Society

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Who’ll stop the art attackers?

One problem of being mugged, I am told, is not just the event itself but the dreams of violence that follow. If a thug relieves you of your wallet and you hand it over without a fight, for some time you will keep dreaming about what you might have achieved had the mugger confronted you when you had a gun or chainsaw to hand. Or if you had studied martial arts and could do over the punk in the style of Jackie Chan. I must admit that similar dreams now haunt me whenever I see the Just Stop Oil protestors. Needless to say, their cause is wrong as well as

Melissa Kite

A boiler service – spaghetti western-style

The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came down the track. If this boiler service had a theme tune it would be Ennio Morricone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. The engineers parked up and got out of their vans in a cloud of dust. One was tall and lean, a good enough ringer for Clint Eastwood, given the circumstances, while the other was short and stout, making an ideal supporting character. They strode towards my house grim-faced and I opened the door. ‘Gosh, you’ve come mob-handed,’ I said, and Clint nodded. The little fella looked scared.

Dot Wordsworth

‘Pinch’ has long packed a punch

Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking, breathing and possibly pinching in 1190, and in 1220 in Oxfordshire Ralph Pinchehaste was repenting at leisure. When William Golding wrote the painful Pincher Martin, he knew that any sailor called Martin was nicknamed Pincher. A likely eponym is Admiral Sir William Martin, 4th baronet (1801-95), who headed a drive for discipline. In his biographer’s judgment, ‘his insistence on obedience was not always agreeable to captains and commanders, but if not loved, he was feared, and the work was done’. It seems to me that pinching was highly Victorian. Dickens,

Bruce Anderson

My memorable night at the Carlton Club

‘Club’ is a four-letter word. Whenever a club is mentioned in the press, it will inevitably be portrayed as a sinister meeting place where men gather in secret to plot against the common weal. If only. The main point about all clubs is that they are fun. That is true in St James’s. It is also true in the working-men’s clubs of the north and Midlands. That said, the Carlton Club could claim to be a special case, although anyone entering its portals in the hope of coming across louche behaviour would be disappointed (almost always). But it could be regarded as a trustee of the Conservative party. As such,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I get my cleaner to put everything back in its proper place?

Q. This year once again my company took a small group of clients to lunch at Royal Ascot. Our guests included a couple of former clients we asked along for old times’ sake. These have both written not only to thank us but to say we can count them in for next year’s lunch as they ‘wouldn’t miss it for the world’. Fond as we are of these former clients, to be brutally honest we can’t afford to have them every year as we need to invite current spenders. Any thoughts, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. Tell them they were a great asset at the lunch and their

Toby Young Toby Young

My admiration for the other Toby Young

It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert telling the search engine to send me an email every time my name popped up on the internet, but this Toby turned out to be a 47-year-old woman who was running the dog rehabilitation programme at a correctional facility in Leavenworth, Kansas. The reason she hit the headlines is because she fell in love with John Manard, a 25-year-old inmate serving a life sentence for murder, and smuggled him out of the prison in a dog crate. They went on the lam together for 12 days and were the subject

The Spectator

How has the Wimbledon prize money changed over time?

Blooming huge Botanists discovered the largest species of giant water lily at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with leaves more than 10ft wide. The plant with the largest leaves is the Raffia regalis, a palm whose foliage can grow up to 82ft long and 10ft wide. The largest living organism is a colony of identical aspen named Pando (‘I spread’ in Latin) in Utah which covers 108 acres. A wild fig tree in Mpumalanga, South Africa has the longest roots on record at 400ft. Net profits Wimbledon comes to an end this weekend with the men’s and ladies’ finals. How has the total prize money for the singles championship changed

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The truth about life as a gay Tory MP

Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a dressing-gown ‘like a pound shop Harvey Weinstein, with his chest and belly hanging out’ to massage the neck of an Olympic rower? Such are the allegations. ‘What,’ you may think, ‘is the world coming to? It was never like this in my day!’ How wrong you’d be. It was very much like this in the 20th century. There is in fact something tragically old-fashioned about the whole story. This is how it used to be for many when I was an MP, and there were dozens of other gay Tories

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The pernicious creep of the 20mph zone

‘Twenty is plenty’ say the passive-aggressive road signs as you drive very slowly through 20mph zones all over Britain. The slogan is accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a snail. Then you get a frowny-frowny-frowny electronic sign and you slow from 25 to 20 to make it turn into a smiley face. That’s how we’ve been softened up: with a cocktail of the sanctimonious and the kindergarten. As I crawl along the empty dual carriageway of Park Lane late in the evening, where the speed limit has been reduced from its previous 40mph to the now blanket central-London limit of 20, I hiss: ‘No, twenty is not plenty. Twenty is

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Nick Bostrom: How can we be certain a machine isn’t conscious?

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off. Lemoine declared that what’s sometimes called ‘the singularity’ had arrived. The story was for the most part treated as entertainment. Lemoine’s sketchy military record and background as a ‘mystic Christian priest’ were excavated, jokes about HAL 9000 dusted off, and the whole thing more or less filed

James Graham

Boris, Sherwood and the politics of the past

It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt like the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy and yet the curtain just won’t fall. This week saw one of those rare electric nights of drama when a prime minister looks set to be toppled. At least, they used to be rare. In the first 25 years of my life I had only three prime ministers. The past chaotic decade looks to be about to produce its fourth. The axe hovered in the air for Johnson, but was prevented from falling – at least at the time of writing –

Robin Oakley

Why racing needs Frankie Dettori

Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was rescued by a Mr Dettori. Mrs Oakley’s relief was tempered only by my disappointment that our saviour wasn’t Frankie or even a relative. This time it looks as though it is Frankie, the world’s favourite sardine, who might need rescue. Imagine Morecambe splitting with Wise or Torvill walking out on Dean. The racing world has focused on little else since John Gosden announced, after openly criticising some of his stable jockey’s rides at Royal Ascot, that he and Frankie Dettori are taking a sabbatical. John Gosden is the epitome of

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of a children’s choir

All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those two states. By six o’clock the temperature had relented from 38 degrees to a comparatively easier 27 and I heard ice cubes tinkling into a glass. Catriona called up the stairs, offering gin. I said I’d rather a pot of tea and that His Lordship would rise and come downstairs for it. So I put on my shorts, went down and joined her out on the terrace for the six o’clock shape-changer. For a pleasant change Catriona had no evening invitations or work commitments. We sat side by side sipping

Taki

The delights of two-timing

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after they chose the same boyfriend. They were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back then such things were commonplace, and it was Paris after all. Both ladies are still alive and now quite old, Giselle a widow, Kiki a princess. There were many other beauties, of course, but those two

Wednesday

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 9 July 2022

In one respect, it would be so much easier to play a game like poker or chess than bridge; if you play badly you only embarrass yourself – you don’t have partners or teammates to worry about. Mistakes at the bridge table are doubly painful when we imagine our partners rolling their eyes, or our teammates moaning behind our backs – and we’re not being paranoid, they probably are. But we shouldn’t be too thin-skinned; it’s important to remember that even the best players screw up. If you want to feel better about yourself, all you need to do is go online and kibitz some of the major tournaments. During

Daisy Dunn

Just Stop Oil’s protest is doomed to fail

The eco-mob is at it again. Members of the protest group Just Stop Oil have progressed from blocking fuel terminals to disrupting the British Grand Prix and gluing themselves to the frames of paintings in galleries and museums across the country. To which anyone with even the vaguest recollection of the traffic-stopping stunts of Insulate Britain must sigh, ‘Not very original’. Last Wednesday, a pair of activists stuck themselves to the frame of a nineteenth-century landscape by Horatio McCulloch at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. The following day, another pair selected the decidedly more famous ‘Peach Trees in Blossom’ by Vincent van Gogh at London’s Courtauld Gallery for the sticky-fingered

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

I stand with Macy Gray

There’s a new heretic in town. It’s the great Macy Gray. Ms Gray has uttered that most blasphemous of beliefs – that a man can never become a woman, even if he has his bits lopped off. Cue the pointing of fingers and howls of ‘BIGOT!’. If this were the 15th century this is the point at which Ms Gray would be marched off to the stake. It was on Piers Morgan’s Talk TV show that Gray came out as someone who understands biology – a dangerous thing to do in the 21st century. In her soulful, plain-speaking style she said:  ‘Just because you go change your parts doesn’t make

Gus Carter Gus Carter

The rise of the neo-Luddites

Yesterday, a pair of Just Stop Oil protesters glued themselves to a John Constable painting in the National Gallery, covering The Hay Wain with a printout of an alternative vision of England. The cart crossing the River Stour in Suffolk is perhaps Constable’s most famous painting. But instead of a bucolic, biscuit tin Albion, Just Stop Oil’s version shows the Stour tarmacked over, a belching power plant in the distance and a commercial jet overhead. The message is clear: our modern world is sick. I have some sympathy with these student activists, or at least I envy their certainty. Their view of the world is simple: bad things like fossil fuels,

Monday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Chechen warlord Kadyrov mocks Zelensky in spoof video

A strange video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is currently circulating online. In it, he sits at his presidential table, dressed in his trademark khaki t-shirt. Staring straight down the camera, he addresses the Ukrainian people: ‘Dear citizens!’ At first glance, it could really be one of Zelensky’s nightly addresses. Except, almost immediately, you notice the meaty disembodied hand gripping him by the left shoulder. With apparent distress, Zelensky continues, announcing the surrender of Ukraine on ‘land, sea and air’. The meaty arm shakes him to get him to spit the words out, committing Ukraine to ‘complete denazification’ within a month of signing. Kadyrov is mocking Zelensky and the Ukrainian