Society

Friday

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The real winner from ‘Brexodus’ will be New York

How big is Brexodus — the flight of business and people from the City of London in parallel with our exit from the EU? I observed recently that squealing from the Square Mile has been minimal compared to sectors that make and move physical goods — suggesting that banks, insurers and investment houses have quietly completed all the necessary rejigging of domiciles and compliance that will permit them to carry on making money willy-nilly. There’s been plenty of paddling beneath the City surface. A report by the New Financial thinktank ‘identified 275 firms in the UK that have moved or are moving some of their business, staff, assets or legal

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: ‘She had the type of fake tan that would be of great service if she ever had to hide in Oak Furniture Land’ – and other bad analogies

Your latest challenge was to come up with toe-curlingly bad analogies. This is an idea shamelessly pinched from the Washington Post, whose contests have produced the impressively so-bad-they’re-good ‘Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze’ (Chuck Smith) and ‘Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever’ (Jennifer Hart). Yours, too, were gloriously cringe-inducing. Laboured, overwrought, banal, tasteless — yet grimly compelling for all that. The winners take a fiver each per analogy printed below. Adrian Fry As the narcotic took effect, Frank felt extremely odd, as if he were sole occupant of a set in a Venn diagram containing men who loved the novels of

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Fischer favourite

A favoured line of the great Bobby Fischer was to meet both the French Defence (1 e4 e6) and the Caro-Kann Defence (1 e4 c6) with 2 d3, introducing what is known as the King’s Indian Attack. Fischer won celebrated games with this line against such powerful opponents as the Argentine grandmaster Oscar Panno and World Championship candidate Boris Ivkov. This week’s puzzle shows a further coruscating finish by Fischer with the King’s Indian Attack from the Interzonal stage of the World Championship cycle which brought Fischer the supreme title. Ever a good learner, the three-times British champion grandmaster Julian Hodgson put the King’s Indian Attack to good use in

Raymond Keene

no. 547

White to play. This position is from Fischer–Myagmarsuren, Sousse Interzonal 1967. How did Fischer conclude his attack in fine style? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 2 April 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 … Qe1+ (2 Kh2 Qe5+) Last week’s winner Steve Fox, Crawcrook, Tyne and Wear

The Spectator

Barometer | 28 March 2019

Silly signs The Department for Transport ordered councils to remove ‘obsolete and unnecessary’ road signs. Some examples of the art from around the world: — ‘Sign not in use’ (UK) — ‘Please do not throw stones at this sign’ (Ireland) — ‘Road unsafe when this sign is under water’ (US) — ‘Caution: water on road during rain’ (US) — ‘Caution: road unsuitable for some types of vehicle’ (UK) — ‘Caution: no warning signs’ (US) — ‘Caution: this sign has sharp edges’ (US) Packing in fans Tottenham Hotspur held the first match in its new stadium. Which English clubs can pack in the greatest number of fans? Manchester United 75,811 Spurs

The Spectator

Healthy debate

It is not hard to make the case that vaccination programmes have been one of the greatest contributions to mankind over the past century. It is sufficient simply to list the most common causes of death in 1915 of British children aged under five, in descending order: measles, bronchitis, whooping cough, diphtheria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, infective enteritis and scarlet fever. Few parents in Britain now have to undergo the trauma of nursing a child suffering from any of these conditions, still less of burying a child who has died from one. That these diseases have receded into history is down entirely to advances in medicine and public health. We have a

Nigel Farage

Diary – 28 March 2019

I’m famed for my mustard cords. Back in 2013, the press mockingly dubbed my campaign trips around the country in a purple London taxi the ‘Mustard Trouser Express’. Photographers everywhere still cry, ‘Nigel, when do we go to the pub?’ They want that ‘pint shot’ of course, and they always know they are on to something when they get to see a little flash of yellow-clad corrugated calf. I’ve helped organise a March to Leave, which will arrive in Parliament Square this Friday, the day Britain was meant to leave the EU. The march — which travelled from Sunderland — has been the perfect opportunity to wear the trusty corduroys

Taki

High life | 28 March 2019

New York   This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling Wasps are now irrelevant, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs. The Chinese are creeping up, having bought more real estate in Manhattan alone than Islamic State has lost in Syria and Iraq. (I now get nuisance telephone calls in Chinese.) On the bottom of the ladder are the Hispanics and the African-Americans, the former doing all the heavy lifting in the construction business, the latter, sadly, being the majority in

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 28 March 2019

I’ve swapped my carer’s tray in Devon for a barrow and spade halfway up a cliff in the south of France. Right next door to the modernised, carpeted cave in which we live is a concealed cavern, home for hundreds of years to troglodytes (the ceiling is black with soot from their fires) and their domestic animals. The floor is feet-deep in accumulated manure and debris that has turned over the years to a fine black dust. I’ve dug down to rock and now I’m working forward towards the door with three electric fans at my back directing the rising dust out of the cavern entrance in a stream of

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 March 2019

‘This clean sock regime is really annoying,’ said the builder boyfriend, as he rummaged through his newly inaugurated top drawer. I had toyed with the idea of giving him two small drawers as I did last time he graced my domestic arrangements with his presence. But this time I gave him the entire chest: that’s four drawers in total. That’s a lot of commitment on my part and a fair amount on his, too. It scared him, understandably. ‘You’ll be wanting rent next,’ he said, grinning sardonically. ‘Aren’t you pleased, having all your clothes so nicely arranged?’ I had put everything away for him while he was at work and

Robin Oakley

The turf | 28 March 2019

As jockeys, trainers, punters and media folk gathered at Newbury on Saturday to say farewell to Noel Fehily, the ultimate professional who fittingly rode Get In The Queue to victory in his final race before retirement, I couldn’t help contrasting his departure with the picture of her Cabinet allies and those lovely forgiving folk in the ERG jostling simultaneously to force Theresa May out of No. 10, with a crowbar if necessary. Racing does its farewells decently whereas political careers almost invariably end in tears. Mrs May once had a share in Dome Patrol, a winner trained by Willie Muir, and she could do worse than seek solace in the

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 28 March 2019

Susanna and I don’t play on the same team very often, but once a year Fiona Hutchison puts together a squad of eight to play the Garden Cities Qualifier — I’m not exactly sure what we were qualifying for but I think it’s possibly a second qualifier. It’s a lovely, fun, stress-free evening of bridge with people you don’t normally compete with, who are all super supportive: no one criticises anyone else, and you don’t go home hating yourself and hating your ‘never been wrong’ partner more.   So, everything was jogging along nicely. We played five boards against five teams and scored up afterwards in the bar. ‘Minus 200,

Toby Young Toby Young

Mob rule at Cambridge

On Monday, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge university, Stephen Toope, issued a statement defending the decision of the divinity faculty to rescind its offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson. The world-famous professor had been invited by the faculty to give a series of lectures on the Bible later this year, but was dis-invited after some academics and students objected. Not that the faculty had the courtesy to inform Peterson of this, mind you. He learned about it through the grapevine and then saw it on Twitter. He was left to work out what had prompted the volte-face by reading the various statements given to the media. For instance, a

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 28 March 2019

Q. I belong to a religious congregation whose minister is politically minded. Every time I attend a service, I am forced to sit through a sermon which is bound to contain at least one reference to UK politics, unashamedly biased. The last time, at least half the sermon amounted to a political diatribe. Worse, it elicited a round of applause. Mary, what can I do? I do not want to worship elsewhere, but if this person cannot stop making partisan political speeches, thereby cheating us of a religious sermon, they should give up their position and launch themselves in politics. — Name and address withheld A. Why not encourage a

Dot Wordsworth

Coin a phrase

My husband has been doing something useful but criminal for the past two years. He reads the sports pages, mostly of the Telegraph, or of other papers if another member of his club has nabbed the Telegraph. When he comes across something promising, he tears out a snippet, none too neatly often, and stuffs it in his top pocket. That is antisocial and deserves expulsion. But it is not for a mere woman to interfere. I’ve gone through some of his grubby snippets that include the words to coin a phrase. Most are used in the orthodox manner, ‘ironically to introduce a cliché’ as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. Brexit

Doc

2401: Sign here please

The unclued lights are of a kind and all have to be ignored in the completed grid.   Across 1    Fortune-teller worried small company chairmen. Right! (11) 7    Party goer often over the clutch (3) 11    Spike, I look anaemic! (6) 13    Prize stone cut with edge of blade (7) 15    Become liable to back police force and its patch (5) 18    Similar to a story about Bartok’s finale (5) 20    Outline is almost correct (6) 21    Sleep on board – records on film? (5) 22    About one, delivers a flower (7) 29    European birds in the housetops? (5) 30    Evil demon – one unattached and tense (6) 34    King

Clementine Hain-Cole

Rhubarb

The tale of forced Yorkshire rhubarb has the makings of a David Lean film. Frosty Slavic beginnings, wartime devotion, steam trains. Rhubarb was brought to Britain from Siberia towards the end of the 17th century, and it’s hard to imagine a more eccentrically British fruit — though technically it is of course a vegetable. The curious method of ‘forcing’ rhubarb to make it fruit early wasn’t discovered until January 1817, when gardeners digging a trench inadvertently buried some rhubarb crowns in soil. Uncovered, it would have taken until Easter for these crowns to show any signs of growth. One can imagine the gardeners’ surprise when, a fortnight later, bright pink

Dea Birkett

Doing it for themselves

They cut virgin paths through tropical forests, paddled dugout canoes over West African rapids, sailed along the Yangtze in a sampan, climbed the Rocky Mountains with a gun-toting guide, galloped across the Iraqi desert in search of sheikhs, slept under the stars and ate a lot of snake. It’s easy to be seduced by the exploits of the Victorian women travellers. Broadcaster Mariella Frostrup pays homage to ‘their courage, curiosity and pioneering spirit’ in her new book, Wild Women and Their Amazing Adventures Over Land, Sea and Air, a collection of 50 pieces of travel writing by women. Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, now revived by the National Theatre in London,

The Spectator

to 2398: All steamed up

The unclued lights are the names of FAMOUS STEAM TRAINS including the pairs at 14/15 and 17/30.   First prize Jenny Harris, Cheltenham, Glos Runners-up Virginia Porter, Gwaelod-y-Garth, Cardiff; Wendy Atkin, Sleaford, Lincs