Society

Thursday

Kathleen Stock

How to be a heretic

Two weeks ago, I resigned my post as philosophy professor at Sussex University. For three years, I’ve faced bullying and harassment for my views on sex and gender. More recently, this intensified into a full-blown campaign. Posters and graffiti went up denouncing me. Masked students held protests, set off flares and gave interviews saying they felt unsafe with me around. The problems all started when I began making such controversial statements as: ‘there are only two sexes’ and ‘it’s wrong to put male rapists in women’s prisons’. I even went as far as worrying out loud about the consequences of children being given body-altering drugs based on potentially temporary inner

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 13 November 2021

It can’t have been a surprise to anyone who knows him that when Andrew Black — Bertie to his friends — decided to get serious about bridge, he was thinking big. He doesn’t do things by halves. His passion for sports betting led him to co-found the world’s first and largest bet exchange, Betfair, in 2000. His love of horse-racing spurred him on to be a successful owner and breeder; in 2009 he joined forces with the former England footballer Michael Owen to become co-owner of the renowned racing complex Manor House Stables in Cheshire. And then there’s bridge. Over the past few years Bertie and his squad — Team

Jeremy Clarke

A tale of bitter brotherly rivalry

For early humans there was no distinction between spirit and matter. There was no idea of self; no barrier between consciousness and the world. Eventually, evolving self-consciousness and thought put a barrier between the two. Object was irrecoverably divorced from subject. Or so I’ve read somewhere. Something like that anyway. Very recently yet another barrier has been erected between human consciousness and the world in the form of the smart phone touch screen, putting us at not one but two removes from reality. No wonder everyone’s lost the plot. On Sunday, at the very forefront of the evolution of human consciousness, I took human evolution a step further by watching

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: tourist misinformation

In Competition No. 3224, you were invited to submit snippets of misleading advice either for tourists visiting Britain or for British tourists travelling abroad. You normally embrace this challenge with mischievous relish but this time around the mood felt somewhat muted, perhaps not surprising under the circumstances. There were plenty of zingers all the same, and as usual those with a ring of plausibility worked best. Several of you submitted permutations on this one, from Janine Beacham: ‘It’s traditional to picnic on the lawns at Oxford University, so pack a basket. The grass is maintained specially to encourage visitors’; and on David Shields’s ‘When travelling on the Underground, it is

Robin Oakley

My tips for this season and a look back at our Flat Twelve

There are Flat people and there are jumping people. People like the late Captain Tim Forster, trainer of three Grand National winners, Ben Nevis, Well to Do and Last Suspect, who once declared: ‘One day I’m going to stand for Parliament. If I get in my first Bill will be about abolishing Flat racing and the second about doing away with hurdlers.’ People like Trevor Hemmings, the billionaire with the flat cap whose later life became a quest for Grand National winners in his green and yellow quartered colours, a quest in which he succeeded with Hedgehunter, Ballabriggs and Many Clouds. Sadly the kindest of owners died last month and

Doc

2532: Patchy?

The unclued lights (one of two words) can be arranged into two associated groups. Across 1 Company accepts blame having mended harpsichord (7) 5 Pieces of cloth left in islands linked with Turks (7) 9 A jolt makes it open a little (4) 11 Mid-June physical is affected (9) 12 Check mutt beginning to bark (4) 14 Shadows and clouds initially moving from isles in the Clyde (6) 16 Carpet the setter after a fiddle (5) 17 Fabulist seen by river and waters ebbing (5) 20 Hot air rising from the room — with a bit of luck! (7) 21 Outlet for Hardy novel and other books (7) 24 Caviar-covered

Melissa Kite

Just another mad night out at the local bad-food gastropub

We were enjoying our evening at the overpriced gastropub until a woman in a dark uniform appeared at our table. She didn’t introduce herself or explain why she was there, and the first thought that entered my head was that we were being arrested. It was partly that the woman was extremely well built and wearing a navy gabardine jacket and trousers. But it was also because we were with Anthony. I looked across at the builder boyfriend’s wayward friend, a tanned, blond, spiky-haired estate agent who is a dead ringer for Shane Warne. He was spooning French onion soup into his mouth in between downing vodka shots and I

Luke McShane

No. 679

White to play. Trisha Kanyamarala–Roderick Mckay, EJCOA Forest Hall Invitational, 2021. White found a brilliant strike on the kingside, forcing a quick mate. What did she play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 15 November. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Qxh7+! Kxh7 2 Rh3+ Bh4 3 Rxh4+ Kg7 4 Bh6+ Kh7 5 Bf8# Last week’s winner William Jolliffe, Oxford

Luke McShane

Fide Grand Swiss

Alireza Firouzja, just 18 years old, was the clear winner of the Fide Grand Swiss, which concluded in Latvia last weekend. Originally from Iran but now settled in France, Firouzja already looks like a credible future contender for the world championship, and his victory in the Grand Swiss has earned him a spot in the 2022 Candidates tournament, which will select the next challenger for the world title. The current challenger, Ian Nepomniachtchi, who won the Candidates tournament in April, will face the world champion Magnus Carlsen in Dubai later this month. Play begins on 26 November. England’s David Howell also produced an outstanding performance in Riga, finishing in a

Wednesday

Harry Clynch

Cambridge’s hysterical reaction to a Hitler impression

Last week, the Cambridge Union hosted a debate on the motion ‘This House Believes there is no such thing as good taste.’ During the debate, the prominent and respected art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon made the point that humans have an instinctive feeling for what is beautiful and what is repellent. There are obvious, undeniable examples of good and poor taste. To demonstrate this, he staged a long impersonation of Hitler’s views on ‘degenerate’ modern art. His parody included many offensive and racist comments of the sort you would expect from Der Fuhrer. Graham-Dixon’s argument was clear, even if his impression of Hitler was shaky and his presentation somewhat eccentric. Everyone

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Harry and Meghan, the term ‘Megxit’ isn’t sexist

Just when you thought Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s collective victim complex couldn’t get any more vast and cavernous, up they pop again to make clear, in pained tones, just how persecuted this multimillionaire formerly royal couple believe themselves to be. We already knew that their allies think ‘Megxit’ was all about racism. That their departure from the monarchy, freeing them up to cut lucrative deals in the United States, was forced by their supposedly racist treatment by the tabloids. Now we learn it was also all about misogyny, and that the term ‘Megxit’ is itself shot through with hatred for the Duchess of Sussex. Speaking this week on an online

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Pub theatres are a British institution

Which is the oldest pub theatre in London? The King’s Head in Islington claims that its American founder, Dan Crawford, established the trend back in 1970. But a rival venue, Pentameters, above the Horseshoe in Hampstead, maintains that its proprietor, Leonie Scott-Matthews, set it up as a fringe theatre in August 1968. The dispute rumbles on. Pubs are peculiar to British culture, and their conversion into theatres owes something to the quirks of architecture. Most have a small room on the first floor which is slightly inaccessible from the downstairs drinking area, and it’s hard to tempt boozers to climb a narrow flight of stairs and sup their pints in

Tuesday

Posie Parker Posie Parker

Jess Phillips and Labour’s ongoing women problem

Last week, Intelligence Squared put on a debate called ‘Is Labour unelectable?’ Unsurprisingly, Labour MP Jess Phillips spoke against the motion – yet in doing so she managed to prove exactly why Labour are in fact hopelessly sunk. The key moment was when Spiked’s Ella Whelan challenged Phillips for having quote tweeted and then promptly deleted an article that was supportive of Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor hounded out of her job for her audacious view that women deserve some of their own spaces.  ‘This is worth a read. Thoughtful and gentle,’ said Phillips on Twitter, though apparently she quickly decided it wasn’t worth a read and removed the tweet. Some

Andrew Tettenborn

Could the ‘Kathleen Stock’ amendment backfire?

The hounding of Kathleen Stock – who left Sussex university following a concerted campaign against her by trans rights activists – was a disgraceful indictment of freedom of speech on campus. But one remedy for preventing a repeat – the so-called ‘Stock amendment’ to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, now passing through the Commons – isn’t the answer. Impetuous legislation is normally bad legislation; unless we think very carefully, we may end up with something ineffective or even counter-productive. At first glance, a simple ban on students piling in to demand the sacking or departure of professors on account of their politics or teaching might look good. Indeed, it could be defended

Monday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Bitcoin delusion

Cast your mind back a few years to last week – when there was much laughing and wailing at the collapse of Squid coin, a meme cryptocurrency launched to capitalise on the popular Netflix show. It had gone to market, had rocketed 23 million per cent in value to $28,000-odd a unit… and then plummeted to zero on Monday morning after the creators cashed out for real-world money. Yet like the battle-hardened protagonist of the show, amazingly, the currency is down but not out. Yesterday it was reported to have been the top gainer in the global crypto market, having rocketed more than 800 per cent in 24 hours to…

Sunday

Malcolm John Dickson

Britain is running desperately short of midwives

On Sunday 21 November, midwives will be holding peaceful vigils in city centres around the country as part of March with Midwives UK. Is this another group of public sector workers campaigning for greater pay and longer holidays? Unfortunately not – if the problem was that simple, a remedy would have easily been found by now. The nation’s midwives are instead taking action to preserve the women in their care and their profession from desperate and dangerous staffing shortages. I am in my third decade working as a consultant obstetrician. In all that time, I have never seen the midwives I know and work with so demoralised, so drained and so

Pieter Cleppe

It’s time to reform the Big Four accounting firms

It has been exactly 20 years since the Enron scandal upended the reputation of global accountancy firms, leading to the downfall of both the company – one of the largest in US history up to that point – and Arthur Andersen, one of the ‘Big Eight’ accounting firms. Enron’s collapse provoked an avalanche of regulation, ostensibly to reduce the chances of similar accounting fraud repeating itself. In the United States this effort was spearheaded by the 2002 Sarbanes–Oxley Act, while the European Union’s 2006 Auditing Directive followed scandals like the 2003 collapse of Italian dairy giant Parmalat. In reality, these supposedly stringent regulations were crafted under considerable influence from the

Friday

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Pfizer’s Covid pill breakthrough

After the UK medicines regulator yesterday approved Merck’s Covid pill for use on recently infected, vulnerable patients, Pfizer announced its own successful treatment, Paxlovid. Pfizer’s pill was shown to reduce the risk of hospitalisation and death in Covid patients by up to 89 per cent compared with a placebo. The drug has proved so effective that enrolment in the trial has been stopped and Pfizer says it plans to apply to the US regulator for emergency use ‘as soon as possible’. The pill is most effective when treatment starts as soon as a patient becomes aware they are infected with or have been exposed to the virus. It’s taken with