Society

Thursday

Peter Jones

Roman cancel culture didn’t stop at statues

The mob is at work again in Oxford, protesting against the existence of Oriel’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. But this is a mob of dons who, rather than doing anything about it, have decided just to stop teaching at Oriel. And that will solve the problem? The Romans were a little more proactive. ‘Statue’ derives from statuo, ‘I place X so as to remain upright’. That was its correct position, where it could be kissed, garlanded and so on. Cicero mentions a deity whose mouth and chin had been worn down by worshippers. Vandalism and indeed theft were known, but it was damnatio memoriae (‘condemnation of memory’, a designation invented

Doc

2511: Changing places

The 12 unclued lights (one of two words) are somehow paired and one solution in each pair is of a kind with the five others.   Across 12 Prizes at dance which Desperate Dan patronises? (7, hyphened) 14 Fancy notepaper? (5) 15 Fish and cheese sauce, not new (5) 16 Stay out of bed with Christmas singer at university (6, two words) 17 Top chess player in compound (6) 24 With various actors, Ginger shared the lead (9) 29 Island garden with a cuckoo (7) 32 Appreciation from US actor? (6) 33 Secretary general of UN that flourished (6, two components) 35 Surpass and exit? (5) 36 Stop will be

Lucy Vickery

Extracts from Shakespeare’s newly discovered play, Charles III

In Competition No. 3203, you were invited to supply an extract from the newly discovered Shakespeare play Charles III. I haven’t seen Mike Bartlett’s 2014 King Charles III but the theatre critic of this magazine wasn’t impressed: ‘A script that breezily defames the royals ought to be great fun, but this cheerless, overblown little play seems to have been created by political numbskulls for those of similar calibre.’ So it was pleasing to receive such a varied and accomplished entry. Martin Parker, Simon Hunter, Nigel Stuart and Alaric Evans earn honourable mentions. The winners take £25. HARRY DUKE OF SUSSEX Well, well, a king at last. All hail for now. But this

Luke McShane

No. 658

Mammadzada — M. Muzychuk, May 2021. In this messy position, Black’s next move prompted instant resignation. What did she play? Answers should be emailed to chess@-spectator.co.uk by Monday 21 June. 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…Qg1+! 2 Kxg2 f2+ 3 Kh1 fxe1=Q 4 Bxe1 Rxf1 mate Last week’s winner Peter Dearnley, Kidderminster

Luke McShane

Macaques and defence

January normally brings cheerful photos from the Gibraltar Chess Festival, where visiting chess-players get an impromptu snap with the Barbary macaques which inhabit the island. Alas, the 2021 festival was off, while the Fide Women’s Grand Prix, a 12-player all-play-all which forms part of the Women’s World Championship cycle, was planned for January and then postponed. Gibraltar vaccinated most of its adults by March, and by mid-May the government announced that there were no active cases among residents or visitors. That was good timing for the Fide Women’s Grand Prix, which had been rescheduled for later in May, and offered a refreshing glimpse of over-the-board chess. Zhansaya Abdumalik, 21, from

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 19 June 2021

Immense excitement in the relatively tiny world of bridge — the English Bridge Union has announced that the Premier League will be held face to face, beginning in September at the brand new Young Chelsea venue in London. Sadly not all our clubs will be reopening, the tremendous toll of the past 18 months having made many of them unviable. But it hasn’t been all bad; the three biggest pluses for me were brilliant online tournaments (even though the cognoscenti call them computer games with cards), no travelling and no fuming partners starting every sentence with: ‘Why did you…?’ And the three deal-breakers? Cheating, cheating and cheating. We all know

Melissa Kite

My medical embarrassments are my business and no one else’s

While we were looking forward to Freedom Day, the National Health Service was busy planning something extra special to coincide with it almost exactly. From 23 June, our medical records can be given by our GPs to other agencies and third parties for the purpose of that most ambiguous of all state activities, ‘planning’. While you thought they were busy planning Freedom Day, they were, in fact, planning Freedom of Your Information Day, in which everything you have ever told your doctor would become only marginally more secure than the information about your shopping habits that your loyalty card is collecting for the supermarket giants. Where your medical records are

Jeremy Clarke

Jason Ricci is my mentor, guru and anointed one

A second week recovering in bed in this pleasant south-facing bedroom. If I sit up, my back resting against whitewashed rock, I can look out of the window across 30 miles of oak forest to the Massif Des Maures, a coastal mountain range. As the day progresses, these indistinguishable mountains are altered by the changing light until finally and dramatically the softer evening rays reveal the folds and valleys in topographical detail. The revealing doesn’t last more than five minutes and I try to remember to look out for it. Then the mountains darken and, after a last commemorative glow, vanish. Last week there was a violent electric storm and

The Sun

Why Kelvin MacKenzie is wrong about the Sun

It is complete nonsense to say that the word ‘woke’ has been banned from the Sun. No such conversations have taken place — with Ally Ross or anyone on the paper. We cover ‘woke’ stories on the front page regularly, including today, and we use the word throughout the paper and in leader columns. There is also no agreement with ITV to only write positive stories about their celebrities, nor was there any meeting with Carolyn McCall, CEO of ITV, to discuss this or to discuss Phillip Schofield coming out. There are many other factual errors in this piece, and outdated assumptions about the Sun’s readership and editorial position. The Sun

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Euro 2020: Finland and Russia’s less than epic rematch

Finland: 0 Russia: 1 (Zhukov, 45) Following an earlier, epic, encounter between these two plucky teams, Adolf Hitler commented: ‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ He had noted the parlous performance of the Red Army during the initial stages of the 1939 Winter War and thus convinced himself that invading the USSR would be a doddle.  We have those Finns to thank, then, sort of, for the Allies’ eventual victory. Famously, they routed the Red Army because they had the sense to wear white gear in the snow, while the commies wore green. It was a game of two halves, mind, and

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Brexit, lockdown and the fracturing of British politics

Is our society becoming less tolerant and more viscerally tribal? Or is our politics provoking people into committing more angry and desperate acts? The harassment of BBC Newsnight political editor Nick Watt in Whitehall this week by a group of anti-lockdown protestors recalled the ugly mood that descended on the environs of the Palace of Westminster during the Brexit stalemate of 2016-20. Back then, it was Remainer MP Anna Soubry who suffered the worst incident of intimidation, while the Leaver Jacob Rees-Mogg was also horribly abused by a pro-EU crowd as he walked home from a key vote with one of his children. Many of us might have hoped that

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is inflation about to bite?

The signs were there for all to see — pubs, restaurants, hairdressers and so on all pushing up their prices. Businesses have to make a profit while observing social distancing, dealing with soaring fuel prices and fast-accelerating wages. Yet the latest inflation figures seem to have caught many people by surprise. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) is back above the Bank of England’s target at 2.1 per cent. Fears that Brexit would lead to a surge in food prices appear to be unfounded Drill down into the figures and you can see that, while the current level of CPI is not in itself a problem, inflationary pressures are building. Producer price inflation —

Raghib Ali

Lockdown delay is a price worth paying

For the first time during this pandemic, I think we should delay lifting restrictions. Looking at the latest data, it seems that the Prime Minister was right to postpone ‘Freedom Day’. I am no zero-Covider. Its clear restrictions can be as harmful as Covid. Last September, it seemed obvious that a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown would have just postponed the wave further into winter. In February, the government did the right thing by explicitly ruling out an elimination policy and introducing its roadmap. At the front of everyone’s minds should be minimising harm. This time around, minimising harm means delaying reopening. The situation is completely different from other stages of the pandemic. Vaccines are preventing hospitalisations

Matthew Scott

Cressida Dick and the ‘institutional corruption’ of the Met police

The report by Sir Richard Henriques into Operation Midland argued that the Metropolitan police was institutionally incompetent, stupid and credulous. If the devastating report by the independent panel into the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan is to be believed, the force is also institutionally corrupt. The institutional corruption consisted of dishonestly ‘concealing or denying failings, for the sake of the organisation’s public image.’ And the ‘failings’ which the Met tried to conceal or deny appear to have sometimes consisted of actual, old-fashioned corruption by individual police officers. The stench rises overpoweringly from every one of the report’s three volumes. From the very first vital minutes after the private investigator Daniel

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Euros 2021: Hungary’s lockdown lesson for the world

Hungary (Orban 1, 90) 2 Europe and the WHO 0 Now THIS was a proper game of football. Fractious and furious, bitterly contested in front of 61,000 magnificently partisan Hungarians in Budapest. Scarcely a mask in sight and certainly not a knee. Orban has had enough of lockdown: Hungary took us back to the old world, that world we quite liked. The Magyars, roared on, fought for everything, inspired by Laszlo Kleinheisler (a Danube Swabian? One of Hungary’s ethnic Germans, persecuted of late and often expelled?) They were undone, cruelly, by a deflection and a penalty, having had a goal of their own disallowed. How I hoped they might win,

Tuesday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The strange boycott of GB News

GB News, the UK’s first new news channel in decades, launched on Sunday night with a monologue from the estimable Andrew Neil, setting out the channel’s philosophy.  ‘We will puncture the pomposity of our elites and politics, business, media and academia and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture for the threat to free speech and democracy that it is’, he said. Just 48 hours later and GB News’s detractors have already proven him right.  Anyone who has bothered to watch GB News’s output in its first couple of days would not have detected anything resembling ‘hate’ Stop Funding Hate, a pearl-clutching campaign group that seeks to deprive news outlets

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Covid and the difficulty with ‘following the science’

Did anyone fancy being in Boris Johnson’s shoes before he made the decision to delay the full lifting of Covid restrictions? Keir Starmer, perhaps. But even Starmer might have preferred opposition if he had read the latest paper by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) committee, which will have informed the Prime Minister’s decision. It reinforces just how difficult it is for any government to ‘follow the science’. If you can sum the paper up in one sentence it would be ‘sorry, but we really don’t have much of a clue as to what will happen’. Here are just a couple of highlights: ‘The scale of this resurgence

Monday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

How long will political and public patience last?

11 min listen

It seems Freedom Day is no longer June 21st. The writing was clearly on the wall this morning, but now the Prime Minister has officially told the public, it is likely to be another four weeks of restrictions. ‘Conservative MPs are getting really agitated by this moving of the goal posts‘ – Isabel Hardman But after so many backtracks how much credibility does Boris have left?  ‘I think the real problem with him and the public though, will come if this July 19th date is not met’ – James Forsyth Katy Balls is joined by James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman to discuss.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Euros 2021: Scotland have exposed the pointlessness of ‘taking the knee’

Scotland 0 Czech Republic 2 (Schick as a parrot, 42,52) Have you ever visited Carlsbad, now known as Karlovy Vary? I’d always had a faint hankering to live there, being hugely enamoured of what we once called eastern Europe, but I’m told it’s full of the most ghastly Russians these days. Maybe Slovakia is a better bet, somewhere near the Tatras. A Hungarian diplomat once asked me: ‘What do you call a Pole who speaks Hungarian?’ The answer – a Slovak. I like the fact they all hate each other, too. You should hear some Austrians when they talk about Slovaks. The mask slips and they begin to echo an