Society

Thursday

Peter Jones

How John Bercow could have learned to control his temper

The ex-Speaker John Bercow has been found to be a serial bully and serial liar. The ancients would have had views on both counts. Bercow’s bullying seems to have arisen from his uncontrollable temper. The philosopher Seneca (an adviser to Nero) painted a memorable picture of the physical results: ‘The eyes blaze and flash, the whole face is crimson, blood surges up his heart, the lips quiver, the teeth clench, the hair bristles, breathing is forced and harsh…’ (Seneca would have suggested showing Bercow a mirror). The result was a total and shameful loss of self-control and of judgment, and refusal to face facts: ‘However much truth is piled up

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The invasion of Ukraine has exposed the West’s impotence

When the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the House of Commons recently, he was afforded two standing ovations from MPs, both lasting about 40 seconds, before and after he spoke. He was probably used to it, having received a similar reception when addressing the European Parliament a week before. On both occasions, then, he was engulfed by warm, moist waves of adulation and respect. On both occasions he also asked for important, difficult stuff from the people he was addressing and didn’t get any of it – just lots of applause and legislators delicately dabbing their eyes before quickly averting them. If Le Creuset saucepans had been allowed into the

Douglas Murray

The West has rediscovered its purpose

Over recent days I have been reflecting on War and Peace. Or Special Operation and Peace as it must now be known in Russia, unless you want to spend 15 years in prison. And I am reminded once again of how utterly unpredictable war always is. On this occasion almost every-thing that people imagined just a couple of weeks back has been completely inverted. In no particular order the list includes the following. A few weeks ago Vladimir Putin looked like a strongman. Today he looks like a weak and deluded leader. A few weeks ago Volodymyr Zelensky looked like an ex-comedian who might soon be out of his depth,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I avoid splitting the bill?

Q. These days I am on a tight budget while many of my friends are still able to spend freely. Often when I meet someone for lunch or dinner they eat and drink far more than I do (I am careful to eat only what I can afford) yet they still presume I will be up for splitting the bill down the middle. They are not doing this out of meanness – just not thinking about how broke I am compared to in the past. I live in dread of quibbling. What do you suggest? — F.J., London SW6 A. Wait till the bill arrives, then pre-empt the presumption by

Francis Fukuyama

I’ll stick my neck out: Russia may be heading for an outright defeat

Skopje, North Macedonia In the West, it’s tempting to believe that revulsion at Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is universal, and that he’s receiving support only from a handful of miscreant countries like Venezuela, Syria and Iran. I wish this were true. I’m in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, where there’s much sympathy for Putin, which has only increased since the invasion began. This is despite the government in North Macedonia being pro-western and pretty decent when compared with its predecessors and many of its neighbours. A Russian defeat will make possible a ‘new birth of freedom’ The reasons for North Macedonia’s Putin sympathy are complex. The country’s largest

Nathan Risser

The decline and fall of Durham university

When Mark Hillery – Durham University’s largest donor – cut his funding for the institution last month over ongoing Covid-19 restrictions, the students of Collingwood College had the most to worry about. Hillery had previously endowed his alma mater with a £5.6 million arts centre, a shiny new gym and a revamp of its junior common room. He was also known for returning once a year to attend a formal dinner and pick up a bar tab that regularly exceeded £10,000. Double Grey Goose Red Bulls were a popular drink on those jubilant evenings in the Stag’s Head. But the Durham of recent years is being fuelled by a stronger

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The magical kitschiness of Black Forest gateau

Kitsch is something of my stock-in-trade. And it doesn’t get more kitsch than Black Forest gateau. Pots of cream, pints of cherry schnapps, a storm of chocolate shavings and some very baroque decoration: it ticks all my old-school boxes. Of course, we are very familiar with the Black Forest gateau’s – BFG to its friends – punchy flavours. Chocolate, cherry, cream. What a trio! Now so classic that we barely give it a second thought. But where did this particular combination of ingredients first come from? I like the (unsubstantiated)theory that it harks back to a traditional costume worn by women in the Black Forest: dark chocolate for their black

The Spectator

The soft censorship of the Online Safety Bill

The arrest of a reporter who held up a poster during a Russian news broadcast criticising the war in Ukraine reminds us how dictatorships operate. One of Vladimir Putin’s first acts on the home front, after sending his tanks over the Ukrainian border, was to pass a law specifying jail terms of up to 15 years for anyone who dares to disseminate ‘fake news’ – i.e. anything which contradicts his government’s lies – about the Russian war effort. Britain is a very long way from that kind of suppression of speech. If a publication wishes to condemn Boris Johnson for his handling of the Ukraine war, Covid or for anything

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Why Boris can’t blame rising energy prices on Ukraine

Are you ready to take cold showers to do your bit for the war effort? Protestors in Berlin have been holding up placards suggesting they’d sooner do so than use Russia’s gas. Boris Johnson has called on the British public to make similar sacrifices, solemnly telling us that we need to drop cheap Russian energy and ‘accept that such a move will be painful’. The government will spend billions to help ease that pain, he says, but ‘none of us can afford to carry on like this for long’. On the surface, it sounds like the start of an honest conversation: telling voters that the cost of living squeeze we’re

Timothy Garton Ash

How Ukraine can win

If Ukraine lasts for another thousand years, people will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ The Ukrainians’ magnificent defiance will shape their country’s image in the world for generations to come, as the lone stand led by Winston Churchill did for Britain. But what almost certainly awaits Ukrainians in the next few days is far worse than what the British went through in 1940. They are about to face a Russian campaign of long-distance bombardment and siege to try to break their will to resist, through fear, hunger, thirst, cold, sickness and all the other consequences of indiscriminate destruction. Mariupol has already been devastated. Now the Chechen butcher Ramzan

Ursula Buchan

In defence of slugs: gastropods are seriously misunderstood

Slugs and snails are the bane of every gardener who tries to grow strawberries, leafy and tuberous vegetables, flowering bulbs and soft-shooted perennials. But Britain’s gastropods are ‘misunderstood’, according to Dr Andrew Salisbury, principal entomologist at the Royal Horticultural Society, which announced this month that it will no longer class slugs and snails as ‘pests’. That is because – along with earthworms, springtails and woodlice – they clear up dead plant and animal matter in the garden and thus balance their perfidy with benevolence. I am no slug-hater. I find them more fascinating than repellent and am especially intrigued by the great grey slug and its un-usual mating habits (look

The Spectator

Letters: Ukraine’s perpetual struggle against Russia

Two Russias? Sir: I have been turning Owen Matthews’s article (‘Putin’s rage’, 5 March) over in my mind since I read it, and I feel compelled to respond. I am married to a Ukrainian, so I have some insight into the relevant history. After the Wall came down, my wife’s uncle Stephan visited us in England. He had spent 20 years in a Soviet gulag because his brother – my father-in-law – had fought against the Russians for a free Ukraine in the 1940s, during what they still call the Great Patriotic War. Unable to imprison him, they took his brother instead. Recalling the perpetual struggle waged by Ukraine against

The Spectator

Who coined the name ‘Londongrad’?

Thamesky Prospekt Who first coined the place name ‘Londongrad’? The name was used in a BBC sitcom called Comrade Dad, written by Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent, and first broadcast in 1984. It was set in a Britain of 1999 when the Soviet Union had annexed the country. However, the first use of the term has been traced to an obscure columnist, Senator Soaper, writing for the Montana Standard in 1931. Ridiculing George Bernard Shaw’s fondness for communism, he gave Shaw’s address as ‘Whitehall Courtsky, Londongrad’. Whitehall Court, on the Embankment, has become a favourite of Russian investors. Igor Shuvalov, deputy prime minister of Russia between 2008 and 2018, is

Dot Wordsworth

The ancient origins of ‘doomscrolling’

In 2019, Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’. I was surprised then to find that the doublet doom and gloom dated only from 1947, in the play Finian’s Rainbow. Three years after the 2016 referendum, Project Fear was still being applied to Brexit. Since then, to buy time in combating coronavirus, another project was launched to instil fear in the population. So, if they could, they stayed at home, petrified of Covid-19, and it proved hard to tempt them out again. Now Brexit and the pandemic are dwarfed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since Vladimir Putin hinted he wouldn’t mind using nuclear weapons, Joe Biden

Bruce Anderson

A toast to the platonic ideal of diplomatic intellect

My dear friend Richard Stow is a most congenial fellow. A serious financial entrepreneur, he is also a clubman and an oenophile. Over a sound meal and good bottles, he enjoys convening a group of old muckers. They are all well into the respectabilities of middle life. Some of them have already featured in the Honours List. Others are heading in that direction. But Richard still manages to evoke the atmosphere of an undergraduate dining club. Begone, dull care. So when he proposed a dinner with a diplomatic theme and some estimable bottles, I was delighted. These are times when care has ceased to be dull: heart-rending is more accurate.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is Putin really losing?

I remember my father telling me about Imre Nagy’s final broadcast before the Hungarian leader was taken by the Russians after they crushed his revolution in November 1956. He recalled listening as Nagy’s voice, often faint, came in and out of reception. He said: ‘This fight is the fight for freedom by the Hungarian people against the Russian intervention, and it is possible that I shall only be able to stay at my post for one or two hours. The whole world will see how the Russian armed forces, contrary to all treaties and conventions, are crushing the resistance of the Hungarian people. They will also see how they are

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The link between motorway service stations and shortages of PPE

I spend quite a lot of time attacking what I call ‘motorway service station’ path design. More attentive readers of The Spectator may remember this from 2019: ‘You are tooling down a motorway at 75mph and decide to stop for a break… Once off the slip road you face a barrage of signs: Food Court/Fuel/Lorries/Caravans/Coaches/Travelodge/Costa Drive-Thru, each pointing to a different fork. If your attention briefly wavers and you miss one of these bifurcations, you will find yourself hopelessly trapped in the lorry park with no means of return. This is probably what happened to Lord Lucan.’ Evolutionary processes create many answers to the same question, whereas top-down design provides

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Biden is right: the crypto world needs to be controlled

President Biden’s executive order ‘Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets’ won praise on all sides, an unfamiliar experience for one routinely dismissed these days as lacking the vigour or grip needed for presidential leadership. The order does little more than call for cross-government research into all things crypto. But in doing so it pleased bitcoin fanciers, NFT collectors and their ilk by acknowledging that their $3 trillion market is here to stay – while also giving comfort to sceptics who’d prefer to see crypto dealings brought under regulatory control like any other financial activity, rather than abandoned to the libertarian anarchy favoured by ardent cryptonauts. But that latter fantasy can’t

Toby Young Toby Young

My football analogy for the free speech debate

By the time you read this the new draft of the Online Safety Bill should be on the DCMS website. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have a pretty good idea of what’s in it because I’m one of dozens who’ve been urging ministers and officials behind the scenes to strengthen the free speech protections in the bill. For those not up to speed, the aim of the bill (in the words of Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State at DCMS) is ‘to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online’, i.e., turn the internet into a safe space. The white paper that preceded the

Robert Hardman

Prince Philip’s links with the Russian imperial court

The late Duke of Edinburgh would have had so much to say on the abomination being wreaked upon Ukraine. Prince Philip was our last living link with the Russian imperial court. He enjoyed childhood encounters with a killer of Rasputin. He also played his part in trying to bring post-communist Russia round to western ways during that brief, chaotic millennial window of opportunity. So did the Queen, who still serves tea from the samovar Boris Yeltsin gave her on her state visit to Russia, though she would rather forget the four days in 2003 when the Blair government imposed Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin on her as house guests. Prince Michael