Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Koo detat

From 16 October 1982: Prince Andrew’s Caribbean holiday with Miss Koo Stark (following, perhaps prompted by, months of all-male company in the Falklands) has reassured the nation that its royal family is ‘normal’.The Prince’s conduct is hallowed by tradition. Indeed, the difficulty is in finding a single heterosexual prince… who confined himself to the woman he married. Over the past centuries, only King George VI seems to qualify with anything approaching certainty. Like Andrew, King William IV was a sailor… he visited the West Indies, where he unluckily contracted venereal disease. Mrs Jordan, an actress, bore him ten children. Similar examples are too numerous, or too shameful, to mention. We

James Delingpole James Delingpole

What I learned on my speed awareness course

Speed is in my blood. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all used to race cars in their youth. We even have a hill-climb specialist car part-named after us, the Dellow. Just after I’d passed my test, my dad let me share the driving in his V12 Jag en route to our holiday home in Devon. I vividly remember him rebuking me whenever I let the speedometer dial creep below 100mph. So I suppose it was inevitable that naughty habits would catch up with me in the end and that I’d find myself doing one of those compulsory speed awareness courses. If there’s one thing every boy racer who has yet

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Why Ben Stokes should win Sports Personality of the Year

Oh those lazy, hazy, Stokesy days of summer: how long ago they seem now. When England won the cricket World Cup — or scraped it anyway — in July, and pulled off the unlikeliest of Ashes Test wins on that blazing Leeds day in August, Ben Stokes loomed as a greater certainty to be the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year than Vladimir Putin to win a Russian election. Don’t think we can be so sure now — about Stokesy, that is. He’s odds-on favourite from the shortlist of six contenders for the award announced by the BBC this week, but it is his misfortune that by the time this

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

There’s no need to mourn the loss of Uber’s London licence

Early experiences of Uber in London did not encourage me to become a regular user. My first driver thought I wanted to go to Birmingham when the ride had been booked from Clapham to Mayfair. The next was a furious driver who would have seen off Lewis Hamilton at Hyde Park Corner. Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer the pottering black cab with its opinionated Essex-dweller at the wheel and the possibility of paying in cash. So my own modus operandi is unaffected by Transport for London’s decision not to renew Uber’s licence in the capital and I’m not in the least upset about it. OK, life today is

Lucy Vickery

What’s in a name? | 28 November 2019

In Competition No. 3126 you were invited to rearrange the letters of the names of poets (e.g. Basho: ‘has B.O.’) and submit a poem of that title in the style of the poet concerned.   The inspiration for this challenge was the puzzle writer and editor Francis Heaney’s wonderful Holy Tango of Literature, which includes such delights as William Shakespeare’s ‘Is a sperm like a whale?’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Dreary Hot Pork’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘I will alarm Islamic owls’.   The anagrammatic titles that caught my eye in a large and stellar entry -included ‘Naughty Nude Wash’ by Wystan Hugh Auden (David Shields) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Ode to

Tuesday

Radomir Tylecote

Why is there more intellectual freedom in Bucharest than Cambridge?

‘You can talk about anything you like,’ said Radu, a young Romanian academic when he invited me to a conference in Bucharest. The theme was ‘Real liberty or new serfdom?’ marking the anniversary of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu 30 years ago. The audience was made up of Romanian undergraduates. The keynote speaker, a German federalist, was planning on making the classical liberal case for the EU, which made the title of my lecture – ‘The classical liberal case against the EU’ – a no-brainer. But I was nervous when I told Radu what I wanted to talk about. Thirty years ago, Romanians had been ruled by a man who

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Podcast special: can factories be decarbonised?

Sponsored by Vattenfall Britain looks set on its 2050 Net Zero target (or if Labour gets in, 2030), but to achieve that, it’ll take more than just a beef ban and paper straws. The Climate Change Committee writes that British heavy industry – for example the cement-makers and the steel-makers – will have to ‘largely decarbonise’ in order to achieve 2050. Currently, heavy industry produces a quarter of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. But decarbonisation of heavy industry isn’t just replacing the fossil fuels factories burn with renewables. Some processes, such as steel production, emits high amounts of CO2 in its lifecycle. Swedish energy company Vattenfall may be close to

Mary Dejevsky

Sir David Attenborough didn’t deserve the Chatham House Prize

Every November the London based foreign affairs think tank, Chatham House, awards a prize for ‘the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year’. This year, the joint laureates were Sir David Attenborough and the BBC Studios Natural History Unit for the television series Blue Planet II. It is a choice which, as a long-standing member of Chatham House, I regret. Don’t get me wrong. My misgivings are not about the prize itself, which was designed to raise the think tank’s national and international profile and is now in its 15th year. My doubts stem entirely from this year’s choice of recipients. The contortions in

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Nicola Sturgeon blasted over SNP’s woeful NHS record

It’s safe to say Nicola Sturgeon had something of a rough ride in her interview with Andrew Neil last night. The SNP leader was taken to task over her party’s record in Scotland. And in a blistering 43 seconds, Sturgeon was challenged over whether the NHS is safe in the SNP’s hands: ‘You haven’t hit the A&E targets since 2017. Children are dying in a new Glasgow hospital because the water is contaminated. That’s by pigeon droppings. A new multi-million pound Edinburgh hospital, that should have opened in 2012, is still unfit to open; you can’t even get the ventilation system to work. You have got the worst drug addiction

Monday

Rich Wilson

Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace was bad news for businesses

A couple of years ago, I was briefly involved with Pitch@Palace – Prince Andrew’s initiative to link up fledgeling businesses with investors. On Friday, the Duke of York quit the project following a wave of criticism surrounding his connection to Jeffrey Epstein. But from what I saw of the scheme, the Prince has more questions to answer than just those arising from their friendship. Pitch@Palace appears to have been a vehicle for Prince Andrew to enrich himself at the cost of the hardworking entrepreneurs he claimed to be helping. In 2014, I was invited to a networking reception at Buckingham Palace. The event was part of the Digital Nations initiative,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The Uber ban is just more pointless protectionism

Transport for London doesn’t like Uber. It doesn’t like the innovations the app has created in transport; it doesn’t like how competitive platforms like Uber have become with black cabs; and it doesn’t like that customers have completely embraced the service. That’s why they’ve effectively banned the app – again. This morning TfL ruled that it will not be expanding Uber’s licence, because it claims the platform does not meet the ‘fit and proper’ requirements to be a private hire operator, nor has it done enough to address rider safety over the past few years (TfL refused to renew Uber’s licence back in September 2017 as well, but a court

Matthew Lynn

London’s Uber ban leaves us all worse off

It is unregulated, arrogant, unsafe and has destroyed the livelihood of the traditional black cabs. Ever since it was launched, the ride-sharing app Uber has been as controversial as it has been popular. Now it faces a ban in London that could see the ubiquitous Toyota Priuses favoured by its drivers disappear from the capital’s streets. It won’t happen immediately, because the decision will be appealed, but it could happen very soon. True, that will be a blow to the company, and a relief both to its ride-sharing rivals and even more to the cabbies. With three million passengers and more than 45,000 drivers, London is one of the company’s

Friday

Simon Cottee

France shouldn’t fall for the Isis ‘matchmaker’s’ self pity

Tooba Gondal, the so-called Isis “matchmaker” who acted as a megaphone and recruiter for the terror group, is reportedly on her way to France, as part of an initiative by Turkey to deport foreign jihadists in its jails. Gondal, who holds a French passport but spent most of her life in Britain, travelled to Syria in early 2015, where she married three times, gave birth to two children, became mates with ex-punk rocker Sally Jones, posed with an AK47 on social media, boasted about her firearm training, and hung on to the bitter end in Baghouz, from which she miraculously escaped just before it fell to Kurdish forces in March.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The Politically Homeless Party are now a force to be reckoned with

Nowhere to turn Sir: Like Tanya Gold and Matthew Parris (9 November), I too am feeling politically homeless. Over the decades my vote has wandered along the mainstream party spectrum but today that seems wider than ever and its constituents increasingly unappealing. A vote for the Conservatives would be to endorse utter incompetence in government of several years, whereas Labour’s neo-Marxist tendencies are not to be countenanced in power. As a Remainer, in ordinary times I might, as previously, be attracted to the Liberal Democrats, but their policy on revocation makes them no longer democrats. It is disingenuous of Matthew Parris to not worry about this just because they will

Taki

The cops are impotent in lawless New York

New York   Things are heating up, in both London and Nueva York, as this place should correctly be called. Two flunkeys writing in the New York Times announced that Boris is committing gaffes and could, like Trump, be a dead man walking. This is wishful thinking and the premature celebration confirms that the media can no longer be trusted, certainly not here in the land of the depraved. (The flunkeys sought quotes from obscure British left-wing academics, and loftily present them as ‘the people’. Their detachment from the workaday world is hilarious.) In the meantime, here in the Bagel an alleged drug pusher looking at nearly 100 years behind

Jeremy Clarke

The lessons I learned cycling across Rwanda

The backmarker of the peloton was Eric, a tall, stick-thin Rwandan. Under his cycling helmet he wore a baseball cap with a long peak which give the whole a fashionable Peaky Blinders look. Eric carried the peloton water supply in two rear panniers and it was also his job to ensure that nobody fell so far behind that they got lost. Which basically meant me. Even though I had chosen to ride an electrically assisted bike, I was always last. We were riding along the base of a chain of volcanos in the north-west of the country on undulating but relatively smooth black cinder roads. The fertile countryside was densely

Melissa Kite

How you can tell the gender of a thief

My attempt at being Columbo was only taking me so far. In solving the mystery of who raided the barn, I was going round in circles. All I knew was that the thieves took a weirdly useless assortment of items, including four wrecked horse rugs, a broken lunge line and a wheelbarrow with a completely flat tyre. They left a brand new sack of horse feed and two battery packs, the only items worth stealing. We always assume thieves are men, but it seemed unlikely that a man or men would wheel away items as light as rugs in wheelbarrows. Also, they didn’t make enough of a mess. The horse

Robin Oakley

Cheltenham was the perfect antidote to election politics

I can only be sorry for the 67,496,581 citizens of the UK who were not at Cheltenham last Saturday. For the 33,591 of us who were there, it could not have been a more heart-warming, thrilling and character-filled way of escaping from the insulting knavery of election politics and the sourness of the weather that it so perfectly reflects. There is nothing like being in a crowd of 30,000 enthusiasts who mostly like a bet but who will cheer courage, stamina or quality whether or not they have backed the winner. Many in the crowd remembered how Kerry Lee’s Happy Diva had unluckily been brought down four fences out in

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 21 November 2019

Well, it has taken 12 years, two relegations, one second place and endless ‘nowheres’ playing the Premier League and we have finally won. After three weekends, a triple round robin and 336 boards, the result was decided on the last board, when my partner Artur Mali was put to the test in a delicate 3NT — which ofc he made. That put us a point ahead of Black, making up for Allfrey beating us by one point last year.   Premier League started in its present format in 2008, when Nick Irens’s boys, including Norwegian-born Espen Erichsen, took the trophy and earned the right to represent England in the Camrose