Society

Thursday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Can the Lions prise open the strong Boks?

You would need a digger to explore the levels of irony in a Springbok chief slagging off an opponent’s dirty play. But that’s what Rassie Erasmus, the South Africa director of rugby, was up to when he used Twitter to question Owen Farrell’s choices of tackle technique. Fine and dandy and all part of the pre-Test build up to get the ear of the referee after the ferociously hard Lions defeat to a South Africa ‘A’ side. Yet hasn’t Erasmus got a point? Farrell has long had a taste for the high tackle and has largely got away with it. It’s going to be trickier now, I suspect, in what

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The true cost of the convenience economy

‘Where’s the car?’ said my wife Alice, interrupting my Zoom meeting on Saturday morning. ‘It’s where you left it,’ I said perhaps more pointedly than was kind. ‘When you drove it home last night. On the drive.’ ‘No it isn’t,’ she said. I left my Zoom meeting, shambled to the front of the house and looked out of the window. She was right. Half-full skip, yes. Wheelie bins, yes. The usual pizza boxes, empty vodka miniatures and crisp packets scattered outside our house by generous pedestrians? Present and correct. But no car. ‘It’s been stolen,’ I said gloomily and, of course, I was right. Much of the next couple of

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A Damascene moment in London: Imad’s Syrian Kitchen reviewed

Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is an eyrie off Carnaby Street, a once-famous road which seems to exist nowadays to sell trainers to tourists who have fallen, as if by wormhole, out of the Liberty homeware department with its pathological dependence on florals. No matter. Nearby, in Kingly Court, which is like Covent Garden before it fell to Dior and Apple, more interesting things happen: the sort of things that London, so sunken, needs. Kingly Court is charming because it invokes an ancient coaching inn — London was once filled with them — and it is, due to the presence of independent eating houses, still palpably bright, pleasing and alive. The restaurant

Toby Young Toby Young

In defence of footballers taking the knee

Before the television presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air — which cost him his job at GB News last week — he explained that his understanding of the gesture had changed. Having initially thought of it as political with a capital ‘p’, he now realised that in the eyes of most people, including England’s young football players, it is simply a way of expressing your opposition to racism, as well as solidarity with its victims. It is not an expression of support for the Black Lives Matter organisation or its more controversial aims. In retrospect, that seems pretty obvious. Professional footballers, who tend to be multi-millionaires, drive

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Will England pull out of the World Cup?

I wonder if the moral guardians of our country — the England football team — intend to participate in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar? Most of the players are currently kicking their heels (and presumably missing) in such places as the Turks and Caicos Islands, so they have plenty of time for rumination. Having become, in the words of their manager, a ‘beacon of light’ within a country of savages and bigots, it will be interesting to see if their moral stance extends to boycotting a tournament which is to be held in a totalitarian slave state that outlaws homosexuality and isn’t entirely up to speed on the issue

William Moore William Moore

The curious mythology of the Gosforth Cross

In the small Cumbrian village of Gosforth, in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, there is a sandstone cross which has stood there since the 10th century. It’s tall, nearly 15 feet, which immediately distinguishes it from any other sculpted stone cross you might find in churchyards across Britain. Up close, it’s even more unusual. The imagery is weird: men wrestle with giant monsters that snake up the cross’s shaft. The depictions weren’t identified until 1883 when William Slater Calverley, a vicar and amateur antiquarian, realised that the cross doesn’t show Christian subjects at all. It shows scenes from Ragnarök, the end of the world in Viking mythology. On the

The Spectator

Letters: The clock is ticking in Afghanistan

Out of Afghanistan Sir: Boyd Tonkin’s review of Anna Aslanyan’s Dancing on Ropes highlights the post-war abandonment of local Afghan and Iraqi interpreters by the US and UK (Books, 17 July). The UK’s response, up until last summer, deserved every bit of Tonkin’s strictures but the past year has seen a ‘strategic shift’. Ben Wallace and Priti Patel were clearly determined to change our approach and to give sanctuary to our former staff. More generous regulations were introduced in December and April but the imminent withdrawal of Nato forces now raises the fearful prospect of a Taleban takeover, or Taleban-induced paralysis of the Afghan government, before the necessary evacuation can

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Covid in cabinet, pingdemic pandemonium and Ben & Jerry’s boycott

Home On the eve of the day that most coronavirus restrictions were to be lifted, the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer had to react to having been in close contact with Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, who, despite being doubly vaccinated, had contracted Covid. At first Boris Johnson said that under a pilot scheme he would continue to work at Downing Street. Within hours, during which Labour exploited the idea of privilege, he backtracked, declaring it was ‘far more important that everybody sticks to the same rules’. So he would isolate himself (at Chequers) until 26 July. In a trend called by the press a ‘pingdemic’, enterprises found

The Spectator

What’s changed since the last Tokyo Olympics?

Waiting Games What did Japan, and the world, look like the last time Tokyo held the Olympics in 1964? — As this year, Tokyo had to wait to hold the Games. It was awarded the 1940 Olympics, but the offer was withdrawn after the Japanese invasion of China (before the 1940 Games were abandoned altogether). — South Africa was banned for the first time for refusing to send a single, multiracial team to the Games. — In spite of it being three years since the building of the Berlin Wall, East and West Germany entered a single ‘united’ team. — They were the first Games broadcast around the world by

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: W.S. Gilbert’s guide to wedded bliss

In Competition No. 3208, you were invited to submit a recipe for marital bliss on behalf of an author of your choice. Pausing only to give an honourable mention to Simon Hunter, I pass you over to this week’s terrific winners who each nab £25. I am the very model of a guide to conjugality Advising every blushing bride to face up to reality. If you can follow my advice and act with due humility You’re guaranteed a life that’s spent in unalloyed tranquillity. While testing your endurance when he uses the ‘facilities’, The seat’s still raised, but don’t complain; it might invoke hostilities. Be sure he always has his

Melissa Kite

I enjoy making a nuisance of myself for a good cause

The scaffolding pole across the public footpath led to a farcical conversation with the local council. I had been walking the dogs down this well-used path close to where we keep the horses when I discovered that the pole, which is attached to a post on either side of the path and which has been there for some years, was now padlocked to one of the posts so that I could no longer move it to go through. I rang it in, thinking I was being a good citizen. But no. This act of public service opened up the seventh circle of administrative hell. The staff at the rights of

Henry Blofeld

My 46 days on the road with John Woodcock

Although it was a miracle that he survived until a few weeks before his 95th birthday, the death of John Woodcock, the unrivalled cricket correspondent of the Times from 1954 to 1988, has left an enormous hole in many people’s lives, not least my own. I first met Wooders, as he was known to one and all, at a party at the old Hyde Park hotel in Knightsbridge in May 1962. Two days later as a result of our conversation, I found myself at the Bat and Ball ground in Gravesend on behalf of the Times, without ever before having written a word in anger, trying to put together 500

Matt Ridley

Organic food isn’t better for us – or the environment

It is mystifying to me that organic food is still widely seen as healthier, more sustainable and, most absurdly, safer than non-organic food. Following the publication of part two of Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy last week, the organic movement was quick to suggest that organic food and farming offer a way to achieve the strategy’s vision. ‘The recommendations of the National Food Strategy offer genuine hope that by embracing agroecological and organic farming, and adopting a healthier and more sustainable diet, we can address the climate, nature and health crises,’ said Helen Browning, chief executive of the Soil Association, Britain’s most vocal organic lobbying organisation. Browning also highlighted the

Robin Oakley

Jockeys suffer online abuse just like footballers

At least England’s defeat in the European Cup final has spared us the sight of Boris Johnson, who can scent a photo opportunity at 4,000 yards over the horizon, indulging in any more embarrassing antics in a No. 10 football shirt. Not that he is the only prime minister to have sought to ingratiate himself with football-followers. As BBC political editor in Tony Blair’s time, I learned that the government was thinking of supporting a World Cup bid and fixed an interview with sports minister Tony Banks. Later, to gauge just how much government commitment there was, I spoke to Alastair Campbell in Downing Street. That night Banks called me:

Jeremy Clarke

A very annoying guide to the Somme battlefields

We arranged to meet the second, more expensive, guide of our Somme battlefield visit at the Thiepval Memorial visitor centre car park. He arrived punctually. The foreign correspondent climbed in the back of his car and I got in the front. As he drove us past Lutyens’ masterpiece, instead of genuflecting towards it, the guide launched tunelessly into a repetitive mumbled refrain while thumping an imaginary bass drum with an imaginary foot pedal. ‘What’s that you’re singing?’ I asked. ‘Oh, nothing really. I’m just enjoying myself,’ he said. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘What’s the song?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied tetchily. After a brief respite, the tempo and indistinct vocal

Taki

In praise of Patmos

Patmos I’m in Patmos with four grandchildren, two children, and a wife. I know, I know, it sounds very lower–middle-class and only Bournemouth and some sunbeds are missing, but who cares. Children have friends, and grandchildren even younger friends, so it’s not all gloom and doom. The princely Schwarzenbergs are here — the mother is Greek — and so is half of Vienna, not to mention Florence, Venice and Rome. At dinner the other night up at the piazza, which holds about 40 tables, there was not a single Philip Green-type among the guests, and looking back I cannot remember having had a more pleasant dinner setting ever, other than

Douglas Murray

The 2020s will be boring, not roaring

Earlier this year, I noted the suggestion (made by an American academic and run with by a swathe of the British press) that we may be about to enter a party decade. The claim was that much as the Great War was followed by the Roaring Twenties, so the Covid era might be followed by a roaring 2020s. Advocates of the theory might point to the queues of young people waiting to get into the country’s nightclubs at one minute past midnight on Monday’s so-called ‘freedom day’. But I would suggest that there is more evidence accumulating in the opposite direction. Far from roaring, I would say it is more

James Bartholomew

The strange death of the English garden

Gardening is dead. It had been ailing for a long time and it sometimes looked as though it might pull through. But I knew it had finally kicked the bucket when the last of the three patches of grass I used to be able to see behind my house was replaced with a plastic lawn. Then there was a ghastly death rattle: plastic ivy was draped over an electric gate which serves to let the owner’s car into the paved area formerly known as the front garden. And that came after the arrival of dozens of plastic balls in the neighbourhood. They are supposed to be imitations of Buxus sempervirens

Peter Jones

The ancient Greeks had no time for losers

Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the fine arts. Baron de Coubertin, who dreamt up the modern Olympic Games, took a different view. He admired the spirit of games on the playing fields of Eton and thought that they might provide a model for games of the sort he imagined the ancient Greeks enjoyed at Olympia: competitive but amateur, fair, wholesome, played for the sake of it and also, he hoped, acting as a stimulus to world peace. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Olympic Games, founded in 776 bc, celebrated Zeus, god of Mount Olympus,