Society

Thursday

Peter Hunt

Prince Charles is now pulling the strings of the monarchy

Prince Andrew’s humiliation is complete. For now. Who knows what lies around the corner? Despite Palace protestations to the contrary – and they’re hardly going to say otherwise – it’s extremely doubtful there’ll be a role for the Queen’s son at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday; at the annual Trooping the Colour; or when the royals gather on the Buckingham Palace balcony during significant state and royal occasions. And the idea he can continue his Pitch at the Palace for entrepreneurs is a fanciful one. Businesses that normally flock to the Windsor brand are fleeing this particular representative. When the statement used the words “for the foreseeable future” read “for

The Spectator

to 2432: Getting dry

The DODO (30) organised the CAUCUS RACE (12) to get dry. Participants included ALICE (2), EAGLET (7), DUCK (17), MOUSE (31) and LORY (42). EVERYBODY (33) won, and the prizes were COMFITS (10) and a THIMBLE (39).   First prize  John Fahy, Thaxted, Essex Runners-up  A.M. Dymond, Herne Hill, London SE24; John Light, Addlestone, Surrey

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Hare coursing gangs are terrorising the countryside

If you’re driving at dawn or at dusk in the countryside at this time of year, you might well see shady-looking men standing around in a stubble field, their 4x4s parked close by and ‘long’ dogs — greyhound types — straining on the lead beside them. Watch and you’ll see them walk up the field, or along the edges, until a hare makes a bolt for it. The men are ready. This is what they’re there for. A dog is let off the lead, and someone with a phone videos the scene. The footage is being live-streamed to others who have placed bets on the outcome —guessing which dog will

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

‘Instapoetry’ may be popular, but most of it is terrible

Poetry is on a hot streak. Last year, sales in the UK topped £12 million for the first time — a rise of more than 10 per cent for the second year running. According to Parisa Ebrahimi, the poetry editor at Chatto & Windus, one reason for the trend is that poetry is no longer the domain of the white male. This may be true, but how has it happened? Part of the answer is Instagram. Designed as a social network for sharing photos, recently the app has been adopted and adapted by writers — few of them white, many of them women — who, rather than selfies and sunsets,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Starling murmurations are a display more dazzling than fireworks

It’s late afternoon in the car park of Workington Asda. A little crowd is gathering in one corner, most of them clutching cameras and tripods. We’re not here to find ‘Workington Man’, the supposed archetypal voter who apparently all the parties need to court to win this election. Instead, Workington men and women — and a number of us from all over Cumbria — are here to watch a bunch of birds going to bed. The sun is at that dripping egg-yolk stage where it’s about to slip behind the horizon. It’s cold, and for a few minutes you can see the panic on the faces of the birdwatchers. Perhaps

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 23 November

At dinner the other night, our host spotted a well-priced magnum of fizz on the list and beckoned the sommelier. Alas, it turned out the magnums were no more, the last one having been sold two nights previously. ‘Oh dear,’ sighed my chum. ‘I guess we’d better have it by the half-magnum, then, and see how we get on.’ Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that we got on just fine and ended up having two half-magnums. Crisp, clean, creamy and toasty with an elegantly fine mousse and the most stylish of finishes The fact is that magnums are a real treat, the ideal size for wine lovers, especially at

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Priti Patel hasn’t learned the lesson of ‘no such thing as society’

Can Priti Patel really stand in Barrow-in-Furness, which has some of the most deprived wards in the country, and say that the government isn’t responsible for poverty? The Home Secretary’s comments to the BBC’s North West Tonight have unsurprisingly gone viral because of the juxtaposition between the charity she was visiting and the stridency with which she said them. It’s worth noting that she wasn’t, as some have claimed, standing in a food bank. In the interests of accuracy, Patel was actually visiting The Well, which is a local charity helping people with with addiction (I live in the town, and it’s a fantastic organisation, like so many of the

Bruce Anderson

Wine that puts politics in its place

In the era of vinyl, lost in one of Bruckner’s longueurs, it could be hard to tell what was stuck, the record or the composer. Sir Jim Gastropodi would make regular appearances in the Peter Simple column, conducting the Soup Hales Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of Bruckner’s interminable symphony. Despite Boris Johnson’s attempts to enliven it, this is the interminable election campaign. In effect, it has been going on since 2016, but the end may be in sight. Barring a 2017-scale upset (which is unlikely — though Boris has faults, he is not Theresa May mark two), he will return to No. 10 with a majority. He will also enjoy

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Get ready for the Great Lammy Firewall

Many of you will be waiting, with much excitement, for the Great Lammy Firewall, which will be introduced by our new Labour government just as soon as they’ve nationalised the internet. Free broadband for everyone, except for those reactionaries who contravene one of 756 stipulations written in the inevitable community code of conduct agreements (i.e. most of the people who pay for this stuff through their taxes). That’s me offline, then — and, after a while, probably you too. Imaginary hate crimes will see you sent to the Lammy Sin Bin or, if they’re considered serious enough, the thought police will be round with their black plastic bags and BBC

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

No one else has the weird levels of self-regard shown by people who appear regularly on TV

One of the more tedious tropes of recent years is for journalists to bemoan the rise of populism while busily casting about for some dark force to which to attach the blame. Mark Zuckerberg, Google, nameless Russians, an uneducated populus, social media, whatever. One avenue that is rarely explored is that a major cause of the rise of populism might be the journalists themselves, and the extent to which the once noble aim of impartiality has led to something ridiculous — where almost everyone in authority is treated as a liar. For the past three decades, Britain has had centrist governments led by mainstream politicians. And in that period, did

Lucy Vickery

First or last

In Competition No. 3125 you were invited to compose a comically appalling first or final paragraph of the memoir of a well-known figure, living or dead.   This was one of those challenges that raises a glass in memory of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian novelist and patron saint of purple prose. The oft-cited example of his florid style is the opening to the 1830 novel Paul Clifford — ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ — which was used by Charles Schulz as the first line of Snoopy’s novel, and by Brian Murdoch in his winning entry below.   You didn’t quite hit the spot this week and the standard was

James Delingpole James Delingpole

War of the Worlds is as bad as Doctor Who

Edwardian England deserved everything it got from those killer Martian invaders. Or so I learned from the BBC’s latest adaptation of The War of the Worlds (Sundays). Everything about that era, apparently, was hateful, backward and ripe for destruction: regressive attitudes to women and homosexuality; exultant white supremacy (cue, a speech from a government minister on the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race); a general prevailing bone-headedness and stuck-upness; stiff, stuffy, relentlessly brown clothing with superfluous belts; and as for those ridiculous bristling moustaches… Still, I don’t think H.G. Wells would have been totally appalled by this travesty of his 1898 potboiler. Wells was, after all, a man of the left

Wednesday

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Locking child killers up for life won’t solve our prison crisis

What should we do with adults who murder children? ‘Nothing good’ is a perfectly understandable response. Child killers occupy a unique position on the destitute outer fringes of humanity. Bogeymen made real, they are in fact often pathetic, hideously damaged individuals driven to satisfy appetites we can only guess at. The Conservatives have announced that adults over 21 who murder children under 16 will never be released from custody. It has made for a good Sun newspaper op-ed; justice secretary Robert Buckland is pushing against an open door with the electorate. It’s not just Tory voters who never want these aberrant individuals to see the light of day again. Ask any

Tuesday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

With Will Lander

14 min listen

Will Lander is the owner of the beloved restaurants Quality Chop House, Clipstone, Portland, and the new Amelia. On the podcast, he talks to Lara and Livvy about growing up with the FT’s restaurant critic for a father (not many trips to McDonalds), a childhood dream to become a restauranteur, and the secret to traditional British cooking. Presented by Olivia Potts and Lara Prendergast.

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

In defence of narcissism

I am that rare thing, a vice-signaller; a breed defined by the fact that unlike our virtue-signalling opposites, we delight in presenting ourselves as somewhat worse than we are. Reasons vary; sometimes we were Bad People in the past and changed but (like teenage wallflowers who grew into table-dancing divas and still describe themselves as ‘shy’) we keep an image in our mind of the way we were. Sometimes we choose to present in this way because we are repelled by people who consider themselves good but behave in a manner which we see as substandard; for example, regard the hardcore hypocrisy of racist, misogynist Corbynites who believe that they

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Prince Andrew is a creep but he’s innocent until proven guilty

Prince Andrew is a creep. But he’s not the only one. There is also something creepy about the public shaming of Andrew. There’s something disturbing in the obsessive, salacious chatter about his allegedly depraved private life and the presumption that he is guilty of terrible crimes. The Andrew storm increasingly looks like a clash of two types of creepiness. On Andrew himself: maybe I’m jaundiced because I have been a republican my whole adult life, but I think the Newsnight interview is the best case I’ve seen for abolishing the monarchy. Andrew comes across as a grotesque figure. Aloof, entitled, utterly disconnected from normalcy. Yes, there were the idiotic statements

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview was a career-defining calamity

Hats off to Newsnight. BBC 2’s flagship political show bagged itself an almighty royal scoop. Emily Maitlis was given an hour to quiz Prince Andrew about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex-offender who was found dead in his jail cell in August. The first bombshell of the night was the news that months of negotiation had led up to this stage-managed encounter in a Buckingham Palace drawing room. ‘Normally we’d be discussing your work,’ opened Maitlis, as if her main ambition in life is to cover the potterings of minor royals. ‘We’ve been talking to Newsnight for about six months,’ agreed the prince, ‘about doing something around the

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Halloween/ Occurs between/ The end of October/ And the start of not being sober: calendrical clerihews

Your latest challenge was to compose clerihews about any date in the calendar. I was very grateful recently to eagle-eyed John O’Byrne, who drew my attention to the fact that the closing date for Competition No. 3125 was not 20 November, as printed in the magazine, but 13 November. Even better, he did it in clerihew form: The 20 November, Now that I remember, Is the closing date not for 3125 but 3126 — So herewith my quick fix! Clerihews always go down well and this challenge netted a whopping entry. New Year’s Day, Shakespeare’s birthday, 9/11, the Fourth of July, Black Friday, April Fool’s Day, 5 November, Burns Night

Friday

Mark Tovey

The hypocrisy of the climate catastrophist councils

What do Extinction Rebellion, the Guardian’s style guide and over 200 local councils have in common? All have declared a ‘climate emergency’. Yet while these councils are keen to talk up the consequences on our planet of failing to act, are they actually practicing what they preach? The decision of some councils to purchase cars for their own employees’ use, as revealed in a series of Freedom of Information requests I made, suggests they are not. Councillors from Durham County Council declared a ‘climate emergency’ in February and the ‘County Durham environment partnership’, which the council is a member of, says getting more people to walk, use the bus or cycle is