Each of the unclued lights includes the same letter three times in succession. First prize Tom Rollinson, Borehamwood, HertsRunners-up Lynn Gilchrist, Willoughby, NSW, Australia; Brian Midgley, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire
Greville Starkey’s great victories as a jockey included the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe on Star Appeal at 119-1. In 1978 he won the Derby and Irish Derby on Shirley Heights and the Oaks and Irish Oaks on Fair Salinia. He was also known for his unerring mimicry of a Jack Russell terrier’s bark, a distinction that once had an airliner’s departure delayed while stewards sought in vain the animal aboard. When he deployed his trick during a celebratory dinner at Quaglino’s, trainer Henry Cecil wrapped a napkin round Starkey’s neck and led him yapping out of the restaurant on all fours. In races he used it to disconcert his
You have seen the chart and it is grim. A list of European countries ranked by annual drugs deaths, with Scotland at the top and a long red bar beside it. Scotland recorded 1,264 deaths from drug misuse in 2019, more than twice the number of HIV-related deaths in Somalia and more than double the death toll from terrorism in Iraq in the same year. Two-thirds of deaths were among Scots aged 35 to 54 but there was also an increase among the 15-to-24 demographic. More than 90 per cent involved multiple-drug cocktails, with ‘Street Valium’ cited in two-thirds of cases. The fake benzodiazepines can be bought for 50p a
Can the National Trust dumb down any further? Its latest crazed venture, the Colonial Countryside project, is ‘a child-led history and writing project’, working with 100 primary school pupils, 16 historians and ten commissioned writers. The aim is to ensure that ‘robustly researched stories of empire are communicated’. So here comes another highly politicised scheme – in the light of its disastrous LGBTQ campaign, forcing volunteers to wear rainbow badges, and outing the owner of one of its great houses, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, who bequeathed Felbrigg Hall to the Trust. As Charles Moore writes in his Telegraph column this week, the experts on the colonial project are of a predictable,
27 min listen
Last month the government released its ten point plan for what it dubs ‘The Green Industrial Revolution’. At the top of the list was offshore wind, with a pledge to produce enough power for every home by 2030. Offshore wind currently constitutes over 50 per cent of the renewables in the UK, with costs coming down considerably over recent years. But does offshore wind have its limits? Is it always a good deal for the consumer? And how far can it realistically advance us on our road to Net Zero by 2050? With Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth; Benj Sykes, VP for UK Offshore at
For the last two-and-a-half years, I have been hounded, attacked and shut down for participating in discussions about sex and transgenderism. My offence? That I believe something that was once accepted as truth: women are women and men are men. As a law professor, I have used my expertise on human rights to advocate finding a way to ensure that women’s rights and transgender rights are upheld without one or the other group losing their rights. The attacks on me have been varied, from facing a barrage of constant abuse online, being called a Nazi and a ‘TERF’ (trans exclusionary radical feminist – a slur used against women in my
That the Home Office compiled a report on the political hot potato of child grooming gangs and then actually published it represents progress of a sort. Were you especially charitably disposed towards the department, you could call to mind Dr Johnson talking about the feat of a dog walking on its hind legs: ‘It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ So credit is due to Home Secretary Priti Patel for doggedly battling to ensure that ‘Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation – Characteristics of Offending’ ever saw the light of day. But when it comes to expecting her civil servants to answer the question
For more than twenty years, Brian was left to rot on a methadone prescription. Month-after-month of opioid replacement therapy was the best course of action, his treatment team concluded, making no effort to definitively end his debilitating drug dependency. For Brian’s parents, watching their son slowly succumb to the steely grip of addiction, it was two decades of agony. Then, in 2018, a ‘top up’ hit of street Valium proved too much, and – as they put it – he was at last ‘released from his torture’. In Scotland – which has the worst recorded drug death rate in Europe – such stories are disturbingly common. But is the SNP
The first rule of preaching is not to be preachy – and it’s here that the Vicar of Dibley slips up in lecturing her parishioners on Black Lives Matter in an episode broadcast last night. When I am training curates, I show them Alan Bennett’s skit ‘Take a pew’ from Beyond the Fringe (1961), where a clergyman’s painful attempts at being hip are sunk by the rising of his sing-songy parsonical voice. Dawn French’s character would have been wise to watch too. The normally inoffensive sitcom, which is being broadcast this Christmas in a series of ten minute specials, features the TV vicar ‘taking the knee’. Surely this year, more
Is it possible to ‘deradicalise’ terrorists? Jonathan Hall QC, the government’s terror watchdog, doesn’t think so. He may have a point, but it’s complicated. One of the institutional problems we have is a sort of misplaced arrogance based, in part, on the historic experience of counter-insurgency against violent Irish republicans. Until quite recently, the Ministry of Justice press office referred to our prison deradicalisation processes as ‘world-class.’ Hall himself only recently began looking at our distinctly Heath-Robinson terrorist risk management ‘system’ after London Bridge killer Usman Khan ran rings around it. Having enumerated its many obvious defects, he bizarrely concluded it was pretty much fit for purpose. The IRA were enthusiastic human rights violators — but not even
Back in October, Wales implemented the ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown which was rejected by Boris Johnson on the grounds that these things are not long-term solutions. It’s hard to see what good it did Wales now: after a short-term dip, its Covid rates are now at least twice as high as anywhere else in the UK and seem to be spiralling out of control. The situation is particularly concerning because Wales has been swift to impose strict measures in a bid to contain the situation. No one could venture that a lack of caution is to blame for what is unfolding in Wales. The country imposed its ‘firebreak lockdown’ for just over two weeks on
Three cheers for Jeremy Vine. At last someone has pointed out that cycling in cities is inherently right-wing. Full disclosure: I’m a cyclist. I may not own a square inch of fluorescent or Lycra apparel; I may not terrorise motorists with violently bright and flashing lights but I’ve been riding a bike around London since I was a child. However, whereas Jeremy celebrates the right-wing triumphalism of cycling — asserting that he and other cyclists ‘are acting out of primal selfishness’ — I’m mortally embarrassed by it. Cycling is the exclusive preserve of the very few and the very able. As for cycle lanes, which pander to a tiny and privileged
You could smell the stale popcorn and rancid carpet from the other end of the high street but that unmistakable Odeon odour always set my pulse racing. That was before we lost the vast art deco interior to corporate greed and short sightedness. The carving up of the beautifully ornate auditorium into three miniscule screens ruined the ‘going to the pictures’ experience. It became a sad portent of things to come. A couple of years after the needless vandalism, not one but two hangar-sized multiplexes landed on the outskirts of town rendering the old inner-city Odeon obsolete. For several years, my beloved fleapit stood like a towering 1930s headstone to
It’s been a beast of a year, hasn’t it? This morning my father-in-law died of Covid in Pristina, and it’s only when it comes right home to you that you’re reminded how real and immediate the threat from that spiteful little virus is. The reason I’m writing about this personal loss is that I worry that the whole Covid situation has been politicised, even while the vaccine is finally coming into play. You don’t get points for being defiant towards Covid-19; it really doesn’t care As lots of people have already observed, it’s turned into a left-right issue, with many liberals wanting to close things down and many conservatives wanting
Use of force isn’t like the movies. It’s often messy, frightening and it can go sideways very quickly. I vividly remember my first arrest as a volunteer police officer, surrounded by jeering teenagers in a seaside amusement arcade wrestling on the ground with a completely non-compliant powerfully built kid. When we eventually got the cuffs on him, it turned out he was deaf and most of his resistance was because he couldn’t understand my repeated attempts to negotiate with him. As head of security at HMP Wandsworth, I recall standing in the centre supervising an entirely correct and proportionate restraint and relocation of a prisoner. All the staff were white. The
On the third day after his cancellation, Ted Hughes rose again. Having published a spreadsheet listing his possible association with ‘wealth obtained from enslaved people or through colonial violence’, the British Library backed down, making a public apology to his widow and withdrawing ‘unreservedly’ the reference ‘to a distant ancestor’. A natural first response to this decision would be to welcome it as a sensible step, particularly given that the ‘ancestor’ in question had died almost 300 years before his birth, probably lost money on his involvement with the Virginia company, wrote a pamphlet decrying slavery, and, perhaps most importantly, died childless and celibate – raising certain intriguing questions about how the
What’s the worst thing about Thursday’s Ockenden Review into the latest NHS maternity scandal, at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital? Is it the scale of the trauma, the deaths and the lack of compassion which put together make for the worst maternity scandal that the health service has ever seen? The inquiry started with 250 cases, but widened that to a horrifying 1,862 cases where care may have been inadequate. These are just the interim findings as the investigation continues and will publish a final report in 2021. Perhaps it’s the details that are the worst thing about the document. The review found 13 maternal deaths in 18 years, stillbirths which
59 min listen
Barbara Amiel, Baroness Black, is a journalist, writer and socialite. She’s been married four times – her fourth to the newspaper proprietor Conrad Black. On the podcast, she talks to Katy about her difficult childhood (which she describes as ‘slightly unorthodox’), establishing her journalistic career in Toronto and London, comparing bathrooms with Ghislaine Maxwell, her glamorous marriage to Black and their fall from grace when he was jailed for fraud. Her new book, Friends and Enemies: A Memoir, is and out now.
42 min listen
Joe Biden wants his administration to be a departure from the days of Donald Trump, but will a change in foreign policy harm American interests? (01:00) Why is it taking so long to reach a Brexit deal? (17:10) And finally, should cyclists be given priority on London’s roads? (29:35) With The Spectator’s deputy US editor Dominic Green, Chatham House’s Leslie Vinjamuri, The Spectator‘s political editor James Forsyth, EurasiaGroup’s managing director Mujtaba Rahman, journalist Christian Wolmar and writer, actor, and comedian Griff Rhys Jones. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Max Jeffery, Matt Taylor and Alexa Rendell.
Has there ever been a time when scientists have been held in higher esteem? Compared to the political class, scientists have seemed sober, sensible and our best hope of escaping the coronavirus crisis. Dr Anthony Fauci, the lead immunologist on the White House Coronavirus Taskforce, is just one scientist who has become a hugely respected voice in America and beyond – in spite of repeated attacks from Trump, who told campaign staff in October that ‘people are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots’. In the end Fauci will continue to serve in the White House long after Trump has headed back to Mar-a-Lago for good. Scientists’ stock has