Society

Thursday

Katie Glass

Beach huts have never been so fashionable – or expensive

Despite claims the property market is on the brink of a crash, one niche seems recession-proof: beach huts, barely bigger than Wendy Houses, have never been more in demand. Rightmove has reported that the average asking price for these glorified sheds has more than doubled since 2019, so on average a beach hut costs an astonishing £50,000. Last year, the UK’s most expensive beach hut sold in Dorset for £500,000. This news is especially galling for me. I bought a beach hut in Clacton-on-Sea for £2,500 in 2011. If I hadn’t sold it, it’d probably be worth ten times that now. The popularity of beach huts comes from the English

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A no-confidence vote, a marginal win and the Queen’s Jubilee

Home Boris Johnson won a vote of confidence in him as prime minister among Conservative MPs by 211 votes to 148 (58.8 per cent in favour, compared with 63 per cent in favour of Theresa May in 2018). No more such votes are allowed for a year. Workmen had still been dismantling the staging in front of Buckingham Palace from the Jubilee celebrations when Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, announced that, as at least 54 MPs had written letters requesting it, there would be a secret ballot on the question. Boris Johnson had been booed by people in the crowd as he walked up the steps

The Spectator

2556: Recent origins – solution

The unclued entries give the origins of elements 110-118 now named Darmstadtium, Roentgenium, Copernicium, Nihonium, Flerovium, Moscovium, Livermorium, Tennessine and Oganesson. First prize Susan Edouard, Bexhill-on-Sea, E. Sussex Runners-up Trevor Evans, Drulingen, France; Phillip Wickens, Faygate, Horsham, W. Sussex

Luke McShane

No. 706

White to play and mate in 3. Composed by Sigmund Franz Josef Lehner, 1864. There are several ways to give mate in 4 moves, but it takes a delicate finesse to get the job done in 3. What is White’s first move? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 13 June. 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 Bf4! wins the queen, since 1…gxf4 2 Rg8+ is mate next move Last week’s winner James Obelkevich, London NW5

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can we get a neighbour to acknowledge our kind deed?

Q. As a mildly famous professional cook, I agreed to judge a children’s cake-baking competition at the summer fête of the tiny village I have just moved to. Subsequent conversations have worried me as I have learnt that the parents of these under-tens are taking the competition very seriously. It’s clear that the awarding of a first prize to any child, however well deserved, will make me more enemies than friends. My name is already on the publicity leaflets and it’s too late to pull out. I would welcome your advice. – Name and address withheld A. Instead of awarding a first prize, you should pronounce each of the entries

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Does advertising matter?

‘Stop! Don’t fast-forward. I love this advert!’ How often do you say that? Considering that some commercial breaks run to five minutes, not often enough. How about, ‘Oh no, not again, I can’t stand this advert’? Mm… nightly? According to recent research by the Pull Agency, a brand consultancy, promotion that strains to impress consumers with a company’s progressive imprimatur is off-putting. You always suspected it, but now it’s official: woke advertising backfires. In a survey of 2,000 representative Britons, 68 per cent of respondents were either ‘uneasy’ or ‘unsure’ about brands supporting fashionable left-wing causes such as climate change, BLM, LGBTQ+, diversity, equality, and female body confidence. Fifteen per

Owen Matthews

How Russia is holding Ukraine’s wheat exports to ransom

Starvation is a weapon as old as war itself. But Vladimir Putin has put a perversely postmodern twist on the ancient stratagem. Instead of menacing his Ukrainian enemy with hunger and poverty, he is threatening the whole world. Putin has long used oil and gas as a political instrument, most recently cutting off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria in retaliation for their refusal to pay their bills in roubles. But it is Putin’s blockade of the export of Ukrainian wheat that could prove just as effective in Russia’s war of weaponised commodities. Together, Russia and Ukraine produce 30 per cent of the global wheat exports. Ukraine is the world’s sixth

John Connolly John Connolly

The danger of putting migrants in warehouse ghettos

So far the UK has managed to avoid the kind of clashes between asylum seekers and local residents that blight other European countries. Our workforce is now 19 per cent immigrant – an even higher percentage than America’s. But this relative harmony might soon be threatened. Since 2018 the processing backlog for asylum seekers has grown to a staggering size, thanks to the Home Office’s failures, Covid lockdowns and, to a lesser degree, a recent rise in the number of Channel crossings. The existing accommodation stock is overflowing – with 37,000 migrants being put up in hotels at a cost of £4 million a day. The Home Office needs an

Douglas Murray

A win for the film critics of Bradford

As a general rule, you should never talk about a film you haven’t seen. But The Lady of Heaven is proving a tricky film to catch. Plus whole crowds of people are talking about it without having seen it, so perhaps my joining in won’t do too much harm. Although it sounds like it might be some work of Vatican kitsch, The Lady of Heaven is actually about another religion. A boy in modern-day Iraq loses his mother and through doing so learns the story of Fatima, one of the daughters of Muhammad. And here is where an apparently sweeping historical drama enters tricky terrain. For not all cinema audiences

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Dinner parties are dying

I don’t get invited to that many dinner parties. I hope it’s not a problem with me, although I can’t rule it out. Instead, I have a feeling that the era of nibbles, laying the table and stressing about the starters is over. When I asked my friends how many invites they get, there was a reasonably consistent answer: roughly one every few months. I’m not talking here about spag bol with pals. A dinner party is a sit-down affair, with multiple courses and, ideally, a few people you don’t know for company. In their twenties, my parents were apparently having a dinner party every week. My mum has three

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The British Empire’s despicable treatment of mermaids

I may have broken the law this week, without having intended to, so great was my rush to return home. I forgot to put on my seat belt and may have exceeded the speed limit on more than one occasion. The cause of my intemperate haste was, of course, a desire to be back at my house in time to listen to BBC Radio 4’s daily evening arts magazine programme, Front Row. I live in a part of the world where the radio reception in cars is thinnish to non-existent, you see. Looking around me, as I depressed the accelerator further than I should, I noticed that everybody else was

Toby Young Toby Young

My wine-fuelled mini break

For Christmas Caroline bought me a ‘Deluxe Gift Experience’ at Chapel Down, the UK’s leading winery. I say ‘me’, but it was actually a present for her too since it was a ‘couples’ package. For £490 we got a private tour of the vineyard, a wine–tasting session, dinner for two in the Chapel Down restaurant, an overnight stay at the Sissinghurst Castle B&B and free tickets to visit Sissinghurst gardens the following morning. We left it a little late to book and the only slot they had available was last weekend, presumably because it clashed with the Jubilee bank holiday. I imagine the sort of people this package appeals to

Dot Wordsworth

Why should Turkey be allowed to change its name?

Turkey has told the UN it wants to be called Türkiye. Even when it is written in capitals, it would still like the little dot over the i, thank you, as İ. Exports will now bear the label ‘Made in Türkiye’ instead of ‘Made in Turkey’. Turkey is of course a name for a delicious bird – at first labelled the guinea fowl, until the New World creature was discovered. But the country’s state broadcaster TRT World complains that dictionaries also define turkey as ‘something that fails badly’. There’s worse. The Oxford English Dictionary (in an entry written in 1915, when Britain was at war against Turkey) records under Turk:

The Spectator

How much do the royals like curry?

Curry in favour The BBC apologised after one of its guests for the Jubilee coverage, Len Goodman, revealed that his grandmother had referred to curry as ‘foreign muck’. The corporation might have used it as a way into a discussion of royal eating tastes. In an interview with Radio 1 in 2017, the Duchess of Cambridge revealed that while she liked a hot curry, her husband ‘wasn’t good with spice’. The Queen’s opinion on curry, too, has been reported to be lukewarm. Prince William’s tastes are in contrast to those of his great-great-great-great grandmother Queen Victoria, who gained a taste for curry cooked by an Indian servant, Abdul Karim, in

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Working from home could have been the reset we needed

‘It is vital that we see a return to face-to-face meetings to foster the dynamic collaboration that creates breakthrough ideas.’ All true, I’m sure. But what you’re describing here isn’t an office: it’s a pub. The same goes for ‘team-bonding’. Placing a lot of people in an open-plan office doesn’t really form a close-knit team – which may explain why very little military training takes place behind desks. No, if you want to form a highly collaborative team, just book your subordinates on a Eurostar junket to Paris, then forget to confirm their return tickets. Trust me, not only will they be newly united in a shared disdain for your

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The day I found a postcard from Virginia Woolf

A dispiriting week. Three months ago, skips arrived, into which were cast the detritus of a decade. Charity shops were donated so much that they began to wave us away. Family welcomed furniture while, oddly, refusing to accept their own toys, clothes and school photographs which had been stored with us ‘temporarily’. Book collections were culled because the new house is much smaller. But hey, we had sold the dearly loved house, whose surrounding garden, meadows, trees, pond and abundant wildlife I will miss so much – and, even better, to enthusiastic, trustworthy buyers whose dream home it was. Apparently. Because on the day before exchange of contracts, they pulled

Richard Madeley

Don’t write off Piers Morgan yet

I wish I could persuade certain cabinet ministers to put their money where their mouths are. Several times last month on Good Morning Britain I exhorted Tory frontbenchers, including Liz Truss, to place cash bets with me. If they’d agreed, I’d be richer than Rishi by now. Well, obviously that’s an exaggeration, but I could have at least afforded to hire a private jet to fly me and Judy to our summer hols in France. Oh, all right then, a single-prop Cessna. Bet one was that there would be a swift U-turn on refusing to place a windfall tax on oil companies. I would have staked my house on it.

Doc

2559: Platinum upgrade

Reading clockwise around the perimeter are six theme words, in random order, one of which starts in square 38. The other two theme words are the unclued lights, one of which can be preceded by one normal solution which solvers should highlight.   Across 11 Limerick perhaps, shortened to make an impression (5) 12 Go to the front outside of Leatherhead (4) 13 Hurried, getting caught by Henry’s farm (5) 14 European gentleman concealed gaol-break (7) 15 With due respect to gun-dog – here’s the leader (4,6) 17 Kid is tense. Relax! (5) 20 Person in short race, small and peripheral (8) 21 The way extremists go (3,3) 23 Left

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 11 June 2022

I recently spent a long weekend in Lillehammer in Norway. Apparently it’s very charming, but frankly I have no idea: I only glimpsed it from the taxi to my hotel. It’s always like that when I play in tournaments abroad. Forget sightseeing – I rarely step outside. The Marit Sveaas Swiss Pairs is more intensive than most: 60 boards a day, from morning till evening. I was lucky enough to be partnering Jessica Larsson, the Swedish women’s European champion. A mutual friend had suggested we play, and we met the night before to discuss a system. As it happens, we got on rather too well, and ended up drinking in