Society

Thursday

Robin Oakley

The Sandown meeting that’s a good predictor of next year’s prospects

I never enter a Cheltenham Festival week without thinking of the Irish punter who won enough on champion hurdler Istabraq to pay off the mortgage on his house. He then lost the lot when Ireland’s hope Danoli failed to win the Gold Cup. ‘To be sure,’ he declared, ‘it was only a small house anyway.’ Alas, publication dates mean that this column must be penned before this year’s Festival starts, and I began my week with feelings so mixed about the fortunes of Istabraq’s owner J.P. McManus that they should have been rattled in a cocktail shaker.  As racing’s biggest benefactor and a man with an impeccable record in looking

Luke McShane

Senior service

England’s over-65 team triumphed at the World Senior Team Championships, held in Prague last month. They began this event as second seeds behind the German team Lasker Schachstiftung, whose strongest player Artur Yusupov, originally from the Soviet Union, was once ranked third in the world. That crucial England-Germany match ended in a 2-2 tie, but England’s team of John Nunn, Glenn Flear, Tony Kosten, Peter Large and Terence Chapman scored more consistently against the rest of the field, helped by an outstanding 7/8 score for Peter Large. In the game below, his primitive threat to the f7-pawn at move seven bears a funny resemblance to Scholar’s mate, which arises after 1

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 15 March 2025

Everyone has good days and bad days; no one more than me. I like to think my A game is pretty good but my B game is such a car crash that sometimes I feel like giving up. Great players also have A and B days, the difference being smaller the better the player. Towards the end of last year I was thrilled with my game: defences seemed to go swimmingly, ditto bidding and even my declarer play was unusually successful. Sadly it went crashing down to B with no explanation. Today’s hand came up towards the end of my A streak. North’s 2♣️ was Landy showing both majors. I

Luke McShane

No. 841

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by George Edward Carpenter, Dubuque Chess Journal, 1873. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 17 March. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher 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 Qh6! and Black resigned, as gxh6 2 Nxh6 is mate. Last week’s winner Tom Hawksley, Groton, Suffolk

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Contrarian song

For Competition 3390 you were invited to come up with your own version of the Groucho Marx song ‘I’m Against It’, from the film Horse Feathers: Your proposition may be good But let’s have one thing understood: Whatever it is, I’m against it. Hats off to David Silverman, who got into specifics: (‘Conniving, skiving; Mo Salah diving;/ Texting while driving/ VAR’). Also to Sylvia Fairley, Nicholas Lee, Bill Greenwell and others. Sue Pickard channelled the true spirit of Groucho by keeping it general: I am the very model of a modern-day contrarian If you are a sophisticate then I’ll be a vulgarian Whatever your opinions are, mine are antithetical I

Doc

2694: Arc lights

The unclued lights, including a pair and six of two words, form an association which a normal entry clearly suggests. Across 11    Icons reconstructed with excellent backing and capital (7) 12    Scottish author wants hedge trimmed at one end (6) 13    Scottish bird sports new supporting items on the way in (9) 14    Falls off outhouses (5) 16    Scots flower just missed bronze, say (5) 19    Women’s lib regretted holding back some rodents (7) 21    Tapir from borders of different length in Antarctica (4) 23    College’s leading academician entered elaborately robed in fabric (7) 24    Does she give you the eye, to some extent? (4) 25    City in Campania –

The Spectator

2691: Very large fellow – solution

Richard OSMAN (defined by the title) created 1/42/21, the members of which are 13/39, 18, 37/4 and Ron 29 with RON highlighted in the grid and referred to in the clue at 17 Down. First prize L. Coumbe, Benfleet, Essex Runners-up Angus Ross, Old Portsmouth, Hants  Joe O’Farrell, Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow, Ireland

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spies in Norfolk, rats in Birmingham and Denmark ditches letter deliveries

Home Three Bulgarians were found guilty of spying for Russia as part of a cell that plotted to kidnap and kill targets in Europe, under a fellow Bulgarian who lived in a former guest house in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The court heard that the spies reported to Austrian-born Jan Marsalek, who sought refuge in Moscow after the collapse in 2020 of Wirecard, the German payments company he helped run. Walgreens Boots Alliance, the US owner of Boots the chemist, was taken over by a private equity firm, Sycamore Partners. The government introduced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which will enable councils to seize land. The cost of a first-class stamp

Nigel Havers

Will I be sidelined by AI?

I’ve been head down for the past few weeks, preparing for my one-man show. The title is catchy – Nigel Havers Talking B*ll*cks. I’m not sure this was a good idea because in every interview that I have done, I’ve been told that we can’t use this word on air. I seem to hear nothing but four-letter words on the TV these days, so I hadn’t realised that people would mind the bollocks. It seems to be more offensive than the entire four-letter cannon. I am obviously not down with the kids. I have never done anything like this before and have been worrying about three things: will anyone come;

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Trump has breathed new life into Davos Man

So bad was the debut of this Labour government that many think it has already failed. But now, I suggest, there is at least a chance it will succeed. If it leads industrial recovery based on defence and security, tackles the flawed basis of large areas of welfare spending and sweeps away planning restrictions to build more, it will have confronted problems which the Tories evaded for years. Labour can do this, of course, only if it abjures the beliefs that Sir Keir Starmer has espoused throughout his political career, but that seems to be exactly what his managers, led by Morgan McSweeney, are now (rightly) forcing upon him. Rupert

Paul Wood

Massacre of the innocents: the return of sectarian persecution in Syria

No one covers up their war crimes any more. They film them, celebrate them, post them on X. So we have videos from Syria this week showing Islamist fighters making terrified Alawite men get on their hands and knees and howl like dogs. In one video, the victims crawl along a street spattered with blood and gore as a bearded gunman clubs them with a wooden pole. The camera comes to rest on half a dozen bodies. Then we hear rifle shots. There has been a massacre of Alawites in Syria this past week: hundreds of civilians have been killed. The killings were perpetrated by the armed groups that put

Benedict Kiely

Save Syria’s Christians

David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, and Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, had rather tellingly different responses to the latest wave of violence in Syria. Lammy deplored the ‘horrific violence’ but failed to address where that violence was coming from. Rubio, by contrast, stated clearly that ‘radical Islamist terrorists’ were targeting minorities in Syria, including Alawites, Christians and Druze. Rubio is right. While precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, it appears that, according to a source verified by the Hungarian government’s State Secretariat for the Aid of Persecuted Christians – the only one in the world – up to 3,000 people may have been killed, the majority of them innocent

The Spectator

What music did our monarchs like?

Royal warrant The King revealed that among his favourite pieces of music were the 1980s hits ‘Upside Down’ by Diana Ross and ‘The Loco-motion’ by Kylie Minogue. What music did other monarchs like? – Elizabeth II was reported to have been partial to ‘Cheek to Cheek’ by Fred Astaire, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ by Vera Lynn and ‘Sing’ by Gary Barlow and Andrew Lloyd Webber, written to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. – George V attended a command performance by Louis Armstrong in 1932, hinting at a fondness for jazz. – Edward VII knighted Sir Edward Elgar. Avocado blight Alan Titchmarsh implored people to eat cornflakes for breakfast rather than

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Christianity, culture wars and J.D. Vance: a conversation with James Orr

62 min listen

James Orr was living the life of a young, high-flying lawyer when, after a few drinks at a New Year’s Eve party, he asked for signs that God existed. The signs came; among other things, he narrowly avoided a fatal skiing accident. Now he is a passionate Christian and a conservative culture warrior who helped defeat an attempt to impose the tyranny of critical race theory on Cambridge University, where he is an associate professor of the philosophy of religion. He’s also an intellectual mentor to the vice president of the United States; Politico describes him as ‘J.D. Vance’s English philosopher king’. Dr Orr says Vance is ‘extremely articulate, but he takes

Tuesday

Julie Bindel

Kyle Clifford should have been forced into the dock

There are few crimes as heinous as those committed by Kyle Clifford. The 26-year old former soldier raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, 25, killed her sister Hannah, 28, and fatally stabbed their mother, Carol, 61 during a four-hour attack at the Hunt family home last July. Clifford will die in prison. But he refused to leave his cell to hear his whole-life sentence handed down at Cambridge Crown Court. As a result, Clifford was not present to listen to the devastatingly emotional victim witness statement, in which John Hunt – father and husband of the victims – said that he could hear the “screams of hell” awaiting the killer as

Matt Ridley

The North Sea ship collision is likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy

This week’s ship collision off the Humber could have been much worse. Just one person is unaccounted for and one other needed hospital treatment. The fire is mostly extinguished, the two ships are disentangled from each other and the damage to the tanker is less than feared. It is early days, but there are reasons to be optimistic that the event will not prove to be the catastrophe that some feared.  First, it’s likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy. True, it may seem suspicious that a US government jet-fuel cargo is involved: Iran and others would enjoy that. Plus there has been a spate of suspicious anchor-dragging, cable-breaking incidents involving Russian and Chinese ships, and it’s pretty difficult to crash ships by accident

Harry De Paepe

Why the English education system is so envied in Belgium

‘Just compare this essay by one of our students to the essay of a peer from Birmingham.’ A theatre packed full of teachers was listening to the education expert Tim Surma. He was touring Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, with his Thomas More Expertise Centre which supports teachers in providing better lessons and managing their classes more effectively. I was reprimanded by pedagogical advisors for expecting students to learn a timeline with dates and facts Twenty-five years ago, Flanders was at the top of the world in terms of education. Our children were the best readers and the best at maths. As a region with little else to offer the world

Elisabeth Braw

Military service would ready Britons for our unstable world

To serve or not to serve? Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has declared that the UK government has no plans to introduce conscription. Meanwhile, the President of Latvia, which recently resuscitated conscription, has suggested many other European countries should do as they do. Given the state of the world, the UK would do well to reconsider its position. Every few months or so, someone proposes that the UK should bring military service back. And each time, this undertaking is supposed to perform different functions: teach teenagers to become adults; keep teenagers out of trouble; magically solve the armed forces’ recruitment woes. But now the old world

David Shipley

The Sentencing Council’s tone-deaf response to ‘two-tier justice’ criticism

The Sentencing Council – the organisation that advises judges on how long convicted criminals should be locked up for – has hit back at criticism from the Justice Secretary. Shabana Mahmood challenged the Council’s apparent embrace of ‘two-tier justice’ last week, after it told judges to order a pre-sentence report (PSR) if an offender is from a minority background. Lord Justice William Davis, the Council’s chair, has now responded – and has doubled down on its new guidance to judges. Davis said that Mahmood and her officials had been briefed in advance about the instructions on sentencing offenders from ethnic minorities. He also said that ministers could not “dictate” sentencing and vowed to