Society

Monday

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

The terrifying reaction to a panel debate on Islamophobia

Have you ever wondered why so few moderate Muslim voices are heard in the public debate? I used to, until I started to defend my faith against its extremist defamers. I then found out that any Muslim who ventures into this arena to stand up against hardliners is subject to fierce and immediate character assassination. The process is exposed in a Civitas pamphlet, out this month, entitled ‘The No True Muslim’ fallacy. It provides examples of the attempts to silence people like Sara Khan and Fiyaz Mughal by those who have appointed themselves as Islam’s spokesmen. But I can offer another example: the reaction to a recent event at the last

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: 50 ways to leave the White House

This week’s assignment was to write the lyrics to 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 inspira-tion 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 competitors drew inspi-ration from a variety of other well-known songs. Honourable mentions go to David Shields, Katie Mallett and Rachael Churchill. The winners below earn £30 each. Ian Barker The problem is all about having a legacy. You need to be sure they will remember you, you       see. When it

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why I’m fed up with David Attenborough

The other day, I went to be interviewed in the Savoy hotel. Sitting in what the Savoy now calls the Thames Foyer was Alice Thomson of the Times, a terrifying interviewer because she is so charming. She made me play the game, which she claims I invented, of offering her interviewee a series of choices which one must make (e.g. tea or coffee, town or country). Alice offered me ‘Greta Thunberg or David Attenborough’. I felt I had to break the rules and say ‘Neither’. There is now a small but growing number of people, myself included, who are fed up with the latter. His early days were wonderful — he

Friday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The devastating price of a teenage boy’s unwanted advance

Oh God. Is there no end to this madness? The fate of Jamie Griffiths is now known: he’s the teenager who touched – not groped – a girl he liked on two separate occasions last November on the arm and hip. The teenager was charged with sexual assault and now he’s been found guilty at Manchester and Salford magistrates’ court; he’s on the sex offenders register for the next five years, he has to pay her £250 and do 200 hours of unpaid community work. Of course, with only a few newspaper reports to go on we can’t be sure we know all the facts of the case, but it seems this

Thursday

The Spectator

How violent are our jails? | 24 October 2019

Big Ben protests An Extinction Rebellion protestor climbed to the top of the Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben, with a bit of help from the scaffolding. Who has achieved this before? — A Greenpeace protestor scaled the tower in 2004 to protest the Iraq war. — A protestor was arrested in May last year as he began an ascent. Police did not disclose what he was protesting about. — Two films have reached a climax with their heroes swinging from the arms of the clock, both successfully preventing the detonation of a bomb. They were Will Hay in My Learned Friend (1943) and Richard Hannay (played by Robert Powell)

Taki

The most uplifting film ever made

New York   Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the work looks back to a time before the grotesqueries of the present? Back, back, I say, but that’s to be expected. I’m such a fan of the past that if I could have one wish granted by The Spectator it would be for a review by Deborah Ross of the most uplifting movie ever, Ladies in Black, directed by the great Australian Bruce Beresford. My, my, what memories of Australians and Oz it brought back. The great Lew Hoad, Mervyn Rose, Roy Emerson, Neale Fraser, Ken Fletcher, all great tennis

Melissa Kite

Was our nut-infested plane a death trap?

‘This is your captain speaking, welcome aboard this flight to London Gatwick. As there is a passenger on our flight today with a severe nut allergy we will not be serving any nuts or nut products for the duration of the flight.’ That was the first announcement the pilot made, ahead of anything about flying the plane. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ the builder boyfriend said. He was holding a bar of hazelnut chocolate he was very much looking forward to, not least because on our outbound flight to Greece we discovered that since we last flew (which was, to be fair, almost in the last century) the complimentary

Robin Oakley

The future face of racing

In the second race of a heart-stirring Qipco Champions Day at Ascot the unthink-able happened: on Britain’s favourite stayer Stradivarius, winner of his previous ten races, the King of Ascot Frankie Dettori got beaten. In fact, in going down by just a nose to Aidan O’Brien’s St Leger winner Kew Gardens on heavy ground that blunted his ability to quicken, Stradivarius probably ran as well as he has ever done. Trainer John Gosden and owner Bjorn Nielsen had thought of pulling him out of the contest on such soft ground but they sportingly took the view that, ‘It is Champions Day and you let the day down if you don’t

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: More Brexit chaos, royal complaints and Syrian fighting

Home The Commons voted by 329 to 299 for a Brexit Withdrawal Bill but then stymied progress by defeating a timetable for enacting it by 31 October. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, immediately favoured a delay for Brexit. Downing Street called for a general election. Sir Oliver Letwin had torpedoed the government’s Brexit endeavours by amending a motion that had been intended to secure the Commons’ ‘meaningful vote’ for the withdrawal agreement triumphantly secured from the EU by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, only three days earlier. The Commons, sitting on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982, voted by 322 to

Peter Jones

Roman funerals had real ‘emotional intelligence’

Today’s funerals, featuring shiny black hearses and top hats, lack (we are assured) ‘emotional intelligence’. Colourful coffins featuring pictures of favourite musicians, leopard print hearses and burials in yurts will apparently correct this sad deficiency. The Romans might well have disagreed. Cremation and interment took place outside the boundaries of Rome (dead bodies were considered a polluting force — contrast the Christian view). The less well-off could for a fee join funerary clubs, meeting regularly to dine together, and have a niche in a highly decorated underground chamber reserved for the urn containing their ashes. Those wealthy enough to afford funerary monuments, featuring lengthy epitaphs and portraits of the deceased,

Toby Young Toby Young

The Intellectual Dark Web is more liberal than you’d think

In February last year, Spectator Life ran an article by Douglas Murray on the arrival of a new group of unorthodox thinkers who were challenging the dogmas of the authoritarian left. People who maintained, among other things, that there are fundamental biological differences between men and women, that free speech is under siege on campus and elsewhere, and that some aspects of western civilisation — in particular, the values of the Enlightenment — are worth defending. Murray’s list included Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, Christina Hoff Sommers: all members of what they jokingly referred to as the ‘intellectual dark web’ (IDW). When the New York Times’s Bari Weiss used

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Do I have a moral duty to allow Brexit chat at supper parties?

Q. I’ve been having friends to supper for many decades. Although I say it myself, these gatherings have often been hugely successful, with lots of laughter, people making new friends and guests regularly staying beyond 1 a.m. When Brexit started it was OK because talk of it didn’t dominate the evening. It now does. Last week I told my guests the subject was banned. They looked thrown but we went on to have an enjoyable evening. On the other hand I am also wondering, is it my duty — as someone with a venue and a good network of friends — to allow my guests to hold forth at this

Luke McShane

Great sacrifices

Impelled by his engineer’s mindset, the former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik wrote a short essay to answer a simple question: ‘What is a combination?’ I like his succinct conclusion, which certainly captures the essence: ‘A combination is a forced variation with a sacrifice.’   Like the fizz in champagne, the sacrificial element is the sine qua non and the va va voom. In its absence, a forcing manoeuvre of the pieces may, like wine, still have much to recommend it, but it is a different libation. Nonetheless, an avid taxonomist might like to ponder Nigel Short’s victory against Jan Timman from Tilburg 1991, where the sacrifice of a rook is

Dot Wordsworth

Surd

Lewis Carroll, in his Phantasmagoria, and Other Poems (1869), constructed a poem that yielded a double acrostic, with the first and last letters of 13 words that were suggested by the 13 stanzas spelling out ‘quasi-insanity commemoration’, a reference to an Oxford commemoration ball. The first stanza, which yields the word quadratic, goes: ‘Yet what are all such gaieties to me/ Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds? x2 + 7x + 53 = 11 / 3.’ What, though, is the solution to the equation? I have seen it said that there is none, unless a minus sign is placed before the 53. But then it wouldn’t scan, and

Luke McShane

no. 577

Black to play. From Stepanov–Romanovsky, Lenin-grad 1926. Stepanov resigned two moves earlier, seeing that he would soon lose his queen. Romanovsky has just one winning move. Which one? Answers to ‘Chess’ at The Spectator by Tuesday 29 October or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. 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 53…Rg3 Last week’s winner Mark Nottingham, Ramsgate, Kent

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 24 October 2019

A couple of weeks ago two of the most prestigious events in the bridge nutter’s diary took place on the same weekend. The first was the mini-festival in Vilnius, impeccably and generously sponsored and organised by Erikas Vainikonis and his father, Vytas, in which my team played; the second was the Gold Cup semi-final and final, in which my team did not play because we got unceremoniously knocked out in an earlier round. I caught the end of the semis on BBO and it was very exciting: in both matches, the trailing team overtook the leaders on the last board of sixty-four! For team Allfrey, who the next day defeated

Doc

2431: Pride of place

The unclued lights (two of two words) be paired and are linked by an anagram of the four letters in the yellow squares. Brewer verifies the theme.   Across 1    No stamp confused Pat. Could be him! (7) 6    Optical expert’s endless worry returning item for camera (7) 12    Gave notice of danger of now withdrawn chemical by the sea (7) 14    Disturbances in Stroud not so regularly (5, hyphened) 15    Little men on the front row (5) 16    Bad criminal having time in ancient Greek city (6) 17   Way to anticipate enormous sadness (6) 19    Could be Orange where slavery did not exist (9, two words) 21    Moths

James McSweeney

Don’t celebrate the departure of Extinction Rebellion

After a long period of disruption, the Metropolitan Police’s decision to crack down on Extinction Rebellion and clear them from the streets was greeted with cheers across the capital last week. The actions of the police are certainly understandable. This month, the Met had to request urgent reinforcements from dozens of forces across the country, including 100 officers from Scotland. And if the idea of Scots keeping the peace in the English capital wasn’t embarrassing enough for the force, the newcomers rubbed salt in the wound by leaving Scottish police stickers on the Met’s vehicles. Londoners, many of whom are sympathetic to the movement, have also had their patience stretched.

Naomi Firsht

The bizarre decision to remove the Venus symbol from sanitary towels

Women, eh? Never happy. The feminists are up in arms again, this time over sanitary towels. Still, not to worry – great strides are being made to just erase women altogether, so that in the future, no one will even know what the word ‘woman’ means. So bravo to sanitary towel brand Always for leading the way by announcing their decision to remove the female Venus symbol from their packaging after complaints that the imagery is not inclusive to transgender or non-binary people. It shouldn’t really matter, should it? It’s just a symbol on a wrapper. But it does. Because when you start to deny women’s biology, you begin to