Society

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The finest champagnes do not age

The other night, I dreamt about Brexit. Awakening to the oppression of an urgent task, it took me a few seconds to realise that my only task was to go back to sleep. I described all this to an MP friend, who said that he had done the same several times, as had a number of his colleagues. But there is a difference between that and a normal bad dream, instantly dispelled by wakefulness. It merely intensifies Brexit nightmares. How long, O Lord. Sometimes, much of the public comes to a conclusion without plunging into the detail. A few weeks ago, lots of people who had never taken any notice

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

“Clays, Claret and Cognac Cruise 2019 review”

Well, that’s a sight that will live with me for a long time, that of our esteemed business editor, Martin Vander Weyer, being knocked almost completely over by the ferocious recoil of an ancient and cacophonous blunderbuss. He was vainly trying to get to grips with the weapon in a doomed effort to pepper a sizeable balloon. The rubber sphere in question might only have bobbed a few short metres away on gloomy grey waters but it’s fair to say that never has a target been so safe from harm and never has a man been so profoundly – albeit temporarily – deafened. We were aboard Thames Sailing Barge Will,

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 26 October

We head to Italy this week and the wines of Castello Banfi. The much-admired estate was founded in 1978 by brothers John and Harry Mariani, and remarkably boasts Europe’s biggest contiguous vineyard, stretching from Tuscany to Piedmont. The 2018 Banfi ‘San Angelo’ Pinot Grigio (1) shows just how tasty this grape can be. I love, even adore Alsace Pinot Gris but all too often struggle with Italy’s notoriously naff interpretation, finding it flabby, dull and cloying. This, though, is spot on. Cool fermented and aged for two months in steel tanks, it’s crisp, clean and refreshing. Both peachy and citrusy, it makes a very amenable mid-morning or early evening invigorator.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Plumbers always have the best restaurant recommendations

Whenever I use the security lane at an airport, I enjoy watching people retrieving their bags and metallic items when they emerge from the X-ray machine. You can quickly divide the population into two: a small minority of ‘logistically aware’ systems-thinkers and the logistically challenged majority. To anyone with a grasp of systems thinking, it is obvious that the throughput of a security line is reduced when only a few people can retrieve their belongings at once. People who self-importantly collect their stuff as soon as it exits the scanner are slowing the queue by 70 per cent or more. The answer is first to remove empty trays from the

Paulina Neuding

Bomb attacks are now a normal part of Swedish life

 Stockholm Until recently no one would have thought of adding a column on bombings to the crime statistics One night last week, explosions took place in three different locations in and around Stockholm. There were no injuries this time, just the usual shattered windows, scattered debris and shocked people woken by the blast. The police bomb squad was already on its way to the first explosion in the district of Vaxholm when it had to turn around and prioritise the detonation at a residential building in the more densely populated city centre. Residents whose doors had been deformed by the shock wave had to be rescued. The third target (seemingly

Joan Collins

Joan Collins: why I love London taxi drivers

Percy and I have seen quite a few movies recently and enjoyed many of them, which is rare. But the most enjoyable was Judy, for the performance of its star, Renée Zellweger. I met Judy Garland many times when I had just arrived in Hollywood as a young starlet and I can tell you that Renée resembles her uncannily, both physically and emotionally. Judy was fragile and birdlike, but her voice was strong and magical. I watched her sing at a party given by the legendary songwriter Sammy Cahn, who accompanied her on the piano. Apart from Miss Garland’s brilliant voice, it was fascinating to watch the audience. People who

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is living at sea the best way to escape this Brexit nightmare?

The first time I was ever commissioned by the Daily Mail, the voice on the phone said: ‘You used to be a banker, you must know all about fraud. Everyone else is saying the SFO is rubbish, so we want a piece that says “We support the fraud fighters”.’ Not my field, I said, and possibly not my opinion. ‘Are you a journalist or aren’t you?’ barked the voice. ‘A thousand words by teatime.’ I wrote the piece and the BBC rang twice the next day to interview me as a City fraud expert. It was a lesson in how the media stays half a day ahead of its consumers

William Cook

The Grand Union Canal, a serene sanctuary amid the urban sprawl

It was a Saturday afternoon in September, the end of summer, and I was feeling sorry for myself. I’d gone to see my son play football in Slough. He was on the bench, his team had lost, and now I had to carry his kitbag home while he went out with his teammates. I’d missed my bus back to Uxbridge and it was an hour until the next one. I was trudging back into town when I saw a signpost for the Grand Union Canal. Along the towpath, I reckoned it was about eight miles to Uxbridge. Sod it: I decided to walk home. When I finally reached Uxbridge dusk

Lucy Vickery

Going concern

In Competition No. 3121 you were invited to submit a song entitled ‘50 Ways to Leave the White House’.   While the brief steered you in the direction of Paul Simon’s 1975 hit (the inspiration for whose distinctive chorus was a rhyming game played with his infant son), I didn’t specify that you had to use that as your template, and some competitors drew inspiration from other well-known songs.   Over to the winners, who win £30 each. The problem is all about having a legacy. You need to be sure they will remember you, you see. When it comes down to it I think you will agree, There must

Wednesday

Michael Auslin

Modern Japan is a model of stability, thanks to its ancient imperial family

Japanese Emperor Naruhito was formally enthroned this week, in the second of three major ceremonies marking his accession to the Chrysanthemum Throne. As Brexit chaos continues to paralyse Britain, impeachment roils American politics, and months of anti-China protests rock Hong Kong and flummox Beijing, Japan again offers an example of political and social stability regularly overlooked or dismissed. Even as the country recovers from a devastating super typhoon, it celebrates a new sovereign whose era name, Reiwa (beautiful harmony) is undoubtedly the envy of other great powers being tested at home and abroad. Some of Japan’s stability may well come from the symbolic role the imperial family plays, and its conscious appeal to the past.

Tuesday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

With Alexandra Shulman

19 min listen

Alexandra Shulman is the former Editor-In-Chief of British Vogue. On the podcast, she talks to Olivia and Lara about her mother Drusilla Beyfus’s etiquette tips, wining and dining as a journalist in the 80s, and how doughnuts never lasted long at Vogue. Presented by Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts.

Monday

Will Maule

How a chicken shop was cancelled

From the moment the popular American fried chicken vendor Chick-fil-A opened its inaugural UK branch in Reading, gay rights activists started mobbing it with complaints and calls for it to close. Why? Well according to Reading Pride who led the campaign, the food outlet’s charitable donations to ‘anti-LGBT’ organisations such as The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and, God forbid, The Salvation Army, was indicative of their unforgivable bigotry. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes are opposed to same-sex relationships and marriage equality, and the campaigners say several charities Chick-fil-A gives money to are hostile to LGBT rights. And so, cancelled they must be. Chick-fil-A’s first batch of specialty chicken and waffles had barely been dunked

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Harry and Meghan’s documentary is a spectacular own goal

So after Tom Bradby’s documentary on Harry and Meghan: An African Journey last night, what are people talking about? The mines issue, 22 years after Diana walked through a minefield in Angola? Violence against women and girls in South Africa, as evident in the training that girls get to help them fend off attacks, which the couple saw in Cape Town? Conservation of elephants, Harry’s big thing? The couple – first together, then Harry singly – went to an astonishing succession of African states one after another – was it really necessary to pack them all into a single visit? – and visited a worthy project in each of them.

Jamie Bartlett

How the world’s biggest crypto-scam targeted British Muslims

Back in 2016, thousands of Brits thought they’d struck gold. Word was spreading through WhatsApp and Facebook groups about an exciting new crypto-currency called OneCoin. It was rumoured to be the next Bitcoin – that strange digital currency that had been shooting up in value and minting millionaires. OneCoin’s founder, a Bulgarian-German businesswoman called Dr Ruja Ignatova had impeccable credentials – a degree from Oxford and a stint at the respected McKinsey’s. OneCoin, Dr Ruja said, was the ‘Bitcoin Killer’, heralding a financial revolution and, if you got in early, a unique new investment opportunity. Driven on by the crypto hype, OneCoin reached 175 countries around the world, and over €4bn was poured in from hopeful investors. We estimate as much as €100m was invested between

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘Bloody men are like bloody rockets’: famous poets on the Apollo 11 moon landing

For the latest competition you were invited to step into the shoes of well-known poets and give their reflections on the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 years on. Cath Nichols’s enjoyable entry looked back on the lot of the Apollo wives through Wendy Cope’s acerbic eye. Nick MacKinnon was also an accomplished Cope impersonator: Bloody men are like bloody rockets, you wait nearly five billion years and as soon as one feels up your craters another Apollo appears… Rufus Rutherford, channelling Basho, submitted a charming haiku. And Robert Schechter, as Ogden Nash, also kept it brief: To the marvellous event that happened fifty        years ago I dedicate this ode.

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Gandhi must not fall

Student politics these days is frequently self-parodying. The Gandhi Must Fall campaign at Manchester university is a perfect case study. Manchester city council has approved plans for a nine-foot statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside Manchester Cathedral. The idea is to promote peace in the wake of the horrific Manchester Arena attack. Who could possibly object to this? Sara Khan, Manchester students’ union’s ‘liberation and access officer’, that’s who. She is leading the campaign against the statue on the grounds that the Indian independence leader made racist comments about Africans. This follows the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford, which unsuccessfully tried to have a statue of the long-dead colonialist Cecil

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Brussels journalists applaud Jean-Claude Juncker

The inner workings of the European Union can often seem like a chummy club to outside observers – a place where EU bureaucrats, well-enumerated MEPs and Brussels-based journalists work together and fraternise behind closed doors. That clubby atmosphere certainly seemed to be on display today at Jean-Claude Juncker’s final European Council press conference in Brussels, before he stands down as President of the European Commission. During the press conference, as Juncker gave a short speech to the assembled journalists in French, and spoke of his pride defending Europe, the Commission official began to choke up with emotion. At which point the assembled press lobby responded by bursting into a spontaneous round

Thursday

Peter Jones

Who advises Dominic Cummings?

Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the Prime Minister, thinks that there is no ‘better book than Thucydides as training for politics’. But what does he ‘teach’? His ‘lessons’ are legion. Herewith some possibilities. In his history of the war between Athens and Sparta (430-404 bc), in which he briefly participated, smart one-liners leap off the page: ‘Humans are dominated by three motives: honour, fear and advantage’; ‘Identity of interests is the surest bond between states and individuals’; ‘Men consider what is pleasant to be honourable and what is advantageous, just’; and so on. Typically of a Greek, Thucydides distinguished sharply between thought and action. Describing a ferocious civil war, he reflected that

The Spectator

Letters: Shoots should be about quality, not quantity

Bad sport Sir: At last a respected member of the shooting community has popped his head above the parapet. Patrick Galbraith has had the courage to express the view that many of us from the ‘bygone sporting era’ hold, but have either been too afraid of the commercial consequences, or too idle, to go public (‘Dangerous game’, 12 October). The shooting fraternity has done an awful job of educating newcomers about what constitutes a great day out. It has allowed quantity to prevail over quality. It has failed to ensure that appreciation of the ‘craic’ and the environment are an essential element of the experience. Like all activities, when you do

Taki

Why Simone de Beauvoir is my kind of woman

New York   A strange thing happened to me here in the Bagel last week. Having read the recent review of a biography of Susan Sontag in these here pages, my plan was to compare her with another feminist, Simone de Beauvoir (I have just finished an opus about Beauvoir, Paris and the Left Bank après la guerre). My money was on Simone, an extremely promiscuous and beautiful woman who was the first to raise the feminine flag against men’s oppression of the fairer sex. Beauvoir’s Second Sex, published in 1949, made her lots and lots of enemies, but it also established her as the number one female icon of