Society

Thursday

9 Dec 2021

Why I prefer to rely on natural immunity

‘Did you hear it?’ said a friend of mine, red-faced with the flush of a piece of news she couldn’t wait to offload, as she rushed into a church hall where we were attending an event. She was bursting with excitement because a mutual acquaintance had just been on a radio phone-in show banging the drum for the vaccine. I confessed I had not heard it, because I had no idea she was planning to go on. But it didn’t surprise me because this lady has had a go at me for being ‘one of those anti-vaxxers’ because I won’t have the jab — mainly because I’ve recovered from Covid.

Peter Hitchens

Only a benevolent dictator can save Oxford

Only a dictator can save Oxford now. Local government simply cannot grasp how precious this marvellous, unrivalled city is, and how easy it will be to erode it into bare, dispiriting bleakness and ugliness. Any fool can see that the ancient colleges of the university must be preserved, but the setting in which they stand has no reliable defenders. It is true that a plan to put a bypass through the ancient pastures of Christ Church meadow was defeated in 1968. But that was after 27 years of wrangling, during which this hideous megalo-maniac scheme was actually described as ‘indispensable’. In the half century during which I have lived in

Mary Wakefield

How to spin a storm

If, in the days after Storm Arwen, the north of England began to suspect that the south didn’t much care about it, that suspicion has by now hardened into a cert. Many thousands of homes in the north and in Scotland still have no power and, as I write this, Storm Barra has just arrived, with a forecast of 80mph gales and eight inches of snow. In the south, there’s excitement about the weather — ‘Man the BARRA-cades!’ — and the possibility of a white Christmas. In the north, there are elderly men and women, exhausted, hanging on, day after dismal day in the bitter dark. The village in Northumberland

Charles Moore

Lockdown has made poachers bolder – and more dangerous

One midnight last month, Jon Wiltshire, who lives in a cottage just outside our Sussex village, was woken by a loud bang. Sleepily, he wondered if an intruder had slammed the farm gate shut. He peered out, could see and hear nothing, and so went back to bed. The next day, he had to go to London. When he returned, his wife Anja said: ‘Come and look at this.’ The whole of their sitting room was covered with a fine powder of glass and some bigger shards. Inspecting the double-glazed window, they found a 10mm hole in the outer glass and a much wider break in the inner one. Further

The Spectator

Boris’s Covid rules are coming back to bite him

In normal circumstances, no one would care if staff in No. 10 held a Christmas party. But last year, Boris Johnson made parties illegal. Throughout most of December, London was under Tier 3 or 4 restrictions. Social gatherings were strictly forbidden and anyone who broke the rules was at risk of a £10,000 fine. The Prime Minister could have issued guidance and asked people to use their judgment. Instead, he criminalised non-compliance and sent the police after those who didn’t follow his rules. This is why it matters very much if a party was held in Downing Street last December. Despite multiple denials from No. 10 that any such event

Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t strand Cambo until our energy future is secure

If the phrase ‘stranded asset’ hasn’t yet entered your vocabulary, here’s a useful example of what it means. The 178 million barrels of oil in the Cambo field west of Shetland may stay there for ever because of government shilly-shallying over whether and when to end exploitation of the UK’s remaining hydrocarbon resources — while we import equivalent volumes of oil or gas from the Middle East, Norway and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, just to keep our lights on. Shell — which had a 30 per cent interest in Cambo but is under pressure from shareholders, activists and regulators to accelerate its shift to cleaner energy — has pulled out of

Rod Liddle

My plan for young people

I have been reading 39 Ways To Save The Planet by the BBC journalist Tom Heap, which includes such ingenious suggestions as capturing refrigerant gases in a large box and then destroying the large box. It is an interesting book. I would like to suggest to Tom a 40th way in which we might help to save the planet, as well as saving the country a lot of money: raise the minimum age at which a person can drive a car from 17 years to 25 years. This would immediately reduce our motor vehicle emissions by a little over 5 per cent — no small contribution. It would also reduce

Johnny Marr

I still miss Kirsty MacColl

I’ve been occupied this year recording and promoting a new album. I was pleased to finally see the release of the latest Bond film — I recorded the soundtrack mostly at Hans Zimmer’s studio in Soho. Hans and I are pretty tight, we’ve been working together for around ten years now. Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas came in with a great song — my job was just to ‘Bondify’ it without it not sounding like a Billie Eilish record. We tried taking it down the road of heavy orchestration first — something you need to do with Bond music — but Billie and Finneas know what they’re doing and

Robin Oakley

The culture of the weighing room needs to move with the times

In the first such case for 20 years, former rider Freddy Tylicki, paralysed and wheelchair-bound since his mount Nellie Dean clipped heels in a Kempton Flat race with Madame Butterfly, ridden by Graham Gibbons, has been suing Gibbons for £6 million in the High Court. Arguments have centred on whether Gibbons made a fractional misjudgment in an ambitious manoeuvre or whether he showed a punishable disregard for his colleagues’ safety. It hasn’t helped racing’s image that Gibbons is a jockey with a history of drink problems and that former champion jockey Jim Crowley testified that he smelled alcohol on Gibbons’s breath that day. Judgment will come before Christmas and while

Dot Wordsworth

What do Millwall supporters and internet alt-righters have in common?

My grown-up friends don’t use based in its new slangy sense, so I asked Veronica (whom I still think of as a child) what it meant. ‘It’s a Millwall thing,’ she said, chanting: ‘No one likes us. No one likes us. No one likes us. We don’t care.’ I’m not talking about the established sense, as in based on fact (generally meaning ‘fictional’) or evidence-based (which entails choosing your facts), but about a usage that has jumped in the past decade from the hippity-hoppity world of Lil B to the fringe reality of the alt-right. Thus, in response to a newspaper headline last month about a black Republican politician in

Roger Alton

Has Formula 1 ever been this exciting?

The good citizens of Stevenage would be well advised to prepare extensively for the likely open-top bus parade of their most famous citizen should Lewis Hamilton clinch his position as the best -Formula 1 driver in the world (ever) this weekend in Abu Dhabi. Because it could take some time. The Hertfordshire new town is a pleasant enough place, but it’s adorned with enough mini-roundabouts and dual carriageways to give even the most assiduous bus parade driver seizures. Still, if ever the extravagantly tonsured motor-racing ace deserved homage from his home town, it would be if he wins the 2021 driver championship. This has been an F1 season like no

Tanya Gold

The best Greek salad I’ve ever tasted: INO Gastrobar reviewed

Soho is so gilded nowadays that even drug addicts look down on it. The wasteland without must match the wasteland within. That is harmony. Soho is not a wasteland now: it is no longer that interesting. It is, rather, a shopping district with restaurants and hotels: whimsical, trivial, overpriced. People say it is our youth we lament when we moan about Soho, not the filthy streets we lay in and were fond of, but I am not sure if this is true. Every great city needs a district for wanking and sobs. But this is not it, not anymore. The gateway under the grand hotel by Piccadilly is now an

Peter Jones

It’s time to settle the Great Omicron Question

Time to settle the Great Omicron Question. First, there is no word omikron (and no c) in ancient Greek. Second, the classical Greek (5th-4th centuries BC) name for omicron was an accented ou. In the 2nd century AD it was replaced by the name o mikron (‘little/short o’), when Greece was under Roman rule. So how did Greeks pronounce o mikron? The little o was pronounced short, as in ‘lot’. The letter i (iôta, whence our ‘jot’) was pronounced either long (as in ‘purine’) or short (as in ‘tin’). In the case of mikron, it was pronounced long. The r was lightly trilled. Finally, the last o was stressed. So

Laura Freeman

Why do we kiss under mistletoe?

Give us a snog. Pucker up at the Christmas party. Kiss me quick at the Nativity play. Will you be snogging this season? Thérèse Coffey, Secretary of State for Work, Pensions and Office Passion, has spoken. ‘I don’t think there should be much snogging under the mistletoe.’ she told Robert Peston on ITV. Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health, weighed in: ‘I’ll certainly be kissing my wife under the mistletoe — it’s a Javid family tradition.’ Not just a Javid tradition. Mistletoe is a pale green shrub which grows on the branches of broad-leaved trees. It is hemiparasitic, which means that it draws water and mineral nutrients, but not

The Spectator

Letters: the army should be used as an emergency service

Flood relief Sir: In my lifetime there have been at least two major flood emergencies when the armed forces have played a key role: the 1947 floods, and the East Coast storm surge in 1953 (Leading article, 4 December). Both of these major catastrophes required large inputs of manpower and machinery. We should remember that National Service was in operation then, and because the second world war was so recent there was an innate sense of collective responsibility and discipline which extended to the many volunteers who came forward to help. Disaster and emergency response and relief is a highly interconnected activity, requiring many different roles and responsibilities. Flood-watching is

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: No. 10 parties, a ten-year drugs strategy and Burmese arrest

Home Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, said that the Omicron variant of coronavirus was spreading by community transmission in ‘multiple regions of England’. He gave the number of cases detected as 336 by 6 December, and the next day another 101 were found. Anyone coming from a foreign country would have to pass a coronavirus test within two days of catching a plane to Britain. A newlywed couple who had to pay £2,285 to stay in a quarantine hotel published photos of food such as a slice of quiche covered with sliced carrots in a plastic container. Sainsbury’s asked workers to postpone Christmas parties until the new year. Despite setbacks,

Toby Young

Let’s not become Scotland

The Law Commission has published a string of recommendations following its recent consultation on changes to hate-crime laws in England and Wales. As expected, the last one proposes that all existing hate-crime laws, as well as the new ones the commission would like to create, be swept up in a single Act of Parliament, much like the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. Readers will recall that this Act means freedom of expression is now in greater peril in Scotland than anywhere else in Europe. In some respects, what the Commission is proposing isn’t as bad as the Scottish law. While it does recommend the scrapping of the ‘dwelling

Lavatch

2536: At rest

Unclued lights are three sets of three words of a kind, along with a name which connects them all (two words). Something that this name should possess (5), which is also a thematic item, must be highlighted in the completed grid. Across 1 Always bored by job, like rebellion (8) 8 Dancing girls wanting a relief (4) 12 Follow it to leave bathroom (5) 14 Going furtively out of east, moving sinuously (7) 16 A lot of Italian beer for Eva? (5) 17 Biblical land about to get bread (6) 21 Image about one mount joining several states (9, hyphened) 24 Tower’s inhabitants party with partners (6) 25 Indianan

The Spectator

2533: Monday’s Child – solution

‘From harmony, from heavenly harmony, this universal frame began’ opens JOHN DRYDEN’s Song for ST CECILIA’S DAY (22 November, a Monday this year). HENRY PURCELL set it to music. First prize Hilary James, London W5 Runners-up Harry Duff, Llangynidr, Crickhowell, Powys; Ken Rae, Wadbister, Shetland

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Goldfinger for tots

In Competition No. 3228, you were invited to provide a well-known extract from adult literature rewritten for inclusion in an anthology of children’s literature. It was Julie Burchill’s verdict, in this magazine, on Sally Rooney’s latest novel that prompted me to set this task: ‘Her writing is so blank,’ she wrote, ‘that in parts it reads like a children’s starter book — Janet and John Get Naked and Say Stuff About the Pointlessness of Existence.’ One of the many high points in a terrific entry was John MacRitchie’s recasting of Wolf Hall as Francesca Simon might have written it: ‘Horrid Henry wakes up one morning feeling really cross. Weepy Wolsey