Society

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Government ministries you didn’t know existed

In Competition No. 3260, a challenge suggested by a reader, you were invited to reveal the existence of a hitherto unsuspected government department by means of a speech by its minister explaining its important policies. Among those entries with a distinct whiff of plausibility was Alan Millard’s Department for Silly Talks, which aims ‘to encourage the proliferation of senseless gobbledegook amongst politicians, professional groups and the general population so that anything anyone says becomes too unintelligible to understand’ and to thereby ‘disseminate utter confusion amongst the populace forcing them to accept parliament’s decisions by being too bewildered to challenge them’. Honourable mentions are also awarded to other worthy runners-up: Brian

The Spectator

2564: Sea monster – solution

The unclued lights 11 SOLITARY, 8 POOR, 38 NASTY, 36 BRUTISH and 35 SHORT are descriptions of 1 THE LIFE OF MAN in 26 LEVIATHAN by 13 THOMAS HOBBES. First prize David Andrews, Surrey Runners-up Alexander Caldin, Salford, Oxfordshire; Geoff Hollas, London W12

Fieldfare

2567: Stop!

The unclued lights (including two pairs, one of which is three words, and one single light of three words) are of a kind, as found pleasingly in Brewer. Ignore three accents and one apostrophe. Across 1 Reveal details of ride in car with open top (4,3,3,3) 9 City is enormous, endlessly gloomy (4) 11 Ivied ruin falls over, by God’s law (4,6) 16 Landed fine, using pre-euro notes (5) 17 Cooks up black paints (5) 20 Spy agency recruiting old assistant last to hide bugs (7) 21 Hairy coats regularly end up in African city (7) 23 Unpleasantly loud jewellery worn by a queen (7) 24 Halfway up on mountain:

Luke McShane

No. 714

Black to play. Smirnov – Duda, Chennai Olympiad 2022. With his next move, Duda forced a decisive gain of material. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by 9 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 Last week’s solution: 1 Qh8! Depending on Black’s response, mate follows with Qb8, Qf8, Qe5 or Qd4. Last week’s winner Richard Booth, Cheltenham, Glos.

Luke McShane

A lucky escape

I chatted to a spectator after one of my games at the Sparkassen Chess Trophy in Dortmund. ‘A close shave today, wasn’t it?’ he began. ‘Yes, I can’t believe my opponent escaped with a draw.’ ‘No, I think you were losing.’ ‘Oh, but didn’t you see my beautiful mating idea with b5?’ ‘There’s a fly in the ointment – have another look,’ he said. [The penny drops, eventually.] ‘Oops. Ah well, better lucky than good!’ Fortunately, my opponent shared my delusion during the game. And doubly so, in that my misplaced confidence spared me the need to conduct an arduous defence. My opponent has just snatched a pawn on a3.

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 6 August 2022

In the modern game, being green versus red (non-vul v. vul) is a licence to bid on tram tickets: passing is for wimps. The aim is to be as obstructive as possible – anything to stop the opponents having a clear run at game. Hence the huge array of pre–emptive and two-suited overcalls that have been devised to make life difficult. But although aggressive bidding can work brilliantly, it can also be dangerous – especially against experts, who are primed to take full advantage of any information you give them. Take the following deal from the Yeh Bros Cup in China some years ago. Peter Bertheau and Fredrik Nyström of

Melissa Kite

Everything’s burned to a crisp – and the horses are suffering

Everything is well and truly burned to a crisp, and we are piling through hundreds of pounds of hay a week. When the sun shines relentlessly and it never rains, keeping horses gets awfully expensive. The poor gee-gees themselves are bored stiff. We heave mountains of hay into the fields but they miss the ability to mooch about foraging and munching the greenery. There is no greenery. Everything is brown and white. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing the fields white before. When the grass first burned off, the paddocks went a taupe colour. But after weeks and weeks of relentless sun and no more than the odd

Taki

Sun-drenched days and too much wine: my summer on Patmos

 Patmos Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, monkeypox plague is afflicting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings are becoming a way of life in the US, there’s a war of attrition in Ukraine and Taiwan is being threatened by China. Gloom and doom are everywhere but here in the holy island of Patmos, where Saint John wrote the Apocalypse 2,000 years ago, the backward natives are still using pronouns such as ‘his’ and ‘hers’, and they even identify women as a biological reality. And it gets better – or worse, actually: the only

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The case for theft-tanks

The Conservative party leadership contest is a milestone for diversity and inclusion. This time, we get to choose between someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford and someone who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford. I can barely contain my excitement. I find the very idea of an undergraduate degree in politics alarming. It is often seen in business that people who complete an MBA straight after university turn out to be spectacularly useless employees, and it’s possible that this unhappy pattern recurs in politics. The reason is simple: there is an order effect at work. It’s one thing to theorise on the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What foreign policy would look like under a PM Truss

When Tom Tugendhat announced he was backing Liz Truss for prime minister, his former supporters were dismayed. He was the candidate for the ‘One Nation’ caucus of moderate MPs, who defined themselves against the Tory right. ‘Anyone but Truss’ was their mantra – and they lined up behind Rishi Sunak. Yet here was their former poster boy supporting their nemesis. What could Truss and Tugendhat possibly have in common? The answer can be summed up in a word: China. For better or worse, Truss is an instinctive politician. On foreign affairs, she was held back by Boris Johnson, who was more cautious on China. If she becomes prime minister, which

Fiona Unwin

How Rishi Sunak won over the Tories of West Suffolk

‘I’ve cancelled my exercise class for this! I hope he’s worth it,’ said Selina in the hotel lobby. Rishi Sunak was coming to West Suffolk to meet members of our Conservative Association. Would he be worth a listen? Clearly our members thought so. More than 90 of us rocked up at one day’s notice to meet Rishi (or Sushi, as one of our older members kept calling him). Rishi wanted to pitch for our votes. His strategy is to introduce himself to as many members as possible. Last weekend, he met 2,000 activists in constituencies where 10,000 Tory members are based. He needs every single one of our votes if

Nicholas Coleridge

Why must my mobile provider harass me all through my holiday?

We have been on a family holiday to Tangier, Morocco, and of course my mobile phone came too. Not that I was intending to use it much – minimum impulse roaming; I would mostly wait until we had wifi for the purposes of Instagram and the rest of it. And I don’t tend to use the telephone bit at all. We had been at the villa two days when the barrage began – text after text, email after email, all from O2. I can’t pretend I am someone who can tell one service provider from another, but I know I am ‘with’ O2, and suddenly they were all over me.

Rachel Johnson

They do things differently in the Cotswolds

The Season has ended and – apart from The Spectator’s summer bash of course – the two bang-up parties of July were discos in the Cotswolds. They do things differently there. At Jemima Goldsmith’s I danced so hard in high heels with a selection of her handsome young swains that I suspect the double hip replacement will be sooner rather than later. At Carrie and Boris’s Daylesford wedding do in a magical flower-filled field we all busted out our best moves. I was taught the slut-drop by Liz Hurley years ago in Nick Coleridge’s party barn in Worcestershire. She demonstrated how to collapse to the floor like a broken deckchair

Dot Wordsworth

What do ‘catcalls’ have to do with cats?

‘A law against catcalls?’ asked my husband sceptically. ‘What next, criminalising booing and hissing?’ He often gets the wrong end of the stick, but in this case I hardly blame him, for the press retailed widely Liz Truss’s resolve to make a law against catcalls and wolf-whistles. But to an older generation like my husband’s, catcalling is something to do with the theatre. In Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot assures us that Gus the Theatre Cat acted with Irving and Tree – Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), who Shaw said revealed on stage ‘glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness’, and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917), noted for histrionic versatility. But then Eliot

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I tell my neighbours I’m too busy to stop for a chat?

Q. My parents are abroad for two months and as my flatmates in London are all, like me, working from home, I’ve moved to their country cottage to get some peace. This is an idyllic and very community-based village but one unforeseen problem has arisen. The house is at the end of a cul-de-sac lane and every time I nip out to do anything – post a letter, buy a pint of milk – I run into neighbours, each one requiring at least a five-minute chat. Short errands are taking an hour to complete. Without seeming to be unfriendly, how can I, on weekdays, give the message I am busy

Neil Clark

What we can all learn from Jim Corbett’s tiger tales

‘The word “Terror” is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.’ Thus begins the third chapter of The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (1947), part of the Man-Eater series by the great Anglo-Indian hunter and naturalist Jim Corbett. I was reminded of Corbett and his wonderful books when reading last week that human-assaulting tigers are once again on the prowl in Nepal, with 104 attacks and 62 people killed in the past three years. Conservation efforts have seen tiger numbers rise three-fold since 2010, but with that good news comes the

Toby Young Toby Young

Iceland’s scenery takes your breath away – but so do the prices

I’m writing this on the plane back from Iceland, a fact that fills me with relief. Not because I didn’t enjoy my trip to the land of fire and ice – far from it – but because there was a serious risk I might be stuck there indefinitely with Caroline and my three sons. In the 24 hours before our departure, nearly 4,000 earthquakes were detected in the southwestern region known as the Reykjanes peninsula, which is where the international airport is located. Such unusual seismic activity is often a sign that a volcano is about to erupt and that, in turn, can create an ash cloud that necessitates the

The Spectator

When did ‘best before’ dates begin?

An idea past its sell-by date Waitrose has announced the removal of ‘best before’ dates from many food products. – The idea of printing dates began with Marks & Spencer in the 1950s, but only for use in the stockroom. They first appeared in the company’s shops in 1970 and were named ‘sell-by’ dates from 1973, launched with an advertising campaign saying: ‘The sell-by date means that St Michael foods are fresh.’ There was also a TV advert which featured Twiggy. – The concept was quickly adopted by other supermarkets after evidence that shoppers liked the reassurance of a date. It was expanded in the 1980s, with ‘best before’ dates

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Hosepipe bans, England’s women win the Euros and a strike over dragons

Home BP reported quarterly profits of £6.9 billion, its biggest for 14 years, after oil and gas prices rose steeply. Typical domestic energy bills were forecast by the consultancy Cornwall Insight to go above £3,600 a year in the coming winter. Under the family scheme for visas, 31,300 Ukrainians had arrived in the United Kingdom, and 72,700 under the sponsorship scheme. British Airways suspended new ticket sales for short-haul flights from Heathrow until at least 15 August, to meet the airport’s limit on the number of passengers departing each day of 100,000. On 1 August, 696 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats; in July the total was 3,683, and