Society

Thursday

18 Nov 2021

What did Michael Vaughan do wrong?

Is Michael Vaughan a racist? I hope not. Certainly, referring to Asian cricketers as ‘you lot’, as he is accused of doing – and which he strongly denies saying – would suggest he is. Or, at the very least, that in the past he has been guilty of being egregiously politically incorrect. I’ve met Vaughan several times and once sat next to him on a flight from Abu Dhabi to London. On each occasion I was struck by his openness, and by his enthusiastic and enquiring nature. He certainly didn’t seem a racist to me – the opposite, in fact – but perhaps he was just very good at hiding it.

Rachel Johnson

It’s hard not to pity Ghislaine Maxwell

This week, I’m having puppies! First litter! The Johnsons were not doggy as we always moved around too much (my late mother claims it was 32 times in 17 years), but once you have a dog, life seems boring without. I have a theory that children give couples something to talk about and, when they go, only a dog can fill the conversational void. The mother (or ‘dam’) is Ziggy, who entered our lives one week before lockdown after I had a sudden strong urge to get a dog. On 13 March last year I drove to a farm in Somerset and fell for a puff of white fur with

Olivia Potts

Recipe: Lancashire hotpot

Nine months ago, after a decade spent in London, I moved to Lancashire. Although I’m a northerner born and bred, I’m from the northeast, between Newcastle and Sunderland, so this was new territory for me. Keen to assimilate, I was ready to get stuck into some of the dishes the area is famous for: Eccles cakes, Manchester tart and Lancashire hotpot. I was nervous. Regional dishes are integral to the character of a place, and often fiercely protected by those local to it. There are right ways and wrong ways to make them. As a newcomer, I didn’t want to get it wrong. Lancashire hotpot is a one-pot dish of

Lionel Shriver

The absurd theatre of vaccine passports

When a column highlighting under-appreciated breaking news has had absolutely no impact on the course of events (per usual), the urge to make the same point again is irresistible. In August, Public Health England released data which shows that vaccination does not appreciably guard against Covid infection and transmission and protection worked out at around 17 per cent for the over-fifties. As I observed then, this would mean the vaxxed and unvaxxed pose a comparable danger to each other. All Covid apartheid schemes are therefore insensible. Fresher information has fortified this conclusion of the summer. In every age group over 30 in the UK, the rates of Covid infection per

The Spectator

Emad Al Swealmeen should not have been in Britain

Emad Al Swealmeen, who blew himself up in a taxi outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, is not believed to have been identified by security services as a terror suspect. Nevertheless, he should not have been in Britain. He lied about where he had come from, which ought to have been a red flag, enough in and of itself to warrant his return to his home country. Indeed, his application for asylum was rejected in 2014, but he was never removed. Instead, he reinvented himself as a Christian convert, gaining himself time and grounds for appeal and last Sunday, on Remembrance Day, he attempted to commit what could easily have been

Bruce Anderson

The heady Heights of Israeli wine

‘Where is this from?’ my friend asked, handing me a wine glass. It was a Cabernet Sauvignon, high in alcohol, bit of oak: could do with more time (turned out to be a 2016) but well made. Not French and, despite the alcohol, I did not think that it was Californian either. South Africa? Possibly, but there was a more obvious explanation. My friend is Jewish and he had recently been in Israel. I claimed the Dr Watson prize: ‘The Golan Heights.’ So it was, from Yarden, one of Israel’s best growers. When I first went to Israel, 40 years ago, the wine tasted like bad Anglican communion wine. Since

Melissa Kite

Is there such a thing as a human right to night?

The street lamp as bright as the Dog Star is back to its full glare outside my house. I won a small victory earlier this year when I persuaded the council to fit a shield to one side of it after threatening to throw myself out the window because I couldn’t sleep. But the other day, an engineer arrived in a van with a crane lift and took the shield away. I wasn’t there, a neighbour witnessed it, but when I got back home the street lamp was sporting a makeshift strip of black gaffa tape around the top, shielding only a tiny bit of light. I contacted the council

Jeremy Clarke

My moment of madness in the opticians

Foolishly I chose new specs in the village optician’s after a long lunch: a rather outré design that I might not have chosen had I been completely sober. For the past decade I’ve worn a retro design I’d first admired in David Bailey’s striking black and white photographs of Ron Kray. Thinking it might be time for a change of style to reflect my invalid passivity, and the hairless dome of my surprisingly small skull, I’d gone in a moment of madness for a pair of John Lennon’s hippie silver circles. Three weeks later, I returned to the shop to try them on with the new prescription lenses fitted. It

Taki

The joy of being cancelled

New York I’ve never met anyone called Othello, certainly not in Venice nor in Cyprus, but perhaps there are men by that name in Africa. Someone who was referred to as Othello, but always behind his back, was the greatest of all Russians, Alexander Pushkin: a ‘raging Othello’ was how les mauvaises langues in court described the great poet. Pushkin’s great-grandfather, General A.P. Gannibal, was Ethiopian. I’ll get back to Othello in a jiffy, but first a few words about marital jealousy and Pushkin. The poet got a bee in his bonnet soon after marrying the beautiful but coquettish Natalia because she flirted, harmlessly but nevertheless disastrously. Innocent flirtation might

Dot Wordsworth

How are you meant to pronounce Uranus?

I had thought there were two pronunciations of Uranus. My husband, still capable of distinguishing the anatomical from the planetary, puts the stress on the first syllable. The question arose because Lord Bragg on his radio oasis of sense In Our Time was discussing William Herschel, in 1781 the first man to discover a planet. Herschel at first called it Georgium Sidus, the ‘Georgian planet’. This was to thank his patron George III, who allowed him £200 a year to live near Windsor and show guests the sky’s wonders with the 7ft reflector telescope he had polished into existence, the best in the world. The Georgian name did not catch

Rory Sutherland

The key to happiness? Getting behind the wheel

A friend of mine recently visited a company in Europe which plans to manufacture human-carrying, pilotless drones. These would be capable of carrying a single passenger above the traffic at speeds of around 70 miles an hour. ‘What kind of onboard information would be conveyed to the passenger?’ he asked. Will they be told their airspeed, altitude or location… that kind of thing?’ Even today, 38 years after I passed my driving test, few things give me as much joy as a well-executed parallel park ‘Nothing whatsoever,’ he was told. ‘There is no need. The entire journey is pre-programmed, and there is no need for the passenger to know what

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I stop guests sitting on my newly plumped sofas?

Q. We have recently installed security cameras in our remote holiday house in the south of France and I was surprised to be alerted to an intruder in the garden who was easily identifiable as our young female neighbour who owns a farm across the road. She was, armed with a plastic bag, helping herself to walnuts from a tree in the garden. I watched a little affronted because she had never asked permission, and decided to activate the alarm. She ran off and vaulted the wooden gates at the front of the property and ran straight across the road to her home. Later on, we heard that she has

Toby Young

The day I became a prize contrarian

Something rather unusual happened to me a few weeks ago: I was shortlisted for a prize. Not the GQ Men of the Year — shock! — but the Contrarian Prize. This is an award given to people who’ve exhibited ‘independence, courage and sacrifice’ in British public life. Previous winners include the headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh, the economist Patrick Minford and the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. Quite distinguished company, in other words. On 11 November I was invited along to the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in St James’s by Ali Miraj, the creator of the prize, for the award ceremony. Naturally, the first thing I did was look around to see

Peter Jones

Greta and the gap between words and actions

Greta Thunberg and her supporters were loud in protest at COP26, but one wonders to what end. They demanded deeds, not words, but words were all they had to offer, except when they were so devoutly letting down the tyres of SUVs. Ancient Greeks were extremely interested in the distinction between word (logos, cf. our ‘-logy’) and deed (ergon, cf. our ‘energy’). In one branch of usage, logos was seen in opposition to ergon. The distinction was that logos was merely verbal and therefore a potentially deceptive representation of reality, while ergon was the real thing, reality itself, a fact. One Greek myth suggested that the goddess ‘Conflict’ was responsible

The Spectator

Does Leeds need trains – or trams?

Shell out Royal Dutch Shell announced that it is to move its HQ to London and become a fully British company. What’s its history? — The company has its origins with a London antiques dealer, Marcus Samuel, who in 1833 diversified to import oriental shells as fashionable decorations. After his death in 1870, his sons Marcus Jr and Samuel diverted their interests to oil, building a fleet of tankers to import it from Dutch Borneo. The business merged with the Royal Dutch Company in 1907. Take the tram The government is to abandon the eastern leg of HS2 and offer Leeds a tram system instead. Which does Leeds need more?

Hannah Moore

The hellish return of the mullet

The mullet is back in fashion, which is proof that true evil never dies. What’s more, the trend is being driven by public-school boys. I only noticed its return last month, when I attended a local ball in East Sussex frequented by the type of people you’d expect at a local ball in East Sussex. But this year was different. There were 17-year-olds with mullets everywhere. ‘Why? What does it all mean?’ I asked anyone who would listen. We were all baffled. The mullet has been trending on Instagram and TikTok, supposedly a consequence of 2020’s boredom-induced madness. Rihanna sported a mullet recently as did Cara Delevingne in last year’s

The Spectator

Letters: it isn’t climate change scientists who are the hysterics

Balance of power Sir: Ross Clark sums up the problem with wind power (‘Storing up trouble’, 13 November). It is often inadequate or alternatively excessive, leading in the latter case to the ludicrous position of making payments to operators for producing nothing. A solution to the question of storing electricity to even out the peaks and troughs of wind power would clearly be of great benefit in our quest for net zero. Mr Clark does not appear to be keen on batteries, which make demands on our finite sources of rare metals and can be dangerously volatile. Pumped water storage has limited application. What he did not mention was hydrogen.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: a Liverpool terror attack, the end of COP26 and the Belarus migrant crisis

Home The UK terror threat level was raised to severe after a taxi exploded and burst into flames just before 11 a.m. on Remembrance Sunday outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital, killing the passenger. He was Emad Al Swealmeen, 32, a failed asylum-seeker from the Middle East, who had converted from Islam, and was confirmed in 2017 at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral nearby. He had previously been sectioned for six months under the Mental Health Act because of his behaviour with a knife. The detonator seemed to have gone off but not the bomb. The taxi driver, whose wounds required hospital treatment, was praised for his courage. The Countess of Avon, widow of

Martin Vander Weyer

Shell’s Dutch departure is a boost for the city of London

The scrapping of most of the eastern leg of HS2, originally planned from Birmingham to Leeds, is a news item that’s been waiting like a crowded train stuck at a vandalised signal while ministers squabbled over which cheaper substitutes might appease competing pockets of ‘red wall’ voters. Likewise the ‘Northern Power-house’ high-speed line from Manchester to Leeds, which is set to be replaced by a few more trains running a bit quicker on the existing scenic route. None of this merits the title ‘Integrated Rail Plan’ which it will carry when formally announced by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, rather than leaked in snippets. But ‘Cynical Rail Compromise’ wouldn’t have quite

Matthew Parris

Why can’t we remember our first few years?

I begin this column on a train from Paris to London. Opposite me are a mother and baby. I don’t know them and will probably never see them again. The baby is nine months old and called Gabriel. A genial and relaxed child, he is grinning at me and waving his soft-toy giraffe. He’s wearing bootees, white socks polka-dotted with little red hearts, pale burgundy trousers and a grey top. He seems uninterested in northern France flashing past our window, though his mother has held him up to look; but he is taken with this new stranger, your columnist. And I reflect: is it not very odd indeed — does