Society

In Competition No. 3230, you were invited to supply a double acrostic poem, the first and last letters of each line, read vertically, spelling out The Spectator and New Statesman in either order. This fiendish technical challenge, designed to sweep away the cobwebs, drew an entry that was on the smallish side but varied and engaging for all that. Some took the topical route. Here’s Tracy Davidson, who turned her sights on the shenanigans at No. 10: Taste turkey crown, then trousers down! Have cheese and wine. It’s work, it’s fine… Other submissions worthy of honourable mentions came from Basil Ransome-Davies, Hugh King, Bob Trewin, Steven Smith and Josephine Boyle.

There are few good things to say about the public conversation around transgender issues, which all too often shows us — all of us — at our worst. But it also offers up a seemingly endless series of case studies illustrating wider problems with the way contemporary culture and institutions deal with difficult ideas. The latest lesson comes from Boswells School in Chelmsford, Essex. It has dropped J.K. Rowling’s name from one of its houses. Previously, she was honoured as a champion of self-discipline, regarded as a role model for children perhaps for her determination in starting her globally-successful series of books under difficult circumstances. Rowling wrote her first Harry

My late grandfather, the editor and columnist John Junor, nurtured fondly throughout his career the conviction that nobody could be sued for asking a question. It was in this spirit that he approached in his weekly column the story of a schoolteacher who had been acquitted for the third time in his career of sexually molesting young boys in his care. He did not for a moment doubt the man’s innocence, JJ wrote, but he wondered: would it not be prudent for this man to take up a line of work ‘that carries a less high risk of false accusation’? This formulation came into my mind as I read the

The present best-case scenario is that Omicron peaks early in the new year and then falls just as fast as it did in South Africa. Given how much is still unknown about the variant, it’s impossible to plot any trajectory with confidence far less read a trend into a few days of data over the festive period. Overall it’s quite plausible that London, having been hit first, would face the worst effects first then turn the corner first. That’s what makes recent data here so interesting. This blog will collate the main London graphs (taken from The Spectator‘s live data hub) and they’ll be updated every day so those interested

Two weeks ago, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Imperial College both published modelling showing frightening scenarios if the government did not react to the Omicron variant by imposing immediate restrictions on our day to day lives. The former suggested that hospitalisations could peak at 7,190 a day in January in its most pessimistic scenario; the latter was reported as suggesting that deaths might peak at 5,000 a day in January. Both figures, however, were made on the assumption that Omicron was every bit as virulent as the Delta variant. Since then, several UK studies have suggested that this is not the case, with data showing