Society

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: presidential mnemonics

In Competition No. 3227, you were invited to provide verses to help children remember the sequence of the last eight US presidents. The same challenge was set in these pages more than 30 years ago, and on that occasion the late Martin Fagg, a titan in the world of literary competitions, emerged victorious. Here’s a snippet from his winning entry, which takes us more or less to the point where yours start from: Gerald Ford — so superdumb He couldn’t walk straight chewing gum. Georgia’s Carter — folksy guy, First ‘Jimmy Who?’, then ‘Jimmy Why?’ Last, Reagan — filmic do-or-die man, And one-time husband of Jane Wyman. It was a mixed bag this week, but

The Spectator

2532: Patchy? – solution

The unclued lights are TV detectives and their PATCH: 10/8, 13/5D, 15/39, 26/41, 36/33. First prize Emma Corke, Abinger Hammer, Surrey Runners-up John Gaymer, Effingham, Surrey; Magdalena Deptula, Eton, Berkshire

Luke McShane

No. 682

Black to play. Plat-Esipenko, European Team Championship, 2021. The 19-year-old Russian playing Black found a way to force mate in three moves. What did he play next? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 6 December. 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 Qb8+! Kg7 2 Qa7+ Kh6 3 Rxf6 Qd1+ 4 Qg1 wins with the extra rook Last week’s winner Robert Tove, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Doc

2535: Triplets

The unclued lights, all nouns or verb forms (one is a hyphened plural), include a common feature different in all twelve cases. Solvers are invited to indicate both possible unclued lights at 29 Down. Elsewhere, ignore two accents.   Across 1 Stab with a knife (5) 4 Order a gin around river (9, two words) 9 Potential difficulties from awkward Moscow and far North (10, three words) 11 Sad poem which its middle letters spell out (5) 12 Move forward and notice vehicle by church (7) 14 Corn produced by monarch reigning from 1714 (5) 15 Honda car going back and forth in town? (5) 21 Obscure eyepiece – artist’s

Luke McShane

Mar del Plata

Alireza Firouzja produced a momentous performance for France at the European Team Championships, held in Slovenia last month. The 18-year-old, originally from Iran, had taken first place at the Fide Grand Swiss in Latvia just a few days earlier. In Slovenia, his seven wins and two draws was a staggering achievement, earning him an individual gold medal and propelling him to second place in the world rankings. In the overall team standings, it was Ukraine that took gold, finishing narrowly ahead of France on tiebreak. The England team got off to a shaky start, and we didn’t come close to repeating our bronze-medal-winning performance from the previous edition in 2019.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Donald Trump: monarchist?

As the Harry and Meghan carnival rumbles on, the Queen has found an unexpected source of support: Donald Trump. During an interview with Nigel Farage, Trump said of Meghan: ‘I’m not a fan of hers. I wasn’t from day one…she is trying do things that I think are very inappropriate.’ Meanwhile, he painted the Duke of Sussex as her plaything: ‘I think Harry’s been used and been used terribly. I think it’s ruined his relationship with his family, and it hurts the Queen…I think some day he will regret it.’ If Trump doesn’t like Harry and Meghan, there’s no doubting his affection for the Queen. He described her in the interview which

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Covid restrictions have gone on for too long

We can’t carry on like this. We can’t keep resurrecting restrictions every time a new Covid variant emerges. We can’t keep suspending certain liberties whenever this blasted virus mutates. Somehow we have got stuck in a spiral of doom and kneejerk authoritarianism, and we urgently need to find a way out of it. People, of course, will say it’s only mask-wearing in shops and on buses. It’s only a PCR test if you’re coming back from overseas. It’s only mandatory quarantine if you come into contact with someone infected with the Omicron variant. These are hardly onerous regulations. And Boris says they’ll be temporary. They will be reviewed in three

Monday

Daniel Lightman

Does cricket have an anti-Semitism problem?

The row over racism at Yorkshire County Cricket Club has also shone a spotlight on anti-Semitism in the cricketing world. Andrew Gale, the Yorkshire head coach and former captain, has been suspended for having sent a tweet which said: ‘button it, yid’.  Azeem Rafiq, the former Yorkshire spin-bowler who blew the whistle on racism, was found to have sent a Facebook message in which he labelled a fellow cricketer as a ‘Jew’ for being reluctant to spend money at a team dinner, and went on to assert: ‘Only Jews do (that) sort of shit ha’. The comedian Mike Yarwood once quipped: ‘I was doing the smallest books in the world.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can boosters save us from further restrictions?

The JCVI has announced that all over 18s will be offered a booster jab and that the gap between the second dose and the booster shot will be halved from six months to three. Those with weakened immune systems will be offered a fourth shot and 12 to 15-year-olds a second dose of vaccine. These announcements are clearly in response to the Omicrom variant, which appears to spread particularly quickly. Jonathan Van-Tam likened its effect on the UK’s response to the virus to a football team going down to ten men. In recent months, the UK — and in particular, England — has had a heavily vaccine-based strategy for living

Simon Wood

Do masks really halve the risk of Covid? A note on the evidence

‘Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding’ as Willy Loman said in Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece An Inspector Calls. Grating isn’t it? But also a reasonable facsimile of how science reporting often reads, at least to those of us self identifying as scientists. Pre-Covid it was so. With Covid the problem has become, well, an epidemic. Recent reporting about the efficacy of masks is a classic case in point. You might remember the study in question: it certainly made headlines when it came out. ‘Mask-wearing cuts Covid incidence by 53 per cent, says global study’, stated the Guardian: ‘results from more than 30 studies from around the world were analysed

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

What the BBC show trial of Michael Vaughan tells us

After dropping Michael Vaughan in punishment for what he said (or might not have said) many years ago, the BBC has now given him the chance to explain himself. It took the form of Dan Walker, a BBC1 Breakfast host, confronting the accused with examples of his wrongthink and hearing his defence. That defence is pretty academic now, given that Vaughan has already been dropped from covering the Ashes this winter and may now disappear from the screens entirely. But it has given us an example of what may now lie ahead in the cancel culture we are adopting. Ten years after the Tweets comes the outrage. Then the cancellation.

Simon Clarke

Is Boris right to fear the Omicron variant?

Boris Johnson announced a new raft of coronavirus measures on Saturday, after two cases of the Omicron variant were detected in the UK. Face masks will soon be made mandatory in shops and on public transport and  PCR tests compulsory for those travelling to the UK. These new restrictions were revealed less than half a week after health authorities in South Africa informed the World Health Organisation of the discovery of the new Covid-19 variant, designated B.1.1.529 and now re-named Omicron. First isolated on 9 November, on Saturday two cases of the virus were detected in Britain, in Essex and Nottinghamshire. Is Boris Johnson right to fear this new variant?

Saturday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Has Boris Johnson done enough to stop the Omicron variant?

The restoration of an obligation to take a PCR test within two days of return to the UK, and to isolate until receipt of a negative result, is the most important of Boris Johnson’s announcements today. In theory it will delay the seeding and spread of the new Omicron Covid-19 variant. But the relatively limited prophylactic measures unveiled alongside this – compulsory mask wearing in shops and on public transport, the obligation for any close contacts of those infected with Omicron to isolate, whether or not they test positive – will only turn out to be adequate if the new variant hasn’t already been seeded here. It is possible that

Vernon Bogdanor

Oxford should not accept money that is tainted by fascism

Dons and students at Oxford have in recent years been deeply exercised about Cecil Rhodes, who died 120 years ago. Some politically sensitive students removed a portrait of the Queen in the Magdalen graduate common room, and others even persuaded the geography department to remove a portrait of Theresa May. Yet they seem strangely silent on the implications of taking money tainted by fascism. This month it was announced that the university had been given £6 million from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust for a chair in biophysics. Two colleges have also taken money from the Trust — St Peter’s College received £5 million for a new block of student

Henry Hill

The British Army is becoming an American auxiliary force

What are the armed forces for? This is the question that hangs over every defence review, and one that recent governments have been averse to answering. The problem is this: since the end of the Cold War, defence has gradually slipped further and further down the political priority list. At the same time, ministers and senior officers have been reluctant to publicly scale back their ambitions for what the military should do. As a result, instead of making decisive cuts to certain capacities in order to maintain others, we have gradually shrunk all the services to the point where they face serious operational difficulties. Britain boasts two aircraft carriers, for

Richard Dobbs

The Omicron variant is now in Britain. Here’s how we beat it

As feared, Covid-19 is not going quietly. The arrival of the Omicron strain in Britain – with cases already identified in  Chelmsford and in Nottingham – is clearly not the news we wanted as we prepare for the Christmas holidays. The Prime Minister will hold a press conference later today, likely to mark a distinct change in tone. For a while, it was possible to feel that our vaccine programme, supported by better treatments, mass testing and non-pharmaceutical interventions had started to defeat the virus. So, we started to turn our focus to other activities such as levelling up, addressing the NHS waiting lists, climate change, violence against women and girls, and bickering

Friday

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The ridiculous rehabilitation of Azeem Rafiq

Has Azeem Rafiq been forgiven yet? He’s certainly working on it. After finding himself on both sides of a racism scandal, the former Yorkshire cricketer’s rehabilitation PR operation has been nothing if not swift. As the story broke last week that Rafiq had sent messages mocking Jewish people, he apologised immediately: ‘I am incredibly angry at myself and I apologise to the Jewish community’. The following day, in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Rafiq apologised again: ‘My genuine feeling is that I deserve the flak. I f***ed up’. ‘It’s for the Jewish community to decide whether you guys accept my apology,’ he added. Is this really how apologies now

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The snobbery of Extinction Rebellion’s Amazon blockade

Every week brings fresh proof of what a bunch of bourgeois snobs Extinction Rebellion are. The latest exhibit is their blockading of Amazon’s main distribution centres. The eco-loons and their apologists are dressing this up as a principled stand against venal capitalism. Pull the other one. This is just a noisy middle-class moan about the greedy masses and all the ‘crap’ we’re planning to buy on Black Friday. Yes, not content with irritating deliverymen, builders and other productive members of the working classes by plonking themselves on the M25 and other major roads a few weeks ago, now XR is trying to stop us from getting the things we’ve ordered

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Omicron variant: what we know so far

Will the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, be the black swan that pulls the world back — just when the pandemic seemed to be fading? Global markets certainly seem to think so, with sharp falls on Asian and European trading this morning. But what do we know about the new variant? The variant — otherwise known as B.1.1.529 — was only identified in Botswana on Tuesday. We have had numerous variants emerge this year, few of which have succeeded in establishing themselves as a real concern. But what is worrying virologists about Omicron is that it has an unusually high number of mutations — 50, according to South

Thursday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The sinister attempt to silence a Yazidi survivor

Are we cancelling former Isis sex slaves now? It would seem so, at least going by this barmy story out of Toronto, Canada, where a school-board recently pulled out of an event with a survivor of the Yazidi genocide amidst fears her story could ‘foster Islamophobia’. Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human-rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner. In 2014, her family were killed by Isis as the group swept through northern Iraq. She was sold into sexual slavery. She was raped, tortured and passed around depraved militants until she eventually escaped. She has since become an advocate for the rights of Yazidis, determined to make sure the West does