Society

There isn’t much Nick Sandqvist (my first bridge partner, teacher and great friend) doesn’t know about bridge. He has been playing virtually every day for nigh on 40 years and doesn’t often make mistakes. He was playing Pairs at the newly reopened Acol Club when a situation came up that he had never spotted before and he went wrong. At this point I must come clean: I think I’ve got it, but I can’t be sure. I am quite certain that if this position came up tomorrow I would do the wrong thing, but if anyone out there does benefit, Nick will be thrilled. This was the hand. Nick was

If you wanted a good working example of the concept of dumbing down in practice, look no further than Ofqual, the exams regulatory board, the one that covered itself in ignominy when it oversaw the exam algorithm fiasco during lockdown. Its latest idea is to get exam boards for English to replace ‘complex’ language elements, such as idiom, sarcasm and metaphor, with simpler alternatives in some assessments to make the tests more accessible for pupils. The temptation at this point to respond with sarcasm, irony, idiom and metaphor – not at all nice ones either – is almost irresistible, but let’s not go there. How, in any language, but particularly

I am starting to wonder if the world of arts and culture is staffed, in large part if not exclusively, by massive whinging babies. What other plausible explanation is there for the frequency with which publishing houses, streaming services and theatres are going into open revolt because their employers have commissioned work by someone whose opinions they happen to find disagreeable? Terry Gilliam is the latest artist in the crosshairs. The Monty Python legend and director was due to co-direct a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the Old Vic in London next year. Sondheim had expressed support for Gilliam’s vision for the show. But according to reports

History records that George II was the last British king to lead his troops on the battlefield, at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. But maybe it is only a matter of time… Addressing the COP26 summit in Glasgow Prince Charles called for a ‘vast military-style campaign’ against climate change. We must put ourselves on a ‘war-like footing’, marshalling the resources of the private sector as we did during wartime. I look forward to the sight of Charles, on horseback, leading a battalion against Xi Jinping’s People’s Army to try to take the site of China’s latest coal-fired power station. There is a very big problem with this kind of

Yesterday, at the Trust’s AGM, Restore Trust – the body which wants to stop the dumbing-down and politicisation of the Trust – didn’t win. But it has made an enormous impact for a body which was only set up last summer and now has 20,000 members and a £60,000 war chest. Restore Trust put forward three resolutions. It won one of them: a proposal to disclose in full the pay of the National Trust’s senior staff. It lost the other two: one regretting the loss of expert curators; the other deploring the recent treatment of volunteers. The scale of the loss, though, was small – by 54,708 votes to 57,164

When my son was about six he heard something at school about slavery but was not quite clear what it was all about. So I spelled it out. I told him that a slave was someone that someone else owned and ordered around and probably mistreated. I waited for the proper response of moral horror to show on his innocent features. Instead he said, ‘Cool, I want one!’ I offer this recollection in support of Katharine Birbalsingh’s supposedly controversial opinion that children are not naturally full of the right moral impulses. ‘Britain’s strictest head teacher’ has bolstered her reputation by saying that children are born with ‘original sin’ and must

The BBC this week published a thought-provoking article about lesbians being sexually victimised by trans predators. The experiences of dozens of women were taken into account. Their stories made me sick. In light of #Metoo one could be forgiven for thinking that this BBC article would have inspired its own watershed moment, one in which lesbians could reassert their same-sex boundaries and say that, in a tolerant liberal society, they have a right not to be tormented by the opposite sex. But no. The article is being howled down because it is apparently prejudiced and transphobic. Over 16,000 people have now signed an open letter calling for the BBC to