Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

The stories that are too good to check

Last weekend, Rolling Stone ran a story about an interview an emergency room doctor had given to a local news station in which, according to the TV reporter, he’d said hospitals in his state were so swamped with patients who’d overdosed on ivermectin that gunshot victims were struggling to be seen. For context, ivermectin is an anti-parasitic drug used for deworming horses that has been touted by vaccine sceptics as an effective prophylactic against Covid-19. For boosters of the Covid vaccines, this story was manna from heaven. Here were a bunch of hicks so dumb they were stuffing themselves with horse pills rather than getting jabbed, with predictably disastrous results.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

What tea with the WI taught me about responsible investment

Late-breaking exam results: many of the City’s top fund managers have failed a vital test of ‘stewardship’ — defined for this purpose as ‘the responsible allocation, management and oversight of capital to create long-term value for clients and beneficiaries leading to sustainable benefits for the economy, the environment and society’. That mouthful comes from the Financial Reporting Council’s UK Stewardship Code; asset management firms seeking to become ‘signatories’ to the code were asked to submit essays describing their own investment principles, highlighting their approach to hot-button ‘ESG’ (environmental, social and governance) issues. Out of 189 applicants, 64 failed to reach the pass mark, while some major firms chose not to

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The economic case for flexible working

Is flexible working better or worse for productivity? What is the correct blend of remote and office work? Billions of once-healthy pixels will die in the conduct of this debate. But is it possible that we are asking the wrong question entirely? Instead of asking the proximate question ‘Do we want our employees to work remotely?’, businesses should perhaps be asking: ‘Are we ultimately better off if consumers can work remotely?’ If you are Pret, the Duke of Westminster or Southeastern trains, the answer is possibly no. For almost everyone else, however, the answer is a loud yes. Having richer, more leisured customers is just as valuable as having more

Nick Newman

Can cartoons be both funny – and diverse?

Of the many challenges cartoonists face — rejection, money, drink, or lack of — one of the trickiest is the growing pressure to depict diversity. Nowadays readers often write to publications complaining about the dearth of ethnic minorities in our drawings and demand for cartoons to be more inclusive. It’s like being trapped in a bad political cartoon, walking a tightrope above a minefield. A quick survey of my colleagues in the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation highlighted the following: Cartoons involve laughing at someone. If that person is black, you risk appearing racist; even including a BAME character in the background of drawing can lead to accusations of tokenism (‘background box-tickers’).

Dot Wordsworth

What does Peter Quennell have to do with fish?

When Peter Quennell was sent down from Oxford for consorting with a woman called Cara (by Evelyn Waugh’s account), he joined Sacheverell Sitwell on honeymoon in Amalfi. I don’t know what Mrs Sitwell thought of it. I learnt this odd fact because I was seeing what connection his name had with quenelles, the fashionable dish like rissoles or gefilte fish traditionally made with pike in Nantua in France. Their quenelles are big — no fiddling around with spoons — and covered in crayfish sauce. They may be better eaten on location than tried at home. Anyway, there is no connection. The surname Quennell comes from the Old English cwen, meaning

Bruce Anderson

Spain vs Italy: who would win the wine Test?

In London, the weather is a gentle sashaying mockery. An Indian summer reminds us of the sullen apology of summer which we have just endured. Soon it will be winter, and ‘A cold coming we had of it’. As always, poetry is a respite. My first resort is usually Yeats. In English, no one except Shakespeare is better at turning language into music. I have probably apologised before now in these columns for using those ravaging Yeatsian lines which have become a cliché because they are so true, so powerful, such an epitome of the post-1914 world and its agonies. ‘The best lack all conviction / The worst are full

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How should my granddaughter deal with her date’s body odour?

Q. My granddaughter Jane has been asked on a date to the Wolseley by George (both pseudonyms). Although she finds him attractive, and is flattered by the invitation to an institution like the Wolseley, she can’t bring herself to go because of his intensely bad body odour. Mary, how can she accept the invitation while also getting him to promise to wear deodorant? — Name and address withheld A. Deodorant wouldn’t crack the issue. It sounds like George needs a full hose-down — and probably for his trainers to be binned. Let Jane accept the invitation but suggest that they ‘make a night of it’ since you, her grandmother, have

Andrew Watts

Our fascination with treehouses has deep roots

You can’t (and probably shouldn’t) design a treehouse. Treehouses should grow organically, in every sense: they must be made of wood, obviously — one definition of a treehouse is that it is a tree holding its dead friend — and the footings for the platform must be the knots or branches that are footholds when climbing the tree. Besides, it is only when you are halfway through building that you can work out where you need to fit round branches and add noggins — unless you build it between the trunks of two separate trees, or use some sort of 3D mapping software, both of which sound very much like

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of GPs

Out of practice Sir: GPs are not ‘hiding behind their telephones’ (Leading article, 4 September). In-person appointments are the core of general practice, and practices have been delivering millions of them throughout the pandemic. GPs share patients’ frustrations with the limitations of telephone consulting, which can often take longer than a face-to-face appointment, and with longer waits to be seen. However, as with other areas of the NHS, practices continue to follow national infection control guidance to keep patients and staff safe. You talk of pubs and nightclubs reopening — but how many nightclubs force very sick people, many of them elderly and living with a number of long-term illnesses,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tax rises, Tube gets busier and Taliban names its government

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced a new tax in the Commons branded a ‘health and social care levy’. It would increase National Insurance paid by employees and employers by 1.25 percentage points from April 2022. A year later it would become a separate tax that even pensioners still earning would have to pay. Share dividends would also see an extra 1.25 per cent tax rate. Of the £12 billion a year raised, only £1.8 billion would go to social care for the next three years. Some of the tax would go to meet the increased tax bill of the NHS as an employer paying the levy. From October

Taki

The folly of American imperialism

Gstaad Mercedes Benz heir Mick Flick and I have been friends for more than half a century. We both married Schoenburgs, both like the odd drink, both adore the fair sex, and we are now both candidates for a visit from the man in the white suit, yours truly first in line. Mick gave a wonderful dinner the other evening for around 30 of us. It was in his upper chalet, the one that’s half art gallery and half live-in space. He also has a lower chalet for his two sons and daughter. The dinner was seated and the wine was Latour. I think I had two bottles before the

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 September 2021

The end to the European Championships Qualifier — from an English perspective — was one of the most dramatic ever witnessed. England had been struggling and was out of the top-eight qualifying places — in ninth, eight VPs behind Hungary in eighth place. With only one ten-board match to go, against Germany, things looked bleak, and with nothing much happening on the first nine boards, England could do nothing but pray for a miracle. And a miracle they got! This was the very last board of the tournament (see diagram). David Bakhshi and Tom Townsend sat N/S for England. Bakhshi took a practical shot at 6♥ at his second turn.

Jeremy Clarke

A tale of refugees from ‘Brexit Britain’

In the New Year I was introduced to a couple who had fled Britain impulsively on New Year’s Eve with just a suitcase each to escape ‘Brexit Britain’. They rented a terraced house in our quartier of the village and had us round for supper, and I also went there to watch football on the laptop. They appeared to live modestly and frugally, wore the same clothes every day, and spent their days walking ceaselessly in the blazing countryside armed with shepherd’s crooks. Had they done the right thing, we privately wondered, fleeing their native land merely to prove their allegiance to the ideal of a politically and culturally united

Melissa Kite

Why I’m going to start speaking in acronyms

‘I’ve got COPD,’ said a friend of mine, not elaborating at all as I stared at him waiting for him to explain what that stood for. I had to look it up later. His expression told me firmly that everyone was au fait with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A few hours earlier, another friend had texted to say she would be late for t/c, which, upon my enquiring, turned out to mean that she would be late meeting me to have a cup of tea or coffee. She said she was busy at GC (which turned out to be Guildford College) and had been working late at the ITA (by

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: In memoriam Geronimo the alpaca

In Competition No. 3215, you were -invited to supply a poem about Geronimo the alpaca. The camelid’s fate was finally settled just the day before the closing date for this challenge, and your entries have an added poignancy now that we know which way the dice rolled for poor old Geronimo. I admired Gareth Fitzpatrick’s touching clerihew and Chris O’Carroll’s Ogden Nash-inflected submission. Elsewhere, amid echoes of Manley Hopkins and Milton, was a nice spin on Gray’s ‘Elegy’ courtesy of Max Ross along with impressive contributions from J.C.H. Mounsey, Mike Morrison and Duncan Forbes. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £25. They’re all leaning out from the Golden

Peter Hitchens

How the left thought they were right to fight the war on terror

Late one soft summer night in 1966, my brother Christopher slipped out of our north Oxford house and bicycled to the centre of the city. There he spent a worryingly long time with a spraypaint can, inscribing the words ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’ on a long builders’ hoarding outside Trinity College in Broad Street. You will have to work out for yourselves how I know this, but I do. The punctuation was perfect, and a handwriting expert could easily have told it was him. The slogan endured for months and even appeared in a TV drama filmed in the city some months later. This

Simon Clarke

What Britain should learn from Israel about booster shots

It’s hard to remember a time when politicians have so publicly put pressure on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Even the vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, said this week that the booster programme is his ‘absolute priority’ as it will ‘help us to transition the virus from pandemic to endemic status’. So why is the JCVI so against booster jabs in all but the rarest of cases? My understanding is that its thinking has three parts. First, that the UK has not experienced Israel’s waning immunity against infection because we have had a longer gap between doses. Second, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been widely used here but not

Marcus Rashford

Why I don’t stick to football

In football, you are always stronger in numbers. With a shared focus, people from different cultures, nationalities, races, sexual orientations, political affiliations and religions can unite to achieve incredible things. When you pull on that national team shirt, rivalry subsides and is replaced with a shared desire to win. When fans step into that stadium, for 90 minutes they feel a part of something, a collective, able to leave any worries outside those turnstiles. To many it is a religion. To me, it’s still a dream. You grow up idolising figures in this game who turn out to be just like you and me. Human beings with human emotions and

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

French connection: how to make cherry clafoutis

My daydreams at the moment follow a predictable theme. I am on holiday somewhere balmy, with a carafe of cold white wine in front of me. Someone handsome has just brought me a large bowl of salted crisps, unbidden but very welcome, and the greatest responsibility I have is finishing the book that I’m reading. The reality has been a little more prosaic. I am at my Manchester dining table, nursing a cold cup of tea, as the rain falls so heavily it’s like sitting in a drum. I’m sure I’m not alone: changing rules, quarantines, vaccination certificates, or simply the sheer weight of anxiety mean that the majority of

The Spectator

Has it really got harder to see a GP in person?

Floating vote Voters in St Petersburg were presented with three candidates all calling themselves Boris Vishnevsky, with two believed to have changed name and appearance to draw votes from the other. It is not the first time voters have faced a confusing choice: — In a Moscow city election in 2019 voters had the option of voting for ‘Alexander Solovyov’ — though it turned out not to be the Alexander Solovyov who was in prison at the time and barred from standing. — In the 2017 local election in Ferguslie Park, Glasgow, Conservative John McIntyre was elected, with many speculating that voters had meant to opt for an independent candidate