Society

Thursday

Harry Mount

In our narcissistic age, nothing beats good manners

Last week, a 20-year-old student came into my office, looking for work experience this summer. He was so polite — in a shy, understated, non-oily way — that I was very keen to help him. It was like meeting a time-traveller from the 1950s: no showing-off, just a gentle display of intelligence teased out from behind his veil of self-effacement. He even washed up his cup after I’d told him he didn’t need to. I must introduce a Teacup Test for future interviewees, to see what they do with the cup at the end of the interview. It’s inspired by the Escalator Test, invented by a colleague at the Evening

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Apple’s cowardly surrender to the mob

A few weeks ago, more than 2,000 employees of Apple Inc. signed a petition that led to the sacking of a clever and capable tech engineer, Antonio García Martínez. García Martínez was fired for sexism — not because he behaved badly towards any women, but because of a passage in a book he wrote five years ago. The book was Chaos Monkeys, an exposé of the Silicon Valley scene, and here’s the offending sentence: ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit… but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or a foreign invasion, they’d

Toby Young Toby Young

For journalists like Protasevich, free speech is a matter of life and death

Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of Alexander Lukashenko’s book and campaign for re-election on a vodka-and-sauna approach to managing the pandemic. Belarus was one of a handful of European countries not to impose a lockdown last year, with the President urging his citizens to have plenty of vodka and lots of saunas to avoid infection. To the consternation of other European leaders, Lukashenko’s laissez-faire approach hasn’t proved a disaster — Belarus’s death toll from the virus currently stands at 2,780, although some people don’t believe the official figures — and I thought it was funny that

Lisa Bjurwald

Is Sweden ready for a woke monarchy?

Stockholm The House of Sussex may have flopped in Britain, but elsewhere it does seem to be inspiring others. Here in Stockholm a trendy podcast Värvet (The Task), known for host Kristoffer Triumf’s in-depth interviews with media and entertainment figures, had a surprise guest recently: Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden. He was not so gauche as to attack the constitution or to drop any Prince Harry-style bombs, but his presence on a podcast was seen as the latest part of a royal awokening. Even in exile, Harry has created an interesting challenge for the world’s monarchies. They can be regarded as old-fashioned — normally aligned with the state religion

The Spectator

How safe are cable cars?

Marrying in office It was announced Boris Johnson will marry his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, next year. This will be only the fourth time a serving prime minister has married while in office. — Robert Walpole married Maria Skerrett, daughter of a wealthy merchant, on 3 March 1738, following the death of his first wife. Sadly, Maria died in childbirth a year later. — In the 15 months the Duke of Grafton was prime minister he found time to divorce his first wife and marry his second, Elizabeth Wrottlesley, on 24 June 1769. — Lord Liverpool married Mary Chester, a friend of his deceased first wife, at Hampton Court on 24

Douglas Murray

When exactly did harpsichords become racist?

It’s a dangerous thing when you import the worst aspects of another culture. And an even worse thing when you import the worst interpretation of that worst aspect of another culture. This week marked a year since the death of George Floyd at the hands of a policeman in Minnesota. Since that time, Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed Mr Floyd, has been tried, convicted of causing his death and is currently awaiting sentence. Around the world, the actions of this one awful policeman have been extrapolated out beyond endurance. It has been claimed that they revealed the truth about race relations in America. They have been used to claim

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Scotland is open – and desperate for English tourists

When I told my friends I was heading to the Outer Hebrides on holiday — escaping from London as soon as it was legal to do so — I thought they might be envious. Instead, a few were worried for my safety. ‘Just don’t say you’re from England,’ suggested one. Another encouraged me to ‘lay low’ with my fiancé when boarding the three-hour ferry from Ullapool to Stornoway. Dangerous times, they seemed to think, for anyone down south to head to the Highlands and islands. I initially brushed off these concerns as confusion over Covid restrictions. Travel rules have changed so many times over the last year — not just

Cosmo Landesman

We’ve become a nation of armchair psychiatrists

Are we becoming a nation of amateur psychoanalysts and armchair psychiatrists? We all speak the language of therapy and are quick to diagnose and label friends, strangers and even loved ones. Prince Harry does it to his wife Meghan Markle in a forthcoming five-part series on mental health for Apple TV that he’s co-produced with Oprah Winfrey. Discussing his wife’s suicidal state of mind during her pregnancy Prince Harry offers this diagnosis: ‘The thing that stopped her from seeing it through was how unfair it would be on me after everything that had happened to my mum, and now to be put in the position of losing another woman in

Peter Jones

A Roman solution to Prince Charles’s ‘Harry problem’

Charles, Prince of Wales, is having a little trouble with his son Harry. Romans knew about difficult offspring. They told a story of a father who discovered his son was plotting against his life. Unable to believe a son would commit such an outrage, he received confirmation on oath from his wife that he was their son, and then summoned him to a meeting. There he gave him a sword and told him to cut his father’s throat. The son, horrified by his father’s reaction, threw it away, saying: ‘I ask only that you should not think my love for you to be of little value because it arises from

Dot Wordsworth

How the Great British Bake Off inspired Great British Railways

‘Why didn’t they call it Very British Railways?’ asked my husband. Unwittingly (as in most of his remarks), he had put his finger on something odd about the new name for the nationalised rail structure, Great British Railways. It follows the model of Great British Bake Off. In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary noticed the tendency in a quotation from a magazine published in 2006: ‘The Great British queuer is a bit of a myth.’ In that construction a reference to Great Britain is ‘used punningly, as though great rather than Great British were the modifier’. In the 19th century, the same joke was deployed in the phrase Great British

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Bad food is back: The Roof Garden at Pantechnicon reviewed

The Roof Garden is a pale, Nordic-style restaurant at the top of the glorious Pantechnicon in Belgravia — formerly a bazaar — opposite a Waitrose I didn’t know existed. (Waitrose seems too human for Belgravia. Food seems too human for Belgravia.) This thrilling building, which should be a library — it has Doric columns — is instead a collection of restaurants, shops and what I think are called ‘outlets’ (a Japanese café; something called, gnomically, ‘Kiosk’), all celebrating the ‘playful’ intersection — I mean meeting, but marketing jargon is addictive if you are an idiot — between Nordic and Japanese food. It is a wealth mall from hell, then, in

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: should we exclude our friend for not having had his Covid vaccine?

Q. Once restrictions are lifted, our annual walking group has planned a week’s walk with after-walk gatherings in a different pub every evening. The group is composed of people all of an age to have been doubly vaccinated. We always invite friends along the route to walk a day or two and join us for dinner. One couple invited this year — long-standing friends of some of us and otherwise sensible and interesting people — consists of a husband who, it emerges, is a fierce anti-vaxxer and his embarrassed, vaccinated wife. There are people in the party who do not know this, or him, and might be unamused to discover

Roger Alton Roger Alton

For the sake of athletics, the Olympics must not be delayed again

Whatever became of athletics? It’s fallen nearly as far as show jumping and that is a long way. But the world needs athletics: it is the purest sport. Lots of countries can’t row or sail or do equestrianism, tennis or golf. Anyone, anywhere can run, jump and throw. But where is athletics now? Can you name the fastest man in the world this year over 100m?* Who are the best middle-distance runners? The sport has fallen nearly as far as show jumping and that is a long way In the 1970s and 1980s everyone knew the names of countless athletes, domestic and foreign. Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Daley Thompson, Tessa

Jeremy Clarke

A taste inquisition on Stink Street

Walking up through the Stink Street medieval arch with a bag of shopping, I spotted Michael between the oleander branches seated in front of his ancient cottage having a drink. Stink Street is so called because it is just without the old town walls and in medieval times pigs were kept there. At this time of year it’s not easy to walk up Stink Street after midday without one or other of the cottagers inviting you to join them for a glass. And it was just after six and I deserved one. Stink Street runs uphill steeply and has only recently been dressed with its first layer of tarmac. Michael’s

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Who cares who runs the railways? We just want them to run on time

The long-awaited review of the railways by former British Airways executive Keith Williams chugged past the platform of public debate without creating much stir. Politicos noted that it had become ‘the Williams-Shapps Plan’, indicating an urge on the part of Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, in Tony Blair’s words, to be personally associated with eye-catching initiatives — in this case, especially those that have nothing to do with the issue of whether British holidaymakers will be allowed to fly abroad this summer. But the review’s core proposal — a new public body called Great British Railways that will control tracks, timetables and fares, and contract with private operators to run trains

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The first step towards restoring the National Trust

It is poetically fitting that the resignation of the chairman of the National Trust, Tim Parker, was announced on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The collective mistakes that have so damaged the Trust’s reputation were bound up in the rush of many institutions to ‘take the knee’, metaphorically and literally. Immensely delicate questions about how best to study the connections of Trust properties with slavery and (ill-chosen word) ‘colonialism’ were rushed and politicised. The view inevitably spread that the Trust now bears an animus towards the past whose glorious buildings and landscapes it is supposed to protect so that millions may enjoy them. That animus is

Melissa Kite

Crunch time: why has Walkers changed its salt and vinegar crisps?

Henry Walker might never have got into the crisp business were it not for the fact that his Leicester butcher’s shop was hit by meat rationing after the second world war. In 1948, when Walkers and Son started looking at alternative products, crisps were becoming increasingly popular — and so they shifted to hand-slicing and frying potatoes. The crisps were sprinkled with salt and sold for threepence a bag. Fast-forward 73 years and Walkers crisps are so integral to our way of life that when I bought a six-pack of salt and vinegar the other day and noticed they had changed the recipe it precipitated a personal crisis resulting in

The Spectator

Letters: The unfairness of ‘free care for all’

Taking care Sir: I agree completely with Leo McKinstry that care for parents should be paid out of their estate (‘Home economics’, 15 May). The costs of care are what people effectively work for, not for the passing on of wealth paid for by the taxpayer. My mother lived until she was 100, and was in care for almost 14 years. Although she had a property and shares, we funded her care until her cash/share balance was £15,000. After this time she was means-tested and between her pension and the rent from her flat, we were able to pay for some of the care, with the rest paid for by

Jan Moir

My enduring love for Ewan McGregor

In the New York Times, the celebrated journalist Maureen Dowd describes Crieff as ‘a sleepy town in Scotland’. Well. There speaks a woman who has never been in the Quaich on a Friday night when the homemade haggis baws with whisky mayo are on special offer and Duncan has come down from Ochtertyre with ‘the fire o’ the deil in ma loins’. A fire, I might add, that no amount of whisky mayo could ever douse. It’s all happening there, Maureen! The Visit Crieff website even promises tourists in the pearl of Perthshire ‘a high chance’ of ‘bumping into a young Obi Wan Kenobi in the high street’. Tiny sigh.