Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 May 2019

Home The Brexit party, led by Nigel Farage, received 5,248,533 votes (out of 17,199,701 cast) in the European parliament elections, securing 29 seats — more than twice the seats won by the Conservatives (in fifth place, down from 19 seats in 2014 to four now) and Labour (down from 20 seats to ten) put together. The Liberal Democrats, with 3,367,284 votes, pushed Labour into third place by winning 16 seats (up from one). The Greens won seven seats (up from three). The Yorkshire party secured more votes than the right-wing English Democrats did in the whole country. The Animal Welfare party received more votes than the Women’s Equality party. Ukip

Toby Young Toby Young

The fanatical thinking that’s on its way to Britain

For anyone who isn’t following the long march of racial self-flagellation through America’s institutions, last week’s revelations about the excesses of New York City’s education tsar will come as a shock. Schools chancellor Richard Carranza has introduced mandatory ‘anti-bias and equity training’ for the city’s 75,000 teachers at a cost of $23 million a year. During these ‘workshops’ the teachers are told that ‘worship of the written word’, ‘individualism’ and ‘objectivity’ are all hallmarks of ‘white supremacy culture’ and that it is better to focus on middle class black students than poor white ones. To give you an idea of what these struggle sessions are like, take the experience of

Jonathan Sumption

Diary – 30 May 2019

Recording the BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures has brought me to five cities and five styles of questioning. Cardiff had been pungent, positive and intelligent, with a cameo appearance from a belligerent Mark Reckless, who seemed to think that the judges were responsible for the legislative impasse over Brexit. In London, people came armed with prepared speeches about every subject under the sun, followed by the usual ‘Howzat?’. Birmingham was quieter, thoughtful and to the point. Edinburgh was about human rights: plenty of room for confrontation there, but courteous and well-reasoned points from a knowledgeable audience. In Washington the theme was what British politics could learn from the United States

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 May 2019

Q. A delightful but disorganised friend has invited several of our circle for a weekend at his family’s beautiful country home, having hosted a similar group last year. I have received all the particulars and accepted with pleasure. However, I know of another friend (in last year’s group) to whom the host mentioned the possibility of this year’s reprise, but she has not had full details. How can I delicately figure out if this is an oversight or deliberate? — Name and address withheld A. Ring the host and mention that you are thinking of asking for a lift with this friend but don’t want to put your foot in

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A princess of greasy spoons

Café Diana is a Princess Diana-themed greasy spoon in Notting Hill Gate. It is a mad place, but it is still the sanest part of Notting Hill because it has the integrity to state its madness bluntly. There is a huge photograph of Diana smiling in the window because she was happy to collaborate in myth-making of any kind. She delivered this photograph herself, and this café returns her love. Its website, which is formal, like a fragment of the Almanach de Gotha that flew away, remembers that she was Baroness of Renfrew when most people never knew it or forgot. Café Diana is more thrilled by the object of

Dot Wordsworth

Men in suits

After he invented the term young fogey (in The Spectator in 1984), the much lamented journalist Alan Watkins coined the term men in suits. Of course other people before him had used the phrases young fogey and men in suits as nonce formations. Watkins identified both as what has since been denominated ‘a thing’. By his own account, even before Margaret Thatcher had been dislodged by them in 1990, the men in suits (identified as a group by the definite article) had been transformed into the men in grey suits. This, he observed, was inaccurate: ‘The typical Conservative grandee tends to wear a dark blue or black suit, with chalk-

Doc

2410: Alphabetical jigsaw

Clues are presented in strict alphabetical order of their solutions. Solvers have to assign the solutions to their correct places in the grid jigsaw-fashion.   A) A French messenger’s unending rage (4) Unaltered first principle that’s non-British (4, two words) Far off (4)   B)  Litter from Mark outside vehicle (8)   C)  Sinclair gets off at Norfolk keep (12, two words) Confirm listed items, we’re told, for dramatist (7)   D)  Last old leading Renaissance artist (5)   E)  Awfully hot aldermen absorbing heat (11)   F)  Hunts since heavens knows when (7)   G)  One sitting by the roadside, it’s said, in latex (11, hyphened)   H)  Greets former

The Spectator

to 2407: Stickmen

The unclued lights (with the pair at 37/26) are orchestral CONDUCTORS.   First prize Elisabeth Johnson, Toronto, Canada Runners-up Gareth Davies, Langstone, Newport; Peter Gregson, Amersham, Bucks

Cressida Connolly

The upsides of dementia

My 91-year-old father-in-law has always had a terror of hospitals. This dates from his time as a Royal Marine when, just after the second world war, he was infected with polio by a contaminated needle. The first he knew of it was when a visiting dignitary came on board ship and he was unable to lift his arm in salute. Ever since, he made it very clear that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital under any circumstances, ever. But last week he was admitted to A&E with a high temperature and I didn’t fret for one moment that he’d be alarmed. Why? He’s got late-stage dementia. He’s forgotten

Roger Alton Roger Alton

England vs the rest of the world

Well, you have come a long way baby. As the whizz-bang hoopla of the cricket World Cup strides into view at the Oval, take a look back nearly 50 years to the very first limited overs international played in 1971. It was between Australia and England in Melbourne; 40 eight-ball overs a side, on what would have been the last day of a Test that had been rained off. Australia won with six overs to spare. The names on the team sheet are not those you would associate with breathless one-day hitting: Boycott, Edrich, Fletcher, Lawry and Stackpole. The run rate was pretty painful: England scored at below four an

Lucy Vickery

Life support

In Competition 3100 you were invited to pen an ode to Alexa or Siri. A recent Unesco study claimed that submissive female-voiced virtual assistants perpetuate negative, out-dated gender stereotypes, and this assignment did seem to bring out the unreconstructed roguish side in some. You know who you are. The winners below earn £25 each.   Alexa, you’re the sunshine of my life. You answer wisely like an honest wife. ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, a song by Stevie Wonder, is three minutes long.   Alexa, are you like a summer’s day? That’s what a poet might be moved to say. Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare, who Wrote poems

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 30 May 2019

Laikipia, Kenya   A cheetah perched in the front seat of your gold-plated Lamborghini. Stick that on Instagram in Saudi Arabia and it’s the height of cool. Or a cheetah in bed with your wife in Dubai. The latest fashion among rich Arabs is buying cheetah cubs smuggled out of Africa to boast about on social media. Gangs in Somaliland are exporting at least 300 cheetahs to the Arabs each year and this represents a fraction of the losses across Africa, since hundreds of others die during capture and incarceration. Once these lovely creatures roamed India, Anatolia and the Arabian deserts, but now just 7,100 of them survive, and only

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

Africa’s liberal Mufti

 Kigali, Rwanda To most outsiders, Rwanda is still synonymous with genocide. Nearly a million killed in 100 days; almost three quarters of the Tutsi population dead. The country’s attempts to rebuild have been much commented on, but something else is overlooked: Rwanda has become an astonishing oasis of tolerant Islam and, in many ways, an example to the West. In Rwanda, there is an Islam which stands firm against the petrochemical ‘Gulf Stream’ of Wahhabi finance, despite lacking the huge wealth that Muslims in the Arab world enjoy. It also refuses to yield control to the neo-fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood now backed by Qatar and Turkey. This independence and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

How afraid should we be of Facebook’s cryptocurrency?

The cryptocurrency winter has turned to spring: having slumped from $20,000 in late 2017 to $3,200 a year later, bitcoin has lately risen like a rocket to $8,800. Though it doesn’t change my negative opinion, I admit that if I had bought a fistful of these wacky gaming chips last October when I gave the crypto concept a kicking at our Spectator conference on the subject, I’d be up almost 40 per cent. Evidently, hints from the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank that further bouts of ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing may be in the offing have spurred what the FT calls ‘a rally in riskier

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Going bonkers is no fun

If I’ve been incredibly rude to you or snappy or tearful lately, if I’ve taken offence where none was intended, or I’ve wildly overreacted to something you said on social media, I do apologise. It wasn’t the real me you experienced in those moments: it was the mad brain that sometimes seizes control of me. The reason I have these episodes — as I keep having to explain to my bemused victims, after the event — is that I’m currently undergoing intensive medical treatment which gives me these weird and powerful mood swings. Known as the Perrin Technique, the treatment — which involves regular massage of the limbic system —

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Israel Notebook | 30 May 2019

I’m meant to be peering into a tunnel hacked out by Hamas a few hundred metres from Gaza City into Israeli territory but my attention has wandered. The air around us, above this parched, scrubby wasteland, is fecund with life. A pair of black kites are circling and below them a steppe buzzard is lumbering amidst the thermals. And is that a lappet-faced vulture? Do you know, even without my specs, I think it is. The IDF guy in charge of this facility wanders up. ‘You are interested in the birds, my frent? They too are political. The Palestinians put all their filth, their garbage, right up against the fence,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

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Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How councils in crisis could open up an important Tory leadership battleground

One of the issues that should crop up in this Tory leadership contest is local government funding. True, it’s not a particularly enticing matter, but Conservative MPs are generally very worried about the state of their local councils. Today’s BBC story on 11 authorities which could exhaust their reserves within four years underlines this worry. The Beeb used analysis by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance to work out which councils the organisation had listed – anonymously – as being most at risk. The Local Government Association is warning that councils will have to further cut back services and that ‘ongoing funding gaps are simply too big to be plugged

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Jon Snow on Rory Stewart’s ‘imperial past’

As Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart roamed the districts of outer London yesterday, talking to unsuspecting members of the public about his bid to be Prime Minister, it’s probably fair to say that he had a number of unusual conversations along the way. But it seems that the oddest encounter he had wasn’t with an abrasive member of the public, but the broadcaster and journalist Jon Snow, who for some reason interviewed the contender in the back of a taxi. Introducing the segment on Channel 4 yesterday, Snow led by saying: ‘I put it to him, that as a graduate of Eton and Oxford he was just another member of