Society

Thursday

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 23 October 2021

YAY! We won the Gold Cup! We played Tim Leslie’s strong team in the 64-board final and beat them on the last eight board set. We were awesome — and I can say that because unfortunately I couldn’t play a single board in the semi-final or final. Result! Pushing hard to thin games (if you can play) has always been the way to put pressure on the opponents and IMPs on the score card. This was only the second hand of the final, but already there was no holding back (see diagram). At the other table, West made a T/O of 1◆, and North/South stopped in 3◆, going one down.

Sharri Markson

Wuhan clan: the price I paid for my lab leak exposé

On 12 March last year, I texted a trusted source connected to Australia’s foreign intelligence agency. ‘What do you think about the theory that the virus came from a virology lab in China? Does that have credibility? I know it’s officially a conspiracy theory but China is not exactly a picture of transparency so I thought it’s possible.’ He replied to say he knew someone ‘very involved in the observation of that lab and its activities’ and it was a definite possibility the virus leaked from the facility. It was a surprising response because, at the time, this view contradicted every utterance by scientists and world leaders, who insisted the

The Spectator

What are the Queen’s favourite tipples?

Drinks at the palace The Queen was reported to have given up regular drinking. What do we know about her drinking habits (or what she likes to offer her guests) to judge by the royal warrants she has issued? — These drinks firms currently hold warrants: Bacardi Martini; Berry Bros and Rudd; Britvic soft drinks; Bollinger; G.H. Mumm et Cie; Krug; Lanson Père et Fils; Laurent-Perrier; Moet & Chandon; Veuve Cliquot; James White drinks (tomato juice); Laphroaig distillery. Testing, testing From 24 October, travellers to Britain will no longer be required to present a negative PCR test for Covid, but will be able to use lateral flow tests. Will this

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The case for road pricing

Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with history. We hurl ourselves against the indifference of the age. It is now four decades since one of my first columns was published in London’s Evening Standard. In it I proposed an idea of which (if you read on) you’ll hear more. I got no response. It’s nearly 20 years since I wrote essentially the same piece as a whimsical side column for the Times. Labour’s Alistair Darling had called for debate on the idea. It never happened and my column attracted little notice. Fifteen years later, excited by a

Douglas Murray

Britain’s fatal unwillingness to confront Islamic extremism

More than any other country in the West, Britain has become practised in the arts of self-deception and subject avoidance. If a politician in France had been butchered by a Muslim of Somali descent, the French media and political class would have gone through a cycle of debate about the ideology that propelled the killer. Government and security sources would have talked about the networks surrounding the suspect. And the whole society would have learned a little more about what might have led to such an outrage. In Britain the situation is otherwise. David Amess was stabbed to death in a church while holding a surgery for his constituents. The

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why is it so hard to live without a mobile phone?

Last week, my mobile phone stopped working. No big deal you might think. If you can get emails on your computer, and you’ve got a landline and that old-fashioned thing, post, why, you’re not cut off, are you? There are, of course, people who wilfully eschew their phones so as to be more in touch with the present moment… birds, clouds, flowers etc. And I’m hardly a junkie. I don’t do social media. I’m a grown-up, so I’m not on Snapchat. Not having a phone should have been fine. But as I discovered, I was quickly cut out of society. First off, you can’t tell the time. Obviously, when you’ve

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: David Amess’s death, net-zero plans and contraceptives for hippos

Home Sir David Amess, aged 69, the Conservative MP for Southend West, was stabbed to death while taking a constituency surgery at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Police stopped a priest reaching him to administer the last rites. They arrested Ali Harbi Ali, 25, a British man of Somali heritage, who was detained under the Terrorism Act. The Queen agreed that Southend should be granted the status of a city, which Sir David had long campaigned for. Dennis Hutchings, 80, a former soldier on trial in Belfast for the attempted murder of John Pat Cunningham, 27, in 1974, died after catching Covid. In the seven days up to the beginning of this week,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The ideology of madness

On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for a while a small obelisk around which people deposited flowers. ‘If one man can show this much hate, imagine how much love we can show together’ was the marvellously trite inscription on the obelisk: vapid and close to meaningless, in either Norwegian or English. Utoya lies in the Tyrifjorden Lake about 45 minutes north of Oslo and it is where the Labour party’s ‘Workers’ Youth League’ once held its summer camps — until one afternoon in July 2011 when a man called Anders Breivik turned up, heavily armed. Breivik murdered

Dot Wordsworth

Can a criminal really be ‘prolific’?

The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal history’, in the words of Ian Rushton, the deputy chief crown prosecutor for North West England. To my ears, it sounds weird to call a rapist ‘prolific’. It sounds no better to refer to ‘one of the country’s most prolific serial killers’ as the Sun did last weekend. The difficulty is that the word still carries connotations of its Latin origin prolificus, ‘capable of producing offspring’. The Latin word was in use in Britain from the 14th century, and the English form developed only in the 17th century. Swift, in

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The problem with online property searches

In 1966, the legendary adman David Ogilvy set out to buy a home in France. He boarded a transatlantic liner to meet a French estate agent who had a perfect house waiting for him in Paris, but while still in mid-ocean he heard he had been gazumped. There were presumably other houses on sale in Paris at the time, but it seems the agent did not show David any of them. Instead he suggested they board a train to Poitiers, 200 miles away, to an area David later described as ‘the South Dakota of France’. On the banks of the Vienne stood a decaying 13th-century château with around 30 bedrooms

Bruce Anderson

Vega Sicilia: the best Spanish wine I have ever tasted

Four hundred and fifty years ago this month, a great victory helped to safeguard European civilisation. The battle of Lepanto would be more enthusiastically commemorated if our civilisation retained its self-confidence. For decades, the Ottoman empire had been menacing western Europe. Suleiman the Magnificent was the most formidable commander of the age, and Europe was doubly divided, both by the endemic rivalry between Spain and France and by the Reformation. Popes made regular attempts to persuade European monarchs to set aside their differences but these were usually unavailing. Rulers with other preoccupations often anticipated Stalin’s question: how many divisions has the Pope? By the 1570s, Venice was encouraging an anti-Ottoman

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why I left the Church of England: an interview with Michael Nazir-Ali

By now, almost everyone who’s remotely interested will know that Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester, a man once tipped to become Archbishop of Canterbury, has converted to Catholicism. Dr Nazir-Ali is the second senior Anglican cleric to jump ship this year, which makes church gossip sound pleasingly Shakespearean: ‘Ebbsfleet has fallen… what and Rochester too?’ But it’s also sad. It’s as if the Church of England is exploding in slow motion, all its constituent pieces — bishops, buildings, parishioners — drifting off for want of a centre to hold them. When I went to meet Dr Nazir-Ali this week, I expected to find him full of vim. As Bishop

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop a dinner guest double-dipping?

Q. During lockdown I made good friends with a neighbour who I would never have met otherwise. This man lives so close that he now regularly comes to informal dinners at our house. Unfortunately he has a habit of ‘double dipping’ his used fork into jars of redcurrant jelly, mustard, whatever — even though I always supply saucers and teaspoons. It means I have to throw away half-full jars when he has left. How can I stop this without drawing attention to his table manners and making him feel too shy to come again? I want to introduce this adorable man to other friends but feel I can’t while he

Peter Jones

Twitter has taken the place of the ancient curse-tablet

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to ‘bind’ the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to ‘hobble’ the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before

Andrew Sullivan

Why won’t the US media talk about trans issues?

The wonderful thing about woke narratives is that you only have to wait a while until they collapse. The core of Donald Trump’s appeal in 2016, we were told by the media, was that white supremacists and various gammons saw a chance to reverse racial progress. The results of 2020 showed that, in fact, black and Latino support for Trump had increased over those four years, while Biden won by increasing his white male vote. The ‘racial reckoning’ in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was proof, we were told, that we needed to ‘defund the police’. Only months later, the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral election was

John Sturgis

The simple pleasures of sloe gin

The gin craze of recent years has reached a scale that would have horrified Hogarth. You can now buy strawberry, raspberry, rhubarb, blueberry and lime gins in supermarkets. For me, though, there is only one flavoured variety worth bothering with: sloe gin. Where the rest are novelties, this is a staple dating back to the early 19th century. Sloe gin is everywhere — Buckingham Palace even launched a line this year. But it is the easiest thing to make at home and there’s something very pleasurable about the ritual of doing so. Folk wisdom suggests you should go foraging for sloes in the days after the first frosts — by

Toby Young Toby Young

Virtue signalling is really status signalling

A £19,000-a-year London day school was in the news this week because it has started instructing its pupils about ‘white privilege’ and ‘microaggressions’. Apparently, St Dunstan’s in south London, which boasts Chuka Umunna among its alumni, teaches its well-heeled students that the royal family bolsters expectations of ‘inherited white privilege’, asks them to ‘explore’ why Meghan Markle faced ‘additional challenges’ compared with Kate Middleton when she married a prince, and tells them why it’s important for the National Trust to examine the colonial past of its country houses and links to the slave trade. I was surprised this story attracted so much press interest. Surely a majority of top independent

Wednesday

Andrew McQuillan

Dennis Hutchings and the problem with a Troubles amnesty

The death of the former solider Dennis Hutchings from Covid-19 during his trial for attempted murder is yet another example of the complex legacy problem which besets Northern Ireland. Hutchings, who was 80 years old, was accused of killing John Pat Cunningham, 27, in County Tyrone in 1974. Hutchings’ supporters – which includes a broad swathe of unionist politicians, the Tory MP Johnny Mercer and the wider veteran community – regarded his prosecution as a disgrace. The 80-year-old, kept alive by dialysis, was dragged to Belfast from Cornwall for the non-jury trial. After his death, Hutchings’ lawyer argued he would still be alive had he not been compelled to go to

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How concerning is the new Covid variant?

Should we worry about AY.4.2, the new Covid variant that has been in the news this week? The descendent of the Delta variant — what we once called the Indian variant — was first identified in July. It has since grown so much that in the week beginning 27 September, it accounted for 6 per cent of all new cases in Britain — and is on an ‘upwards trajectory’, according to the UK Health Security Agency. It has been reported as being as much as 10 to 15 per cent more transmissible than the original Delta variant, which was estimated to be seven times as transmissible as the first variant detected