Society

Thursday

Taki

High life | 23 May 2019

Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phoney, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One can’t get back the years wasted in a cell for as good a mind as Conrad’s, but one does emerge from the pokey stronger. The Big Bagel Times reported the Black pardon in a manner that can only be described as constipated. Black is a conservative, which is a red flag to envious lefties. But there’s something else. I have spoken to medical experts about the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 23 May 2019

The mental fruit of yet another sleepless night was that my mother was determined to arrange her funeral as quickly and as cheaply as possible. A friend had told her, she said, that the Co-op do a version called a ‘Simple Funeral’ for less than £2,000. Please would I look it up on the internet for her? The state-funded carer had been in and out already and she was washed and dressed and sitting in her electric recliner, wet hair combed back like a teddy boy, and in her eyes you could see her will burning brightly. I, on the other hand, had slept long and profoundly and was not

Melissa Kite

Real life | 23 May 2019

‘Farewell then, little lodger. I wish you would stay for ever but I understand that girls in their early twenties meet boys and go off to live with them in flatshares in Tooting. I had such a soft spot for her, the builder boyfriend nicknamed her ‘mini-me’. I taught her to ride and would pull her behind me on Grace like a duckling. With her pink specs, white blonde hair and tiny frame, she looked like a miniature Daryl Hannah in the film Steel Magnolias. When we first met she peeped shyly at me through the thick lenses. She began chattering away nervously and I don’t think she ever really

Robin Oakley

The turf | 23 May 2019

Newbury is as fair a test for a racehorse as you can get with its galloping track and a wide-open finishing straight that minimises hard-luck stories. It also gets the little things right: in contrast to the skimpy offerings from places such as Kempton Park, last Saturday’s racecard was a model, containing details in colour of runners at other meetings, a feature with jockey Jason Watson and good historical detail about past winners of the featured Lockinge Stakes. Several bars, like the Wine Cellar in the Hampshire Stand, had become cashless, cutting tedious queues; mobile charging units were available; and a friend staying for the weekend who had left his

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 23 May 2019

Simon Gillis coined a term to describe his disappointment when he sits himself out to allow four of his professionals to go in and do the job — and they fail! Simon calls it ‘Sponsor’s Nightmare’ and I had a hefty dose of it playing the Schapiro Spring Foursomes in Stratford last weekend. We made the quarter finals and drew Sandra Penfold’s strong squad. After three sets, we were 24 IMPs up with eight boards to go. I happily put my two prof pairs in and benched my partner and myself. BIG MISTAKE. A couple of iffy decisions saw us three down with four boards to go, and with absolutely

Lavatch

2409: Crosswords

The unclued lights are of a kind, including one hyphened, all confirmed in Chambers except for 8 across, which is in Collins. Elsewhere, ignore two accents.   Across 11    How mud moves like grease, carrying weight (6) 12    Arab American backs musical (6) 17    Recycle rubbish fellow’s left (5) 18    Lawyer with wine for old maid (7) 22    Dismissed god war god beats for boldness (8) 23    Almost cook stews oddly for fish (7) 24    One backing firm strokes (6) 25    Part of neck right back for surgical device (6) 27    Diamond from foreign character, male writer (7) 30    Careful record on film (8) 33    Perhaps it’s lone? (7) 35   

Elliott Kime

Why young conservatives are the new radicals

Natural death might be non-partisan, but that hasn’t stopped it being politicised by liberals and socialists alike. One writer recently calculated that, assuming birth and death rates in Britain stay steady, Remainers will be the majority in 2022. Now, sitting around watching the clock and waiting for the right kind of pensioners to pop off the electoral register isn’t the most audacious of politics. But the newfound popularity of millennial socialism means ‘young people’ are as synonymous with nationalisation and redistributionism as ‘the miners’ were in the 1970s. So hold on to your iPads and Starbucks’ cups because we are on a one-way journey to a liberal future, and there

Mark Tovey

Why aren’t aborted foetuses given painkillers?

In a UK first last year, doctors at University College London operated on two unborn babies with spina bifida, a birth defect characterised by a gap in the spinal cord which can cause paralysis of the legs and incontinence. Around 1,000 foetuses a year develop spina bifida in the UK; of these, 80 per cent or so are subsequently aborted. The number of pregnancies terminated each year can be expected to drop with the arrival of this new surgery which will be made available on the NHS. And yet, far from rejoicing, pro-life advocates have been whipped into a frenzy over it. The reason? While foetuses – aged between 20 and 26 weeks

Ben Mannings & Peter Chappell

The complete guide to the European Elections

The results of the European elections will be announced tonight. We will have an initial projection from the EU around 10pm and an overall outline of the UK result at 11pm. The specific results will be declared as the night rolls on, leading into tomorrow morning. Both the Conservatives and Labour are anticipating bad results, while Ukip, which secured 24 seats in 2014, is expected to implode.  The Brexit party is tipped to win – but the extent of its victory will be an important barometer on public support for leaving the EU. The UK has 73 seats in the European parliament, and there are currently 72 MEP’s in their

The Spectator

to 2406: Heptad

The group is ‘Les Nabis’ (anagram of ALBINESS (18)). Its members were VALLOTTON, DENIS, ROUSSEL, RANSON, SÉRUSIER, BONNARD and VUILLARD. The seminal work was THE TALISMAN (appearing diagonally from row thirteen). THE TALISMAN was to be shaded.   First prize Peter Tanner, Hertford Runners-up Michael Knox, Beaconsfield, Bucks; Bill Stewart, Leicester

Virginia Blackburn

Book case

I’ve just had new bookshelves put up in the hall, a whole wall-full of them, and for the first time in years, books that have been forgotten are finding a home. There are far more books than there is shelf space, so I’ve had to select which ones to display, and I’ve discovered a surprising amount about myself. Anyone coming into the flat will see them and make judgments on my literary tastes and so most of my new library is pretty erudite stuff. Martin Amis is getting a good show. The chick lit is banished to the spare room. But that’s not even the start of it. I am

Bruce Anderson

Debunking Greek myths

A book, a bottle, a bower set in an ancient garden: you think that if you walked round the right corner, there would be England, putting manure on the roses. Kipling reminds us that gardening is hard work and that beauty depends on bent backs. True enough, but they also serve who only sit and admire. There was a further contrast between hard work and sedentary admiration, for the book was the first volume of Kenneth Rose’s journals: the easiest of reads, yet the product of hard labour. Kenneth was an exemplar of his craft. There has never been a more meticulous journalist. If only the same were true of

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The art of persuasion | 23 May 2019

People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’. There are many suggestions, my own being: ‘Don’t leave — it’s what the French want us to do.’ No Europhile committee would ever have approved a jingoistic slogan, of course; yet the feelings of committed Europeans are irrelevant. Those people will vote Remain in any case. Instead you need to reach the ambivalent, sceptical or mildly hostile. This raises the central question about communication: do you want to feel good about yourself, or do you want to change the minds of others? The art of sloganeering can serve two powerful

Ursula Buchan

Chelsea Flower Show

Chelsea, the most famous flower show in the world, pulled in its devotees once more this week, with its accustomed mixture of colour, scent and glamour. The continuing success of the Royal Horticultural Society’s ‘flagship’ show has much to do with the BBC’s need to fill schedules, the foreign media’s enduring fascination with ‘Englishness’ and royalty, and the desire of committed gardeners to worship in the company of their co-religionists. It cannot be any kind of fun for plant nursery people, who stage the exhibits in the Great Pavilion, since the logistical difficulties are fearsome, but they mostly cannot resist the buzz. The ranks have thinned a little in recent

Leah McLaren

Parent trap

The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private struggle — saw it coming. For days, waves of confusion and sadness emanated out through our patch of north-west London. This is the way of suicides in social groups. I’ve seen it before. They ripple and reach well beyond where they have any right to. But the peculiar thing about this tragedy was the way

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 25 May

We’ve not had an offer from Messrs Corney & Barrow in a while and it’s a treat to welcome them back to these pages, especially since they come wafting such scrumptious bottles under our beaks. There’s much to enjoy here as we head into supposed summer and I trust you’ll take advantage of the fabled Brett-Smith Indulgence whereby C&B’s MD, Adam Brett-Smith, knocks a few extra quid off a case for anyone buying two dozen bottles or more (on top of the existing Spectator discount that is). Get stuck in, I say. The 2017 Domaine Carette Saint-Véran ‘Les Chatenays’ (1) is from a small family-owned estate in the southernmost appellation

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The politics of milkshakes

Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from the world if we did. The economists who pretend on Newsnight that they know what’s going on, when they haven’t a clue. The sociologists fabricating evidence to support their inane and inevitably woke theses. The lies masquerading as fact and able to gull the public because of the spurious claim that they are ‘scientific’. There is no science in economics or sociology, interesting though those disciplines might be once they have been shorn of their pretensions. Let me give you a recent example. A company called Civic Science, based in

Lucy Vickery

Animal magic | 23 May 2019

In Competition No. 3099 you were invited to dream up an imaginary animal that is a hybrid of two existing ones and write a poem about it.   The discovery, some time ago, that the Romans called a giraffe a ‘cameleopard’ (also the subject of a poem by Thomas Hood) gave me the initial idea for this challenge. I was then reminded of it when reading Spike Milligan’s Book of Milliganimals with my son (remember the Moo-Zebras and the Bald Twit Lion?).   Your fantastic beasts included the Octophant, the kangasheep, the corgiraffe and a couple of llamadillos. It was a difficult comp to judge: there were loads of entries

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry’s free marketing advice

Top politicians are constantly in demand on the lecture circuit, as large businesses and other stakeholders seek their advice on the chaos engulfing Westminster and how upcoming legislation will affect their economic interests. So it’s not surprising that Change UK’s Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna were the star speakers at a Marketing Group of Great Britain event in Milford earlier this month. Only, it appears that the founders of the fledging Change UK weren’t the ones dispensing wisdom at the event. According to a write-up by the Marketing Group, the pair seemed to receive more sympathy and advice than probing questions when they had concluded their speeches. In a blog