Society

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The polarising power of plague

Now that the government has kindly allowed us to go out again, I wonder if anyone has discovered the same social challenge I have encountered? Which is that almost nobody agrees on anything. I should pre-empt a possible line of attack here and acknowledge that I am aware of the case study I am basing this on. Still I fancy the problem is wider than myself. Of course we never did agree on everything. But, after a year of seclusion, it seems that as we de-bubble, the divergences are far greater than before. Not least regarding what we have just been through. It forks off at the very beginning. For

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Ollie Robinson’s ritual humiliation

One of the more egregious innovations of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution was something called the ‘struggle sessions’. This involved the ritual public humiliation of anybody the local bigwigs had turned against — often in sports stadiums. The elderly Yangtze swimmer would have smiled approvingly at what has happened to Ollie Robinson, the England fast bowler who was forced to read out an apology on the eve of his first Test match for some daft and obnoxious remarks he made eight years ago on Twitter. He has now been banned, and something with the sinister title of the ‘integrity unit’ is poised to investigate further. But investigate what exactly? Had Robinson

Peter Jones

What Dominic Cummings could learn from Xenophon

On the subject of leadership, the Athenian soldier, historian, biographer and essayist Xenophon (c. 430-354 BC) had much to say, having led the retreat of 10,000 Greek soldiers from Cunaxa (Iraq) through hostile territory back to Greece. Had Dominic Cummings paid more attention to him when he studied ancient and modern history at Oxford, his time in government might have been more successful. The key to Xenophon’s thinking was that the good leader had a positive relationship with his men, calculated to be of mutual benefit to everyone: the image of friendship between leader and men was never far away. In his life of the Persian leader Cyrus the Great,

Philip Thomas

The third wave: it’s here – but it shouldn’t delay our reopening

Lockdowns cannot kill off a virus — they just delay the spread. There was always going to be a new wave of infections as Boris Johnson phased out restrictions. The question was how big it would be and how much protection the vaccines would provide. Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, summed up the case for optimism a few months ago, saying that any ‘new surges will meet a wall of vaccinated people’. His theory is now being tested: the fast-spreading Indian (Delta) variant is making its way through the most vaccinated country in Europe. What to do? And how worried should we be? Since the pandemic began, I have

Taki

In praise of chastity

New York It’s party time in the Bagel, or at least private party time. Yours truly is an extra man nowadays as my wife and I have been separated by pandemic restrictions for six months. Alexandra is in London, quarantining after visiting two little blond things in Austria for my fourth grandchild Theodora’s first birthday. I am doing dinner parties non-stop in the Bagel, as if I were a gaywalker back in the 1970s. Actually, I’ve been seeing a lot of old friends who have thrown dinners for Lita and George Livanos. We have mostly been the same crowd, as New York society types have gone the way of wooden

Andrew Watts

A second home in Cornwall is nothing to be proud of

Last week there was a public toilet for sale on the coast of Cornwall. The Kent-based auctioneer called it ‘an exciting and rare opportunity’, although its video tour of the property did not even undo the padlock on the security door. It was on the market for £20,000, which was a bargain — the last exciting and rare toilet block to be auctioned in Cornwall went for five times its asking price, even though it didn’t have as nice a view. It did, however, have windows. It’s undeniable that the property market in Cornwall is overheating. The backlash to the toilet auction was such that it was withdrawn from sale,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The forgotten joy of spontaneity

If you ask people what they’ve missed out on since the pandemic, they’ll probably lament their cancelled plans. Weddings postponed, birthday parties axed and family reunions moved to Zoom. Me, I’ve missed the unplanned. The spontaneity that knocks your routine, muddles your diary and lands you tipsy in the pub on a Monday night when you were supposed to be at the gym. For more than a year, our lives have been ruled by the principle of ‘safety first’. Accidents — even the fun ones — have been avoided at all costs. It has been illegal to act on a whim or at least, in the better times, very strictly

Lawrence Osborne

It’s getting harder to laugh off the idea of UFOs

When the late-night talk-show host James Corden asked Barack Obama about UFOs last month, there was as usual an air of nervous joviality surrounding the subject. Bandleader Reggie Watts pressed him as well and Obama, as if relenting, admitted two things. Firstly, that he could not divulge all that he knew on air; and secondly, that the slew of footage released by the Pentagon in the past two years showing UAP — ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ — is in fact real. As if overnight, the fringe conspiracy air that has hung over the topic of UFOs for 70 years has seemed to vanish, and this month the Director of National Intelligence

Jeremy Clarke

The art of negotiating with French nurses

‘Ça va, Monsieur Clarke?’ said a nurse when he noticed I was stirring. It was an effort to speak. ‘Thirsty,’ I croaked. He handed me a graduated test tube containing exactly ten millilitres of warm water. Incredibly, the big clock on the wall said six in the evening. I’d been gone for eight hours. While I was gone, a surgeon had snipped 30 centimetres off my colon, plus a valve, and rejoined the ends. I’d never had an operation before and was surprised by the severity of the pain. I couldn’t move an inch in any direction. A porter wheeled me back to the single room with a view over

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Let hymn in: the silencing of indoor singing is senseless

‘And now we sing our final hymn, number 466.’ Remember that? The euphoria of congregational hymn-singing? The well-organised types always had the book open at the correct page, balanced precariously on the pew. The rest of us hurriedly flicked to 466 while singing the first verse, knowing it by heart from a thousand school assemblies. ‘Our shield and defender, the ancient of days…’ I can’t believe I’m writing this in the past tense, but it has been so long — almost 15 months — since anyone not in a choir sang a congregational hymn. How I miss that light-headedness, almost faintness, of standing up after a long service and singing

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My advice to Gareth Southgate

This is a difficult issue to raise on the eve of a major football tournament, but as a progressive individual I am deeply disturbed by the England manager Gareth Southgate’s reverence for Sir Winston Churchill. Twice in the past this man who holds English football’s most important position has cited his apparent hero. Once, commenting on his predecessor Sven-Goran Eriksson’s performance at halftime in the 2002 World Cup quarter final against Brazil, he said: ‘We needed Churchill. We got Iain Duncan Smith.’ And then a few years later when asked if the England team should have a foreign manager, he said: ‘With England I want an Englishman who’s going to

The Spectator

It’s time to revisit the Northern Ireland protocol

Britain has already seen two ‘Brexit days’ — when it formally left the EU on 31 January 2020 and the end of the transition period 11 months later. But given that it has taken less than six months for the Northern Ireland protocol to unravel, it’s horribly clear that our future relationship with the EU is anything but settled. The transport of sausages and other chilled meats from Britain to Northern Irish supermarkets may seem a trivial matter. But the attempt by the EU to enforce a ban on this trade demonstrates what so many people found problematic about the idea of an internal UK border down the Irish Sea.

Lucy Vickery

P.G. Wodehouse’s Aunts Among the Chickens

In Competition No. 3202, you were invited to replace the word ‘love’ in a well-known book title of your choice with a word of your choosing, and submit a short story of that title. This challenge was prompted by Christopher Hitchens’s description, in his memoir Hitch-22, of an after-dinner game he used to play with Salman Rushdie and other friends that involved replacing the word ‘love’ in famous book titles with the phrase ‘hysterical sex’. In a medium-sized entry of a patchy standard, Nick Syrett, Rosemary Sayer, Anthony Whitehead, Catherine Edmunds and Madeleine McDonald stood out. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each. ‘Never mind the suffering little

Dot Wordsworth

The difference between ‘sliver’ and ‘slither’ is a piece of cake

When people say a slither of cake, do they not remember that snakes slither? ‘Slither slide; sliver small piece,’ says the Guardian style guide. ‘Writers often get this wrong.’ True. The Guardian’s sport pages recently wondered what could give ‘Man United the faintest slither of hope’. All the papers do it. I got Veronica to make one of those word-searches of a newspaper database and, of the eight occurrences of slither in British nationals in a month, only four were of the serpentine kind. Half were the erroneous spelling of sliver. To complicate matters, there is a popular way of speaking at the moment that makes no distinction between th

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Pub staff shortages, a baby called Lilibet and a slap in the face for Macron

Home The government pondered delaying the end of coronavirus restrictions on 21 June. But Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, noted that ‘vaccines have broken the chain between Covid-19 infection and high levels of hospitalisations and then mortality’. Of 126 people taken to hospital with the Indian variant of coronavirus (now designated Delta), only three had been doubly vaccinated and two thirds not vaccinated at all. By the beginning of the week, 52.5 per cent of the adult population had received two doses of vaccine; 76.6 per cent the first dose. Vaccinations were offered to anyone aged 25 or more. Of those aged 70 or more, 96.9 per

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 June 2021

I would never say that bridge is just a game — for many of us, it’s a lifetime’s vocation. However, some players heap too much pressure on themselves; they fret if they’ve had a disturbed night’s sleep or feel a slight sniffle coming on — anything that might impair their focus. They practise breathing techniques, insist on absolute silence at the table, and castigate themselves for the smallest mistake. The effect is often counter-productive; they’d probably do better if they simply lightened up. Someone firmly of this view is the manager of TGR’s rubber bridge club, Artur Malinowski. Whenever his customers are fraught or playing badly, his solution is to

Melissa Kite

The truth about Surrey’s obsession with horse masks

A saloon car pulled up opposite our fields and a man sat there looking at the horses with a bewildered expression. I had noticed this car meandering along the farm track, driving between the horse fields and stopping every time he came alongside a horse, sitting there for minutes on end. Then he would start driving again. Then he would stop alongside another horse. For quite a while he was parked by the grazing fields above where the builder boyfriend and I have a smallholding, and was stopped staring at our friends’ horses, I realised. When he got to our fields, he pulled up again and began peering into our

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Christian mental health crisis

34 min listen

Is the mental health of Christians beginning to collapse under the strain not just of Covid and its effect on worship but also the bottomless contempt of progressive ideology for religious belief? This week’s Holy Smoke is a conversation with theologian Dr Gavin Ashenden about a crisis of morale that is robbing some Christians of the will to live. One former churchgoer told me last week that he’d be perfectly happy not to wake up the next morning – and I knew exactly how he felt. But in conclusion Gavin suggests a way of breaking out of this existential nightmare. So, as they say on the BBC, if you’re affected

Leo McKinstry

Judge Ollie Robinson on his cricket skills, not his tweets

Ollie Robinson, who made his Test debut for England at Lord’s last week against New Zealand, is an outstanding cricketer with both bat and ball. But that ability apparently counts for little. His performance was overshadowed by the discovery of some incendiary, tasteless tweets he had sent almost a decade ago as a teenage professional. An abject apology was not enough to save him. The England Cricket Board promptly banned Robinson from the next Test match, and a full inquiry has been launched into his conduct. Quite rightly, sports minister Oliver Dowden has called the penalty ‘over the top’. But that intervention has not helped Robinson. This row marks a