Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 7 March 2019

Q. I run a very small mail-order company from home. Recently I received an exceptionally rude email from a disgruntled customer. On discovering that the problems arising were her own fault, I sent a polite email proving this. Her response was even ruder. I know this woman socially and she obviously doesn’t realise I am the owner of the company. She would be mortified to realise I know about this ‘fishwife’ side of her character, but of course she inevitably will find out if she continues to escalate things. I would not want to humiliate her so how should I handle this? — Name and address withheld A. Write to her

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Ducks and bills

Imperial Treasure is a restaurant in the part of St James’s where Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to George V, buried his dog Giro after Giro electrocuted himself by eating a cable. (Everyone is a food critic. Giro was merely an unlucky one.) And this seems apt. Because it’s rare to see people in St James’s these days. Dog bones and tourists and BBC crews shooting dramas in which actors are spying or arguing about politics are multiple. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Benedict Cumber-batch pretending to be Liz Truss pretending to be Josip Tito. But not real people. They have all gone, presumably to Zone

Dot Wordsworth

One fell swoop

The Sun, reviewing a new laptop from Huawei, mentioned a combined fingerprint sensor and on-switch that lets users ‘power up and log in in one fell swoop’. Logging-in is not usually a fell act, but one fell swoop has long been a cliché, rather than a quotation from Macbeth, where Macduff, on hearing of their murder, asks: ‘What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?’ The phrase at one swoop was in the Jacobean air, for Webster in his White Devil has Lodovico declare: ‘Fortune’s a right whore. / If she give ought, she deales it in small parcels, / That she may take away all

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 7 March 2019

Home Two 17-year-olds were stabbed to death in London and Manchester, bringing the number of teenagers killed in knife crime this year to ten. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said that there was ‘no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers’. Next day, Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said: ‘There is some link between violent crime on the streets obviously and police numbers, of course there is.’ The owners of Giraffe and Ed’s Easy Diner are to close 27 of their 87 restaurants. The family that has owned the British sports-car maker Morgan for 110 years is selling it to an Italian venture capitalist firm, Investindustrial. The philosopher

Andrew Roberts

Diary – 7 March 2019

John McDonnell might think Churchill a villain, but he’s beloved in America. I’ve just returned from a ten-week, 18-state, 27-city, 87-speech book tour there, and can report that the enthusiasm for all things Churchillian in the USA is stronger now than at any time since his death. Merely bringing out a new biography of him secured me interviews on all the major TV morning news shows, invitations to speak at three presidential libraries, and a place on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks. There are active Churchill appreciation societies in 14 states and more being set up. Of course it can go too far: in Coral Gables,

Susanna Gross

Susanna Gross

Geir Helgemo is the most revered bridge player in the world — and that isn’t about to change just because he failed a drug test at the World Bridge Series last September. You probably read about it at the weekend; some newspapers found it positively comical that the No. 1 player had been suspended for ‘doping’. Yet ever since bridge was recognised as a sport by the International Olympic Committee in 1998, players have been subject to random drug tests. Helgemo tested positive for synthetic testosterone. There’s no evidence it improves anyone’s game — indeed, no drug has been shown to do that. But it’s a substance that’s been banned

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 March 2019

A kind billionaire called Jeremy Hosking, whom I do not know personally, has invited us to join the Britannia Express, a steam train, on 30 March, the day after Brexit. The train will traverse Wales and England, starting at Swansea and ending in Sunderland. In an unspoken rebuke to the metropolis, it will not travel via London. The train will, says the invitation, commemorate ‘the UK’s exit (or non-exit) from the European Union’. This is the opposite, I suppose, of the European train which people like the late Sir Geoffrey Howe constantly exhorted us to climb aboard. What to do? The most likely situation on the day is that we still

Doc

2398: All steamed up

The unclued lights (five of two words, two pairs and a singleton) are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer.   Across   11    Ore obtained by worker underground, a trainee (7) 12    DJ due to broadcast around ten (6) 16    Bound by discretion, one is silent (5) 19    Quandary of back-cover girl (7) 21    Bridge closure? (4) 23    In France the one certain time for relaxation (7) 24    Second bird in winter nest (4) 25    Setter’s quick riposte around the end of June — does it get on your nerves? (7) 31    Crossing-point for number of French (4) 32    Treads that are relative (7, hyphened) 34   Top of robe that’s

Daniel DePetris

How Steve Bannon tried – and failed – to crack Europe

When Steve Bannon was ousted from the White House as president Donald Trump’s chief strategist, the populist provocateur and former Hollywood executive was back running staff meetings at Breitbart less than 24 hours later. The rumpled, grizzled, grey-haired Bannon – who has a fondness for philosophy, history, political bloodsport and green camo jackets – is constantly on the move for a new project. In the United States, the big project was getting Trump elected and ensuring the New York billionaire never forgot about the part of America that loved him and the part that cringed at the mention of his name. But ever since he left the Trump administration –

Mark Lehain

Don’t blame school exclusions for knife crime

For too many people, schools are the solution to every one of society’s problems. Last year my campaign group Parents & Teachers for Excellence – which campaigns to raise standards in state schools – logged 213 calls in the media for schools to teach something extra to address a perceived issue. When something is going wrong, we look to teachers to fix it. Less common, but even more pernicious, is the phenomenon of blaming schools for causing societal problems in the first place. Now I accept that problems like illiteracy can be blamed on educators – we get paid lots of money to teach kids to read and write. But pinning

James Kanagasooriam

The Brexit paradox that spells doom for the Independent Group

When I quit investment banking in search of daylight in 2014 I thought my life was going to be little easier crunching numbers for political campaigns. It wasn’t to be. Over the last few years, I’ve worked on the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the 2015 general election, the Scottish Holyrood election in 2016, the EU referendum and the 2017 snap election. What I’ve never been able to wrap my head around through all these campaigns is why we’ve seen so many political upsets. Just why has the political consensus been wrong so often these past five years? When I worked on the Remain campaign, the upending of the consensus

The Spectator

2395: Concise Crossword

The seven concise clues lead to: heALth centre (3,31), HEARTbreak (9), midrIFf (26), last of alL (40), out of afRIca (14/2), wild WEST (21) and false DAWN (7,24).   First prize Margaret Lusk, Fulwood, Preston, Lancs Runners-up G.H. Willett, London SW19; E.C. Wightman, Menston, W. Yorks

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why can’t Prince Harry be more like the Queen?

Are you feeling better? Anyone who’s seen Prince Harry address the WE Day – Me into We! – gathering in London yesterday of woke young people, chiefly teenage girls, may have taken time to get over the sheer emetic quality of the performance, but I’m there now, thank you. But have you ever heard more unvarnished drivel? “You are the most engaged generation in history!” Harry told his audience. “You have the incredible opportunity to help reshape mindsets, to empower those around you to think outside the box and to work with you, not against you, to find solutions”, one cliché at a time presumably. The rumours about Meghan helping write

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Let’s calm down about Amber Rudd’s ‘coloured’ gaffe

If you want to see the detrimental impact political correctness has had on our society, you could do worse than examine the scandal swirling around Amber Rudd today. Rudd is being mauled for using the undoubtedly antiquated word ‘coloured’ to describe Diane Abbott. On Radio 2, she referred to Abbott as a ‘coloured woman’. Cue fury. ‘Told you the Tories were racist’, everyone is saying, to such an extent that Rudd has now issued an apology. But here’s the thing: when she used the word ‘coloured’, Rudd was speaking out against racism. She was condemning it. Does the context of people’s words, their actual meaning, count for nought now? It

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis can never be solved under Corbyn

If racism is to succeed in corrupting institutions and countries it needs authorisation from the elite. The popular caricature of the racist as a white working-class man, or superstitious east european peasant, or shabby paranoid academic, shows not only class bias, but a lack of understanding that what transforms extremism from poisonous men muttering in corners to political movements with the power to ruin lives, is the authorisation given by leaders and intellectuals. A party can have racist members – as the Conservative party undoubtedly does. But because its leadership is not anti-Muslim their effect is constrained to personal abuse. I don’t mean to diminish it. If my experience is

The Spectator

Dangerous liaison

From ‘She was a child and I was a child’ by Kingsley Amis, 6 November 1959: The only success of the book is the portrait of Lolita herself. I have rarely seen the external ambience of a character so marvellously realised, and yet there is seldom more than necessary for the undertone of sensuality… She is a ‘portrait’… devotedly watched and listened to but never conversed with, the object of desire but never of curiosity. What else did she do in Humbert’s presence but play tennis and eat sundaes and go to bed with him? What did they talk about? What did they actually get up to? Apart from a

Rachel Johnson

Publish and be damned

The other day Will Self unburdened himself on the state of fiction with crushing hauteur. ‘What’s now regarded as serious literature would, ten or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young adult fiction… in terms of literary history, it does seem a bit of a regression. If you consider that Nabokov’s Lolita was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, it’s a different order of literature…’ Stop right there! Will Self’s top pick was Lolita. This was the novel of the 20th century that stood the test of time. But would Lolita even be plucked from the slush pile in 2019, let alone be listed as

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 7 March 2019

Laikipia   A female black panther was recently photographed at our neighbours’ place. Exactly like Kipling’s Bagheera, she was ‘inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk’. The images show her to be the most beautiful of creatures. A black panther is a melanistic leopard. I rarely see leopards and I have never seen this individual but for years a local Laikipia researcher called Ambrose Letoluai had heard about these black panthers from elders in our area. Based at Loisaba Conservancy next to us, Ambrose works for a San Diego Zoo leopard project. As part of his routine

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The coolest man in cricket

It can’t be a coincidence that two of the coolest sportsmen on the planet are from the same place, Jamaica. Must be something in the air. Chris Gayle and Usain Bolt have both redefined excellence in their fields. And Gayle’s impending departure from cricket, like Bolt’s from athletics, will have the effect, sadly, of making sport more monochrome, though diehard traditionalists world over will doubtless be glad to see the back of him. Ten years ago, Gayle (aka Universe Boss) said he wouldn’t be ‘so sad if Test cricket died out’. In the intervening decade he has striven spectacularly to promote the action-packed delights of the limited-overs game, rarely more