Society

Thursday

Richard Madeley

Why I won’t be replacing Piers Morgan

Piers Morgan may have been the UK equivalent of a TV shock-jock, but there’s another side to him. I’ve known Piers for more than 30 years — we went to the same journalism college — and he has a large heart. Years ago Judy and I and the kids were holidaying in Florida and, unknown to us, we were papped in a hotel pool. The photos were hawked around the tabloids and I had a call from Piers, then editor of the Daily Mirror: ‘These pool snaps… I’ve bought them, exclusively.’ ‘Cheers, Piers. I thought you were a mate.’ ‘No, no — I did it as a favour. I’m suggesting

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The finest humous in England: Arabica food boxes reviewed

Restaurant-goers who cannot let go of restaurants — for professional or other reasons — are floating on a sea of takeaway boxes, which have none of the glamour. Which of us fell in love on a takeaway? I wish I did not have to write about them, nor you to read about them, but if this is the worst thing that happened to you this year — packaging — it is not so bad. I have already begun a small counter–revolution by shopping at the greengrocers and the cheesemongers, and I suggest you do the same. Even so, they are faintly mesmerising by volume: a box-themed version of the Rumpelstiltskin

The Spectator

Letters: What really irritates Meghan’s critics

Meghan’s adroitness Sir: Tanya Gold suggests that people criticise Meghan Markle because she is mixed race and a woman, and states it is because she has dared to attack the royal family (‘In defence of Meghan’, 13 March). I think that misses the point. For a great number of people, her narrative simply does not ring true. Over the past few decades, thousands of media articles have accused the royal household of being claustrophobic, pedantic and antiquated. But unlike the young and naive Diana, Meghan was a thirtysomething TV star with agents and PR people when she met Prince Harry. It’s hard to believe she didn’t know what she was

Peter Jones

The Stoics would have had little sympathy for Meghan

Meghan Markle seems to see herself as a ‘victim’. Had she called herself a victima in Rome, it would have been a matter of some surprise, since the ancients used that image solely with reference to animals for sacrifice. But our ‘victim’ is used as if one genuinely were as helpless as a victima. Ancients would have none of that. In place of our ‘victimhood’, they used words like ‘wronged, betrayed, worsted, dishonoured, neglected, injured’. Even the classical terms for ‘suffer’ meant at root ‘undergoing/enduring an experience’ of some sort. Ancients, then, were not for relapsing into supine self-pity, but for taking action against the humans who had wronged them.

Fiona Mountford

Awards season loses its shine when no one can go to the cinema

Here it is again, a couple of months later than usual but back nevertheless. It’s the time of the annual jamboree that is film awards season, a three-month extravaganza that predominantly revolves around three key events: the Golden Globes, the Baftas and the Oscars. All three of these celebrations of artistic excellence and mutual backslapping have been delayed due to Covid. The Globes took place — virtually — three weeks ago, Bafta revealed its shortlist last week and the Oscar nominees were announced on Monday. The starting gun has been fired — while all our cinemas remain closed. Have you seen Nomadland, The Father or Promising Young Woman? Of course

Dot Wordsworth

‘Sacred space’ has become a crowded marketplace

‘This is the book that horses wish every equestrian would read,’ says the blurb for Sacred Spaces: Communion with the horse through science and spirit by Dr Susan Fay. It might sound like putting the cart before the horse to have equines deciding our reading list, but everyone wants a bit of space at the moment. ‘Thank you for giving us the space,’ said the Duchess of Sussex to Oprah Winfrey at the end of their ample airtime. This is not Star Trek’s ‘space, the final frontier’, nor yet the spatium verae paenitentiae, the time for repentance, that the Christian asks before death. Yet space is the prime thing now

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I prioritise ‘first division’ friends after lockdown?

Q. Before Covid, I was staying with friends in the country every other weekend. As a single man living in London, I am more than keen to resume my social life. However invitations are starting to come in again, specifically for July and August, yet none have come from my closest friends who tend to be less organised than my ‘second division’ ones. These invitations require an answer but I don’t want to find that by the time my favourites get around to inviting me again, I will have to say no because my diary is full. I realise I may be coming across as an arrogant sponger when in

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The Richard Freeman affair casts a cloud over British cycling

For those with neither the time nor inclination to plough through a PhD in the intricacies of the scandals surrounding British cycling, here’s a quick suggestion for Sir Dave ‘Marginal Gains’ Brailsford, head of Team Sky, now Ineos Grenadiers. His former team doctor, Richard Freeman, has been found guilty of ordering packages of banned testosterone for an unnamed rider a decade ago in 2011 but — in a neat piece of Harry and Meghan-style ‘We’re not saying who said what’ — has refused to reveal which athlete. Armstrong said it wasn’t certain that he gained any unfair advantage from doping So since it seems that marginal gains might involve considerably

Toby Young Toby Young

My plan to kick off life after lockdown

The last time I went to a football game was on Saturday 7 March last year when my 12-year-old son and I went to see QPR play Preston North End. When we got there we were handed a certificate, signed by the manager, congratulating us on having travelled 228 miles. Pretty heroic given QPR’s record on the road is so poor the fans have a song they sing after away games, adapted from ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’: ‘We’re the Rangers, the mighty Rangers, we never win away… a win away, a win away, a win away…’ etc. But on that occasion we won 3-1, in spite of going a man

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What happens when Facebook pays for news?

The recently departed head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, wants to balance China’s ideological antagonism to the West with the need for coexistence. Commenting on the government’s new ‘integrated review’, he says we must fight back with technological innovation and stronger alliances but avoid a second Cold War. He advocates ‘One Planet: Two Systems’ — a globalised echo of the Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong Agreement by which Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997 under the principle of ‘One Country: Two Systems’. Sir Alex’s is an interesting analogy, but the important thing to note about ‘One Country: Two Systems’ is that China adhered to it only for 20 years

John Connolly John Connolly

Top floor: Minton tiles inspire a remarkable devotion

It’s only since I moved to Staffordshire that I’ve come to appreciate that some of the finest works of public art aren’t on the walls of great buildings, but on their floors. Staffordshire, of course, is the home of Minton tiles — one of the most successful British exports of the Victorian era. The company was founded by Thomas Minton in Stoke-on-Trent, but it was his son, Herbert, who cracked the tile market. In the 1820s Herbert became obsessed with the idea of making medieval-style encaustic tiles, which create a pattern using different colours of clay rather than a glaze. Encaustic tiles are centuries old, but were too expensive to

James Bartholomew

An open letter to my golf club

Dear Mike, Thank you for asking me, along with all the other members, whether I would like to become part of the golf club’s new ‘Equality — Diversity — Inclusion (EDI) Working Group’. The short answer is I would rather spend a couple of hours in the mud, picking up old beer bottles and condoms out of the river which winds though the course, than sit on such a ‘working group’. It is difficult to describe -exactly why I think this venture is a bad idea but I will have a go. Let’s take the words of the title of the new committee. What kind of ‘equality’ is it going

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The ‘long Covid’ time bomb: an interview with Tim Spector

It sometimes seems as if Professor Tim Spector, of King’s College London, was conjured up especially to be a walking, talking rebuke to Public Health England. Where PHE has been lumbering, slow to respond to the fast-moving virus, Spector has been nimble, quick to see opportunity and adapt. This time last year, as Boris was preoccupied with the defining question of his premiership — who could possibly have leaked a disobliging story about his girlfriend’s dog — Tim Spector was concocting a plan for how to collect data about Covid from around the country. His Covid Symptom Study app (CSS), a year old this week, has been a triumph. There

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why Pontins thinks I’m an ‘undesirable guest’

Oh curses, one less option for the summer holidays. Pontins, the holiday camp for those who don’t mind bringing their own cleaning products, has been exposed for issuing a list of surnames belonging to ‘undesirable guests’. Under the legend ‘You Shall Not Pass’ on the company intranet was an instruction: ‘Please be aware that several guests are not welcome at Pontins, however some of these will still try and book… We have been informed by our Operations Director that we do not want these guests on our parks. Please watch out for the following names on ANY bookings.’ There follows a list of 40. There are the O’Briens, the O’Donnells

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tributes to Sarah Everard, rows over AstraZeneca and Nokia cuts jobs

Home A Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, 48, was charged with the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard, who was last seen on 3 March as she walked home from Clapham to Brixton. A mass vigil on Clapham Common was called off after the High Court declined to interfere with a police ban on the event in accord with coronavirus regulations. The Duchess of Cambridge came alone and left some daffodils at the bandstand. Women who stayed in their hundreds saw police struggle with women who refused to leave the bandstand. There were four arrests and pictures of policemen subduing one of them, Patsy Stevenson, on the floor fed

The Spectator

2495: Contrary – solution

Four unclued lights are places in Britain with MARY in their name. The remaining unclued lights can be linked with MARY (see Brewer). (Peter, Paul and Mary have been the theme words of Doc’s puzzles numbered 2489, 2492 and 2495.) First prize Simon Goodlad, Stowmarket, SuffolkRunners-up Kiran Parekh, Wayne, Illinois; Sue Matejtschuk, Stotfold, Hitchin, Herts

Doc

2498: Cross-country

The unclued lights are all non-words, but each can be resolved into a pair of thematic solutions. Across 1 Game stuffed with hard vegs (6) 7 Lacks confidence, but somehow is seen in parties (6) 13 Cast of Hamlet gutted about falling-out (5) 15 Feature of credit (9) 16 Sister screwed up extra chances at school (6) 20 Stentor’s warning of nebulous threat (7) 21 Meagre buffets for the Garden Goodie (6) 22 Airport facilities lacking vehicle for fliers (6) 24 He’s surprisingly genial and philosophical (8) 26 Shop in Edinburgh stocks wood (4) 27 Mark Ramprakash keeps farm animal going to and fro (3) 28 Chief contributor to magazine

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the novels you will never read

In Competition No. 3190 you were invited to submit the first paragraph of your least favourite type of novel. Sci-fi was the most well represented genre by a long way, with many thinking along similar lines. Here’s a flavour from Joe Houlihan: Not for the first time, Drod Vordant was struck by the ethereal beauty of the Butterfly Nebula. Even at 178.4 light years distance the clouds of silicate and poly-aromatic-hydrocarbon dust that formed its wings occupied three quadrants of the ship’s astrodeck… In a smart, funny entry, hardboiled–hater Robert Schechter stood out (‘The phone rang on my rented desk like the bell on the neck of an epileptic cow…’),

Luke McShane

No. 645

Black to play. Kosteniuk–Koneru, Skolkovo Grand Prix, 2019. The obvious 1…Kg3 fails to 2 Rg5+ Kf4 3 Rg4+. Losing the pawn looks inevitable, but Koneru found the only move to save herself. What did she play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by 22 March. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qh3! If 1…Ka6 2 Qf1#, or 1…Ka4 2 Bc6# or 1…Kc4 2 Be2#Last week’s winner Mark Duncan, Bromley, Kent

Luke McShane

When the universe winks

I write this with a sunny feeling. That’s partly because spring is upon us, but mostly because I have just spotted one of those winsome coincidences which lifts the spirits with its serendipity. The first part of this delightful dyad occurred in the preliminary stage of the latest (and ongoing) Magnus Carlsen invitational event. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov–Daniil Dubov,Magnus Carlsen Invitational, March 2021 Two pawns up, Mamedyarov is certainly expecting to grind out a win. His last move, 66 Bd4-e5 threatens Re7-c7+, skewering the bishop on c2. Quick as a whip, Dubov fires back with 66…Rf1!! to attack the pawn on f5. If White loses that pawn, the game is bound for