Society

Thursday

Boris Kálnoky

‘It’s in my blood’: Why Prince Charles loves Transylvania

For the first time since the pandemic, Prince Charles has returned to Transylvania. When he visits the small village of Miclosoara, or, as the Hungarian locals who live here know it, Miklósvár, the weather is perfect. There’s a small breeze and a light rain has fallen, but the sun is now out. ‘Look at that!’ someone exclaims in surprise and points a finger in the air. It’s a rare sight: over the mossy rooftops, an angry jay is chasing off a stork. The storks returned weeks ago, and while some are still busy perfecting their nests most already have chicks to feed. Prince Charles looks around. The bird must be

Mervyn King

The Bank of England has to act to prevent higher inflation

To Windsor for Garter Day, the first since 2019. With a strong voice and smiles for us all, the Queen presided over the investiture of three new Knights – Tony Blair, Baroness Amos and, as a Royal Lady of the Order, the Duchess of Cornwall – in the small Throne Room. After luncheon with the royal family in the Waterloo Chamber, we processed to St George’s Chapel for a service during which the new Knights were formally installed. It is a splendid pageant appreciated by the large crowd of onlookers who look with amazement at our outfits. We wear morning dress, garter star, a dark-blue velvet mantle, a rather heavy

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Can this Made in Chelsea star harness the power of nuclear fusion?

Long involvement in The Spectator’s Economic Innovator Awards has taught me that entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Even so, when I met the founder of a British rocket-science venture called Pulsar Fusion, I was looking for a bespectacled boffin rather than someone I might have presumed was a musical-theatre actor – or a star of one of those TV reality shows populated only by the young, fit and blond, such as Made In Chelsea. Well, guess what: 35-year-old Richard Dinan actually was a star of Made in Chelsea and he has the teeth, hair and cheekbones to prove it. But he’s also been a serial start-up entrepreneur since

Dot Wordsworth

Have we made a hash of rehash?

My husband put one foot forward at an angle to the other and grasped his left hand with his right. ‘Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros,’ he declaimed. He was quoting Juvenal, the seventh satire (‘rehashed cabbage is the death of wretched teachers’), though I don’t think he could manage much more from any Juvenal satire, except perhaps ‘bread and circuses’, panem et circenses, from the tenth. Boris Johnson was the object of his borrowed remark. Juvenal, speaking of the poor pay of literary men, came to the unprofitability of teaching rhetoric when pupils keep saying the same thing in the same words. I had thought, perhaps because I’d heard my

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why neither Andrew Neil nor I can be part of the Establishment

Even before the ECHR injunction, the bishops had issued their anathema. All 25 of them in the House of Lords told the Times that flying asylum-seekers to accommodation in Rwanda ‘should shame us a nation’. I can see reasonable objections to the policy, but is it really a source of shame? Most countries try to check the flow of refugees and most voters agree. They pay other countries to help them do this. In 2020, Turkey contained about four million refugees from Syria. It is still being paid by the EU to keep most of them out of the EU. The housing Britain is funding in Rwanda looks (though one

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: my pool guests are outstaying their welcome

Q. A close friend, who has lost most of her income in recent years, has done something disfiguring to a front tooth – it looks as if she’s used Polyfilla to repair it herself. She tries to never smile so no one will see, but sadly it is highly visible. I’d be happy to pay for a dentist for her but she is proud and would hate me to patronise her. – Name and address withheld A. Collude with your own dentist. If the dentist is the right sort, you may be able to spin your friend a yarn – for example that, for the purposes of teaching junior dentists,

Toby Young Toby Young

Why country house opera is just the ticket

Last Saturday I went to the opera for only the second time in my life. This was at the invitation of David Ross, my former boss at the New Schools Network, who hosts an arts festival called Nevill Holt Opera at his house in Leicestershire every summer. Launched in 2013, it is now a mainstay of the summer season, with the festival lasting until the end of June. The two operas this year are La bohème and The Barber of Seville. Caroline and I were there to see the Puccini, but as anyone who’s attended an opera at a country house will tell you, the production itself is only part

Peter Jones

How the Romans dealt with mutineers

The RMT union is threatening strikes to bring the country to a halt. Such activities have a long history in the West. The Romans got there first in 494 bc when the plebs – that is, most of the workers – won a degree of political power hitherto denied them, by withdrawing their labour. Using this mass communal strategy in the interests of the majority, but sparingly, they achieved political parity in 287 bc. The army too sometimes mutinied. This was dangerously different: the historian Tacitus saw it as a failure of leadership. In ad 14 Augustus died, and the legions in Pannonia (the Hungary-Balkans area) feared their terms of

The Spectator

What does Prince Charles find appalling?

He really is appalled Prince Charles was reported to have described the government’s plan to send asylum-seekers for processing in Rwanda as ‘appalling’. The Prince of Wales has been associated with the word since at least 1988, mainly because of the ‘Heir of Sorrows’ column in Private Eye, where many things elicit the reaction ‘it really is appalling’. He has, however, used the word in real life – most recently last November at the ceremony to remove the Queen as head of state in Barbados, when he talked of the ‘appalling atrocity’ of slavery. Breach of contract The economy contracted by 0.3% in April, but some sectors bucked the trend.

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 18 June 2022

When lockdown struck, high-standard online bridge tournaments sprang up and with them a multitude of cheats, world champions among them, crawled out of the woodwork. The World Bridge Tour came about when Norwegian stars Boye Brogeland and Thomas Charlsen, who had done so much to uncover the 2015 cheating scandal, analysed hands played by suspect players, and effectively barred them from entering. A couple of weeks ago, they moved offline to hold their first F2F event in Lillehammer, Norway. The British presence was impressive, with four top English teams taking part. My friend Simon Gillis eventually won the final against a strong Norwegian/Scottish team, and again the winning team contained

Melissa Kite

I demand my right to night

The LED streetlamp outside my house was fitted with a ‘compromise’ shield acceptable to a vegan that looked as if it had been made on Blue Peter using sticky-back plastic, and that was bad enough. But a few weeks later, we were sitting in our living room and the light from this streetlamp seemed almost back to full strength, despite the makeshift strip of black gaffer tape. We had been forced to accept this most rubbish of solutions – which wasn’t a solution at all really, and which I’m sure totally breached our human rights if I wanted to be that sort of whinger – because our neighbour, the vegan,

Jeremy Clarke

The art of breaststroke

I’m house-sitting for the foreign correspondent while he attends the funeral of his beloved father-in-law Toto, the last of the languid Old Etonian gentleman bankers. And he has a pool. And what a pool it is. The days here are roasting; the sun is now the enemy. Already dead leaves crackle underfoot. So I swim in the evening, when it is a little cooler. The pool is built into the hill above the house. On one side is a wide apron of smooth white stone slabs. Beyond the apron is a rose garden and stone-built pool house with power sockets and a beer fridge. On the other side the water

Taki

The magic of black and white films

He is a rich English lord with a very large house and his wife is a beautiful American with a mid-Atlantic accent. The lord is portrayed by Herbert Marshall, a screen idol of the 1930s and 1940s, his wife by Norma Shearer, a Hollywood superstar whose eyes alone enslaved men and whose figure caused me sleepless nights as a schoolboy, if you know what I mean. Then there is a suitor, Robert Montgomery, the patrician American heartthrob, who plays a rich drunken playboy who pursues Norma. But he does it with class and elegance, without a trace of toxic masculinity, a modern feminist broadside that didn’t exist among the upper

Wednesday

C.J. Farrington

Who might replace Putin once he’s gone?

How long does Putin have left? Combined with rumours of ill-health, Putin’s disastrous military campaign in Ukraine has led many to question how long he will cling to power. According to the Russian-Latvian independent news platform Meduza, ministers and oligarchs alike are unhappy at the scale of sanctions and the slow and uncertain progress of Putin’s ‘special military operation’. Alongside rumours of secret plans for a post-Putin Russia, elite discontent has already fuelled several high-profile resignations, including Boris Bondarev, Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and Valentin Yumashev, Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law. The ship is beginning to sink, and the rats are beginning to swim. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of

Andrew Tettenborn

The European court has seriously overstepped over Rwanda

Last night’s abrupt order from the European Court of Human Rights that led to the grounding of the first Rwanda deportation flight delighted progressives everywhere. They will of course say – rather in the fashion of twentieth-century home secretaries calmly refusing to reprieve a condemned murderer – that the law is merely taking its course, and that we should be proud that the rule of law has been upheld. This sounds comforting. It is also wrong-headed. The Rwanda debacle in fact raises very serious questions about the legitimacy of the Strasbourg judges and their interference with national administrations. To remind you of the background, concerted lawfare in the English courts

Matthew Lynn

The eurozone crisis is back

Stock markets are crashing. Bond yields are soaring. And the cryptos are evaporating. There is so much going on in the financial markets right now it would be hard to miss the most significant event. The eurozone crisis, which almost broke apart the single currency back in 2011 and 2012, is back. And this time around, there is no very obvious way of fixing it. With inflation soaring across the world, the era of plentiful printed money coming to an end and interest rates starting to rise, every kind of financial market is in turmoil. Investors are adjusting to a new set of circumstances, and doing so very quickly. So

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Gareth Southgate doesn’t know what he’s doing

‘The Hungar Shames’ screamed the Sun after England suffered a mortifying 0-4 defeat to the not so mighty Magyars last night. The game was England’s worst home defeat since 1928. England now face the humiliating prospect of relegation from Tier B of the Nations League where they may join the likes of Armenia, Montenegro, and Albania. The shambolic, shapeless, performance against determined but limited opposition (Hungary are ranked 40 in the world) came on the back of three consecutive dismal outings (one goal in six hours of play, and that a penalty). England’s second favourite status for the World Cup in Qatar now seems ludicrously optimistic. Ordinarily there would be serious

Tuesday

The Spectator

Wanted: video editors

The Spectator is looking to expand Spectator TV. Our YouTube channel now has more than 160,000 subscribers, and we want to make more videos for our growing audience. We recently started filming Chinese Whispers and Women With Balls, and want to start putting out new shows later this year. We’re looking for talented video editors to help. We don’t care about your background – university students and retirees are equally welcome. All that matters is that you can do the job. To apply, please do the following: 1. Download these files from a recent episode of Chinese Whispers.  2. Using Premiere Pro (a free trial is available here), edit the show

Fergus Butler-Gallie

In defence of meddlesome priests

The British constitution is best understood as a dinner party. Imagine the key institutions of national life personified and sat around a table debating the issues of the day. True, as you and I picture this scene it is now a little late in the evening, the surroundings are worn and some hitherto unheard voices are beginning to loudly bark above the polite murmur of the older interlocutors. But the conversation carries on. One of the longest-standing participants in this national conversation is the Church of England; indeed, perhaps only the Crown has been part of it for longer. The traditions of Toryism and liberalism are comparative newcomers, Labour even