Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The British Empire’s despicable treatment of mermaids

I may have broken the law this week, without having intended to, so great was my rush to return home. I forgot to put on my seat belt and may have exceeded the speed limit on more than one occasion. The cause of my intemperate haste was, of course, a desire to be back at my house in time to listen to BBC Radio 4’s daily evening arts magazine programme, Front Row. I live in a part of the world where the radio reception in cars is thinnish to non-existent, you see. Looking around me, as I depressed the accelerator further than I should, I noticed that everybody else was

Toby Young Toby Young

My wine-fuelled mini break

For Christmas Caroline bought me a ‘Deluxe Gift Experience’ at Chapel Down, the UK’s leading winery. I say ‘me’, but it was actually a present for her too since it was a ‘couples’ package. For £490 we got a private tour of the vineyard, a wine–tasting session, dinner for two in the Chapel Down restaurant, an overnight stay at the Sissinghurst Castle B&B and free tickets to visit Sissinghurst gardens the following morning. We left it a little late to book and the only slot they had available was last weekend, presumably because it clashed with the Jubilee bank holiday. I imagine the sort of people this package appeals to

Dot Wordsworth

Why should Turkey be allowed to change its name?

Turkey has told the UN it wants to be called Türkiye. Even when it is written in capitals, it would still like the little dot over the i, thank you, as İ. Exports will now bear the label ‘Made in Türkiye’ instead of ‘Made in Turkey’. Turkey is of course a name for a delicious bird – at first labelled the guinea fowl, until the New World creature was discovered. But the country’s state broadcaster TRT World complains that dictionaries also define turkey as ‘something that fails badly’. There’s worse. The Oxford English Dictionary (in an entry written in 1915, when Britain was at war against Turkey) records under Turk:

The Spectator

How much do the royals like curry?

Curry in favour The BBC apologised after one of its guests for the Jubilee coverage, Len Goodman, revealed that his grandmother had referred to curry as ‘foreign muck’. The corporation might have used it as a way into a discussion of royal eating tastes. In an interview with Radio 1 in 2017, the Duchess of Cambridge revealed that while she liked a hot curry, her husband ‘wasn’t good with spice’. The Queen’s opinion on curry, too, has been reported to be lukewarm. Prince William’s tastes are in contrast to those of his great-great-great-great grandmother Queen Victoria, who gained a taste for curry cooked by an Indian servant, Abdul Karim, in

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Working from home could have been the reset we needed

‘It is vital that we see a return to face-to-face meetings to foster the dynamic collaboration that creates breakthrough ideas.’ All true, I’m sure. But what you’re describing here isn’t an office: it’s a pub. The same goes for ‘team-bonding’. Placing a lot of people in an open-plan office doesn’t really form a close-knit team – which may explain why very little military training takes place behind desks. No, if you want to form a highly collaborative team, just book your subordinates on a Eurostar junket to Paris, then forget to confirm their return tickets. Trust me, not only will they be newly united in a shared disdain for your

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The day I found a postcard from Virginia Woolf

A dispiriting week. Three months ago, skips arrived, into which were cast the detritus of a decade. Charity shops were donated so much that they began to wave us away. Family welcomed furniture while, oddly, refusing to accept their own toys, clothes and school photographs which had been stored with us ‘temporarily’. Book collections were culled because the new house is much smaller. But hey, we had sold the dearly loved house, whose surrounding garden, meadows, trees, pond and abundant wildlife I will miss so much – and, even better, to enthusiastic, trustworthy buyers whose dream home it was. Apparently. Because on the day before exchange of contracts, they pulled

Richard Madeley

Don’t write off Piers Morgan yet

I wish I could persuade certain cabinet ministers to put their money where their mouths are. Several times last month on Good Morning Britain I exhorted Tory frontbenchers, including Liz Truss, to place cash bets with me. If they’d agreed, I’d be richer than Rishi by now. Well, obviously that’s an exaggeration, but I could have at least afforded to hire a private jet to fly me and Judy to our summer hols in France. Oh, all right then, a single-prop Cessna. Bet one was that there would be a swift U-turn on refusing to place a windfall tax on oil companies. I would have staked my house on it.

Doc

2559: Platinum upgrade

Reading clockwise around the perimeter are six theme words, in random order, one of which starts in square 38. The other two theme words are the unclued lights, one of which can be preceded by one normal solution which solvers should highlight.   Across 11 Limerick perhaps, shortened to make an impression (5) 12 Go to the front outside of Leatherhead (4) 13 Hurried, getting caught by Henry’s farm (5) 14 European gentleman concealed gaol-break (7) 15 With due respect to gun-dog – here’s the leader (4,6) 17 Kid is tense. Relax! (5) 20 Person in short race, small and peripheral (8) 21 The way extremists go (3,3) 23 Left

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 11 June 2022

I recently spent a long weekend in Lillehammer in Norway. Apparently it’s very charming, but frankly I have no idea: I only glimpsed it from the taxi to my hotel. It’s always like that when I play in tournaments abroad. Forget sightseeing – I rarely step outside. The Marit Sveaas Swiss Pairs is more intensive than most: 60 boards a day, from morning till evening. I was lucky enough to be partnering Jessica Larsson, the Swedish women’s European champion. A mutual friend had suggested we play, and we met the night before to discuss a system. As it happens, we got on rather too well, and ended up drinking in

Robin Oakley

How modesty triumphed in the Derby

In the absence on her Platinum Jubilee of Her Majesty, such an avid Derby attender in the past, and following the death just days before of the legendary Lester Piggott, it could have been a low-key, insignificant Derby. Instead, a truly impressive victory for the favourite, Desert Crown, turned it into a different kind of celebration. He had never really been away, but how the crowd welcomed the comeback when Desert Crown won Sir Michael Stoute his sixth Derby, becoming at 76 the oldest to perform the feat. The previous holder of the record was the 75-year-old Matt Dawson with Sir Visto in 1895, but in those days there were

Melissa Kite

Why I don’t do WhatsApp

If I could ban one question ever being asked of me again it would be: ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ I don’t know how many times I’ve answered this in the negative, 57,983 times at least, but the question just never stops being asked. Nobody wants to use even a fraction of a penny of the almost limitless text and call capacity in their perfectly affordable phone packages to send a text any more. What they want is totally free, completely limitless blathering capacity. Consequently, everything has a WhatsApp group attached to it. Every activity I take part in, every hobby, every social group I belong to, now comes with its

Jeremy Clarke

It is time for me to ‘get right with the Lord’

‘But you look so well!’ How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a few it’s outrageous, after all they have heard or read about my health, and they feel cheated of the mushrooms growing out of the side of my head that they’d been hoping for. Either way I’m surprised by the compliment. Yes, the tan and this expensive shaving balm Catriona bought me, and now hair again, make me appear unravaged from the neck up. ‘But you should see the rest of it,’ I laugh gaily, detailing the bulge in my neck where the chemotherapy tube remains in place; the young Brigitte

Taki

The healing power of the Hamptons

Southampton, Long Island These are peripatetic times for the poor little Greek boy, up to the Hamptons for some sun-seeking among Wasp types, and then down to the nation’s capital for the memorial service of that wonderful humorist P.J. O’Rourke. By all means take the following with a grain of salt, but even 800 million years ago, when only micro-organisms slithered around the beaches, belonging to a private club was all-important, especially in the Hamptons. Never have I seen more chest-thumping, bandy-legged, bearded louts trash-talking as they pollute the beaches in this beautiful town. Southampton was once a luminous little village that served as a seaside refuge for New York’s

Wednesday

John Bell

The Brexit Horizon debate is bad news for scientists

The UK and EU are currently locked in a debate about Britain’s participation in the Horizon Europe science funding programme, with the EU blocking the UK from taking part due to concerns about the Northern Ireland protocol. The situation is very disappointing for scientists. Eighteen months ago, when the Brexit deal was signed in good faith, the UK government signed up to participate in the programme. This would have been a good thing. But it has now been turned into political football. As a result, 18 months later, scientists don’t know where they are. We’re apparently not in the programme, it looks like we’re out. But this row is running

Debbie Hayton

Emily Bridges is right about transgender cyclists

Transgender cyclist Emily Bridges doesn’t ‘want special treatment from anyone’. In an ITV interview, Bridges said:  ‘I just want the same opportunities as my fellow female athletes’. As someone who transitioned a few years before Emily, I’d say Bridges is right: transgender people should not need special treatment. We are human beings, just like everyone else. In the UK, at least, trans people have specific and additional protections against discrimination and harassment. But these only become relevant if someone treats us less favourably because we are transgender. That has happened to me very rarely. So who is to blame for this unfortunate situation? Yet in the debate about whether Bridges

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Banning greeting cards won’t keep spice out of our prisons

The last time inspectors visited HMP The Mount in 2018, the place was awash with drugs. The prevalence of the psychoactive substance ‘bird killer’, and the violence associated with it, meant nearly half of all prisoners there reported feeling unsafe. This insidious drug, collectively known as ‘spice’, was smuggled past officers in the form of letters and cards invisibly impregnated with the stuff which prisoners then smoked or licked. Wings and landings filled with zombified inmates in a haze of toxic smoke that felled officers were not an uncommon sight. The addictive qualities of this junk resulted in a spiral of debt, predation and lawlessness that threw rehabilitation out the

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: how not to write a letter of condolence

In Competition No. 3252, you were invited to write a letter of condolence on the mis-fortune of an acquaintance which, intentionally or not, would have the effect of lowering rather than raising the spirits. An example of how not to write a condolence letter, according to New York-based funeral director Amy Cunningham, was Nancy Mitford’s upbeat ending to a letter to her cousin, who had just lost her husband: ‘It’s nice that Decca is coming over for a long visit. Why don’t you come to Versailles with her – I would put her in a hotel and you could stay with me. Think of it.’ It doesn’t seem all that

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Nigeria’s Christians are relentlessly under attack

Dozens of Christian worshippers, including several children, were killed in a gun raid on a church in Nigeria’s Owo town on Sunday. Initial estimates place the death toll at around least 70 parishioners but that number is set to rise, given that the church in question, St Francis Catholic Church, has one of the largest parishes in the southwestern state of Ondo. Nigeria is experiencing an epidemic of terror attacks. Over the last six months, gunmen have killed 48 in the northwestern Zamfara state, massacred over 100 villagers in Plateau state, and raided trains and buses leaving dozens dead and hundreds missing. At least 3,000 Nigerians were killed and 1,500

Jay Elwes

The trouble with Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty, the French economist who shot to fame for writing a colossal work of economics that many people bought but few actually read, recently received some advice. ‘What you write is interesting,’ a friend told him, ‘but couldn’t you make it a little shorter?’ Piketty has answered the call for brevity with a book which by his standards is the equivalent of a Post-it note. It’s certainly ‘brief’ – but is it a ‘history of equality’? Alas, no. What we have instead is an eye-wateringly left-wing manifesto for dismantling economic inequality, both domestically and internationally. ‘Inequality is first of all a social, historical and political construction,’ Piketty writes, and the