Society

Thursday

3 Jun 2021

Are we overusing ‘overhaul’?

Last week, John Lewis and Marks & Spencer were overhauling their stores. Football clubs were madly overhauling teams and we women were overhauling wardrobes, if you can believe what you read in the papers. There was a clear danger of over overhauling. What do we mean by it? Overhauling implies change. But that sense has only dominated in the past 150 years. Before that, the usual meaning was to inspect or audit, in a naval context. ‘To-day I over-haul’d the Powder, and told the Lieutenant that I had twenty-three half Barrels in Store,’ wrote the Royal Navy gunner John Bulkeley in 1740. His ship, the Wager, was wrecked in remote

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do we tell our friend that her hairstyle doesn’t suit her?

Q. At a lunch party, I was getting on so well with someone I had not met before. She knew my work (I’m a designer) and loves it — so much so that she suggested I contact friends of hers who own a design company and are looking to fill a post. I told her that, coincidentally, I had just been for an interview at that very company but, despite shared aesthetic sensibilities, had not (inexplicably to my mind) been offered the job. At this point my interlocutor cried: ‘Oh, how ridiculous. You would have been perfect. I had forgotten what terrible snobs they are.’ Mary, I am still asking

Toby Young

The rise of the pluto-meritocracy

Meritocracy, a word coined by my father, gets a bad press these days. Two recent books — The Meritocracy Trap (2019) by Daniel Markovits and The Tyranny of Merit (2020) by Michael Sandel — hold it responsible for many of America’s ills, and in some settings saying you believe the most qualified person should get the job is classified as a ‘micro-aggression’ because it ignores the role that race plays in determining a person’s life chances. It’s one of those progressive doctrines that’s fallen out of favour. So kudos to Adrian Wooldridge, the political editor of the Economist, for producing a full-throated defence of the principle. In The Aristocracy of

Frederick Edward

Do you speak Viking?

Supposedly 5 per cent of words in English are borrowed from Old Norse. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but much of our key vocabulary was brought over in longboats: ‘get’, ‘take’, ‘give’ and ‘egg’ are all derived from the language of the Vikings. Indeed, it took the Saxons centuries to thwart the gangs of sly lads who came across the gusty seas full of anger, hoping to ransack the weak Saxon oafs and angrily hit their skulls together. Our Saxon fellows repeatedly fell victim to these dregs of the North Sea. They blundered in paying the Danegeld and only slowly learnt the awkward lesson that this gift would not

Chris Daw KC

There was no Hillsborough ‘cover-up’

Eight years ago, I was instructed as leading counsel for two South Yorkshire Police officers who had overseen the force’s evidence-gathering in response to the Hillsborough stadium disaster. They were accused of trying to minimise the blame placed on the police by amending witness statements. It has been the longest and most challenging assignment of my 27-year career, with the weight of public and media opinion pitted heavily against us. Finally, last week, the only one of my two clients to be criminally charged, 83-year-old retired chief superintendent Donald Denton, was cleared, alongside a 74-year-old retired detective chief inspector and the former police solicitor. It was a just outcome that

Timothy Spall

The Dickensian delights of London in lockdown

I’m blessed by the fact that I live almost smack-bang in the middle of old London, a pebble’s toe punt from St Paul’s cathedral. Being an aficionado of Charles Dickens and J.B. Priestley, I’ve been able to wander along empty streets and alleys that have been immortalised in such novels as Angel Pavement and Bleak House. When I’m walking around the yards and courts at the back of the Bank of England, I can imagine the nefarious Mr Golspie darting round a corner with an enigmatic grin of triumph on his conniving, pugnacious moosh. Kicking a stone down a street for as long as possible has been a rediscovered pleasure

The Spectator

Letters: The uncivil service

Uncivil service Sir: The elephant in the room in the handling of the pandemic (‘A tragedy of errors’, 29 May) is the civil service, which has become the problem in government rather than the solution. Repeated disasters of problem management — from the blood transfusion scandal to Hillsborough to the failures illuminated by Dominic Cummings — reveal an inability to make precise decisions, accept errors and move on. This is especially illustrated by the Home Office which is no longer fit for any purpose. The difficulties encountered by the Windrush people are a case in point. The incompetence and sheer nastiness is breathtaking. It is apparent that we are governed

Charles Moore

The crisis at the heart of the National Trust

When Tim Parker announced his resignation as chairman of the National Trust last week, it was a first. Since it was founded in 1895, the Trust has endured many controversies, but until now the shared acceptance of its founding purposes has seen it through. The very first meeting proposed a body ‘for the holding of lands of natural beauty and sites and houses of historic interest to be preserved intact for the nation’s use and enjoyment’. The National Trust continued thus ever since, enforced by Acts of Parliament. This unity of purpose as a conservation organisation enabled it to become the owner of more than 600,000 acres of land and

Rod Liddle

Big Tech is turning into Big Brother

The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that Covid originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed upon us by Chinese scientists. I don’t know either way, but I would suggest that a suspicion that the virus was man-made, given the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, scarcely qualifies as a lunatic conspiracy theory to be banned from public utterance. But that’s what the Big Tech companies decided — almost certainly

Piers Morgan

The Keir Starmer revelation that we didn’t air

Following my abrupt departure from Good Morning Britain after declining to apologise for disbelieving Meghan ‘Princess Pinocchio’ Markle, I’ve been riding a rare wave of public popularity, with my anti-woke, pro-free speech book Wake Up becoming a no. 1 bestseller and people stopping me in the street to offer support. A lady named Marion from Eastbourne wrote to compare my campaign to that of John Lilburne, the 17th-century English political leveller who coined the term ‘freeborn rights’ and became a champion of liberty. She wrote: ‘Lilburne spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, and for this he was whipped, pilloried, half-starved, exiled, imprisoned and twice put on trial for

Matthew Parris

Boris Johnson has defied the pro-lockdown groupthink

Should the name of Dominic Cummings ever make it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, there’s one Cummings phrase our successors are sure to see. ‘Weirdos and misfits’ were what he valued. He said so in his blog, describing his preferred applicants for a job with his team at No. 10. I like the phrase. Such misfits can so often light the pathway where more timid minds and characters lose their nerve or their way. Cummings has always valued disruptors; always railed against Orwell’s ‘groupthink’; always rated the kind of people who question the conventional wisdom, the nostrums of the hour. And good for him. He’s one of them,

Anthony Browne

The ‘clean meat’ revolution is coming

On 19 December last year, some chicken nuggets were sold in a restaurant called 1880, in Singapore. This doesn’t sound like a significant turning point in history, but it was. That small plate of chicken nuggets might well have been the start of a major industrial, social and cultural revolution — one the UK needs to prepare for. That Singaporean chicken nugget was the first time in history that meat that did not come from a slaughtered animal had been sold commercially. It was genuine chicken meat, not a substitute, but it had been cultured from cells in a vat called a bioreactor. The cultured chicken meat was approved a

Cindy Yu

Why Chinese women don’t want more children

Years after my mother and I left China, I found out the real reason why. A neighbour had reported my mother for being pregnant with her second child. She was paid a visit by local officials who gave her a choice: she could either take herself to the abortion clinic or they’d take her there themselves. She chose a third option: to move to London to join her husband, who was working in the UK. In August 2004, when six months pregnant, she left her family and friends behind in Nanjing. My brother was born later that year in Kingston Hospital. Other families weren’t so lucky. Beijing demographers were concerned

Bruce Anderson

The wine that links Thomas Jefferson, Charles II and Samuel Pepys

It seemed a suitable topic for a bank holiday. We were discussing Haut-Brion, a bank-breaking wine. There is a question that is often asked. Which is the greatest claret, Haut-Brion, Lafite or Latour? I find that easy to answer: the one I have drunk most recently — not that I have tasted nearly enough of any of them. (I have heard at least one expert claim that post-war, there has been no greater claret than Haut-Brion ’59.) Haut-Brion is a marvellous wine. Thomas Jefferson may have been the first to explain why. There is a good deal of gravel in the terroir, which seems to give the wine an intellectual

Taki

Why night-clubbing in New York is a risky business

New York The acerbic writer Gore Vidal was once asked which period of history he would choose to have lived in. ‘The 17th century with penicillin,’ was his answer. It was a good sound bite but I don’t agree. Just the smells back then would be enough to kill me, and what about the people without teeth? And the plague of 1665 makes today’s virus seem like a slight head cold. Personally, I’d choose post-second world war New York City, as described in Jan Morris’s wondrous Manhattan ’45. I got there three years later, to Manhattan, that is, and the place was as fabulous as I had heard and imagined

Laura Freeman

What does your wedding reading say about you?

Arts journalism, like crime, doesn’t pay. So I’ve been thinking of getting a side hustle. ‘You know about books and stuff,’ say friends who are getting married. ‘What should we have for our readings?’ If I can advise friends, why not strangers? By the laws of wedding economics — pick a number and add some noughts — I could make a marital mint. We’d start with a couple’s questionnaire. No good my offering Rainer Maria Rilke if they’re more of a Purple Ronnie pair. Then a consultation over Zoom, before proposing something old, something new, something sonnet, something haiku. It is, tentatively, wedding season again. Boris and Carrie kicked us

Sam Russell

How TikTok can turn a book into a bestseller

I have an American friend who loves reading, but is clueless about technology. The last time I visited him he was still using Internet Explorer, which even Microsoft has given up on. My friend was puzzled when he walked into his local bookshop and was met by a table of books with the sign ‘#BookTok made me read it’. Soon afterwards I received a bewildered WhatsApp message: ‘What is BookTok?!’ Until recently, I didn’t know. Before the pandemic, I was a working stand-up comic. I’ve never been on television and you probably haven’t heard of me, but I was happy. I worked six nights a week, made enough to pay

The Spectator

Have tennis players always been expected to give interviews?

Game, set, chat Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open after being fined $15,000 for failing to appear for a post-match press conference. Have players always been expected to give interviews? — Wimbledon was first televised live in 1937, the year of Fred Perry’s third and final victory against Gottfried von Cramm. A photo from 1938, when Bunny Austin was beaten by the US player Donald Budge in the final, shows that the post-match interview was already part of the coverage. Vaccine clots How many people in the UK have died from blood clots related to the AstraZeneca vaccine? Up to 27 May the Medical and Healthcare

Peter Jones

A sex education from Aristophanes

The publication of the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon reminded the comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes of her frustrations at school, when she found that the lexica either translated sexual vocabulary into Latin or otherwise bowdlerised it. So when she read the comic poet Aristophanes, she decided that any word she could not identify meant ‘vagina’. Fair enough, but did her school not teach her that it takes two to tango? For the sexual organs, the poet’s hysterically anarchic inventiveness draws largely on rustic images of agricultural instruments, plants, animals, birds, and food, with military images from land and sea battles added for the male organs. Many of these terms are

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris Johnson’s wedding, bitcoin blackouts and a £140m tomato ketchup factory

Home Freelance scientists urged the government not to end coronavirus regulations on 21 June, for fear of a third wave. Fewer than 900 people remained in hospital with Covid, compared with 39,249 in January. Chris Hopson, the head of NHS Providers, said ‘very, very few’ Covid patients in hospital had received two coronavirus vaccinations, and usually had additional conditions. Heathrow got round to using a separate terminal for passengers arriving from countries with a high risk of Covid. The government considered compulsory Covid vaccination for NHS staff. The Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine was approved for use. By the start of the week, 47.3 per cent of the adult population