Society

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Elegy in a country churchyard

‘I love this old watering can,’ said my sister, sprinkling the miniature rose. ‘Though I do worry about soaking Mum. How far down is she? Do you remember?’ I said I thought about five foot. The country churchyard is sheltered by hedges and trees and the graves are decently spaced. On Mothering Sunday mown grass was scattered across the gravel path and graves and a chill sea mist billowed like smoke off the sea. Two months before Covid struck, I’d thrown my handful of soil in after her. This was my first visit since that day. The earth was still broken and heaped but now there was a grey headstone

The Spectator

Letters: To achieve net zero, we need to go nuclear

Nuclear future Sir: It is refreshing to see Martin Vander Weyer note that, properly and fully costed, nuclear power is cheaper than power from wind and solar sources (Any other business, 26 March). That is because, as he says, ‘wind and solar require excess capacity and battery storage to compensate for periods of low output’. It cannot be predicted when those periods of low output will occur, and the proportion of our electricity provided by wind at any one time can be anywhere between 2 per cent and 40 per cent. Martin supports the aim to meet 25 per cent of UK energy needs using nuclear by the net-zero deadline

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 02 April 2022

I don’t play rubber bridge nearly as much as I used to, but I still enjoy the occasional game at TGR’s. The stakes normally range from £10 to £30 per hundred. Although I play at the lower end, it’s still a nerve-racking amount, especially when cutting into a game with top-class regulars like Gunnar Hallberg and Robert Sheehan. But this is no place for sissies – the bridge is fast; people get heated; and a big loss can feel a bit like getting mugged. Many years ago, the late great Oswald Jacoby tried to warn a friend against playing rubber bridge. The man responded, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?

Taki

My lack of schadenfreude worries me

Something has been bothering me of late, and that is my total lack of schadenfreude. The malicious pleasure at someone’s misfortune never counted a lot, but it’s now totally absent, and it worries me. Take, for example, the case of John Bercow, the preening popinjay show-off whose physical stature matches the respect he earned as Speaker. I can’t think of anyone I found more irritating, unfair and unfit for high office, yet now that he has been branded a liar, a bully and someone unwelcome even at Annabel’s, I feel no particular joy. His pompous self-regard brought about his comeuppance, but I have been denied the pleasure that Gore Vidal

Bruce Anderson

War, wine and the brilliance of Beychevelle

If only toasts and good wishes were weapons of war. At every serious repast I have attended since the invasion began, someone has raised a glass to the heroes – and heroines – of Ukraine. The rest of us have responded with a blend of solemnity and moist-eyed emotion. One’s emotions are strange. I can read about the deaths of warriors on the battlefield, now riding with the Valkyries on their way to Valhalla, and merely respond with a dry-eyed salutation. But hearing of some old girl who had been living in hunger and squalor and terror in a cellar for days and indeed weeks, with the regular crump of

Toby Young Toby Young

My £50-a-week chocolate habit

As I’ve got older my tastes have generally become less refined. During my youth I dutifully slogged through Kafka, Camus and Sartre, but my current bedtime reading is Sharpe’s Trafalgar by Bernard Cornwell. With movies, I used to feel obliged to watch subtitled masterpieces like La Règle du jeu and Le Salaire de la Peur, but now I’m perfectly happy with the latest Marvel blockbuster. However, when it comes to food and wine, I’ve become more snobbish – insufferably so. My last meal on death row would be the twice-baked cheese soufflé from Le Gavroche washed down with a bottle of Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru. For some reason, this is particularly

The Spectator

Why Boris Johnson should not resign over partygate

Afew weeks ago it seemed that the issue of Downing Street parties over lockdown had been usurped by a more serious matter: what to do about the invasion by a nuclear power of a neighbouring European state. But now partygate is back, fuelled by the news that the Metropolitan Police has issued 20 fixed penalty notices and may announce another tranche of fines at a later date. Some of the heat has left the whole affair. Several of the letters written to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, demanding a Conservative leadership election were withdrawn at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The leader of the Scottish

Christopher Howse

Why the destruction of Ukraine’s churches matters

One small, deadly incident in the Ukrainian war proved memorable because it involved the ordinary things of life. A mother and two children trying to leave the town of Irpin on foot on 6 March died from Russian shelling. Their suitcases fell beside them and, miserably, a pet dog carrier. They lay on an ordinary road that could be in Surrey, on the steps of a memorial to Soviet dead from the second world war. That spot is opposite a little row of bells under a tiled roof in the grounds of the Ukrainian Orthodox church of St George. A neat hoarding was visible in 2015 on the building next

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In defence of healthy opposition

Glasses chinked. From massive chandeliers, lights glittered beneath the high vaulted ceiling; heroic statuary around the carved stone walls stared eyelessly down; heraldic flags draped from brass rods; and a sense of history and of – how shall I say? – consequence hung in the air. We were dining at the Guildhall in the City of London, and from my place at the top table, flanked by judges, eminent barristers, our host Lord Grabiner QC of One Essex Court chambers, and the justice minister Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, one could survey the whole hall: perhaps 400 of the brightest and best in the English legal world. These were not, for

Douglas Murray

How should Prince William respond to questions about slavery?

It is uncanny how swiftly British culture imitates the worst of American culture. Take Whoopi Goldberg, who distinguished herself again last week on The View. For anyone who does not know, The View is a long-running US TV show in which a collection of the dimmest women in America are invited to opine angrily on things they know nothing about. Goldberg is a long-term resident of this asylum, though she recently had to take a break from the show after declaring that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race, was some white-on-white thing, and in any case (as a woman of colour) didn’t concern her. Her suspension over, Goldberg

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What would have happened in the Falklands if Thatcher had been a man?

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands 40 years ago. I had joined the Daily Telegraph as a reporter in 1979 and was by then a leader writer. The Falklands was the first really seismic story I had encountered. What made it so exciting was that it was both genuinely absurd and genuinely important. The absurdity lay in Argentina’s vainglory. It violently claimed a right to the islands which not one single Falklands resident accepted. Its caudillo, General Galtieri, was from the comic-opera school of Latin American dictators, covered with gold braid and frequently drunk. In his invasion broadcast, he invoked the Virgin Mary. But Our Lady wisely ducked the contest, leaving

Melissa Kite

Covid has given me a superpower

Since recovering from Covid, I seem to have quietly been developing supernatural powers. At first I thought I had simply lost my sense of taste and smell, but a year on the situation is more complicated than that, I am starting to realise. I can’t really taste or smell anything in the conventional sense. If I sniff and sniff, with my nose over a cafetière of coffee, or a pan of bubbling Bolognese sauce, I get nothing. When the builder boyfriend comes home in the evening, I call up the stairs from the lower ground floor kitchen: ‘What does this smell like to you?’ I burn everything I don’t stand

Dot Wordsworth

When did brothers and sisters become ‘siblings’?

I never cared much for the word sibling, though I hardly knew why. The reason must be that it was introduced by a scientist, Karl Pearson, who in 1900 wrote of the ‘inconvenience of our language having preserved no word for either member of a pair of offspring of either or both sexes from the same parent’. So he reintroduced ‘a good Anglo-Saxon word’, and it stuck. It’s not quite that simple, for cultural anthropologists had, a decade earlier, adopted sib for a kindred group, apparently from the parallel German word Sippe. My aversion to sibling was merely its artificiality. We never used to use it in speech, but would

John R. MacArthur

The descent of New York

New York When Will Smith strode to the stage and slapped Chris Rock, I was surprised by how many of my friends thought the violence had been staged to rescue the Academy Awards from its years-long ratings decline. I instantly recognised it as authentic rage, not because I know anything about Hollywood or Will Smith, but because I witness similar ugliness so frequently on the New York City subway. For me, Smith’s outburst was shockingly familiar – emblematic of a simmering, pre-volcanic atmosphere in the country that no one seems to be examining or attempting to explain. As New York emerges from its third wave of Covid, an exceptionally creepy

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Should the young pay less tax than the old?

In evolutionary terms, it is obvious why we get more conservative with age. Two strong forces, acting in the same direction, lead us not to bet on rank outsiders when we’re nearing the last race of the day. First, older people have more experience to draw on when making decisions: if you already know what you like, the need to experiment is much less. But that’s not all. The elderly also have far less time remaining to benefit from experimentation. If you happen on a new cuisine, band, social circle or holiday destination in your twenties, you have many decades to profit from the discovery. Someone in their sixties might

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I deal with my book club’s dietary requirements?

Q. I live in the Hampshire countryside, in a lovely apartment where I have the use of an old walled garden which I share with the occupant of the adjacent apartment. My issue is with my neighbour, an elderly eco-warrior. His latest crusade involves building a variety of hedgehog hotels scattered about the garden. My subtle suggestions that Mr and Mrs Tiggywinkle would struggle to scale the heights of the garden walls have fallen upon deaf ears. To make matters worse, Mr Samuel Whiskers and his wife Anna Maria have now taken up residence in one of these five-star abodes, and I worry that before long there will be the

Linda Gamlin

The scourge of urban gulls

Early this year, five dead herring gulls were discovered on a Cornish beach, and when tested it was found they had bird flu. This should have provoked serious concern: these were the first gulls to be found carrying bird flu in Britain. But because of the war and because we’re sick of epidemics, it was largely ignored. The dead gulls matter because gulls live among us. Some 75 per cent of our herring gulls are now urban. There are 100,000 to 180,000 breeding on rooftops in England, according to the 2020 national census. Tim Newark sounded the alarm in these pages that year, but since then the problem has grown

Peter Jones

Could today’s Hollywood stars have made it in ancient Greece?

The Oscar frenzy spent, it is worth reflecting on how easy writers and actors have it these days. The ancient Greeks invented our idea of acted drama, and the conventions were tough. Here are the main ones. In myth-based tragedies, for example, all the speaking parts – young and old, male and female – were played, and occasionally sung too, by only three fully masked male actors (one play had 11 speaking parts – work that out!). There was also a ‘chorus’ – 12 or 15 actors, all masked, singing and dancing in unison between episodes, though the leader could converse with the main characters. Of low social status, they

The Spectator

How much of a litre of fuel is now tax?

Common knowledge Tensions in the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to Jamaica led some to speculate that the Commonwealth might not long survive the present Queen’s reign. Who came up with the idea of naming the successor organisation to the British Empire after a term first used by Oliver Cromwell? – Lord Rosebery is recorded as referring to a ‘Commonwealth of nations’ in 1884, a decade before he became prime minister. – The term was first used officially in the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, which established a federation of British colonies. – The idea of a British Commonwealth first surfaced at the 1926 Imperial Conference.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Partygate penalties, Oscars drama and Dairy Milk shrinks

Home Twenty fixed-penalty fines were issued after the police inquiry into Downing Street parties that broke Covid rules, but the Metropolitan Police refused to say who was fined for which events. Peter Hebblethwaite, the chief executive of P&O Ferries, admitted to a parliamentary committee that the company had broken the law by sacking 800 workers without consulting unions. He said that foreign replacements would earn an average of £5.50 per hour, which is below the British minimum wage. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, said he’d change the law to stop that. Lord Grade of Yarmouth, a former BBC chairman, was announced as the preferred candidate to be chairman of the