Society

Wednesday

28 Sep 2022

I’m in trouble with the police

There is almost nothing I like more than a running battle. As my friend Julie Burchill also says, when a really good row comes along it gives you this warm, cosy feeling inside. So it was not with disappointment that I received a noteworthy response to my column of last week. For those who were sleeping on the job (or only read Rod’s column), I made some pertinent comments about community relations in the Leicestershire area. Community relations, you may recall, have essentially broken down, with Hindu and Muslim gangs facing off in the city and some of the surrounding area. In passing I noted the number of female police

Rod Liddle

Why is the right not making the moral case for lower taxes?

There was an article recently in the increasingly woke but still useful New Scientist which attempted to gauge the degree to which luck was responsible for who we are and, hence, an individual’s life circumstances. I think it came in third place after genes and the environment – which are also both down to luck, really, I suppose. The thesis seemed to be we pay too little attention to the role of luck when considering why one man is a millionaire and the other is a lavatory attendant or a book reviewer. I would beg to differ. Ascribing luck to one’s unfortunate position in life is very prevalent indeed and

Bruce Anderson

Why the dry martini is the finest cocktail of all

We were discussing bourbon and whether American whiskey could ever rival Scotch. I recalled the first time I ever tried the transatlantic spirit. It was more than 50 years ago, in an undergraduate room in Oxford. The occupant was an ingenious fellow. At the beginning of one term, he wrote to Jim Beam, the whiskey makers. He informed them that he had discovered their wonderful product in the States, but it appeared to be impossible to come by in Oxford, which was a pity, because it deserved to be better known (in truth he had never tasted it and had never been to the US). A case shortly arrived, followed

Martin Vander Weyer

City slickers’ reaction to Kwarteng’s unfunded plan is entirely rational

‘Fury at the City slickers betting against UK plc,’ shouted the Daily Mail on Tuesday, after Monday’s mayhem saw the pound hit an all-time low of $1.03. A more accurate corporate metaphor, though less punchy as headline material, would have been something like this… Activist mavericks seize boardroom control of giant sluggish utility. Novice finance director slashes prices, raises dividends for rich shareholders, shuns in-house forecasters and says he’ll borrow whatever it costs. To which markets reply: ‘Blimey, mate, that’s bonkers. So we’re dumping your shares and the cost of your debt just doubled.’ And that, I’m afraid, is an entirely rational response, not a wickedly speculative one. Moments after

Lionel Shriver

Shame should not be heritable

Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope claims it was ‘inevitable’ that a university ‘as long-established as Cambridge’ would have links to slavery. Now that faculties gorge on racial guilt as Cambridge dons once famously feasted on roasted swans, what was really inevitable is that a body christened ‘The Advisory Group on the Legacies of Enslavement’ would find links to slavery. Why, it must have frustrated the authors of the report released last week that their three-year inquiry didn’t manage to dredge up any evidence that the university ever directly owned slaves or plantations. Rather, it’s the money that was tainted; lucre having always passed through dirty hands somewhere along the line, there’s no

Matthew Parris

Maybe Nanny does know best

Not least among the shivers down my spine as I listen to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng pump up the rhetoric on their economic revolution is the evocation of myself – myself when young. Like Ms Truss, I too joined the Liberal party as an Oxbridge fresher. I too believed in the power of personal choice. I too had a dream of unhindered competition liberating the animal spirits of enterprise and individual genius. I too told myself that we liberals must grit our teeth and keep the faith when sink-or-swim left some to sink. I too thrilled to the metaphor of ‘tall trees’ being allowed unencumbered access to the light.

Robin Oakley

The lessons of Newmarket

The swallows who nest yearly in my garage have agreed that ‘that’s enough baby-making for this year’, and started their 6,000-mile trip to the southern Sahara. Between burps, many thousands of wildebeeste are currently sniffing the Kenyan air and nudging each other south for new shoots on the grassy plains of the Serengeti. To me, Newmarket’s Autumn Double meetings, embracing the Cambridgeshire and the Cesarewitch, bring the same strong sense of seasonal change with the second of those Heritage handicaps over two miles and two furlongs offering a strong challenge to the Flat trainers from jumps specialists warming up their charges for the winter season. We also look to Newmarket

Melissa Kite

AA only admits the right sort of alcoholics

The support group groupies have issued another ban. They have attempted to slap an exclusion order on another long-standing member, in addition to the one they have meted out to my friend, the bricklayer. This latest victim hasn’t been to a meeting in Surrey for seven years because the last time he went, the local area committee accused him of something so Orwellian it was impossible for him to do anything other than leave. They accused him of believing in God too much. During a ridiculous row over whether members should be forced to applaud the giving out of sobriety chips, this fellow wouldn’t back down in his belief that

Rory Sutherland

The hidden benefits of smart motorways

In 2015, Holborn Underground station was suffering from serious overcrowding at peak hours, with a bottleneck forming in the space leading to the escalators. So Transport for London tried an experiment. Abandoning the usual ‘stand on the right, walk on the left’ convention, they placed signs on two of the three ascending escalators instructing people on both sides to stand. Outrage followed. But the experiment worked. Escalators with passengers standing transported an average of 151 people per minute, compared with 115 for the dual-use escalator. People cannot all walk up an escalator in strict lockstep for fear of ending up on the sex offenders register You can see why people

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of morphine sulphate

Two football friends, brothers, Mick and Pete, came to visit last week. We’ve been going to matches together since 1969, aged 12, in the good old skinhead days when the police enjoyed a punch-up as much as anybody. We used to travel all over the country on Lacey’s Coaches for away games and looked up to the older hooligans as gods. Those dockers were good honest scrappers, kind, fearless and very fun, in an era long before the sociologists or politicians started paying attention or hooligans wore designer jumpers. Mick still goes with Arthur, his son. Me and Pete haven’t been to a game since the team moved to its

Taki

Rupert Murdoch has nothing to fear from me

Harvard man Russell Seitz has sent me an extraordinary present as an object lesson in ‘what a magazine should be in case you start another one’. The paper has yellowed and is dog-eared, pages are falling out and the print is faint. But the Transatlantic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, dated January 1924, is a joy to behold. Mind you, we were already almost 100 years old when Ford Madox Ford first edited TTR in Paris. And that’s what I told my friend Russell. Anyone who writes for or reads The Spectator is not likely to be impressed by other publications, but this does not include a posturing peacock from

Sam Leith

What does it mean when Giorgia Meloni quotes G.K. Chesterton?

For a UK audience, the most striking moment in the new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s victory speech will have been that she anchored its peroration to a quote from G.K. Chesterton. ‘Chesterton wrote, more than a century ago,’ she said, ‘“Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” That time has arrived. We are ready.’ G.K. Chesterton? The creator of the excellently herbivorous Father Brown mysteries, the Isaac Newton of what we now call ‘cosy crime’? That G.K. Chesterton? The author of a poem, memorised by many a previous generation of English schoolboys, about

Dot Wordsworth

What ‘Budget’ and ‘bilge’ have in common

The Budget (which the revolutionary fiscal act last week was technically not) is directly connected with bilge and with one of the circles of Dante’s Hell, the eighth, which houses the financial fraudsters, speculators, extortionists, counterfeiters and false forecasters. The circle is divided into the ten ditches of Malebolge. The Malebolge, singular bolgia, take their name from Latin malus (‘evil’) and bulga (‘bag’). The early commentator on Dante, Benvenuto da Imola, says that bolgia in Florentine speech means a concave and capacious ditch. In Dante’s Hell inside the Earth, the Malebolge are concentric. Budget also comes from the Latin bulga. We are just about aware of the obsolescent budget meaning

Jenny McCartney

There’s a growing sense that tomorrow belongs to Sinn Fein

Where can Ulster Unionism go now? If it were a person, it would be someone in the grip of a long depression, whose occasional bursts of anger mask the fact that they so often feel despondent and betrayed. The widespread reaction to the latest Northern Ireland census, in which Catholics narrowly outnumber Protestants for the first time, is unlikely to give it a reason to be cheerful. A jubilant Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Fein vice-leader, was quick to claim that ‘historic change is happening across this island’, while other party members called for a referendum on unity. The rallying cry of Sinn Fein has long been ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’, which

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I get out of a friend’s bad birthday party?

Q. I shall be spending more time in the company of newer acquaintances in the West Country and would appreciate your advice with regard to a resurfacing problem: narcolepsy. The condition is the source of much embarrassment and I find myself at pains to explain it upfront. (People may infer spurious connections due to limited understanding – that is to say ‘narc’ is now much more closely associated with narcissistic tendencies or worse, narcotics.) In anticipation of negative reactions how can I deal with any awkwardness? I am keen to attend social events. – Name withheld, Wimbledon A. Turn your condition to your advantage by arriving with a lightweight, blown-up

Toby Young

I’m on Andrew Doyle’s side – for now

I’ve agreed to interview the author and journalist Andrew Doyle about his new book at the Conservative party conference – on stage, no less – so I thought I’d better read it. It’s about the inexorable rise of the social justice warriors, whom he regards as a danger to the survival of free speech and, by extension, the institutions and traditions that our liberal democracy depends on. My first reaction was one of irritation. The book is called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World and it’s annoyingly similar to the title of a book I’ve been working on – Salem 2.0:the Return of

Olivia Potts

The sweet satisfaction of a burnt Cambridge cream

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, then a Trinity or Cambridge burnt cream must taste as sweet as its French twin, the crème brûlée. The two cooked custard dishes are essentially identical: an egg yolk-rich baked custard served cold and topped with a layer of hard caramel. Both are similar to the crema Catalana you find throughout Spain (known as ‘crema cremada’ in Catalan cuisine), but Catalana is made with milk rather than cream. It means it is lighter, and tends to have a thinner, paler caramel layer. Lemon or orange zest and a cinnamon stick are often used as flavouring for the Spanish pudding,

Bernard Cornwell

The ups and downs of driving a Tesla

I began the week in Miami, looking forward to what a friend of mine describes as ‘the finest sight in all Florida – the departure lounge’. That is a little unfair; a tour of Cape Canaveral is mind-blowing. But beyond that I confess I find the state brash and gaudy, a fitting place for Donald Trump’s retirement. If indeed the 45th President has retired. No one will be surprised if he runs again, nor if he is re-elected with the help of his Republican party which has been busy restricting voters’ rights and playing origami with constituency boundaries. I doubt he will win the popular vote, but nor does he

Peter Jones

Peta, Lysistrata and the comedy of a sex strike

The German branch of the ‘green’ organisation Peta (‘People for the ethical treatment of animals’) is demanding that, until men stop eating meat – apparently they cause 41 per cent more pollution than female carnivores – women must deny them sex. The same sanction had its origin, of course, in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata (411 bc), staged during the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), just after Athens had suffered a disastrous defeat in a failed attempt on Sicily. Naturally, an organisation like Peta might well think the play was in earnest. Was not Lysistrata proposing a noble, female-instigated sex-strike, by the women of both sides, to stop a war?

The Spectator

Who was the first monarch to live in Buckingham Palace?

Fit for a king King Charles III, it has been reported, is reluctant to move into Buckingham Palace. Who was the first monarch to live there? – The core of what is now the palace was built as a townhouse, Buckingham House, for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703 and purchased by George III as a home for Queen Charlotte and her children – while he lived at St James’s Palace. – His successor, George IV, started work on enlarging what by then was already called a palace, intending to use it for his own residence. He died before it was complete, however, as did William IV. William IV was