Society

Thursday

Mark Piggott

Renter’s paradise

On turning 50, I realised I’d never own my own home. What bank would agree to give a mortgage to someone with no regular source of income? Even if I did somehow hold down a job, I would have just 15 years until retirement age. For a while, I was depressed. Owning your own home is the British dream. Why else would all those property shows I drool over be so popular? I won’t have anything to hand down to my kids. What sort of loser am I? Then I remembered: I live in a five-bedroom Victorian terrace in Islington, which is owned by the council. At £650 per month,

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Pale imitations

You can tell something about national character from the way a country clears its cupboards. In the States they have the yard sale. The American dream remains a detached house with a front and a back yard, all enclosed by a white picket fence. Daughter selling lemonade, son playing catch, consumer goods spread on the lawn. The French have the vide grenier — the emptying of the attic. The Frenchman in his romantic soul still imagines he is a poet or a painter starving for love and art in a bare, unfurnished room. The English have the car-boot sale. We take a picnic, waterproofs, stop at a stone circle on

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

On Nobel Prize winners and Mastermind losers

I once worked my way through two whole books of IQ tests devised by Hans Eysenck and by the time I had finished I was much cleverer than that self-publicising ass Einstein, according to the helpful chart, and quite possibly the cleverest person ever to have walked on the face of the earth. So I came to two conclusions. First, that — as I had long suspected — I was indeed the clever-est person ever to walk the earth and it was pleasant to have this suspicion of mine validated. And second, that one can learn to excel at IQ tests, despite the insistence from their promulgators that they are

Lucy Vickery

Unauthorised version

In Competition No. 3081 you were invited to supply a parable rewritten in the style of a well-known author. Like Milton, many of you seemed taken with the Parable of the Talents. Here is Sylvia Fairley channelling Mark Haddon: ‘He gave five talents to one, that’s 14,983 shekels, and two to the next, 5,993 shekels. Those are prime numbers. I like prime numbers…’ I thought Kafka might loom large but he cropped up only once in a sea of Austens, Hemingways, Trollopes and Wodehouses. Strong performers, in a keenly contested week, were Joseph Harrison, W.H. Thomas, Philip Machin, Hamish Wilson, David Silverman, David Mackie, Jan Snook and Hannah Burden-Teh. The

Wednesday

Aidan Hartley

Kenya’s terror threat is no worse than London’s

Kenya is getting much better at tackling terrorist attacks, as we have seen in the Nairobi hotel siege which ended this morning. Within seconds of the first explosions at the DusitD2 hotel at 3pm on Tuesday, news was circulating across the Twitter-obsessed capital. Scores of licensed private pistol owners – pudgy Kikuyu lawyers, Asian shopkeepers, random mzungus — instantly raced towards the complex where five militants were shooting civilians in a restaurant after an Al Shabaab suicide bomber had blown himself up in the hotel lobby. Rapid response police teams arrived within minutes, but they could barely hold back the Kenyan Dad’s Army sprinting towards the gunfire and black smoke

Henry Williams

The Gillette advert has more to do with market control than #MeToo

For those looking to an antidote to Gillette’s painful ‘The Best a Man Can Be’ advert I highly recommend browsing YouTube for another, equally revolutionary, commercial which also attracted millions of hits. Seven years ago, Dollar Shave Club’s controversial advert revolutionised the congested and hotly contested field of men’s grooming and had Gillette firmly in its sights: ‘Do you like spending $20 a month on brand name razors? 19 go to Roger Federer.’ Gillette’s rivals certainly liked it, with Unilever snapping up the upstart company for $1 billion as Gillette’s market share spiralled downwards from 70 per cent at the beginning of the decade to 54 per cent today. Gillette has

Tuesday

Spectator Money

Best Buys: One year fixed rate bonds | 15 January 2019

A fixed rate bond can earn you more interest than a notice or easy access savings account, but it does mean putting your cash to one side for a year. If you can face doing that, then here are some of the best one year fixed rate bonds on the market at the moment, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Has the single currency proved its worth?

Against a background of drooping eurozone growth (the consensus forecast is 1.6 per cent this year) I met no one in France who was celebrating the 20th birthday of the euro, despite European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s imaginative toast to it as ‘a symbol of unity, sovereignty and stability [that] has delivered prosperity and protection for our citizens’. The French associate the euro with the inflation that is stoking unrest, but only the very old feel nostalgic for the franc (and they tend to mean the pre-1960 ‘old franc’, of which there were 100 to the new one). In summary, southern Europeans, especially Greeks, regard the euro as an instrument

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why I’m not surprised that Prince Harry meditates

Surprise! Prince Harry has let it be known that he meditates daily after being presented with a copy of Eight Steps to Happiness by a Buddhist monk, Kelsang Sonam. It is of a piece with his assertively detoxed marital masculinity which reportedly involves eating kale and doing yoga, and describing himself as a feminist, which he also did yesterday. Perhaps he also uses Gillette. There’s obviously nothing wrong about meditating – Sister Wendy Beckett did it all the time – nor, I suppose, about eating kale, though I personally prefer eating pheasant. But let’s not go with the notion that there’s anything brave or interesting about all this; the Prince,

Monday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The Bryony Gordon Edition

37 min listen

Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts talk to Bryony Gordon, columnist at the Telegraph and author of Eat, Drink, Run. They have a frank conversation about Bryony’s relationship with food and mental health, and Bryony comes clean about her toddler’s metropolitan diet and why dinner parties are totally not for her.

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The Sophia Money-Coutts Edition

28 min listen

Sophia Money-Coutts is former features editor at Tatler magazine, and now columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. Her new book, The Plus One, came out earlier this year. In this episode of Table Talk, Lara and Livvy talk to Sophia about how cheese fondue helped her get through her parents’ divorce as a child, how an ex-boyfriend berated her poppadom manners, and the best way to juggle a clutch bag and canapés at writers’ parties. Presented by Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts.

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Prue Leith on her life through food and drink

25 min listen

For our inaugural episode, Livvy and Lara are joined by Prue Leith: chef, restaurateur, broadcaster, journalist, novelist and, of course, Great British Bake Off presenter. They chat about her time in South Africa and Paris, and how that helped shape her attitude to food. She comes clean about some of her cooking mishaps, making sandwiches for both toffs and builders, being the first woman to have a proper restaurant in London, why she hates washing up, and her first cookbook in 25 years, Prue: My All-time Favourite Recipes.

Imam Hoque

What might Brexit mean for the fight against money laundering?

Looking at the past year, it’s evident that 2018 saw some incredibly high-profile cases of money laundering. For offenders to operate successfully in organised criminal circles, ‘dirty’ money needs to be cleaned before it can be used. This poses a real threat to not only businesses but also to the general public, as criminal activity such as people trafficking, terrorist financing and drug dealing is funded and supported by laundered money. Prominent instances of money laundering have brought attention to the issue, and have encouraged financial institutions across Europe to tighten up their regulations and take a step in the right direction to prevent financial crime. The European Commission’s 5th

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator’s sales are booming. Find out why

It’s been a busy weekend for subscriptions at The Spectator and already it’s our best January since our records began (in 1828). Today (Monday) we’ve already broken the one-day record. Which stands to reason. These are uncertain times, so you will want the best and sharpest analysis – all of which is up our website within an hour of any major news breaking. Given the extraordinary demand, we’re offering a month free access to The Spectator (with four issues of the magazine) absolutely free. Sign up here. You’ll find that The Spectator gives writers a lot of freedom – which can be discombobulating for some in the digital age. Now

Steerpike Steerpike

Chris Williamson on the joys of Venezuela

Venezuela is a country in crisis: inflation hit one million per cent last year and GDP has plummeted by half since 2013. Those who dare stand up to president Nicolás Maduro risk finding themselves locked up – or worse. Many have opted to leave: three million migrants and refugees have fled the country in the last few years. But ever the optimist about the joys of socialism, Labour MP Chris Williamson has managed to find some good news about Venezuela – the country’s social housing programme is ‘on track’: The Corbynista MP shared a link to a news story on a website called Venezuela analysis. But while the site promises

Slavoj Žižek

Roma is being celebrated for all the wrong reasons, writes Slavoj Žižek

My first viewing of Roma left me with a bitter taste: yes, the majority of critics are right in celebrating it as an instant classic, but I couldn’t get rid of the idea that this predominant perception is sustained by a terrifying, almost obscene, misreading, and that the movie is celebrated for all the wrong reasons. Roma is read as a tribute to Cleo, a maid from the Colonia Roma neighbourhood of Mexico City working in the middle-class household of Sofia, her husband Antonio, their four young children, Sofia’s mother Teresa, and another maid, Adela. It take place in 1970, the time of large student protests and social unrest. As already

Sunday

Andrew Levens

There’s nothing extreme about being a populist

I’m slightly sick of the word ‘populist’ being used to suggest some sort of extremist (‘The Last Heave’, 5 January). The political establishment has proven itself broken not only in this country (see the failure to agree on a viable Brexit policy, let alone run a train service), but also widely across the EU, where the establishment has turned its back on listening to the people. Reform needs to come, and soon. One result of social media and regular polling is that people are used to expressing an opinion, and expect to be heard. The idea that you elect someone for five years, during which time they can decide what

Katy Balls Katy Balls

How heavily will Theresa May’s Brexit deal be defeated?

Theresa May’s Brexit deal will finally be voted on this week. However, the signs so far are not good. Despite the government decision to delay the vote until after Christmas in the hope MPs would calm down, few in the Commons believe it has any hope of passing when it’s put to a vote on Tuesday night. Instead, the focus has moved to what will happen once it is defeated. The Sunday papers are filled with talk of such Brexit plots. Dominic Grieve stands accused of working with the Speaker to change the Commons rules so that backbenchers decide the Commons business and thereby can map out Brexit (see Nikki Da

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘O Walkman! O Walkman!’

The most recent challenge, suggested by Paul A. Freeman, asked for an elegy on a piece of obsolete technology. There’s nothing like a blast of nostalgia to usher in the new year. Sinclair C5s, faxes, floppy discs, typewriters; all were eloquently hymned. I admired Hamish Wilson’s elegy on a radiogram and John O’Byrne’s Whitman-esque homage to the Walkman: O Walkman! O Walkman! our cassette days are       done, My ears have enjoyed every tune, the tapes I       played are worn, The phone has come, the apps are here, the       playlists all inspiring, But Apple killed this mobile thing for designs