Society

Thursday

William Cook

Online chess is the ultimate lockdown sport

How have you been filling these listless homebound hours we’ve been given by the government? I’ve been frittering them away playing online chess, and it seems I’m not alone. The Economist reports that traffic on chess.com, the leading chess website, has more than doubled during lockdown. Log on at any time and you’ll find tens of thousands of games in progress. Once upon a time, in that lost age before the world wide web, chess players had to get dressed and leave the house to feed their habit. Now, in our brave new virtual world, those days are long gone. Today anyone with an internet connection can play ad infinitum,

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Klopp’s childlike enthusiasm – and incalculable savviness

Where were we? Oh yes, Liverpool were running away with the Premier League and a mere three months later have sealed the deal. For Liverpool fans it must have seemed like the longest drum roll in history. A week ago the drum roll ended in an explosion of joy — too literal an explosion for some tastes — for those who worship at the temple of Anfield. Liverpool were champions of England for the first time in 30 years — and the wait for the first English manager to win the Premier League was extended for another year. That last fact must be one of the sorriest statistics in English

Aidan Hartley

How two children vanished for a week en route from Africa to London

As we all know by now, the pandemic distorts time like a concertina. Life before March is a world that seems too distant, an image viewed down a telescope held the wrong way — yet there are moments when the months retract into almost hours. We are still castaways in London, still waiting for the airspace to open so that we can fly home to Kenya. I feel glum about it, then remember how my father was marooned for 12 years in southern Arabia and Africa on either side of the war. He missed his mother, as I do, sitting in his mud tower on the edge of the Empty

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What we still don’t know about Covid in Leicester

Just why has Leicester been locked down, its economy placed back in the deep freeze and many more of its citizens condemned to lose their jobs? Since the announcement, the country has gone back into panic mode. Leicester, according to much reporting, is in the midst of a second spike – and is surely just the first of many towns and cities that will have to be placed back in lockdown. Listeners to the Today programme on Wednesday morning, in particular, will have been left in no two minds: we are in the foothills of a resurgence which could overwhelm the whole country. Finally, on Wednesday evening, Public Health England

Samir Shah

The sheer hypocrisy of the food culture wars

Alison Roman, a celebrity chef and Instagrammer, has come under attack from woke warriors because of her dish ‘#thestew’. Her crime? The recipe uses spiced chickpeas, coconut, and turmeric – and Roman does not call it a curry. Once again, we are witnessing the sorry sight of people, organisations and institutions crumbling in the face of those determined to bring ‘white’ culture to its knees. Food publishing companies are reviewing their recipes to check for cultural sensitivities. Last week, Bon Appétit magazine admitted that it was guilty of ‘decontextualizing recipes from non-white cultures’, while the editor-in-chief of ‘BBC Good Food’ and Olive magazine, told the Times that she is making

Luke McShane

Twitch pageant

Chess has much in common with video games — not least, the eager disdain of uninformed critics. An 1859 article in Scientific American noted the achievements of Paul Morphy ‘vanquishing the most distinguished chess players of Europe’ but concluded sniffily that ‘skill in this game is neither a useful nor graceful accomplishment’. You can’t please everyone. Gamers are used to suffering the same old brickbats — their pursuits are addictive, isolating, sedentary, a channel for violent impulses, or just a waste of time. This is mostly silly: games can offer a rich and fulfilling competitive environment. It is enough to consider that even after DeepMind’s AlphaZero attained superhuman levels of

Luke McShane

No. 611

White to play. From the ridiculous to the sublime. According to the ‘Chess Notes’ website, a game won by Edward Gestesi in Paris, 1911. Which move forces a quick checkmate? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 6 July. 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 Ra1! draws. The key line is 1…Ke3 2 Ke5 Kd3 3 Kf4 Kc3 4 Ke3 Kb2 5 Kd2 Kxa1 6 Kxc2 stalemate. Last week’s winner Terry Needham, Eltisley, Cambs

Doc

2464: Topsy-turvy

  14 which is unclued below, but is clued elsewhere, has to be divided into three components (one a Spanish imperative), each of which is linked with a trio of unclued lights. Across 1 US soldier with Christmas novelty among my low-value ornaments (11) 7/40 Bowler on Anglo-French 10s (6) 11 Fruit, almost a pound, once topped (6) 13 A liberal ruler admits a palace in Spain (7) 17 They never give up being essayists (6) 18 Fuel vessel having head of heater out of commission (5) 20 Wrong about the girl (6) 21 Large rodent, diffident, on borders of Peru! (5) 22 It’s a relief for a cockney on

The Spectator

Leicester has a history of lockdowns

Leicester lockdowns Leicester was forced to impose the first local lockdown, in response to a reported surge in cases of coronavirus. — The city was last locked down from the rest of the country on 30 May 1645, when a 10,000-strong royalist force led by Prince Rupert and Charles I himself besieged the town and demanded it to surrender. The parliamentarians, who consisted of 480 garrisoned soldiers, 900 townsmen and 150 volunteers from the rest of Leicestershire, were heavily outnumbered. Moreover, the city’s medieval walls had mostly gone, and had to be hurriedly replaced by earth banks. Even so, the parliamentarians inflicted large losses on the royalists as they breached

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris does press-ups, pubs reopen and Leicester locks down

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he was ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’ and did press-ups to prove it, as he announced infrastructure initiatives to counter the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus outbreak. With a slogan ‘Build, build, build’, he made a speech in Dudley promising £1.5 billion for hospital improvements and planning changes to make loft extensions easier. Pubs were allowed to open from 4 July, after a fashion, with table service, as were restaurants. Churches could hold services without singing and newlyweds were told to wash their hands after exchanging rings. The government was poised to announce that from 6 July British travellers to

Peter Jones

Tiberius and the ‘phantoms of liberty’

Word has it that ministers already do not bother to argue their corner with the government’s inner ring, while a slimmer, streamlined cabinet office threatens to disempower them still further. Ministers could soon resemble senators under Rome’s second emperor Tiberius (ad 14-37). The historian Tacitus painted an extraordinary picture of Tiberius’s early days in office. The fact was that his stepfather Augustus had exercised autocratic power after he ‘restored’ the republic that had collapsed in 31 bc. The question for senators, therefore, was what change to expect under the new man in power. Their experience suggested precious little. They already knew Tiberius as a cryptic, devious and heartless character, whose

The Spectator

Letters: Police must focus on deterring crime, not responding to it

Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies, but I think he misses the crucial point (‘Defund the police’, 27 June). We simply do not have bobbies on the beat to even feel sympathy for, and this means that constructive relationships between a recognisable police officer and their community are a rarity. As Kevin Hurley describes, many black youths in our cities have nothing but hatred towards police officers, and this cannot be a surprise when the only interactions they have with them are being forced to empty their pockets after being suspected of criminal activity. Mr Liddle

Paul Mason

Why Rebecca Long-Bailey had to go

Do you remember where you were when the BBC showed a rerun of Bowie’s Glastonbury set? When we ask each other that in future, the answer is always going to be: ‘At home, recovering from a day of Zoom calls.’ It’s 100 days since lockdown and as we slowly emerge it’s hard to keep a sense of proportion about the events in between. I remember pricking my finger for a trial antibody test; I remember my delight at discovering that an old-time cockney butcher still exists on a nearby council estate; I remember the absolute stillness of the air as a sparrowhawk circled over south London. Best to fix these

Leo McKinstry

The caution that almost cost us the Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain, which began 80 years ago this week, occupies a unique place in our island story. Its epic moral quality, representing the triumph of freedom over tyranny, continues to resonate to this day. The RAF’s victory marked a crucial turning point in the war; it was the first time the Nazi machine had suffered a defeat. If the Luftwaffe had gained the mastery of the skies over southern England in September 1940, the Germans might well have been able to launch a vast, seaborne invasion across the Channel. Beaten in the West, the Reich had to turn eastwards, to Russia, with disastrous consequences. What makes the tale

Douglas Murray

What a leaked NHS memo tells us about White Fragility

Of all the people who have made cash in the past month, few can have raked it in like Robin DiAngelo. Since the death of George Floyd, the white American academic and author of White Fragility has been absolutely milking it. A term I probably shouldn’t use, since Peta last week declared milk a symbol of white supremacy. I might say she is absolutely creaming it, though by the time you read this ‘cream’ might be racist too. In which case it will join the British countryside, which was designated as racist by the BBC’s Countryfile last week. A fact that I learned after opening Google’s homepage, where I was

Conrad Black

If Boris wants a New Deal he needs to end the lockdown

The invocation of Franklin D. Roosevelt by Boris Johnson is welcome, but the conditions that greeted Roosevelt when he was inaugurated US president in 1933 and those in the UK today are very distinguishable. Roosevelt inherited a collapsed financial system; the stock and commodity exchanges and almost all of the banks in the country had been closed for up to two weeks. Almost a third of the country was unemployed (the states compiled the figures and they were not entirely reliable), and there was no direct relief for the jobless. For the first time since the Civil War there were machine-guns at the corners of the great federal buildings in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why Boris Johnson’s ‘New Deal’ won’t save us

John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I change my mind’. Boris Johnson’s £5 billion ‘New Deal’ of school and hospital projects to stimulate the pandemic-torn economy is pure Keynes, as well as a conscious reference to Franklin Roosevelt. And like the totality of the Treasury response to Covid, it represents a 180-degree change of mind from the modern Conservative belief in squashing state spending while letting the private sector drive. But in dire circumstances, most commentators accept it’s right to park ideology and try anything that looks like it might work. And for a while — I’d

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The pandemic’s invisible victims

I sometimes pick up some food at Tesco for an 86-year-old pensioner who lives a few streets over. At the weekend, I brought him milk and cornflakes. He opened his front door; I put the bags down, retreated the required two metres, but when I looked up he was in tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’m just so lonely at the moment.’ Should I have moved closer, put my arm around him? At the moment the risk of passing on the virus is low in London. I’ve had the bug (I think) and I used hand gel after leaving the supermarket. It’s been said of the recent protests that

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

To understand the past, you need to inhabit it for a while

‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling by the hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’ The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe.