The Battle for Britain – 20 June 2019
Society
Thursday
to 2410: Alphabetical Jigsaw
First prize Susan Edouard, Bexhill-on-Sea Runners-up Joan Sutton, Canterbury, Kent; Harry Duff, Machen, Caerphilly
A perfect match
Cricket is the most gracious of games. County grounds in the lee of cathedrals, village greens in the perfect setting of trees and a pub, and not far from the parish church: even if the match will not be over in time for evensong, there is more than a hint of Dearly Beloved, a phrase which captures so much of English civilisation. Cricket is an intellectual game. It baffles Americans. Try explaining that a Test can last for five days and then end in a draw — which may well be the right outcome, morally and aesthetically. Think of Gavaskar’s immortal match in 1979. Any other ending would have been
Signs of the times
My first award for intelligent design this week goes to Dublin airport for displaying a sign which reads ‘Lounges. Turn back. No lounges beyond this point.’ It may seem like a trivial thing, but it takes a rare intelligence to think in this way. It’s one thing to put up a sign that says ‘Lounges, this way’. But it takes nous to think ‘yes, well and good, but what happens if people see the first sign but miss the second one?’ In all likelihood, they would end up walking 500 yards in the wrong direction, as I nearly did. Signage and wayfinding are mostly designed for people who never make
Wine Club 22 June
Ah, how lovely! The sun’s out and the birds are tweeting. My boys’ wretched A-levels and GCSEs are finally over and, bless them, the chaps remembered Father’s Day unprompted for once. I’ve got my Ashes/World Cup cricket and Glyndebourne tickets and, well, everything seems to be coming up rosé. And, goodness me, don’t we Brits get through a lot of the pink stuff? Sales show no sign of doing anything other than rocketing. Indeed, I understand that pink wine is still the fastest growing wine category of all. Of course, here in my home town of Brighton, we’ve been out and proud about our fondness for anything pink for yonks
Talking heads | 20 June 2019
In Competition No. 3103 you were invited to submit a Shakespearean soliloquy delivered by one of the contenders for the Tory leadership in which they consider their pitch for the top job. Though many chose to plug the gap created by Boris Johnson’s public reticence, there was a sprinkling of his fellow hopefuls. Most are now out of the running, but they get one final hearing below. A round of raucous applause for the winners, who take £20 each. And commiserations to the unlucky losers. Away with hustings, pish to protocol! I am the one convincing candidate To lead our nation through these troublous times. My rivals — ill-starr’d,
The brutality of the Isis Beatles
Beirut Television cameras get everywhere these days. Or maybe that was always true. Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, wrote a book in which NBC gets the rights to the crucifixion, live from Golgotha, with St Paul as the ‘anchorperson’. So it was only faintly bizarre when CNN ‘crossed’ to a prison in northern Syria to speak to two of the so-called ‘Beatles’, the British jihadis accused of murdering British and American hostages while members of Isis. The interview was just as self-serving as if the remote link had been to some politician or celebrity. But it was also revealing, the most honest — or least dishonest
Claire’s Accessories
I was 17, studying for my A-levels in Great Yarmouth. Looking to defy my parents’ instruction to get a part-time job, I hit upon a cunning plan: why not apply to the shop least likely to require the services of a mopey teenage boy? That shop was Claire’s Accessories. Little did I know at the time that Claire’s — home of plasticky tiaras and tinsel wigs — was a retail empire at the height of its power. Five decades after it had arrived in America, Claire’s commanded some 3,000 outlets across the world and was present in more than 95 per cent of American malls. Its success had been built
Lead astray
Is the pope a Catholic? You have to wonder. In the old days, a pope’s remit was modest: infallible, but only in the vanishingly rare cases when he pronounced on matters of faith and morals concerning the whole church. But even at their most bombastic and badly behaved, earlier popes would have hesitated to do what nice Pope Francis has done, which is to approve changes in the liturgy which amount to rewriting the Lord’s Prayer. That bit that says ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ is, for Pope Francis, a bad translation. ‘It speaks of a God who induces temptation,’ he told Italian TV. ‘I
Be careful what you christen
An author of spoofy, light-hearted mysteries, my friend Ruth Dudley Edwards has had unusual difficulty completing her new novel, Death of a Snowflake. The trouble isn’t lack of material —she’s spoilt for choice — but real life outpacing satire. As we now live in a world of ‘you could not make this stuff up’, readers looking for a laugh are spurning fiction in droves in preference for the newspaper. To wit, exam administrators rather than students are now tested. Stirring widespread consternation this month, a GCSE English exam cited a passage from H.E. Bates’s short story ‘The Mill’, which in due course —not in the passage itself — portrays a
Tuesday
Why ITV’s decision to ban all-male comedy writing rooms is a mistake
Laugher is a universally understood language. If something is funny, we all react the same way. What we find funny can be subjective – dark humour, slapstick, take your pick. But at the end of the day, comedy may be one of the truest forms of meritocracy we have. Regardless of your gender, race, beliefs or background, the question is clear cut: either you make people laugh, or you don’t. Which brings into question ITV’s decision to ban all-male writing rooms, as part of its strategy to be more inclusive to female writers and comedians. ITV is a private media company and is free to do what it pleases with
Nicola Sturgeon needs to do more for children in care
If you’ve glanced at a photograph of Nicola Sturgeon in the past year or two, you won’t have failed to spot a recurring theme. The SNP leader surrounds herself at every opportunity with young people who have been in care. It is Sturgeon’s current cause – with education and social justice having fallen by the wayside. Scotland’s First Minister has been in the job four and a half years and deputy for seven before that. She is in the market for a legacy, and with every passing day it is less likely to be Scottish independence. Whatever the politics, that Sturgeon has taken an interest is an indisputable good. There are
Monday
Are LGBT people really under attack in the UK?
On June 7th of this year, five teenagers were arrested in connection with a homophobic attack on two women on a London bus. It was an extremely heinous incident, and prompted widespread condemnation across the UK. But though the crime was grotesque, disingenuous outlets have since used the incident to promote a nefarious idea: that members of the LGBT community are under constant attack, quite literally. Over the weekend, the Guardian published a piece of analysis that said ‘Homophobic and transphobic hate crimes have more than doubled in England and Wales over five years.’ The report, which used Home Office and police force statistics, revealed that the ‘rate of LGBT hate crime per capita rose
Mahathir Mohamad and the hypocrisy of Cambridge University
One of the most enjoyable videos to watch on YouTube features Colonel Gadafi. I am not referring to those snuff videos which cover the internet in which the Libyan leader is shown getting the sharp end of the Libyan peoples’ emotions. Rather I refer to the Colonel’s seminal, though too infrequently referenced, address to the academics and students of the London School of Economics in 2010. On that occasion the Libyan dictator was given a truly magnificently fawning, indeed rather flirtatious, introduction by a female academic. She also read out a message of support from the then-director of the LSE who made some joshing jokes about how good it would
Sunday
It’s not just cricket: India vs Pakistan is the greatest rivalry in world sport
There are plenty of much-anticipated contests in the 2019 Cricket World Cup. But nothing to compare with today’s match at Old Trafford, where India play Pakistan in the latest epic in a rivalry that dates back to Partition in 1947. It’s a rivalry that is regularly punctuated by war. No cricket was played between the two countries from 1961 until 1978. The 1965 conflict, caused by Pakistani aggression, severed relations. By the time a ceasefire was declared, Indian tanks were on the outskirts of Lahore, where a 12-year-old Imran Khan was distraught not to be allowed to join a local militia. The two countries fought again in 1971 when India
Common sense is the real generation gap – just ask John Cleese
As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend not to know what ‘John Cleese’ means. If anything saves him from cancellation, it will be the hope that he can snuggle down and hide in that gap until it’s all over. The cancellers won’t try too hard because they didn’t know who he was in the first place; others will register the row, furrow
Losing the TV licence will empower the over-75s
Although people over 75 will naturally be annoyed to have to pay their television licence fee once more — unless they are poor enough to qualify for pension credit — the decision will, in fact, empower them. Gordon Brown should never have let them off payment in the first place since they are the greatest users of television and radio in the country and are mostly not the poorest either. So long as they were getting the services free, they had no power over their content. They have had to endure ever more abasement before the young, propaganda for women’s football, preaching about Greta Thunberg, and the removal of people
Saturday
Spectator competition winners: Gradgrind’s fan letter to Michael Gove
The idea for the latest challenge — to compose a fan letter from one well-known person from the field of fact or fiction to another — came from a letter written by Kirk Douglas to Gary Cooper, received just days before Cooper died of cancer, in which Douglas reflects on the impossibility of complying with a director’s request to ‘play this the way Gary Cooper would’: ‘It sounded easy to me — because I say to myself Coop is a simple man — natural. So I’ll just be natural. Then I learned the big — big lesson. It ain’t easy. My temptation is to ask how the hell have you
It would be weird if Michael Gove hadn’t taken drugs
Cocaine is an abominable drug, by far the most hateful of all the various uppers and downers and psychoactives because it turns you into such a complete moron. The problem with coke, as my friend, the drug historian Mike Jay, once explained to me, is that nature never intended us to use it the way we do. In its raw, coca leaf form, it’s a handy and pleasant stimulant, just what you need to keep you going on a long trek over the Andes. But in its refined form it’s just nasty, not least because it plays a cruel, built-in trick on you. You take cocaine to get high —
Friday
The remarkable life of Tom Derek Bowden
When good men who did great things pass into the next life, they leave an example for this one. Tom Derek Bowden was 17 when he first set foot in the land that once was – and would again be – Israel. It was 1938 and he was stationed in Palestine under the mercurial British officer Orde Wingate, an ardent Zionist. Bowden was awed by Wingate and his commitment to training local Jews to defend themselves from their Arab tormenters. While there, Bowden fell in love with a young kibbutznik, Hannah Appel, but the outbreak of war frustrated their plans to marry. In 1941, he was despatched to Vichy-held Syria-Lebanon,
