Society

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Commanding presence

One of the pleasures of journalism is the opportunity to meet eminent persons: bankers, businessmen, civil servants, diplomats, politicians, vignerons. Although there are occasional exceptions, such as Theresa May and around one-third of the current cabinet, it is usually easy to see why these characters attained their eminence. That is especially true when it comes to the ablest group of them all, the soldiers. There is a good reason for this. It is hard to believe that any large organisation on earth devotes as much effort to training as the British army takes for granted. (I am sure that the same is true of the navy and the RAF, but

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The tech timewasters

I have just spent a weekend planning a family trip to Chennai and Hyderabad. Since some of the flights are booked with reward points and some are not, our flights are under three separate booking numbers, each of which requires a separate login. I also had to print out booking confirmations from three different hotels, four boarding cards for the internal flights from Madras to Hyderabad, and a separate docket for my airport parking. That doesn’t include the two hours my wife spent applying for online visas, or the 90 minutes I spent getting approval to use a British credit card on an Indian airline website. Or the time I

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 8 December

Being a veritable martyr to Christmas Affected Doom, Depression and Despondency, I admit to feeling far from chipper. My wife says I should grow up and stop being so bloody grumpy and my boys bait me constantly by whistling ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ and wishing me a cool Yule. Sigh. I’ve since locked myself away to self-medicate. I started with this very tasty selection from Mr Wheeler and I strongly suggest that you do too. Thanks to a couple of jolly jaunts to Spain, I’ve rekindled my fondness for the country’s vino, particularly the whites, and the 2017 Bodegas Aquitania Albarino ‘Bernon’ (1) is right up my street.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Out of the mouths of babes

For any bosses from the Singapore education department reading this, I have a message. It comes from (I’d guess) most of your schoolchildren. They detest their education system. They burn with resentment at the way their schooling tries (they think) to shackle their imaginations, their individuality, their free spirit. They hate being forced to compete, and are made miserable about what they see as learning by rote. That’s the bad news. But the good news is this. However they may chafe at the way they are taught, these children are anything but broken reeds. Imaginative, rebellious, thoughtful, original, poetic, these winning boys and girls (often of Chinese origin!) write English

Andrew Gilligan

Define ‘Islamophobia’

Sadiq Khan is an Islamophobe. Not just any old Islamophobe, and not just in the woollier parts of the web. According to a group part-funded by the EU called the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), the mayor of London, a practising Muslim, is one of the four ‘politicians and figures of note in the UK who [have] flagrantly displayed the most Islamophobia’ in 2018. Barack Obama is an Islamophobe. Cathy Newman, the Channel 4 News presenter, is an Islamophobe. So are Louise Casey, who led an inquiry into the Rotherham grooming scandal, Michael Wilshaw, the ex-head of Ofsted, and Maajid Nawaz, the Muslim counter-extremism activist. Over the last few years,

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

I love the idea of race becoming vague

Behold, the most incendiary statistic in America: the Census Bureau’s projection of when whites will become a minority in what last century was ‘their own’ country. (In only 1980, 80 per cent of Americans were white. Mind, where the US leads, Europe often follows.) When in 2008 that red-letter date moved up to 2042, notes California demographer Dowell Myers: ‘People went crazy.’ After decades of progressive lobbying for multicultural inclusion, the startling proximity of this demographic tipping point is enticing a certain brand of activist to embrace the rhetoric of replacement instead. Evident during the midterms, this new approach to the melting pot is militant. If I may paraphrase: ‘Move

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘We’re all travelling together’

‘But what must it be like for the fish?’ We’re talking about cormorants, Neil MacGregor and I, and the spectacular way they dive for food, when he pauses to consider the situation from the perspective of a fish. ‘I mean just think, there you are swimming along with lots of chums and then suddenly there’s this great whoosh and the chum next to you has just disappeared! He’s vanished! And of course you can’t see the cause of it.’ MacGregor tilts his head. The sunlight in the offices of Penguin on the Strand seems to condense to a point in his eye. ‘Can you imagine it?’ he says. I can’t.

Mark Mason

St Martin-in-the-Fields

St Martin’s really did once stand in the fields, just as nearby Haymarket was a market selling hay. But the church has moved with the times. In 1924 it hosted the first ever religious service to be broadcast live. You might have expected Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s to get the nod, but neither wanted it — many in the religious establishment thought it would be wrong to transmit divine worship over the airwaves, as people might listen in pubs. Dick Sheppard, St Martin’s vicar at the time, was delighted to receive a letter saying that people in one south London pub had tuned in. Not only had they sung

Lucy Vickery

Shakespearean sonnet

In Competition No. 3077 you were invited to submit a sonnet with the name of a Shakespearean character hidden in each line This one pulled in a bumper haul of entries, from old hands and newcomers alike. While some competitors described the challenge as ‘fun’, others greeted it with a squeal of horror. C. Paul Evans, for example: ‘The mother of all horrors, what a comp,/ A theme to turn my ashy locks to dust!…’ The shoehorning in of names occasionally led to some stilted lines, but there were bursts of remarkable fluency too. In an entry full of witty touches and clever flourishes, commendations go to David Silverman, Chris O’Carroll,

Wednesday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Women are abused in the name of ‘trans rights’. But do MPs care?

There are some things that pretty much everyone in politics and public life agrees on. Ask any politician about any contentious, heated debate and they’ll immediately talk about the need for respectful debate, for all views to be heard calmly and in a civilised manner. They’ll say that there is no place for harassment and abuse and bullying and threats, because this is Britain, a mature democracy where everyone gets to express their views about things like politics and the law without fear. Except that’s not entirely true. There are some people who aren’t allowed to speak freely, who cannot express their views about things like politics and the law without

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Reggae was sexist and homophobic – Unesco ‘safeguarding’ it is ludicrous and conservative

Until last week I believed that Unesco – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – existed solely to protect and promote remarkable aspects of the material world, such as my beloved Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv. But of course I should have known that it would be beyond the wit of the UN to do anything as sensible as taking on a simple task and sticking to it.  Since 2008 they’ve also set themselves the frankly ludicrous job of upholding something called the ‘Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage’, featuring hundreds of customs from French cooking (understandable if dull) through ‘Mongolian coaxing ritual for camels’ (getting freaky) to ‘Cambodian

Tuesday

Benedict Spence

The remarkable scandal threatening to topple the Czech Prime Minister

I have only personally encountered Andrej Babis – the billionaire Prime Minister considered the Czech Republic’s answer to Donald Trump – once. It was during, of all places, a lingerie runway show at Prague Fashion Week. Even amidst the booming music and assorted fashionistas, the buzz that greeted Babis was unmistakable. The only other thing which generated anywhere near as much interest that night was when an outfit malfunction left one of the models more exposed than planned – the crowd watched in astonishment as she carried on nonplussed. This strange occurrence seems as good a metaphor as any for what has befallen Babis in the months since then. Already

James Burnell-Nugent

Like Ukraine, Britain is unprepared for Putin’s hybrid warfare

Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine is growing, and as Owen Matthews writes in this week’s Spectator, there is a looming threat of war breaking out between the two countries. But the Kerch Strait confrontation also poses a question for Britain: how well equipped are we to deal with this new style of warfare invented by Putin and being adapted by China, North Korea and Iran? In the run up to the Great War, Britain’s foreign secretary, Edward Grey, offered a memorable comment on the changing nature of conflict: “Instead of a few hundreds of thousands of men meeting each other in war, millions would now meet, and modern weapons would multiply manifold the

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Cox reacts to being found in contempt

In an exceptional move, MPs have just voted to hold the government in contempt of Parliament for not releasing legal advice on the draft withdrawal agreement with the EU. While not being named specifically by the motion, it was the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, who was the figurehead for the contempt proceedings, and as you can imagine, he was not pleased to possibly be the first government legal advisor to be held in contempt in recent history. Mr S thinks his reaction speaks for itself: Earlier in the debate, the Attorney General already looked close to tears when he was defended by his colleague Nadine Dorries: It’s safe to say that

The Spectator

Why I quit Ukip

There has never been a more pressing need for a home for Brexit voters disillusioned by the spectacle of recent events. Yet Ukip, under a leader fixated by EDL founder Tommy Robinson, has marched to a place where very few Leave voters wish to go. When I left Ukip last week, what caused the biggest stir was the fact that it was not to sit as an independent but to join the SDP. Many political journalists did not know that the party still existed, let alone that it has been Eurosceptic for many years. But the party has been growing fast over the past few months as the more moderate elements of Ukip

Jamie Bartlett

How social media turned us into a nation of pub bores

Opinions are like social media accounts: approximately 2.7 billion people have one. I’ve no problem with people having an opinion of course. Quite the reverse: a nation without opinions is one without thoughts, ideas or morals. But over the last decade something has changed. We’ve always had opinions but now we feel compelled to share them with the world. And that is a problem. A few years ago, I had opinions about everything. I had strong views on Peter Mandelson and BSE and Sierra Leone and 7/7 and the price of bus fares and Uri Geller’s friendship with Michael Jackson. But none of these opinions were good enough to share

Monday

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The shame of Naked Attraction

The fact that Naked Attraction is still being broadcast after a year or so strikes me as proof that there is something very wrong with our culture. In a healthy culture it would have been howled offstage after a few weeks, and the moral babies who made it shunned, and firmer procedures put in place to ensure that this sort of thing is not inflicted on us.  This show, in which people peer at the private parts of potential dates before meeting them, is not funny or daring or witty or brave or ironic or cheeky or iconoclastic or anything else. It’s just wrong. Why is it wrong? It is

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

In praise of the Gilets jaunes

At last, a people’s revolt against the tyranny of environmentalism. Paris is burning. Not since 1968 has there been such heat and fury in the streetsThousands of ‘gilets jaunes’ stormed the capital at the weekend to rage against Emmanuel Macron and his treatment of them with aloof, technocratic disdain. And yet leftists in Britain and the US have been largely silent, or at least antsy, about this people’s revolt. The same people who got so excited about the staid, static Occupy movement a few years ago — which couldn’t even been arsed to march, never mind riot — seem struck dumb by the sight of tens of thousands of French people taking

Saturday

Prof. David Paton

Ten myths from the ‘no-deal’ Project Fear

Myth 1. The UK economy could shrink by eight per cent in a single year under no deal (Project Fear, Bank of England version) You will have read about this. The Bank of England now sheepishly claims that this was never meant to be a forecast, only a worst-case scenario. Mark Carney surely knew the headlines it would generate. Doubtless he was shocked – shocked! – to see the newspapers treat scenario as a forecast. Whatever. But in case there is any doubt, the idea that a no-deal Brexit would cause a crash of such proportions is nonsense, pure and simple. An eight per cent reduction in GDP in one