Society

Thursday

Peter Jones

The unflattering truth about the battle for No. 10

The battle to be PM raises the question: in a functioning democracy, how should arguments be won? Surely, by persuasion. But for ancient Greeks, too often it seemed to be by flattery. The Greek for ‘flatterer’ was kolax, and a comedian described a kolax’s lifestyle as follows: he would dress up in his best cloak, hire a slave and head off into town looking for someone rich and stupid, whom he would load with grotesque flattery. With any luck this would result in a dinner invitation, where he would make witty comments, turn the host’s vices into virtues and express delight at being the butt of his jokes. Aristotle described

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: A Kentish Lad

In Competition No. 3259, you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘A(n) [insert county of your choice] Lad’. There has been quite a fanfare this year to mark the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but rather less attention has been paid to Housman’s Last Poems, also published 100 years ago. Hence this Housman-themed challenge, which attracted a smart and thoughtful entry with some nice Housmanian echoes. George Simmers’s offering also owes a debt to Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen. He and his fellow winners, printed below, take £25 apiece. You reckon you knew misery In Wenlock and on Bredon, You say the world weren’t good to thee? Well, it gave

The Spectator

2563: Areas for development – solution

As suggested by 11 across, the other unclued lights were anagrams of capital cities: 23A Nairobi, 25A Nassau, 29A Lima, 35A Pretoria, 40A Kabul, 2D Seoul, 6D Luanda, 20D San Marino, 28D Nicosia, 31D Manila. First prize Elaine Galloway, London SE6 Runners-up Dennis Cotterell, Carlisle; Wendy Whitelock, Kilgetty, Pembrokeshire

Pabulum

2566: Somewhere XII

Somewhere in 23D 30 July is important. Remaining unclued lights (including two pairs and a trio) give the place’s capital city, one of its volcanoes, an indigenous reptile and its national anthem. Its former name (three words) appears diagonally in the completed grid and must be shaded. Elsewhere, ignore an apostrophe.   Across 1 Observe switch in fashion (4) 7 Brit abroad demolished fibros (6) 12 Lion beginning to nibble wader (5) 13 Jenny produces a lot of herrings (250) (5) 15 Secure sheep that’s penned (3,2) 18 Loose covers partly dry (4) 20 Harrow titan loses it (4) 21 Groom accepts alien child (3-4) 22 Fabric had by Lady

Luke McShane

No. 713

White to play and mate in two. Composed by Henri Rinck, La Strategie, 1892. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 2 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 1 Rc2! If 1…Kd5 2 Bf3# or 1…Kd3 2 Nf2# or 1…Kf4 2 Rc4# Last week’s winner Iain Chadwick, Edinburgh

Luke McShane

Heavy is the head

On International Chess Day, 20 July, Magnus Carlsen announced that he will not defend his world championship title next year. The Norwegian won the title in 2013 by beating Viswanathan Anand in Chennai, and went on to defend his title against Anand once more, then Sergey Karjakin, Fabiano Caruana and most recently Ian Nepomniachtchi. Carlsen stressed that he has no intention of retiring. In fact, his stated goal is to keep improving, unencumbered by the grind of preparing for a new world championship match. (Each one might easily demand six months of preparation.) Reaching an international rating of 2900 is still a target he has in mind, though that Everest

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 30 July 2022

The bridge world is coming back to life with a bang. The World Championships were held (live) in March, the Europeans in June, the Rosenblum Cup (transnational teams) is coming up in Poland mid-August, and tucked in between, the ACBL’s Summer National Spingold Teams, won by Pierre Zimmermann’s brand-new, unstained, all-singing, all-dancing, glittering team, who beat the Street team by one IMP! I highly recommend kibitzing on BBO. I watched the Spingold as much as I could and I like to think I learned a bit. There was much chat from the commentators about good players showing great technique in the card play – they take a ruff here and

Aidan Hartley

There are almost no animals left – but we’ve been here before

Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at the gym in stripey spandex stretched around plump buttocks. Pastures vanished long ago and our plains resemble Sudan’s Batn-el-Hajar – the Belly of Stones desert – so that I cannot even recall what they were like when they were last thick with green grass. The zebra foals are dying, the elephants are thin, while the buffalo disappeared a while back. The dry has killed quite mature trees which now shudder with the sound of termites and crash to the ground. To the north of us, horned skulls and dried carcasses

Melissa Kite

The Lycra louts are back

‘That will be £7.50 please,’ said the girl in the bakery to the cyclist in black Lycra after he put a sandwich and a drink on the counter. By way of reply, he slapped down a fiver. He still had his aerodynamic hat on, and the straps and flaps on his booty feet. Click clack. Click clack. He moved with a waddle, like they do when they’re in their special outfit. They look like aliens to me in their pointy hats and clacky shoes and their behaviour is as alien as anything I have ever come across. He pulled this £5 note out of a little pouch in his pants

Jeremy Clarke

I’ve been bitten by the TikTok bug

In theory TikTok knows nothing about me. I have posted two videos: one of my grandsons kicking a football in a garden, the other of their much younger selves running through the dry desert house at Paignton zoo. They are the most unremarkable clips imaginable. The last time I looked, the football being kicked in the garden had been watched 3,700 times and ‘liked’ by 650 people. Astonishing. Apart from those two videos, I haven’t posted. My grandsons love TikTok. They are on it every day. They post videos of football cards they have collected and the ones they want to swap. Except when my grandsons post one, I never

Wednesday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The bravery of Allison Bailey

Allison Bailey is a criminal defence barrister at Garden Court chambers in London, a large and important group of lawyers with a reputation as a human rights ‘set’ supporting trans rights. In December 2018, she complained to her colleagues about Garden Court becoming a Stonewall ‘Diversity Champion’. She said that Stonewall advocated ‘trans extremism’ and was complicit in a campaign of intimidation of those who questioned gender self-identity, a claim the charity denies. In October 2019, she was involved in setting up the Lesbian Gay Alliance, a charity to resist ‘gender extremism’. She tweeted about these matters. That led to complaints to her chambers, accusing her of transphobia and other hateful

Ian Williams Ian Williams

The UK is just waking up to the scale of Chinese espionage

The scene could have come straight out of a spy novel. An ornate Chinese garden with temples and pavilions, built at one of the highest points in Washington DC – a gift from the Chinese government. At its heart, a 70-foot high white pagoda – perfectly positioned and equipped to eavesdrop on communications at the heart of the American government below. China offered to spend $100 million to build the garden at the National Arboretum. But the project never got off the drawing board. It was quietly killed off by US counter-intelligence after they discovered that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Meghan Markle’s feelings don’t care about your facts

Did Meghan Markle grow up as an only child? She said she did, in that famously awful Oprah interview. Yet Samantha Markle, her half-sister, has taken her to court over the claim. She argues that Meghan made her feel ‘humiliation, shame and hatred on a worldwide scale.’ Rather than defending the veracity of their client’s assertion, the Duchess of Sussex’s lawyers have chosen instead to say that Meghan’s claim was ‘obviously not meant to be a statement of objective fact’. In other words, duh, people – Meghan knows she has two half-siblings, Samantha and Thomas. No, her remark was, according to her lawyers, ‘a textbook example of a subjective statement about

Douglas Murray

Why should straight white men ‘pass the power’?

If you happened to be walking through Southwark this week you might have been accosted by a big public sign. ‘Hey straight white men’, the billboard bellowed, ‘Pass the power!’ Similar billboards apparently cropped up in other, equally squalid, parts of London. They are by a black artist from Marseille called Nadina. It will not come as a surprise to anyone who has seen her work to learn that Nadina is self-taught. Her other street art includes posters saying ‘Never forget George Floyd’ and ‘Nobody is free until Palestine is free’. It is brought to us by a gallery run, so far as I can see, by two white males.

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Is self-loathing the British disease?

Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left suddenly finding all sorts of reasons why only the UK – ‘a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island’ according to Emma Thompson, patron of the Refugee Council – would do as a final destination for these poor people. It was especially ironic that the place which the great and the good decreed unfit for humane habitation was a country of which liberals have historically approved: France. The phrase ‘French flu’ was coined in the 1950s to describe the cultural cringe of British progressives towards France as the source of all things

Joanna Williams

The truth about trans teaching in schools

The LGBT advocacy group Stonewall has come in for criticism over recent months with many big name organisations – including the BBC and the cabinet office – withdrawing from its diversity champions programme. Yet rather than toning down its controversial claims and divisive rhetoric, the charity insists on doubling down. It now seems to have children firmly in its sights. ‘Research suggests that children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity,’ Stonewall recently declared. ‘Yet, many nurseries and schools teach a binary understanding of pre-assigned gender. LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming education is crucial for the wellbeing of all young people!’. Following a huge backlash to that tweet, Stonewall clarified that it

Monday

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

Is the NHS beyond repair?

Another week, another warning that the NHS has reached crisis point. A cross-party group of MPs today published a report detailing the extent to which the health service and social care sector in England is understaffed – and found that it is facing the worst staffing crisis in its history. Research found that NHS England is 12,000 doctors and 50,000 nurses and midwives short at the moment. There are more than 99,000 vacancies in the health service – with 105,000 in the health and social care sector. The ever-declining number of healthcare staff is a problem that is only going to get worse as demand rises: almost a million more positions

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The curse of ‘deadmin’

George Monbiot has gone to war. Some readers may know this fellow by his nickname ‘Moonbat’ – he’s a Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner and sometime bugbear of my colleagues on this magazine. But I think his casus belli, here, crosses the ideological battle-lines.  He is in a righteous rage because, a full four months after the death of his mother, Vodafone was refusing to cancel her mobile phone contract. He says they were rude and aggressive, insisted on speaking directly to his ‘frail, confused’ elderly father (despite his children having a power of attorney), asking him to recite his dead wife’s phone number and tell them exactly when the contract

Andrew Tettenborn

Will the police finally see sense on ‘non-crime hate incidents’?

Sex offences, violence and fraud have spiked, according to the latest crime figures. Meanwhile, the number of convictions remains staggeringly low: in England and Wales, more than 99 per cent of rapes reported to police do not end in a conviction. In short, there’s plenty for the police to get on with. Yet worryingly, officers are sometimes kept busy investigating legitimate debate. Finally, though, there are signs that police chiefs are seeing sense. The College of Policing, the national standards body for police, has said that officers need to focus on cutting crime, take a common sense approach and ‘not get involved in debates on Twitter’. Police have been told to avoid recording trivial incidents and reduce the