about themselves, and the ultimate horrors, of course, the profoundly ignorant woke brigade who block free speech. I can’t remember how long ago it was that I

Wednesday

The Spectator

The heatwave shows the lockdown instinct is still alive

Trains were running even more slowly than usual. Schools were closed again. Offices were empty. No one would deny that Monday and Tuesday were on the warm side, at least by British standards. Even so, there was something more alarming than the temperature: how quickly the authorities started to close down society – and showed that the lockdown instinct is still very much alive. The Met Office, a body that has turned from fairly comical to slightly sinister in recent times, started advising everyone to stay at home. The unions asked for schools, offices and transport systems to be closed down. There were no trains north out of King’s Cross