Society

Friday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The latest celebrity must have? A trans child!

Hard luck, Madonna, your lovingly assembled rainbow family is no longer the most cutting-edge crew on the showbiz block. If you want to excel as an A-list parent these days, you need a trans child to show off on social media. Jamie Lee Curtis has revealed that her child, born Thomas, now answers to the name of Ruby. The 62-year-old actress has declared to a waiting world – via People magazine – that the most difficult thing about adjusting to this unforeseen circumstance is calling them by their new name. ‘It’s speaking a new language…l earning new terminology and words… that was the hardest thing, just the regularity of the

Graham Medley

In defence of Sage’s models

As a member of Sage, I support public scrutiny of our scientific advice. However, once our models enter the public domain they are interpreted in many different ways and some of the crucial context can be lost. Modelling is an important tool for epidemic management, one that has been tested against numerous infectious disease outbreaks and continues to be improved. If we knew what the future held, decisions would be easy — but we don’t know what will happen. The alternative to using models is to guess. Models mean that the assumptions and data used are clear. It’s repeatable science. Guessing is not repeatable and relies on prejudices and wishful

Hardeep Singh

The fatal flaw in the Assisted Dying Bill

The push for legalised assisted dying for the terminally ill is back with a debate on Baroness Meacher’s private members’ Bill on the subject today in the House of Lords. It’s an emotionally charged issue which goes to the heart of medical ethics. It is also true that euphemistic language is often deployed by advocates of assisted dying to frame the narrative. Another way of describing ‘assisted dying’ is of course the grislier ‘assisted suicide’, or ‘assisted killing’. Even euthanasia, which is the act of intentionally ending a life to relieve suffering means ‘good death’. Meacher’s Bill will be debated by more than 140 peers, but it’s not clear that

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

There are no safeguards when it comes to euthanasia

Molly Meacher, whose Bill to allow assisted dying gets its further reading in the Lords today, gave an interesting interview on BBC radio today – there was no other speaker to counter her arguments; an exchange of views came later in the programme. She explained that her engagement with the cause had been prompted by the lonely death of an aunt who had a terminal illness; she went on to describe the unpleasant conditions that could not be dealt with by palliative care. But then the interviewer, Martha Kearney, went on to ask about the problem that old people might be made to feel a burden. Baroness M said that

Thursday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Does ‘white privilege’ exist?

On Wednesday Radio 4 aired a programme called White Mischief, which promised to trace ‘where whiteness came from and how its power has remained elusive.’ It asked whether white privilege existed. Or rather it pretended to ask. It assumed that it does. Instead of directly admitting that it was putting forward one point of view, it was one of those annoying programmes that affects a sort of light-hearted neutrality, and vaguely claims to be moving away from the unhelpfully limited conversations we have been having so far. So instead of soberly setting out the issue, it began with a jokey clip of Grayson Perry hooting with laughter at some wise

The Spectator

Letters: How to feed the world

Doom and gloom Sir: The depressing article by Tom Woodman (‘You must be kidding’, 16 October) confirms my growing fears about the damage being wrought by the promoters of apocalyptic climate change, which has become a dangerous cult with alarming echoes of millenarian doom which has stretched through many previous centuries. While sensible care for the environment is a good thing, the descriptions of a frightening future of the imminent end of the world through drought, flood and fire now imbues every aspect of education and politics. Constantly bombarding young people with the news that the end of the world is nigh has led many of them into completely unnecessary

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

My advice to Dave Chappelle

I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights that abruptly run out. But this time, I rushed to see Dave Chappelle’s new stand-up special The Closer lest Netflix’s own disgruntled employees succeed in getting the performance taken down. Strictly speaking, the affronted staff aren’t demanding the show’s withdrawal, but it’s hard to see what else the proposed employee walkout on Wednesday was designed to accomplish. After all, in the olden days if you didn’t like something on television you just didn’t watch it, but in our enlightened times you make damned sure no one else can watch it

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

My night in Béziers with Zemmour

Béziers is the ancient winemaking capital of the Occitanie region in the deep south of France and a stronghold of the French right. Its popular mayor, Robert Ménard, a former journalist, was elected as an independent, but with a strong endorsement from Marine Le Pen. Her political movement, the Rassemblement National, formerly the National Front, with historical roots in anti-Semitism, has been powerful here for decades. So is it paradoxical, bizarre, or perhaps evidence of a more profound shift of social and political tectonic plates, that last Saturday night thousands of Biterrois turned out at the Zinga Zanga theatre to cheer Éric Zemmour, a Parisian Jewish intellectual, author and television

The Spectator

The government’s net zero strategy doesn’t add up

The commitment to reach ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 is the most expensive government proposal in modern history. Yet it was rushed through parliament with minimal debate or scrutiny, thanks to a last-minute pledge by Theresa May in 2019, weeks before she left office. She had no credible plan, just a lofty ambition without costings. It has taken the government two-and-a-half years to come up with a proposal — and it is not convincing. The Net Zero Strategy document published this week opens with the Prime Minister’s trademark optimism. ‘We can build back greener, without so much as a hair shirt in sight,’ he writes. ‘In 2050, we will still

Taki

The poor are too busy to care about the rich

New York   ‘The City of London is hiding the world’s stolen money’, screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other examples of anti-white, anti-cop, anti-male and anti-Conservative platforms. (‘Bid the binary goodbye’ is another pearl.) Not that anyone any longer takes the Bagel Times seriously since it decided that whites are very bad people. Still, I found it amusing that London is responsible for the shame of the Pandora Papers, when most of the miscreants involved are Third World dictators and eastern oligarchs. Never mind. A newspaper that consistently shades the facts to suit its agenda — even book reviews are

Cosmo Landesman

Would you go to a naked dining club?

Why would anyone want to dine in the nude with other nude diners? Yes, I get being nude on a sunny beach. Swimming nude. Walking nude. But eating nude in public? What’s the appeal? Why leave your comfort zone for the Twilight Zone? Yet nude dining is making a comeback — or at least it’s trying to. The food-in-the-nude movement was just taking off in Bristol — and various secret places in London — when Covid first struck. Now that things are going back to normal, the normal are going nude. Ever curious, I went to an event billed as the ‘first in a new series of nude supper clubs’

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Prince Harry is surfing an investment wave

Does the economist David Blanchflower — who I described as the Bank of England’s ‘resident wacko’ during his 2006-09 tenure on the Monetary Policy Committee and who later served as an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn — have a former pupil on the editorial team of the Today programme? I can’t think why else he should have been afforded a soft six-minute interview with Mishal Husain (addressing him by his nickname ‘Danny’) in Monday’s prime slot between Thought for the Day and the eight o’clock news. British-born, US-based Blanchflower is best remembered for declaring in 2009 that if the then shadow chancellor Osborne’s proposed spending cuts were ever enacted, ‘five million

Melissa Kite

If a bloke can wear stockings and suspenders in a stable yard why can’t I?

We had gone to visit a friend at a stable yard on a country estate on a crisp autumn Sunday. I was going to help his daughter with a pony they weren’t sure about. The builder boyfriend and I drove up a winding driveway past an elegant stately home to an antique stable yard from a bygone era where our friend was waiting with his daughter and their pretty black cob tied to the wall. Hens clucked from a nearby coop, kids came and went in wellies and warm jumpers, for there was a chill in the air. A young girl tacked up a smart, dapple-grey mount. Clip clop clip

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why the baby doomers are wrong

Rarely does a piece of journalism bring a tear to my normally cynical eye, but I did find this happening when I read Tom Woodman’s piece (‘You must be kidding’) in last week’s edition. He and his wife would not have children, he wrote, because climate collapse means that ‘I can’t give them a future’. What made me weepy was his combination of obvious decency and utter mistakenness. How tragic that what he called ‘the facts and figures’ — in reality, contentious projections — have persuaded this couple that no little Woodman must come into the world. ‘Tree,’ I felt like shouting, in reversal of the Green order of priorities,

Doc

2529: Formerly

The unclued lights (five of two words which include three apostrophes) can be preceded by the same word, all confirmed in Chambers and/or Brewer. Across 11 A record bill, getting a pack animal (6) 12 Earthling beginning to excavate rock formation (7) 14 What contains oxygen and is able to girdle the Earth? (5) 15 Oddly, St Thomas in porticos (5) 16 Currency unknown to ethnic group abroad (6) 17 Jock’s meant to have decided without son (6) 21 Fabric dealer removes power from ambitious governmental worker (7, hyphened) 24 Moving into gear, I start (9) 29 Small change for a European banking system, once (7) 30 Performance – tear

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: odes on the Marble Arch Mound

In Competition No. 3221, you were invited to submit an ode on the Marble Arch Mound. The 25 metre-high artificial hillock, dubbed ‘Teletubby Hill’, has drawn near universal mockery and derision, leaving Westminster City Council red-faced and poorer to the tune of £6 million. But it inspired a funny, imaginative entry, with a strong whiff of Keats and Wordsworth. The Bard of Dundee, channelled by Brian Murdoch, speaks for many: When the Mound next to Marble Arch was first erected You had to pay to walk up it, which made many good folk dejected… Commendations go to Bob Trewin and George Simmers; the winners earn £25. I hail thee, Mound!

The Spectator

2526: Everybody out! – solution

The unclued lights are preceded by ALL (with the title suggesting that ALL is to be omitted). The paired lights are 6/19 and 9/30. First prize Guy Taylor, London EC1 Runners-up Tony Alers-Hankey, London W4; Arabella Woodrow, Riddlesden, W. Yorks

Luke McShane

No. 676

White to play. Bjerre–Maiwald, Bundesliga 2021. Black has menacing counterplay, so White’s attack needs an accurate conclusion. What did he play next? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 25 October. 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 Qc7# Last week’s winner Sam Morton, Newport-on-Tay, Fife

Luke McShane

Eaten by a bear

I don’t like losing at chess. It feels bad in the moment, whether my position subsides like a failed pudding, or crashes like a severed tree. It feels bad right afterwards too, staring at a big fat zero on the scorecard. But worst of all is the lingering knot of disgust, because usually one’s mistakes are echoes of shortcomings one knew about already, and there is no hiding from them. The chorus from Radiohead’s ‘Just’ (from The Bends) could as well be an anthem for sulking chess players. You do it to yourself, you do And that’s what really hurts Is you do it to yourself Just you, you and

Aidan Hartley

Africa’s empty vastness has vanished under the concrete of the present day

Kenya   When I was a child in Kenya, the road from the Indian Ocean up to Nairobi was still a dirt track, with the way frequently blocked by a rhino or large herds of elephant. A few decades later, the route has two railways and the road is an unbroken column of lorries heading all the way to the Congo. Africa is growing so fast that older people like me feel a kind of existential jetlag — or a sort of phantom limb syndrome, in which our eyes still see empty wilderness, plains and forests of a recent past that have vanished under the concrete of the present day.