Society Archives

Saturday

6 Jul 2019

Why I’m sick of Pride

Anyone else sick of the Pride flag? It’s everywhere. It flutters from virtually every building in central London. Town halls across the country are emblazoned with it. Every bank, corporation, supermarket and celebrity Twitter account has had a rainbow makeover. There are Pride-themed sandwiches, beer bottles, cakes. Jon Snow has even worn Pride-coloured socks. You could be forgiven for thinking we’ve been conquered by a foreign army that has proceeded to stick its flag in every nook, cranny and orifice of the nation. It’s Pride Month, of course. And the reason it’s a whole month is because we are at the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Stonewall Riots of

Rory Sutherland

Why governments should spend big on tech | 6 July 2019

I was talking to a large Silicon Valley video-conferencing firm the other day. ‘Just for interest,’ I asked, ‘what would it cost to provide your service to 65 million people?’ The reason I asked is simple. I don’t understand why it is fine for government to spend £60 billion on a railway or £20 billion on an airport, but not, say, £300 million a year providing the whole country with first-rate video-calling technology. The argument for the UK seems especially compelling. An English-speaking country situated on the Greenwich meridian is likely to gain disproportionate business advantage from the widespread adoption of video–conferencing. If we were to negotiate a collective price

Fraser Nelson

David Johnston and social mobility

For some time now, I’ve been involved in the Social Mobility Foundation, whose interns we take at The Spectator (and who were at our summer party last week). It has been run by David Johnston, who has stood down after ten years. What he has achieved at the SMF has been nothing short of extraordinary. The idea was that it takes bright teenagers who qualify for free school meals, and help them with internships – and other forms of support – to give them more of the opportunities available to wealthier families. When this all started, it was against the grain: a great many employers couldn’t see what was wrong

Friday

5 Jul 2019

Douglas Murray

Billy Connolly and the death of free speech

I hope readers will forgive me for returning to a subject I addressed here recently. It was a reflection on the current confusion over who in our society is allowed to speak and who is not. Back then I referred to the oddity of the YouTuber Carl Benjamin being forced to live with his worst ‘joke’ forever while Jo Brand appeared to be able to be forgiven for hers in no seconds flat. Incidentally, since the comedienne advocated an upgrade in the contents of the trend for ‘milkshaking’ it has indeed been stepped up a gear. Last weekend in Portland, Oregon so-called ‘anti-fascists’ reportedly laced their offerings with skin-corroding substances to

Thursday

4 Jul 2019

Raymond Keene

Tigran, Tigran, burning bright

This year Tigran Petrosian would have celebrated his 90th birthday. The Armenian grandmaster and world champion was noted for the profundity and originality of his strategic concepts, as well as his quasi-invincibility in high level contests. He was certainly my role model when I was a student of chess in my teens, a chess hero to emulate along with Aron Nimzowitsch, Richard Reti, Alexander Alekhine and Mikhail Botvinnik. Petrosian-Gligoric: Zagreb 1965; Grunfeld Defence 1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 Nc3 d5 4 Nf3 Bg7 5 e3 0-0 6 Bd2 c6 7 Be2 Ne4 8 0-0 Nxd2 9 Qxd2 e6 10 cxd5 exd5 11 b4 In this structure White plans to

Raymond Keene

no. 561

White to play. This is from Reti-Bogolyubov, New York 1924. How did Reti conclude his attack with a fine blow? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 9 July 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 Nxd5 Last week’s winner James Tuohy, London SE8

The Spectator

Letters | 4 July 2019

Support for stop and search Sir: Mary Wakefield is rightly exasperated by fatuous comments over police use of stop and search (‘Stop posturing over stop and search’, 29 June). Perhaps this year there will be 200 murders of children by other children. Swamping areas with police is obviously a visible response to the problem, but gangs know there is a reluctance to stop and search and this is part of the reason for their arrogant attitude. Stop and search is street policing in the raw. It often leads to arrest, and it can be a messy, frustrating, confrontational business, even when done with tact and patience. As a Met PC

Taki

High life | 4 July 2019

Hold the presses, this is a world exclusive. A Boris ex I sat next to last week gave me the scoop: he is absent-minded, disorganised and drops wine on sofas. The ex in question was Petronella Wyatt and we were at a lunch Rupert Hambro gave for Conrad Black. There were lotsa big hitters there, including Pa Johnson. La Wyatt is a good girl, and she did have a bit of a rough time with Mr B, but she’s been grand where cashing in is concerned. Despite non-stop offers by the lowlifes that pass as journalists nowadays, she has refused them all. Ladies do not spill the beans, especially not

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 July 2019

As they say: it all happened so quickly that it wasn’t until afterwards. One minute I was bawling at my sister, the next NHS workers arrived from all directions and removed my mother from her house to a nursing home. It was like the dramatic conclusion to an undercover ‘sting’ operation. They came streaming in through the front door laughing and joking. To avoid doing anything silly or controversial, I removed myself from the scene. While my mother was being carried out of her front door, a diplomatic mission was dispatched to offer me a confection of emollient explanations. This consisted of a community nurse and an occupational therapist. They

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 July 2019

Either the osteopath is a psychopath or he is the second coming. I see no other possibility. I turned up on the doorstep of his surgery feeling demented from the pain that has been gnawing at the base of my skull relentlessly for two weeks. All I had done was to duck under the tape of my horses’ field, a movement I have performed a thousand times. But this time, as I turned my head momentarily upside down, something pinged and my skull exploded into the worst headache ever. It was so bad I wrapped my head in a coat and became, like Tchaikovsky, possessed by the theory that it

Robin Oakley

The turf | 4 July 2019

When Hayley Turner was made, she wasn’t just given a competitive spirit, a sensitive pair of hands and excellent balance. Somebody screwed her head on the right way too. Profiled by the Racing Post after becoming the first woman to ride a Royal Ascot winner for 32 years on Thanks Be, she was embarrassed to take the limelight away from trainer Charlie Fellowes, who was also recording his first Royal Ascot success, and swift to urge her interviewer not to go down the feminist-icon route: ‘Maybe it’s going to help the girls in the future, give them another goal, but that’s it, full stop. There’s no need to keep going

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 4 July 2019

I know I’m not the strongest declarer in the world (or even at the table) but I didn’t realise my partner(s) literally stop breathing when they put dummy down. Unusually, I was declarer on quite a few hands in the recent European Mixed Teams, and I started to get an uneasy feeling when I heard a loud exhalation of breath coming from pard, which sounded like pheeeeeewwww, when I made my contract. I now understand why the late Danish International Jens Auken told my then partner Gunnar Hallberg that he wouldn’t have his job (i.e. playing with me) for £1 million a year. It’s dangerous! Here is a hand from

Dot Wordsworth

Posh

Two rules of grammar are certain: never split an infinitive and never end a sentence with a preposition. As for the origins of words, it is universally known that the origin of posh is from ships’ tickets to and from India stamped ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’. None of this triad of certainties is true. Let me touch upon posh, about which I wrote here in 2002. Since then, the admirable philologist Michael Quinion has published a book called Port Out, Starboard Home, a title emblematic of popular etymology. He doesn’t think that this was the origin of posh, of course. No one has ever found such a ticket or any reference

Toby Young

The disastrous decline of Scottish and Welsh education

I’ve contributed a chapter to an education book published this week by the Institute of Economic Affairs. I was asked by the editors, Pauline Dixon and Steve Humble, to assess the impact of Britain’s education reforms, beginning with the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, extending through the creation of league tables in 1992 and culminating with the opening of academies and free schools from 2002. The first challenge was finding a reliable way to measure the effect of these initiatives. The introduction of the National Curriculum coincided with the replacement of O-levels and CSEs with GCSEs, making it difficult to compare before and after. In addition, the steady,

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 July 2019

The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill, is offering to meet Jeremy Corbyn about the Times story last week which reported that senior civil servants were worried Mr Corbyn was ‘too frail and is losing his memory’. As usual with such stories, one cannot know their exact truth, but there is a general trend in the civil service to be looser-tongued. A recent column by Rachel Sylvester, also in the Times, contained a long string of insults of Boris Johnson from unnamed officials. Sir Mark did not offer to meet Mr Johnson about that. Before and after the Brexit referendum, government officials, especially at the Treasury, repeatedly briefed views hostile to

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 July 2019

Home Boris Johnson, the bookies’ favourite for the leadership of the Conservative party, would, if he became prime minister, ‘show the public sector some love’ said his supporter Matt Hancock. Jeremy Hunt, his rival for the leadership, said: ‘If you’re a sheep farmer in Shropshire or a fisherman in Peterhead… I will mitigate the impact of no-deal Brexit on you.’ The 160,000 members of the Conservative party, few of them public-sector workers, and even fewer sheep farmers or fisherfolk, were sent postal ballots from 6 July to vote for the new leader. The Speaker chose not to select an amendment by Dame Margaret Beckett and Dominic Grieve intended to stop

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 4 July 2019

Q. Friends and I keep in touch and share our more memorable experiences on Facebook. One friend is an elderly woman who makes comments on our posts that are intended to demonstrate her wit and erudition but which never fail to come across as banal and irritating attempts at point scoring. She is delightful company in person and we have no wish to lose her friendship. How can we encourage her to stop her puerile comments without giving serious offence? — R.P., London W1 A. Poignantly, your elderly friend may be using Facebook to signal that she still has her wits about her. But, of course, one of the first

Peter Jones

Tragedy and validity

Rufus Norris, the National Theatre’s artistic director, has revealed that all those tedious ancient plays will from now on be updated with a ‘modern twist’ to ‘bring in a fresh audience’. By way of example, he assures us that the forthcoming reworking of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 bc) will still be ‘a very valid Greek play’. Valid? What does he mean by that? The original was pretty ‘valid’, with its chorus and three masked male actors playing all the parts, speaking and singing in complex metrical forms in high linguistic register; and it was a serious, elevated medium, inhabited by high-status characters. Most tragedies were drawn from myth. That too was

Pabulum

2415: The limit

1A (hyphened) suggests a word which, with changes to its 7D 33, becomes the four other words (including a name) suggested by the remaining unclued lights (including a pair). The word will appear in the completed grid and must be shaded. Across 7 Outburst of song from tailor (3) 11 Lid of fryer accepted by mummy (6) 13 Hooters spoiling film again (7) 15 Central Zanzibaris run out and kiss in Scottish district (5) 16 George papers hypothetical surface (5) 17 Pip causing endless messes (6) 18 Lass returning for important date (5) 20 Pump supplying priest and townie (6) 21 British monarch embedding one shrub (5) 29 Girl

The Spectator

to 2412: Transponders

On 15th June 1919 John ALCOCK (34) and Arthur BROWN (37) completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight when they crash-landed near CLIFDEN, COUNTY GALWAY (46/9) in a VICKERS VIMY (23/25), having taken off from ST JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND (10/13) the previous day. First prize Judith Cookson, Prestbury, Glos Runners-up Martina Fabian, Bourne End, Bucks; Alan Peevers, Manchester