Society

Friday

Yiannis Baboulias

What the St George’s Day bores get wrong

It’s St George’s day – a chance to celebrate England’s patron saint, and, for some sanctimonious characters, it’s also an opportunity to berate people by reminding them who St George really was. But there’s a problem with those determined to lecture others: they’re getting their facts wrong. In recent years, a peculiar narrative has taken hold among seemingly well educated people, who have suddenly discovered that St George was a ‘Turkish soldier’, an ‘Arab’ whose mother was Palestinian, or – perhaps the most absurd claim – ‘a migrant worker from the Middle East’ who would be ‘banned’ from the UK. The problem with these claims is that none of them are

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Biden’s Rodeo: How were his first 100 days?

30 min listen

Joe Biden is approaching his first 100 days in office. How has he fared, and has he delivered on his promise to bring about a return to normalcy? (1:15) Plus, the proposed European Super League wasn’t super after all. The six English teams invited to join the league pulled out earlier this week, and the plans have now been shelved. But will it still happen eventually? (10:30) And finally, what’s it really like to live in a listed building? (19:30) With the Spectator’s US editor Freddy Gray; our economics correspondent Kate Andrews; journalist Damian Reilly; veteran football reporter Julie Welch; Spectator contributor Hamish Scott; and Liz Fuller, a buildings at

Jonathan Sacerdoti

What the fight against HIV can teach us about defeating Covid-19

In the eighties, we were warned to beware an easily spread, deadly virus. The government’s ominous HIV adverts told us not to ‘die of ignorance’. Thus a generation was educated through fear how to avoid infection by practicing safer sex and avoiding contact with the blood of those who are positive.  While those messages are still important today, HIV no longer represents the death sentence it once did. Still a life-altering and permanent disease, it can now be managed in a way that means people often live full lives with HIV, rather than die early because of it. No successful vaccination has been developed for HIV, but other medical developments

Douglas Murray

The Church of England’s new religion

This article first appeared in the 20 March edition of The Spectator.The Church of England report that was leaked to Douglas Murray has now been published. You can read the full report here. With a heavy heart I must return once more to the subject of the Church of England. I recognise that is not a subject for everybody, and occasionally someone implies that it should not be a subject for me. But I am concerned about the fate of the national church because as the new religion heaves ever clearer into view, I realise that I prefer the old religion to the new one. I would rather attempts to influence

Andy Owen

Our shameful failure to commemorate black Great War heroes

A report by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has this week concluded that ‘pervasive racism’ was to blame for the failure to properly commemorate non-white troops who died for Britain in the first world war. It is estimated that at least 116,000 predominantly African and Middle Eastern first world war casualties ‘were not commemorated by name or possibly not commemorated at all’ having laid down their lives in the service of the Empire. Their names were not even included on communal monuments, in part due to sentiments like those expressed by British colonial governor FG Guggisberg who claimed in 1923 that ‘the average native… would not understand or appreciate a headstone.’ The purpose of

Taki

We need Voltaire more than ever

New York The high life has gone with the wind because of you know what. The last time I went to a glittering ball, Marie Antoinette still had a head on her shoulders, or so it seems, and sweats and leggings are now ubiquitous at intimate dinner parties. Here in the Bagel fashion has followed the street for a long time, making high fashion seem as irrelevant and obscene as Anna Wintour being paid millions to kiss the ass of celebrities. No sweats, no leggings was my only rule for an intimate dinner for Prince Pavlos, expertly cooked by Michael Mailer and attended by Arki Busson and three youngsters of

Dot Wordsworth

What’s so great about ‘super’?

‘Wizard,’ said William. ‘Super,’ said Ginger, in William and the Moon Rocket (1954). More recently we have had Alex Salmond, the leader of the new Alba party (a grand coalition embracing albinos, Albanians, albatrosses and Albigensians) declaring that it can achieve in Scotland ‘a supermajority for independence’. Is a supermajority even a thing? (This form of question, with thing, has been asked by the Americans since about the year 2000, according to the OED.) The Guardian has found evidence that the term supermajority is puzzling voters. How big is it? Does it have a legal effect? Again, it is America that came up with supermajority. In Congress, a two-thirds majority

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

How to get a police record (without committing a crime)

I couldn’t quite believe it when first I read the newspaper subscriber’s letter. Columnists for the Times and Spectator do still get real letters, and this one from (shall we say?) Mr Jones had enclosed the copy of a letter he had written to a lady whom we shall call Mrs Smith. Mr Jones had read about the public protest she was leading last year against an Emmerdale episode in which a couple, after much agonising, choose to abort their Down’s syndrome baby. Mrs Smith has a Down’s syndrome child, whom she adores. Mr Jones’s letter to her defended the broadcaster’s right to show parents who make a different choice.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Crypto is a virtual Vegas whose towers must fall

What should we make of the valuation of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange listed on Nasdaq last week at $80 billion — three times the market value of Nasdaq itself? Coinbase’s stratospheric debut is clearly a reflection of the mania for bitcoin, currently trading at five times its price of six months ago. And that spike has in turn generated short-term profits for Coinbase, making it an attractive rarity among tech flotations that more often come to market long before they reach profit, which some never do. But is there a deeper message? Some say this is crypto’s coming of age, coinciding as it does with Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a

Hamish Scott

The fury and frustration of living in a listed building

You have to really love old houses to buy a listed building. My wife and I know this to our cost. We’re now on our third in a row. In each case we swore we’d never make the same mistake again and then, idiots that we are, we’d be seduced by some deceptively charming little gem and the same story would unfold. It’s not just that old houses are likely to be impractical by modern standards: cold, crumbly and liable to leak. You accept that there’s a price to pay for character and historic heft. Most of these problems can also be lessened with some hard — and usually extremely

Dr Anton Gilbert

Hospital wards are filling up again – with fakers

How do I know that Britain’s Covid crisis is over? The fakers are back. The hypochondriacs, the psychosomatics, the pseudo-fitters, the attention-seekers and the lonely. They’ve started to return to the acute medical ward where I work. They’ve been gone so long I actually almost missed them. This collection of patients, who take up time and resources inversely proportional to the state of their physical health, simulate symptoms for gain (malingerers), simulate/induce their symptoms for the pleasure of the sick role (Munchausen’s syndrome) or genuinely experience symptoms such as pain, seizures or paralysis in atypical ways with no physically identifiable or treatable cause (now vaguely termed ‘functional disorders’). Members of

The Spectator

The public has kept its side of the lockdown bargain. Now it’s the government’s turn

Over the past week, the country has started to spring back to life. Trains and buses are no longer running empty. Bars and restaurants have put out signs proclaiming they are fully booked. Pubs are using school playgrounds as beer gardens and filling every seat. In Soho, people danced in the streets when someone walked through with a stereo. A country that has been locked down for months is finally coming back into the open, with not a penny of government bribery required. There is a palpable sense of both relief and accomplishment. Yet the recent noises from No. 10 have been far from positive. The Prime Minister has claimed,

The Spectator

Letters: The true cost of the green dream

Zero possibility Sir: Katy Balls is right to conclude that the government is ‘not being upfront’ on the bill for net zero and who will pay (‘The green games’, 17 April). As the Covid pandemic has revealed, expectations need managing, and without an urgent agreement on a consistent set of policy guidelines which embrace fairness, energy security and affordability, the whole net-zero project could backfire. Whichever way you approach the problem, the costs of transitioning to net zero by 2050 are massive, with estimates ranging from £50 billion p.a. (Climate Change Committee) to £100 billion p.a. (National Grid), and the burden falling most heavily on those who cannot afford it.

Melissa Kite

When people say ‘do your bit for your country’ what they mean is ‘do your bit for my holiday’

Trying to get hold of HRT in the time of Covid is like trying to score crack. Possibly, scoring crack is way easier than trying to persuade your GP to do your annual blood pressure test so you can renew your prescription while the nurse who does the blood pressure testing is socially distancing. I can’t be sure, obviously. While they don’t much want to wrap a strap around my arm and press a button, they are very keen on sticking a syringe into me. The vaccine call-up came in a text from the NHS the day before my blood pressure test, which they finally decided to give me after

Toby Young Toby Young

Am I really paying £3,000 for six days in Wales?

Has it ever been more difficult to plan a family holiday? At the time of writing, it is illegal to travel abroad from the UK for non-work purposes. That restriction is expected to be lifted in due course, although not before 17 May, and replaced by a traffic light system, with countries ranked green, amber or red depending on how they’re coping with the virus. Only eight places are expected to be on the green list — Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Israel, Gibraltar, Iceland, Malta and the USA — and holidaymakers will be required to take a PCR test before boarding a plane home and another within 48 hours of

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Video calls are the new penny post

Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no university education but I have undergone the ordinary school course… I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as “startling”. This was the opening of the letter written by the Indian maths prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan to Professor G.H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge in January 1913. The penny post was the first network

Bruce Anderson

Wine by the jug in Venetian Venice

We were discussing travel, that forbidden delight now tantalisingly close. Where would be our first destination? Forswearing originality, I chose Venice. Among the world’s greatest paintings, one in particular does not merely come to mind. It fills the mind. I have never been in the Serenissima for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, probably just as well. In mid-August, there are bound to be pedestrian traffic jams all the way from the Piazza to the Rialto. But it is possible to imagine the event. Go to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Use your inner eye to fill the church with the entire nobility of Venice, festooned with gold

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What’s the etiquette of loo-flushing for overnight guests?

Q. My husband and I have started receiving invitations to large summer events scheduled for after 21 June. We have been shielding for the past year and, although happy to meet up with small groups of friends out of doors, for the time being we are fearful to commit to indoor unventilated parties. Obviously our hosts require responses to these kind invitations, but we don’t know how to refuse without being thought of as ‘wimps’. Mary, can you help?— P.Z., London SW7 A. There is no need to supply a reason for a party refusal. Indeed traditional etiquette decrees that you should not. You need only say you will be

Peter Jones

The Greensill scandal wouldn’t have shocked the ancients

Ex-prime minister David Cameron, ignoring official protocol, though not acting illegally, went directly to the chancellor Rishi Sunak to ask him to give Greens(w)ill Capital access to government-backed loans. Result? No cigar. And that is ‘corruption’? Tell that to the ancients. For Greeks and Romans, one of the oils which kept social, political and business wheels rolling was reciprocal gift-giving. But how does one draw a line between a ‘gift’ and a ‘bribe’? Those claiming a gift was a bribe would talk of ‘corruption’ or ‘buying’, ‘selling’ and ‘profit’ (trade was seen as a dirty business); those defending it as a gift called it ‘giving’, ‘receiving’ and ‘persuading’. Indeed, so