Society

Julie Burchill

Michael Buerk wants to let fat people die early? That’s a bit rich

I nearly choked on my Krispy Kreme when I read that the journalist Michael Buerk had announced that fat people (I’m not going to use his word, obese; fat is perfectly serviceable and doesn’t have the same judgemental, almost parasexual feel) should be allowed to drop dead and no longer trouble the NHS with their chubby troubles. All those years I listened to The Moral Maze thinking of him as a cross between Solomon The Wise and Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid and he turns out to be some superannuated playground bully! It’s a bit rich that Buerk himself is a whopping 73 years old; there are a lot

In the shadow of the Whaley Bridge dam

It was two days after the storm, or ‘extreme weather event’ as we call them now. I was trying to get into the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge, which sits below a reservoir with a crack in its dam wall. The reservoir had topped over during the night and the build-up of pressure meant the wall was beginning to crumble. Fifteen hundred people in the town have been evacuated since the storm, with hardly even the time to pick up their keys. They have sought shelter in schoolhalls and with friends and acquaintances in nearby towns and villages. The world’s media quickly descended on the town and before journalists could

The last hurrah of an America I once knew

It’s all too easy to overreact to yet another mass shooting in America. But the two shootings on Saturday, hours apart that killed 29 and wounded dozens more, seem in some respects to be the last hurrah of an America that I once knew. The recent tragedies have been met with all the usual tropes: hand-wringing by editorial writers; meaningless clichés from the White House and political leaders; calls by the left to ban all guns; calls by the right to stop name-calling. And on and on. None of this counts for anything at all and will be trotted out at the next massacre in exactly the same terms and

James Delingpole

McDonald’s straws and the policies of moral panic

McDonald’s has bowed to public pressure and replaced plastic straws that you can recycle, with paper straws that you can’t recycle and which have to be put into the general waste and burned. How is this a victory for the environment? Well it’s not, obviously. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore could have told you this a year ago. As indeed he did when he tweeted: ‘Plastics – “Global Enemy Number One”- ECJ OK, let’s call for a global ban on plastic children’s toys and see how that goes over! This is “pop-environmentalism” at its finest. Banning plastic straws is disingenuous tokenism. 3 Cheers for Plastic!!’ Why was the co-founder of Greenpeace

Lionel Shriver

All money is dirty – but it can still be used for good

Whitney museum: no space for profiteers of state violence // dismantle patriarchy // warren kanders must go! // supreme injustice must end // we will not forget // choking freedom is a crime // enough // greed is deadly // humanity has no borders // we grieve the harm… If that array of posters paving the entrance to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art hasn’t plunged you into such an insensate catatonia that the print has blurred, here’s the drill. For months protesters have been campaigning to have Warren B. Kanders, the museum’s vice chairman, who’s already donated $10 million to the institution, removed from the board. Eight artists

Charles Moore

The ambiguity of the woke businessman

The woke businessman, like the woke prince and princess, is an ambiguous figure. Being woke, after all, involves a contempt for profits and big business, as for social hierarchy. I first noticed this uneasy phenomenon many years ago when I attended a lunch in the City at which Paul Polman, the then chief executive of Unilever, read us a moralistic lecture about European integration, greenery and how ‘I agree with Mahatma Gandhi: you must be the change you want to see in the world’. I found it intensely annoying to be told how to be good by someone much richer than myself. Last year, the change Mr Polman wanted to see

Rory Sutherland

Why do we remain disillusioned, when our material quality of life improves?

Today we suffer disillusion, not because we are poorer than we were — on the contrary, even today we enjoy, in Great Britain at least, a higher standard of life than at any previous period — but because other values seem to have been sacrificed and because they seem to have been sacrificed unnecessarily, inasmuch as our economic system is not, in fact, enabling us to exploit to the utmost the possibilities for economic wealth afforded by the progress of our technique, leading us to feel that we might as well have used up the margin in more satisfying ways. If you finished that paragraph and thought ‘Gosh, Sutherland has

Spectator competition winners: the Last Bumble Bee

For the latest competition you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Last Bumble Bee’. The buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, was once voted Britain’s favourite insect, and this challenge seemed to strike a chord, inspiring stories that ranged from the topical to visions of a near-future of drone pollinators and enforced entomophagy. Congratulations all round. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each. Bill Greenwell As B. came buzzing over the common, he noticed that he was alone. Where were his erstwhile friends? he wondered idly. They seemed to have packed up their hives and vanished, although some, he realised, had switched sub-genus, and were describing themselves as rumblebees,

Game plan

What distinguishes the expert from the amateur in chess is partly tactical fluency, but also the ability to map out long-term patterns, in other words to visualise a distant goal. Some champions were distinguished by their talent for rough-and-tumble tactics; among such illuminati one could mention Alekhine, Tal and Kasparov. Others, such as Capablanca, Reti, Nimzowitsch, Smyslov and Karpov, stood out by virtue of their ability to foresee routes to victory that could only have been vaguely discernible to the average chess eye. A new book Planning: Move by Move by Zenon Franco (Everyman Chess) explains this long-range vision and how to improve one’s prospects of achieving it. A particular expert in

no. 565

White to play. This position is from Capablanca-Lasker, Havana 1921. Capablanca was another great champion famed for his ability to plan. How did he finish off here? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 6 August 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 1 Rxc6+ Last week’s winner Richard Watkins, Chepstow, Monmouthshire

Barometer | 1 August 2019

Growing fanbase A photograph of the Queen meeting Boris Johnson revealed that she uses a Dyson electric fan. How many of us own fans? — Sales of electric fans rose from 471,403 in 2008 to 648,829 in 2017, according to Prodcom figures collected by the Office for National Statistics. — The retailer AO.com reported that sales rose six-fold during last week’s heatwave compared with a week earlier. — Fans are popular in Britain because so few homes have air conditioning. A Mintel survey from 2009 revealed that only 0.5% of homes have air conditioning. In the US the figure is 87%. — The use of air conditioners and electric fans currently

High life | 1 August 2019

Coronis   We are steaming on Puritan ‘What are you trying to say?’ asks Geldof, in probably the shortest sentence ever uttered by him towards the private isle of Coronis for a long Pugs weekend and the boozing is easy. Bob Geldof is lecturing on everything and anything and the listening is even easier. After three hours of this, and about five vodkas on the rocks in the sun, we have passed the island of Hydra and I feel faint. The gentle swaying of the boat, the constant blare of Bob’s lecturing, and the booze is just too much. I pass out in the sun, but only for a minute

The turf | 1 August 2019

It is stupid to become attached to inanimate objects but when modern technology finally forced me to ditch the Olivetti Lettera 32 mobile typewriter which had taken me round the world as a correspondent I truly felt the pangs of parting. In the same way I have been resisting Mrs Oakley’s insistence, repeated with increasing vehemence over recent months: ‘It really is time we changed the car.’ Alas the ten-year-old BMW 320, a veteran of racecourse car parks nationwide and innumerable trips to the council dump as we restored a crumbling house, is now on its way out. Mrs Oakley earned double-bonus Brownie points by being noble enough not to

Bridge | 1 August 2019

TGR’s Bridge Club in Paddington is the daily home to those of us who want to play bridge but cannot always adhere to the times of local duplicates. There is a game every afternoon and from time to time there is also an evening Goulash game; any contract at the one level (or passed out) is redealt in some form of 5-3-5 combination. This makes for very distributional hands which often end in slam either bid to make or as a ‘save’. A couple of weeks ago I picked up, first in hand, the following: ♠A K Q J 10 9 8 7 5 4 3 2 and a singleton

Real life | 1 August 2019

The village fête had to be cancelled because of what they called an ‘incursion’ on to the green. The way the local paper told it, an ‘unauthorised encampment’ put an end to the annual summer event that would have raised money for charity. Actually, as I watched from my bedroom window, what happened was that the organisers of the fête arrived the day before to set up, unlocked the padlock on the gate leading onto the green, and left it open. Our visitors then simply followed them in. The police were called, arriving with amazing speed in lavish numbers, and the new arrivals agreed to move to the back meadow

Letters | 1 August 2019

Poppycock Sir: Last week’s lead article (‘Boris begins’, 27 July) suggested that if we leave without a deal, ‘the Johnson government will have another huge challenge on its hands — how to avert large-scale economic damage’. I have some experience of the conduct of economic policy, and I hope you will forgive me for saying that this is poppycock. Leaving the EU without a trade deal will cause some short-term disruption, but the essence of good government is to do what is best for the medium and long term, whatever the short-term difficulties. And although the main purpose of Brexit is political — i.e. self-government — the economic consequences will be hugely positive,

Toby Young

The arresting truth about snowflakes

I was driving to Gunnersbury Park last Sunday for my weekly 10K run when I caught the tail end of Broadcasting House on Radio 4. The presenter Paddy O’Connell was interviewing George King, the 19-year-old who scampered up the Shard at the beginning of July without the aid of ropes or suction cups. As you’d expect, he was impressive. He first set eyes on Britain’s tallest building as a 13-year-old on a school trip and decided then and there that he wanted to climb it. He embarked on years of rigorous training, taking up boxing and running a 62-mile ultramarathon. Last August, he became the first person to ‘free climb’

Portrait of the week | 1 August 2019

Home  The Conservatives’ poll ratings went up and the pound went down after a week of the prime ministership of Boris Johnson, as the government reiterated its commitment to leaving the European Union by 31 October. David Frost, the Prime Minister’s chief Brexit negotiator, told his EU counterparts of the commitment and Rishi Sunak, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: ‘We are turbo charging preparations for no deal.’ When Mr Johnson visited Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, said he was ‘really pursuing a no-deal Brexit’. Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said: ‘I don’t think the government should pursue a no-deal Brexit.’ Before going

Your problems solved | 1 August 2019

Q. I took an old friend to Bellamy’s for lunch. We were just settling in for a proper gossip when a couple I know were shown to the next table. Now, I’m on good terms with these two, but for various reasons I don’t want to be on better terms. Nor did I want them eavesdropping. As a result my friend and I raced our way through watermelon salad, iced lobster soufflé and îles flottant and found ourselves standing outside earlier than we needed have. What should we have done? — Name and address withheld A. You need only have outlined your dilemma to a member of Bellamy’s staff. All