Society

Saturday

J. Meirion Thomas

It’s time to lift the medical student cap

Gaining a place in medical school has always been a lottery, made even more difficult for aspiring doctors this year. For those who failed to achieve their A level conditional offer grades, this will come as a hard blow and may seem grossly unfair. Some students are entitled to feel victims of the A level grade inflation in 2020 and 2021 when exams were cancelled due to the Covid pandemic and acceptance to medical school was determined by over-generous teacher-assessed predicted grades. As the government returns the cap on the number of medical school places to approaching pre-pandemic levels, fewer places have been offered to students for 2022 entry and

Justin Bronk

How Ukraine is sabotaging Russia’s army

Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SOF) or possibly partisan fighters have conducted successfully attacks on three significant targets in occupied Crimea since 10 August. An initial attack on the Saki airbase caused a fire that quickly spread to stored ammunition and fuel, resulting in multiple huge secondary explosions. These destroyed at least nine Russian fast jets and inflicted extensive damage to the base’s facilities and surrounding buildings. On 16 August further attacks were carried out on a large ammunition and equipment depot at the strategic railroad junction town of Dzhankoiskyi and another Russian airbase at Gvardeyskoye causing further fires and secondary explosions. All three attacks were initially blamed on accidents and

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Cultural appropriation has killed modern music

It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of a woman – took a mysterious liking to all the outrageous acts I was crazy for, from Roxy Music to Sparks. Having been driven to find ever more unwholesome combos, the final straw came when, one Sunday morning, I was lying in bed when I heard the strains of my precious Velvet Underground album –

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What’s to blame for the surge in excess deaths?

From the beginning, the debate over lockdowns was skewed by the fact that Covid deaths were imminent – and any other effects from lockdown would become apparent over a longer period. But are we beginning to see that now? Over the past few months the Office for National Statistics has been recording ‘excess’ non-covid deaths of around 1,000 a week in England and Wales – that is to say deaths above and beyond the level which would be expected at this time of year. Deaths over the summer months have been more in line with the number of deaths which might be expected in a normal winter. The possibility remains

Robert Clark

The RAF’s recruitment policy could damage Britain’s defences

This week’s news that the Royal Air Force is reviewing its recruitment policies is causing quite a stir. In an astounding revelation, it emerged that all white male recruit applications are effectively to be put on pause to allow for a dramatic increase in ethnic minority and female hires. There are many, many troubling issues with this. Legality for one. There is a crucial distinction between two important definitions: positive action, defined as measures to encourage minority candidates, and positive discrimination, which includes measures to force ethnic diversity through discriminating in favour of ethnic minority individuals. The latter is illegal under the Equality Act 2010, which safeguards the protected characteristics

Thursday

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

The government is successfully tackling A-level grade inflation

After the disruption caused to education by the pandemic, this is the first year since 2019 in which school leavers have sat traditional A-level exams. Normally, 26 per cent of A-level students are marked A or higher: last year it jumped to 45 per cent after teacher-assessed grades were brought in. Now it’s 36 per cent, as per the government’s plan to mark a halfway house between last year’s grade hyperinflation and normality. But A* grades, normally reserved for the top 8 per cent of pupils, have been handed to 15 per cent. This is slightly down on last year’s 19 per cent. It is clear that the attainment gap

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the housing bubble about to burst?

There are so many house indices that they can create confusion. Last week, the Halifax house price index showed a small monthly fall. This week the government’s own index, the HPI, shows that prices rose by 7.8 per cent in the year to June, down from 12.8 per cent in the year to May. That suggests a slowing market, but then that is hardly surprising. June 2021 marked the end of Rishi Sunak’s stamp duty holiday, which created a rush of completions as buyers sought to avoid a bill of thousands of pounds. This month’s HPI marks the first time that bulge in sales has dropped out of the annual

Tim Rice

Why I still love the Edinburgh Festival

When I was in my twenties, exactly 50 Edinburgh Festivals ago, Frank Dunlop directed the first professional production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat which Andrew Lloyd Webber and I had written for a primary school concert in 1968. In the first four years of the work’s existence, it began to burrow its way into educational musical syllabi at a modest pace. This we appreciated, but in 1970 we stumbled into overnight success with our double album of Jesus Christ Superstar, and we did not thereafter give our earlier piece the attention it perhaps deserved. Superstar’s hefty impact on both record and stage did cause a certain amount of

Melissa Kite

My farmhouse nightmare

From the veranda of a small Irish farmhouse, I looked out over the sun-drenched West Cork peninsula. All I could hear was the clank of the boat yard below. ‘How much is the booking deposit on this one?’ After two days of viewing farms, I was tired of asking this question. Conveyancing is different in Ireland. As soon as you say you want to buy somewhere you have to transfer money to the estate agent to become ‘sale agreed’, and it’s often as much as 5 per cent. I had found plenty of tantalising period farmhouses with 20, 30 or even 50 acres, but I couldn’t get too excited that

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

Sole Véronique: there’s no need to fear fish and grapes

One of the joys of writing about old-fashioned food is coming across dishes that are new to me, and turn out to be such a delight that they gain a recurring role in my cooking. Of course, some I’ve encountered were already among my established regulars – boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin. Others were childhood staples – shepherd’s pie, proper rice pudding. But a few of the dishes I take into my kitchen to work with I’ve never even tried before. The first recipe I wrote for The Spectator was for blancmange. Having grown up during the brief period when milk jelly was fashionable, I’d avoided blancmange like the plague.

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The shameful truth – terrorism works

This is a bleak version of looking on the bright side, but what’s astonishing about last week’s vicious stabbing in upstate New York is that such an attack didn’t occur decades ago. However sickeningly incapacitated at present, Salman Rushdie himself would doubtless agree. Having survived unharmed for 33 years under a death sentence – endorsed by a depressingly hefty proportion of Muslims – was no mean feat. Yet that’s too long to maintain nonstop vigilance. Little wonder that Rushdie and his minders let down their guards. Coming unnervingly close to fulfilling its lethal intent, the frenzied assault at one of the world’s most painfully harmless gatherings (and I should know)

Robin Oakley

Is this the death of horse racing?

I don’t miss too many from the political world I once inhabited but I was saddened by the death of Sir Christopher Meyer, the diplomat who was famously made ambassador to Washington by Tony Blair with the instruction to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’. Chris added pepper and salt to the niceties of the diplomatic scene: after being ambassador to Germany he agreed with Mark Twain that: ‘A German joke is no laughing matter.’ I enjoyed jousting with him in his days as John Major’s press secretary and the last time I met Chris, at a Jeffrey Archer party, I reminded him of the

Jeremy Clarke

My evening as a rapacious capitalist

An isolated Provençal stone farmhouse from the outside; from the inside a comfortable English country house. Sunk into the garrigue a short distance away is an impossibly blue infinity swimming pool. My two grandsons came here direct from their tiny house in Basingstoke. Catriona was fortuitously asked to house-sit for ten days. I’m the wounded Master of the Revels. We have looked forward to their regular summer visit for months. The presiding unspoken feeling this time was that this might be the Master of the Revels’ farewell annual appearance. The boys have rarely heard a controversial opinion and they rejoice in their grandfather’s outspokenness on various delicate subjects; and in

Taki

The thrill of sailing rough seas

 Coronis I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a sailing boat and took the coward’s way out after being bashed about by an angry Poseidon and a furious Aeolus. Actually it was the wife who couldn’t take it any more and I simply went along. Sixty years of being thrown around while giving the middle finger to Aeolus and Poseidon, and during the week of another disaster, my birthday, I threw in the towel and was driven to Coronis. A deep barometric low caused high winds with gusts of 11 to 12 Beaufort. My captain is something of a

The Spectator

Letters: Blame the regulators, not the water companies

No competition Sir: Ross Clark’s compelling critique of the water companies comes to the wrong conclusion (‘Water isn’t working’, 13 August). He is right to say that water privatisation has been a failure, but this was inevitable given the nature of the industry – a monopoly providing an essential public service. Clark’s suggestion that there should be more competition is unworkable for the simple reason that there is too much fixed investment stretching back to the 19th century and we all have only one pipe into our homes. There are parallels with the rail industry, where a quarter of a century of trying to introduce competition has resulted in a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Inflation soars as Boris moves out of No. 10

Home The annual rate of inflation rose to 10.1 per cent, its highest since 1982. Average wages rose by 4.7 per cent between April and June, but inflation in that quarter left average workers 3 per cent less well-off than before. The supermarket Iceland was to offer customers interest-free loans of between £25 and £100, repayable at £10 a week, to help them buy food. Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, called for £29 billion to be spent on freezing energy prices for six months for all consumers, rich and poor, partly to be paid for by extending the windfall tax on oil and gas. Railway workers

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Tory leadership acrostics

In Competition No. 3262, you were invited to submit a poem on behalf of Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss in which they set out their stall, the first letters of each line inadvertently spelling out an inappropriate word or phrase. As the Tory leadership contest limps towards its conclusion, you crafted some muscular last-minute pitches on behalf of the two hopefuls. The winners below snaffle £25 each. Look! I’m the face the country needs! You’ve seen the photos – loads! – they’re great! In every one I’m She-Who-Leads Negotiating for the State!  Grand deals! Delivered round the world! My Cheddar cheese! What triumph! God! You wait! Just watch my plans

The Spectator

Somewhere XII – Solution

30 July is Independence Day in Vanuatu in MELANESIA (23D). Its capital city is PORT VILA (39/16), one of its volcanoes is LOPEVI (30), an indigenous reptile is the FLOWERPOT SNAKE (11/36) and its national anthem is YUMI YUMI YUMI (4/43A/43D). Its former name was THE NEW HEBRIDES (diagonally from 1) which must be shaded. Apostrophe: NAINSEL’ (40) First prize Gerry Fairweather, Layer Marney, Essex Runners-up Michael Debenham, Shrewsbury; Sid Field, Stockton-on-Tees

Pabulum

2569: Anadad

Round the grid from 1 runs a quotation (1,3,4.2,5,3,5,3,2,6) from a play followed by the dramatist’s name (two words). Two pairs of unclued lights give the name of the speaker and a sparring partner. Elsewhere, ignore an accent. Across 9 Romeo sharing bathroom with a woolly bear? (5) 10 The Enemy’s former sobriquet (3,4) 11 Regrets having to discard poet’s jewels (7) 13 Brown adult tree shrew (4) 15 Triple Martini drunk with endless glee (10) 16 Light shedders maybe no bishop makes resentful (8) 19 Very silly fish (5) 20 The turf, say, found next to yard by Mark (7) 21 In a twist, wasting month (5) 23 Gathering

Luke McShane

No. 716

Black to play. A variation from McShane-Hamitevici, Chennai 2022. I avoided this position, but lost in a different way. White would be three pawns up, but facing a fierce attack. Which move wins the game for Black? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 August. 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 Qxh7+! Kxh7 2 Ng5+ Kg8 3 h7 mate Last week’s winner Wendy Lott, Warnham, West Sussex