Society

Friday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Will Cardinal Pell’s fall prompt soul-searching in the Catholic Church?

I have heard surprisingly few Catholic responses to this week’s news of the conviction of Cardinal George Pell. I guess those who are not in denial are in shock. Let me interrupt the stunned silence with an outsider’s perspective. This is not just another paedophile priest story – Pell was a key figure in the Vatican under the last three popes – and a major public face of the church’s moral conservatism. So will his fall bring a new level of Catholic soul-searching, a new critique of the Church’s entire moral culture? Pope Francis himself often seems to call for such critique. Last week he warned against the potential dangers

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Playing the blues

This Saturday (2 March) sees the annual varsity match between the teams of Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford are strengthened this year by the addition of China’s Hou Yifan, the former women’s world champion, and are likely to be the favourites.   As usual, the match starts at noon in the traditional venue of the RAC in Pall Mall and spectators are welcome, though there is a smart dress code for those who wish to watch.   A continuing problem is the failure of Oxford to award their players half blues in recognition of their distinction in representing the university. The more enlightened authorities at Cambridge granted this deserved honour many years ago. It

Raymond Keene

no. 543

Black to play. This position is from Wagner–-Eckersley-Waites, Varsity Match, London 2008. How did Black make effective use of the powerful bishop pair? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 5 March 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 Bxf7 Last week’s winner Peter Skelly, Bedford

Taki

High life | 28 February 2019

A rare British species, a womanising ex-foreign secretary, kissed and told about his brief affair with a yellow-eyed temptress last week, and it brought back memories of a similar tryst on the part of yours truly. Boris Johnson reclined on a bed of straw with a purring cheetah and lived to write about it, although I am certain there were plenty of Brussels sprouts hoping for a different ending to the affair. Never mind. Boris and the cheetah met at Howletts, the John Aspinall Foundation-owned wild animal park in Kent, a place I used to know well. A bit of antebellum lore: if your name is carved on a commemorative

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 28 February 2019

My fifth week confined to barracks as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer. I drive to the supermarket about twice a week, otherwise my horizon has shrunk to a vase of cut daffodils on the kitchen table, and through the window a fluorescent orange football in the garden with the grass growing up around it, and in the field beyond furry heifers enthusiastically nosing up hay from their circular feeder. Nevertheless I am far from unsocialised. The house is close to the centre of the village. The front door is always open — you enter via a conservatory — and there are plenty of visitors. Some of these stand at

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 February 2019

‘What do you mean, you have no ID?’ I asked the farmer, starting to feel dizzy with the mind-boggling convolution of it all. ‘They took all my personal documents. I keep asking but no one gets back to me,’ he said. The farmer, you may remember, was the subject of a police and RSPCA raid on land near to where I live in Surrey where the RSPCA seized 123 horses, which then disappeared on to the motorway in lorries with the charity refusing to say where it was taking them. Shortly after, I was leaked documents showing where the horses had gone. They had been split between half a dozen

Peter Jones

The aim of the Games

The Olympic Committee has added surfing, skateboarding and break-dancing to the events for the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020. Heaven knows what ancient Greeks would have made of it. The satirist Lucian (2nd century ad) invented a dialogue in which the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis argued with the famous Athenian statesman Solon (d. 558 bc) about the purpose of athletics. Anacharsis expressed amazement that in the gymnasium men covered in oil were writhing about in sand-filled pits and punching each other, and when Solon told him it was to win prizes at the Games — a wreath of wild olive, of parsley or of pine, or apples — Anacharsis said that

Toby Young Toby Young

Four kids – what were we thinking?

You’d think the little buggers would be grateful. Caroline and I had just shelled out for our two middle children — Freddie, 11, and Ludo, 13 — to spend a week in Austria on the school’s half-term ski trip. It meant we couldn’t afford to leave the house for the whole of February, but we stupidly paid for their sister to go on the same trip last year so felt we had no choice. Yet as soon as they came back they wanted to know where we were going on holiday this summer. Ten years ago, they were more than happy to go to Cornwall, which suited me down to

Robin Oakley

The turf | 28 February 2019

Owner Phil Simmonds from Rochdale was 17 when he first went racing, joining a friend’s stag party at Haydock Park. For years he dreamed of owning a racehorse and finally took the plunge. He bought a bumper horse called Burns Cross and placed it with Neil Mulholland, whose response appealed to him when he wrote to three trainers. A software developer, he doesn’t pretend, like some owners do, to know everything about the sport, acknowledging: ‘I love racing but I realise you can’t solve it with a computer programme.’ Last year Phil was driving to Chester races when Neil phoned. It was the kind of call every trainer hates having

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 28 February 2019

The winter ‘season’ of terrific bridge competitions came to a close last weekend with the Lederer Trophy held at the RAC Club in London. Generously sponsored by Simon Gillis and faultlessly organised by Ian Payn and Kath Stynes, it really is a pleasure for the ten teams lucky enough to be invited to play in it. It was a star-studded affair, the room filled with world champions from different countries. But the team that gets my vote for awesomeness is the eventual winners — the (reconstructed) Allfrey Team. Alex A. plays with the legendary Andrew Robson and their teammates are Tom Paske and Ed Jones, both in their twenties and

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 28 February 2019

Q. Please advise on how I can move on from a social impasse. My best friend of 50 years claims she cannot afford to pay for a taxi to bring her a few miles across London to my house where I want to give her dinner and invite mutual friends who she would love to see. I know she can easily afford taxis because — despite being mentally and physically fit — she receives various disability benefits from Social Services. She is angling for me to pay for her taxis, as she thinks (correctly) that I am richer, but I refuse to do this on principle. At this rate we

Dot Wordsworth

Kibosh

‘What is a kibosh?’ asked a German medical friend of my husband’s, when the word cropped up. No one knew, though we were certain it was the kibosh and it was put on things. All our lives, the earliest citation for the word had been from Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): ‘ “Hoo-roar,” ejaculates a pot-boy in a parenthesis, “put the kye-bosk on her, Mary”.’ The entry for kibosh in the Oxford English Dictionary is not fully updated, but the online edition has cleared up that strange k. In the first edition of the Sketches, it was spelt kye-bosh, later doubtless misprinted kye-bosk. Someone in the journal Notes & Queries

Pabulum

2397: Obit V

We recently lost a fine 13, whose legacy includes 10 (two words) and 9 (two words), and four other unclued lights (including one of two words and a pair). A further two unclued lights combine with a clued one to give an anagram of the 13’s name (two words); the clued light must be shaded. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across 6    Hussies cooked no English dishes (6) 12    Liberal started gobbling bananas (10, hyphened) 14    Musicians once in depression about dead uncle (7) 15    Made ordinary valuer happy with digs (10) 16    Revolting hymn snubbed by a Swedish city (7) 22    Pleasantness of little woman having Spike back (7)

The Spectator

to 2394: Opening time

‘Never eat an oyster unless there’s an R in the month’ (Brewer). Eight unclued lights (in appropriate order) start with abbreviations of the months said to be safe for OSTREOPHAGES (1): SEPTIME (18), OCTANDRIA (26), NOVICE (34), DECELERATING (43), JANIFORM (11), FEBRIFACIENT (13), MARION (19D) and APRICOT (28).   First prize Dennis Cotterell, Carlisle Runners-up Peter Tanner, Hertford; Neville Twickel, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit betrayal is complete

Let us consider the gravity of Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement that Labour will push for a second referendum. In siding with the so-called People’s Vote lobby, Corbyn has betrayed Labour’s traditional working-class base, who tend to favour leaving the EU. He has betrayed his party’s own manifesto in the 2017 general election, which promised to respect the outcome of the referendum. He has betrayed his old Labour mentors, most notably his hero Tony Benn, who was the left’s most articulate critic of the EU. And he has betrayed himself. He has betrayed his own longstanding and correct belief that the EU is an illiberal, undemocratic, anti-worker outrage of an institution. Has

James Kirkup James Kirkup

What MPs are still getting wrong about the trans debate

I am a little late in coming to the recent report on community cohesion by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hate Crime. It was published earlier this month but drew little attention at Westminster: yet another example of Brexit smothering the domestic policy agenda, I suppose. The report has lots to say about lots of different types of nasty behaviour. Among the topics it covers is the gender debate, the discussion of trans rights and their potential impact on the rights of others. One one level, this is a good thing. It is the job of MPs to debate and discuss matters of contention and controversy. This is one

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

In praise of speaking ill of the dead

There’s quite a few writers who are sensitive souls, and the worst are those who like to dish it out but reach for the smelling salts and swoon when anyone so much as gives them a funny look. Luckily I was born with the Sensitivity Gene missing, especially when it comes to dissing, and I find that like with gifts, I’d just as soon receive than give. Say nasty things behind my back, to my face – or both ways in bed – and not only will I not get upset but I’ll derive a mild kick from it. Just a little one, mind you – I’m not kinky! I’ve

Matt Ridley

Beware pseudoscience

‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong. Increasingly, in a crowded market for alarm, it becomes necessary to make the scares up. More and more headlines about medical or environmental panics are based on published scientific papers, but ones

Bruce Anderson

Glyndebourne in the City

Early last century, an impoverished youth emerged from the East End. Able and hard-working, he discovered — as many had before him — that the City offered an open route to opportunity and riches. By the early 1950s, Rudolph Palumbo decided he could afford a family office. So he commissioned a Queen Anne building on Walbrook. Although it could not compensate for the City’s grievous architectural losses during the war, it was a reassertion of old values: of a long tradition that finance and the fine arts could march together. Forty years on, Rudolph’s son Peter was having lunch with Mark Birley at the Connaught. Mark, son of Oswald, a