Society

Monday

Emily Ferris

Why Vladimir Putin may have Belarus in his sights 

What will Vladimir Putin do next? Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, discussions about Russia in the west have been preoccupied by two questions: which other countries does Russia have territorial ambitions in? And what is Putin’s plan for when his presidential term expires in 2024? The answer to both of these questions could lie in an often overlooked country: Belarus When Putin’s presidency officially ends, the Russian constitution prevents him from seeking another term in office. Putin could, of course, change the rulebook. He did this before by switching roles with prime minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2011. But a repeat of this looks unlikely: the head of Russia’s Constitutional Court has strongly

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why the odds are stacked against plans to tackle domestic abuse

The government is publishing its draft domestic abuse bill today, over a year and a half after it announced plans to do so in the Queen’s Speech. Like so many pieces of domestic policy, this legislation has suffered greatly from the lack of government bandwidth for anything else other than Brexit, and it has been delayed repeatedly.  The bill itself is something campaigners are very keen on: it will include the first ever statutory definition of domestic abuse, set up a domestic abuse commissioner, and prevent alleged perpetrators of abuse from being able to cross-examine victims in the courts. The first and last changes show that ministers understand what domestic

Sunday

Mark Lehain

How the education establishment got it wrong on cuts

One of the most successful political campaigns of recent years has been on school-funding, with various teaching unions driving home the message that state schools are desperately under-funded. This week, though, their credibility suffered a serious blow. Responding to a well-publicised campaign run by the National Education Union (a merger of the NUT and ATL unions), the UK Statistics Authority said that it was unable to confirm the numbers behind the campaign “as the underlying data are not publicly available and the methodology is not wholly clear.” Rather awkward for the NEU itself, but also the educational establishment which had taken on their message pretty wholeheartedly. So where did it all go wrong? As

Soutiam Goodarzi

Teenagers like me will never forgive Dominic Grieve’s generation if they scupper Brexit

One of the most tiresome tropes of the anti-Brexit backlash is the well-trodden line that older voters have somehow ‘stolen the future’ of the country’s youth. And that all of us are sitting at home, angry that our “future” is being stolen. I see it differently. Dominic Grieve’s generation may see the borders of the Europe Union as the end of their own horizons, but a good many members of my generation have never understood this Little Europe mentality. We think global, and no one ever speaks for those of us who see Brexit as part of going global. When David Cameron called the referendum, I was 13 years old

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: The Parable of the Faithful Servant as P.G. Wodehouse would have written it

The call to supply a parable rewritten in the style of a well-known author drew a lively and entertaining entry. 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, David Silverman, W.H. Thomas, Philip Machin, Hamish Wilson, David Mackie, Jan Snook and Hannah Burden-Teh.

Friday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: does parliament have a plan for Brexit?

Over the next couple of weeks, parliament gears up for another meaningful vote. But can Theresa May win around enough MPs – 116 – to pass the Withdrawal Agreement the second time around? To do so, she may well have to soften her Brexit vision into something that looks more like Norway. But if that’s still not enough, then unless Article 50 is revoked or extended, we are surely left with a no-deal Brexit. None of these options look likely for a variety of reasons, but as James Forsyth writes in this week’s cover piece, ‘by the evening of 29 March, one of three seemingly impossible things must happen.’ So,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Does Lancet want to hand control of our diets to the state?

Interested in a case study of all rational and proportional thought going out the window? No, I’m not talking about Brexit – I’m talking about the ‘EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health’ which – in an ironic attempt to lay out prescriptions for a better world – published a report yesterday calling for intervention, force, rationing, and the abolition of consumer choice to achieve its ends. This latest dietary decree only allows seven grams of pork per day (equivalent to a half-rasher of bacon, or one-tenth of a sausage), twenty-nine grams of chicken each day (roughly one and a half nuggets), one quarter of a baked potato, and only one and

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Knockout

The 2018 UK Knockout, won by Gawain Jones, ahead of Luke McShane (silver) and Michael Adams (bronze), was played in conjunction with the rather unsatisfactory finale of last year’s Grand Tour. The latter ended in victory for the US grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who prevailed over Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the final. Sadly there was a dearth of decisive games. In contrast, the UK Knockout was packed with excitement. A fine example was this win by Gawain Jones, in the enterprising style of Mikhail Tal.   Jones-Howell: UK Knockout, London 2018; Giuoco Piano   1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bc4 Bc5 4 0-0 Nf6 5 d3 d6 6 c3 a5 7

Raymond Keene

no. 537

White to play. This position is from Jones-McShane, UK Knockout, London 2018. White’s next move was the start of a clever geometrical combination that wrecked the black position. What did he play? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 22 January 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 … Rd2 Last week’s winner Tim Leeney, Hartfield, East Sussex

Peter Jones

In the people’s interests

The Transport Secretary Chris Grayling may be quite right (not words one often reads) to warn that failure to deliver Brexit may end the culture of a broadly moderate politics in the UK and usher in an era of ugly extremism. The Roman republic was destroyed by a similar crisis. In 137 bc, it became clear to Tiberius Gracchus — a grandson of the great Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal in 202 bc — that the men who had fought Rome’s overseas wars ‘are called masters of the world but have not a patch of earth to call their own’. So in 133 bc this aristocrat stood for office as

The Spectator

Letters | 17 January 2019

The straight dope Sir: Much of the media and a large part of the political class in Britain seem to have fallen completely for the propaganda of one of the biggest greed lobbies in the world, the billionaire-backed campaign for cannabis legalisation. Articles such as the one by Robert Jackman (‘Homegrown industry’, 12 January) suggest that marijuana is a benign drug, and make vague claims for its supposed medical benefits. Yet across the world, as Alex Berenson’s new book on the subject, Tell Your Children, shows, worrying developments are correlated with this poorly researched, expensively hyped and brilliantly spun adventure. In Finland, Denmark and the US, recorded instances of mental

Taki

High life | 17 January 2019

Gstaad   Do any of you know what cisgender is? I just found out. Cisgender is a term that describes someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Amazing, isn’t it, that we now need a pleonasm for saying that someone’s a man or a woman? I sometimes envy my low life colleague Jeremy when I read about his conversations with normal people while living inside a French cave. I can no longer converse with anyone who is ‘with it’ — you know the type, the ones who think you’re a Paleolithic hunter gatherer if you say you’re hungry, what with there being so many famine

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 17 January 2019

We drove down from the hills to visit friends of friends with a house by the sea and on the journey I experienced all the usual mixed feelings of a trip to the coast. On departure: the not unsnobbish excitement at the prospect of a day out on the glamorous French Riviera. On arrival: the disenchantment with the traffic queuing in the cramped streets, the hideous, jerry-built apartment blocks, the boulder beaches, the dog shit, the prevailing chill of vulgar, insentient wealth. Always the disenchantment brings to mind that passage in Cyril Connolly’s only novel, The Rock Pool (1936), which is set on the Côte d’Azur. The central character is

Melissa Kite

Real life | 17 January 2019

Splitting the atom is nothing compared to figuring out how to get hold of your farrier. Why is the farrier more capricious than a rock star? Why does he hardly ever turn up on the day, much less time, he says he is coming? Why does he not keep a diary? Why does he never return calls? Why does he find it impossible to reply to a text, claiming all manner of bizarre contingencies including that his texts get automatically sent to his iPad, which he only checks at night? And anyway his iPad isn’t working so he didn’t see my 15 messages begging him to come and telling him

Robin Oakley

The turf | 17 January 2019

‘Deer-stalking would be a very fine sport,’ W.S. Gilbert once observed, ‘if the deer had guns too.’ We who love jump racing have to acknowledge that there are plenty of folk out there who feel that horses, too, are helpless victims with no alternative but to hurl themselves at obstacles to profit heartless owners, trainers and riders. Trying to change the minds of such critics is probably akin to urging Jacob Rees-Mogg to stand a round for the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker, but I just wish that some of racing’s critics could have been in the winners’ enclosure at Kempton last Saturday. Nobody watching Amy Murphy’s bold-jumping Mercian Prince soar over

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 17 January 2019

2018 ended on a very sweet note for my team. We played the London Year End one-day teams tournament — and won! Highly enjoyable and highly satisfying. The perfect warm-up for the first weekend of the Camrose Trophy in Mold, North Wales, where I got my second England cap playing against the home countries. We played five 32-board matches and ended in second place, which is a reasonable position for the second weekend in March.   I played with my regular partner, Artur Malinowski, who never fails to dazzle at least once a session with his astonishing card-reading skills. Take a look at this slam.   My 3♠ bid showed

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 January 2019

Home Brexit threw politics into unpredictable chaos. The government was defeated by an unparalleled majority of 230 — 432 to 202 — on the withdrawal agreement it had negotiated with the EU. The result was greeted by cheers from demonstrators outside the House, both those in favour and those against Brexit. Labour tabled a motion of no confidence for the following day. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said in the House after the vote: ‘The House has spoken and this government will listen.’ She said she would talk to senior parliamentarians and that the government would return to the House on Monday with proposals. This arrangement was in line with

Toby Young Toby Young

I see no signs of civilisation crumbling

There’s a scene in Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s masterpiece about the collapse of western civilisation, in which a particularly sadistic boy named Roger starts to throw stones at a weaker, younger lad called Henry. Yet when he tries to hurt the boy, he finds he cannot do it. ‘Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them,’ writes Golding. ‘Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life.’ Golding attributes this six-yard forcefield to civilisation. It’s the legacy of the various authorities Roger has been conditioned

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 January 2019

Q. I note that (Dear Mary, 12 January) you advised your correspondent, resentful of Christmas expenditure, to offer instead ‘mutual experience gifts such as lunches and massages’. I am in my seventh decade and realised this year that, like most friends and family, I too have reached ‘peak stuff’. I propose that next year I will invite people to give me the name of their favourite charity and then make a donation to that charity. Surely this would be a better idea? — A.C., London W8 A. In the past this might have worked well, but sadly the idea is now tainted by excessive virtue-signalling on social media, with people

Dot Wordsworth

Colleagues

The parliamentary press gallery has in the past given a pair of silver shoe buckles to the Speaker as a token of respect, since his shoes were all they could see of him from their perch above his chair. They won’t be giving buckles to John Bercow, for he has done away with most of his official attire. He wears a gown like a teacher in the Beano and sports a variety of what might be categorised as snazzy ties. I was struck recently by hearing him refer to MPs collectively as ‘colleagues’. I can’t remember previous Speakers doing so. ‘I will come to other colleagues, if that is what