Society

Thursday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The word ‘woman’ is under attack

A confession: when I set off on my journey down the rabbit hole of gender issues, I was a bit sceptical and possibly even dismissive of some of the fears raised by some of the more animated feminist participants in the debate. When I heard women talking about “erasure” and the removal of women as a distinct category of people from public conversation and policy, I had my doubts. I mean, the concept of “woman” is pretty robust, isn’t it? Just because a number of male-born people start describing themselves as “women”, the fundamental concept of “woman” will surely remain as the vast majority of people understand it to mean:

Bruce Anderson

Disloyal toast

Drink and democracy have one important point in common: an ambivalent relationship with discord. They can mitigate it. They can also exacerbate it. Events at last week’s Tory conference led me to ruminate on that theme, as a little good wine did indeed mitigate political depression: these bottles I have stored against my ruin. In a modern society, by giving legitimacy to governments, democracy can underpin political authority. But that depends on two related outcomes. The government must be worthy of authority, and those who lose an election must accept the result. By transforming pluralities into sizeable majorities, the British voting system has encouraged all that. 1945, Wilson’s first governments,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why better beats bigger

A few weeks ago I flew to Sydney to speak at a conference. The first leg was on the new Qantas route non-stop from London to Perth, the UK’s longest flight. Two million people live in Perth, of whom 250,000 were born in the UK, so the route makes sense. But I was dreading the length of the flight. Granted, I wasn’t travelling at the back of the plane, but I was surprised to find the 16-hour flight little worse than an eight- or ten-hour one. For one, there is the unexpected bonus that you can fall asleep whenever you like. On shorter flights, if you miss a narrow window-of-nod

Mark Forsyth

Beware!!!

‘The trade deal USMCA has received fantastic reviews. It will go down as one of the best ever made, and it will also benefit Mexico and Canada!’ These are the words of Donald Trump, not tweeted, not spoken, but written down on the headed notepaper of the White House and finished off with an exclamation mark (or exclamation point, as he would call it, being of the American persuasion). The punctuation is rather mysterious and I think it has one of four possible meanings. First, I should probably say what an exclamation mark is. The question is more vexed than you think. Most authorities on English style despise exclamation marks.

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 13 October

Everyone loves the wines of Maison M. Chapoutier, one of the great names of the Rhône Valley. The company was founded in Tain-l’Hermitage in 1808 and has passed from father to son ever since, with Michel Chapoutier the current boss. The company makes excellent wine in almost every appellation in the Rhône and — Michel, being a proud lefty keen to ensure that the good things in life are accessible to all — Chapoutier’s wines are always among the most keenly priced in the region. Michel is also dynamic, forward-thinking, obsessive, outspoken, mercurial, innovative, single-minded, easily bored and just a little bonkers. Some years ago I spent a few days

Henry Jeffreys

Home bars

When I mention to people that I have written a book about home bars, the most common response is, ‘my parents/grandparents/swinging uncle used to have one of those globe cocktail cabinets’. The other thing they mention is Only Fools and Horses. For years, having a bar in your home was seen as the height of bad taste. It’s a far cry from the home bar’s 1950s heyday. After the second world war, people were spending more time at home, but still wanted to lead the cocktail lifestyle. It was the suburban American dream: after a hard day’s work, drive home in your shiny new Chevrolet, put Frank Sinatra’s Songs for

Lucy Vickery

Favouritism

In Competition No. 3069 you were invited to provide a spoof version of the song ‘My Favourite Things’ for the constituency/demographic of your choice. I decided to set this comp after stumbling across the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic recast as it might have been sung by an elderly Julie Andrews (‘Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,/ Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings…’).   It seemed to go down well, drawing an entry that ranged far and wide, from Basil Ransome-Davies’s fetishists (‘Dildoes and butt plugs that tirelessly tingle,/ Electrical probes and Ben Wa balls that jingle…’) to Max Gutmann’s Fox News viewers (‘Gawking at lovely harassable females,/

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is World Mental Health Day just tokenist rubbish?

What is the point of a Minister for Suicide Prevention? That Jackie Doyle-Price is taking on the role as part of her portfolio as a health minister is one of the big government announcements on World Mental Health Day, but it’s tempting to ask why on earth Theresa May is making such appointments. Some might wonder whether government can really stop suicides, while others might question the difference that giving a minister an additional job title will really make. It’s the sort of question that you might reasonably ask about World Mental Health Day itself, as it happens. A fair number of people who have mental illnesses find the rather

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theresa May reveals her plan to bring Chequers back from the dead

Golden sunshine streamed across Westminster at noon. And Jeremy Corbyn wiped away the cheer as soon as he stood up at PMQs. Performing his sad-sack routine, he grouched his way through six questions about ‘painful austerity’. Theresa May wants Scrooge replaced by Lady Bountiful in the corridors of Whitehall. But it hasn’t happened, grumbled the Labour leader. Crime, poverty and mental illness are soaring. May hit back with a barrage of statistics. Britain’s lucky citizenry is awash with cash, she said. Billions here, billions there. More for cops, teachers, hospitals, mental health. The figures gushed like an exploded water-main. ‘200 billion pounds’, she flannelled vaguely, had been made available ‘between

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Face it ladies, this is a womxn’s world now

A confession: when I set off on my journey down the rabbit hole of gender issues, I was a bit sceptical and possibly even dismissive of some of the fears raised by some of the more animated feminist participants in the debate. When I heard women talking about “erasure” and the removal of women as a distinct category of people from public conversation and policy, I had my doubts.  I mean, the concept of “woman” is pretty robust, isn’t it? Just because a number of male-born people start describing themselves as “women”, the fundamental concept of “woman” will surely remain as the vast majority of people understand it to mean:

Andrew Roberts

Scott Kelly was foolish to apologise for quoting Winston Churchill

This week, an astronaut called Scott Kelly was quoting Churchill and his great line, ‘in victory, magnanimity’. He got massively trolled by the anti-Churchill cyber warriors who denounced him for all sorts of things. One of the things for which he was attacked, of course, was the Bengal famine, which they say he caused. In October 1942, Bengal was hit by a massive, terrible cyclone which destroyed the rice crop, which the Bengalis living in that area entirely depended upon. The road and rail links that had hitherto brought food in were also destroyed. In the past, rice from Thailand and Malaya and Burma was brought in to deal with

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The audacity of Nicola Sturgeon’s hope | 9 October 2018

Patience. Pragmatism. Perseverance. Nationalist leaders do not, as a general rule, use such terms to inspire their troops. Not, at any rate, if they think the day of national emancipation is imminent. Yet these were precisely the terms in which Nicola Sturgeon spoke to her party’s conference in Glasgow this week.  That reflects one of the paradoxes of our time. Politically-speaking it is possible to march closer to independence without actually getting closer to it. Or, to put it another way, the road to independence is shorter now but also littered with more, and larger, obstacles than was the case as recently as 2014. This is the conundrum in which

Rockpool Investments

Guide to private business investment

Capital is at risk.  There is no guarantee of any return.  Private company investments are illiquid, which means you may not be able to get your money back when you want to.   SPONSORED BY Professional investors worldwide have been selling UK stocks at the fastest rate since May 2016, as they look to rebalance their books ahead of the impending Brexit deal — or lack thereof. This rebalancing can clearly be seen in recent research from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which revealed that 28 per cent of fund managers hold less than the market weighting of UK stocks in their portfolios. One potential avenue for growth is investing

Monday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Good news: we now have until 2030 to save the earth

Phew! The dangers of global warming are receding. Admittedly that is not how most news sources are reporting the publication of the latest IPCC report this morning. But it is the logical conclusion of reading coverage of the issue over the past decade. According to today’s IPCC report we now have 12 years to avert climate catastrophe. That might not sound long, but it means we are a good deal further away from doom that we were in 2007, when the WWF said we had five years to save the world. The doomsday clock hadn’t moved in 2011 when the International Energy Agency warned us that we had five years

Sunday

Peter Mckay

What Michael Gove has in common with Jacob Rees-Mogg

A recent news report says Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s childhood has been scrutinised by colleagues ‘for clues to understanding this most paradoxical of politicians — the popular, ultra-courteous free-thinker who, by knifing Boris Johnson in the 2016 Tory leadership election, became a byword for treachery’. Gove was adopted as a baby and has never sought to meet his birth parents. He speaks fondly of the Aberdeen couple who adopted him. While the article concerned was generally favourable to Gove, the line about colleagues scrutinising his childhood jarred. It seemed to suggest childhood adoption might have inclined him to later-in-life treachery, as if that was the sad result of giving a

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: back-to-front sonnets

The latest competition asked for a sonnet in reverse, modelled on Rupert Brooke’s ‘Sonnet Reversed’, which turns upside-down both the form — it begins on the rhyming couplet — and the Petrarchan concept of idealised love, starting on a romantic high but ending in prosaic banality. This challenge produced a delightfully varied and engaging entry. Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies, Jennifer Pearson, David Shields, George Simmers and Philip Roe. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each. Max Ross Art soared to heights as high as man could go When David rose from Michelangelo. A fractured piece of marble, an idea, And genius fingers made the marble live.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Fan Bingbing and the tyranny of Twitter

My first reaction when I read Fan Bingbing’s apology for tax evasion was to laugh. Who wouldn’t? It was so wonderfully OTT in that unmistakably communist way. ‘I have failed my nurturing country,’ declared China’s highest-earning actress, who resurfaced this week after disappearing from sight over the summer. ‘I have failed society’s trust, and I have failed the love of my fans.’ She talked of having ‘experienced pain and torture like never before’ (a figure of speech, one hopes) but ultimately she had come through her ordeal a better person, thanks to ‘the good policies of the [Communist] party and the state’. Bingbing, who has agreed to pay £100m in

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Role model

World champion Magnus Carlsen is not competing in the Batumi Olympiad (of which more next week). Doubtless he is conserving his strength for his title struggle against Fabiano Caruana in London in November.   This lull gives me the opportunity to mention a new book about the great Emanuel Lasker, champion from 1894–1921, a role model of Carlsen’s. Lasker’s forte was to keep the ball in play through thick and thin in order to avoid draws. The same trait is evident in many of Carlsen’s victories, often achieved from risky situations. Notes to the following game are based on those by Zenón Franco in the forthcoming book Lasker: Move by

Raymond Keene

no. 526

White to play. This position is from Giron-Altaya, Batumi Olympiad 2018. Can you spot White’s classic winning combination? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 9 October 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 Qa6 Last week’s winner Barnaby Weiler, Berlin