Society

Saturday

Richard Walton

How the police should deal with far-right terrorism

As New Zealand comes to terms with the most deadly terrorist attack ever carried out on its soil, leaders from around the world will be asking their security advisors whether this marks the start of an escalation of right-wing threats and whether their current strategies for defeating this form of extremism are fit for purpose. It has been obvious for several years now that far-right extremism has been growing across western democracies with social media providing the means for a new global connectivity between far-right individuals and groups. In the past three years alone, the UK has experienced two terrorist attacks carried out by far-right extremists (the murder of Jo

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Are IQ tests really the best way to measure nature vs nurture?

I have a dim memory from 1970 of a primly dressed distant relative visiting in a Baby Austin. This, I later learned, was the anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood. I googled her 45 years later and was astonished to find she had spent several years in the 1920s and 1930s living alone among Stone Age tribes in New Guinea. Her pet kitten so enchanted the normally fierce Kukukuku that they even built her a temporary house. Aside from her travels, what also surprised me was how close-knit the world of anthropology then was. Just a few hundred people gave rise to debates which are still alive today. Nature vs nurture, for instance.

Friday

Martin Leigh

We should be worried about the decline of music in our schools

Whether it’s Ariana Grande or something grand from Aïda, music is both inescapable in our society, and of incalculable value to it. This is the starting point of a new report from The Music Commission, set up by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, which offers a manifesto for ‘music learning’ and finding ways of ‘enabling all young people to make progress in their musical knowledge, understanding and skills.’ We lucky ones had parents who spent countless hours driving us from instrumental lesson to youth orchestra rehearsal, from music festival to summer course. But there are thousands upon thousands who are not so blessed, whether by time

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why are bishops so boring?

In the new Holy Smoke podcast episode, I finally get something off my chest. For 30 years I’ve been bored senseless by the public pronouncements of bishops – Anglicans and Catholics. Why do they feel the need to speak in such dreary jargon? Why do interesting clergy never make it to bishop? I’m joined by Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, who shares my views. But I’m the one who names names, including that of a certain Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, so our conversation could get me into trouble. Listen to it in case you never hear from me again…  

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

My grief for the victims of the New Zealand mosque attack

‘We belong to Allah and to Allah we shall return’. Muslims around the world, including me, are now reciting the verse from the Quran that Muslims say on hearing of the death of a fellow believer. Taking in news of the murder of 49 worshippers at a mosque in sleepy, safe New Zealand at the hands of a white supremacist, this verse came to my lips again and again. I felt the same grief when I watched the attacks on 9/11 unfolding. In the days afterwards, I also struggled with the reaction of others in Riyadh, where I was living at the time, and their shameful sense of schadenfreude. This was hard to deal with

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Oxford win

The annual Varsity Match between Oxford and Cambridge ended in a surprisingly narrow victory for the dark blues. Their team was led by the former women’s world champion Hou Yifan from China, and the rating difference on virtually every board was massively in favour of Oxford. Cambridge put up a stout fight and it was only a series of misjudgments by Cambridge board six, Peter Finn, in the tense last game to finish, which converted a drawn match (or even a win for Cambridge) into a loss. This was one of those times when defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory.   Oxford 4½ Cambridge 3½   1 Hou

Raymond Keene

no. 545

White to play. This is from Finn-Abbas, Varsity Match 2019. A strategic puzzle rather than a tactical one. White has three ways to recapture on e4. Only one gives him the advantage. Which is the best move? Answers via email to victoria@spectator.-co.uk by Tuesday 19 March. 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 Qxe8+ Last week’s winner Oliver McEvoy, Elstree, Herts

Peter Jones

The curse of long life

A research professor has pointed out that lengthening human lifespan threatens to turn us into living zombies unless we can cure dementia. That would have come as no revelation to the ancients. They were well aware of the cognitive decline that set in at old age: but who did not want to be old? This provided an easy theme for the Roman satirist Juvenal. In his tenth satire (c. ad 120), known as ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ after Samuel Johnson’s imitation (1749), he mocked the false hopes raised by (among other things) a long life. The physical consequences were bad enough: wrinkled, baggy face, trembling limbs and voice, bald

Taki

High life | 14 March 2019

Gstaad   As Emperor Maximilian told his convulsed-by-tears servants as he was about to be executed by the Mexicans: ‘Who knew?’ Last week the owner of the Palace hotel in Gstaad rang me and asked me to join him for a drink with Akira Kitade, a Japanese author best known for Visas of Life and the Epic Journey about how the Jewish Sugihara survivors reached Japan and safety. Like most of his countrymen and women, Mr Kitade was extremely polite and shyly asked me to tell him all I knew about Nissim Segaloff, born between Bulgaria and Serbia before the turn of the last century and a survivor of the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 March 2019

Does the BBC suppose that it will convert the public to a belief in equality if it does not, in its heart, believe in it itself? Unlike the genial guidance of wartime propaganda, this current stuff feels like snobbish contempt. Of course no one forces me to watch state television, and apart from snooker, darts, football or horse racing, I don’t. But the other day, I took a tray into the room where my mother sits slumped at an angle and the telly was on, and it was showing the terrier judging at Crufts. Crufts! Terriers! Wondering how this culturally questionable event has escaped the gimlet-eyed ideologues’ red pencil, I

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 March 2019

My mother is a classy lady. I have always known this, but it still affected me in a way I can’t quite describe to see that her handbags have bags. I was helping to move the folks into their new home when I discovered this rather wonderful fact about my mother. Praise be, by the way. HS2 finally played along and the sale went through. We packed up the house in which my parents have lived for 50 years and on the morning of the move the builder boyfriend and I took the spaniels for our last ever walk in the fields at the back of my childhood home. The

Robin Oakley

The turf | 14 March 2019

Encountering a generous-hearted bookmaker is normally as rare an occurrence as finding a picture of the Duchess of Sussex without her hand on the Markle pregnancy bump. All credit, then, to Coral and Betfair and one or two others for their behaviour last Saturday. After a thrillingly close finish to the EBF Matchbook VIP Novices’ handicap hurdle at Sandown Park, the topweight One For Rosie, ridden by Sam Twiston-Davies, was declared the winner over the public-address system. Since I had backed him at 12–1, a certain amount of undignified jumping up and down ensued over which my racing companion was remarkably forbearing. But as I went to buy him a

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 14 March 2019

James Vogl excelled at poker and backgammon and thought, like many of us, that when he took up bridge about a dozen years ago, it wouldn’t be long before he excelled at that too. Always interested in the theoretical side of the game, he took as a mentor an American professional, Ron Von der Porten, known as VDP. Ron played rubber bridge in the low-stake game and regularly took the punters to the cleaners, pointing out all their mistakes along the way. They loved it! A few years after James started, VDP moved to Las Vegas but they continued practice sessions online. One day James called him and asked him

Toby Young Toby Young

Angry women who lead charmed lives

Scarcely a week passes without a privately educated young woman with a successful career in journalism publishing a book about how ‘oppressed’ women are. Names that spring to mind are Laurie Penny (Brighton College), Zoe Williams (Godolphin and Latymer), Laura Bates (King’s College), Afua Hirsch (Wimbledon High School) and Grace Blakeley (Lord Wandsworth College). Indeed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in order to qualify as an ‘intersectional feminist’ and present yourself as a victim of ‘systemic inequality’ you need to be a member of the ruling class. One of the distinguishing characteristics of ‘social justice’ activists is that they tend to be rich, high-achieving young women who have been

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 14 March 2019

Q. When my mother was widowed ten years ago she decided to take in lodgers to pay the gardener’s bills and other outgoings of the large family house she had lived in for nearly 40 years. This was a great success, not least because it provided company at what was initially a very difficult time. My mother is charming, and some of these lodgers became rather attached to her. Now her financial situation has changed and she no longer takes lodgers but many of the former incumbents like to keep in regular contact and are in the habit of turning up unannounced, often with large families in tow. I suppose

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 14 March 2019

Home The government was defeated by 149 votes — 391 to 242 — on the EU withdrawal agreement presented by Theresa May, the Prime Minister. In a croaking voice she announced a free vote on leaving without a deal. Mrs May had come back from Strasbourg with two documents: a ‘joint instrument’, or interpretive tool agreed by Britain and the EU on the effect of the Irish backstop, and a 365-word ‘unilateral declaration’ by Britain, not agreed by the EU, asserting the right to take the persistence of the backstop to arbitration. The joint instrument said that the EU shared the UK’s aspirations for ‘alternative arrangements’ concerning the Irish border

Dot Wordsworth

Coloured

‘The term coloured, is an outdated, offensive and revealing choice of words,’ tweeted Diane Abbott last week in response to Amber Rudd having remarked on the radio with regard to verbal abuse: ‘And it’s worst of all if you’re a coloured woman. I know that Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of abuse, and I think that’s something we need to continue to call out.’ Rudd rapidly apologised: ‘Mortified at my clumsy language and sorry to Diane Abbott.’ It is funny to think that if Rudd had said woman of colour she’d have been immune to criticism. But she tripped over a shibboleth. The Oxford English Dictionary abides by strict neutrality

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 14 March 2019

I had forgotten, until I checked this week, that Mrs May timed the general election of June 2017 in order to have a mandate for the Brexit negotiations. They began ten days after the nation voted. She conveyed no sense, at the time, of how the election result had changed her situation. In her beginning is her end. Political leadership requires imagination. She has never displayed any. Why, for example, did she fly to Strasbourg on Monday night? She made the same mistake in December 2017 when she took a dawn flight to Brussels after making a hash of the Irish problem. The point of dramatically winging your way out of the

George Osborne

Diary – 14 March 2019

The best thing about the Evening Standard going to print at lunchtime is that we can be first to a story. The worst thing is that we can get that story wrong. On Monday, our splash headline about the Prime Minister and her Brexit deal was ‘Outnumbered. Outflanked. Out of time’. I thought we’d called it right. On Tuesday, I woke up to the headlines ‘May claims victory’ and wondered. Then Geoffrey Cox spoke and sank her premiership. Later that day he told the Commons it was highly unlikely David Cameron would ever have made him his attorney general. Geoffrey, you’re right. As this is The Spectator, we should talk

Mr Magoo

2399: Lines of work

Eight unclued entries (two of two words, one hyphened) form a folk rhyme used as the basis for the first lines of a work whose title is the other unclued entry (hyphened). Its author (5 cells) must be highlighted. Elsewhere, ignore two or three apostrophes and an accent.   Across 1    Needing complex course, my job’s on the line  (12, hyphened) 10    Seaman jailed by extremely benign officer (4) 12    Suspect fresh angle will show solar phenomenon (10, two words) 14    Quadruped found in centre of cowboy’s rope (3) 15    More than one ancient stole prayer books (8) 17    Is consecrating old priest leaving marks? (5) 19    Pirate chief in