Society

Thursday

18 Oct 2018

Mr Magoo

2381: Step changes

1 Across and 45 Across form a phrase, and the other unclued entries form a word ladder linking them, by changing one letter at a time, always forming real words. Elsewhere, ignore an accent. Across 11 Weary junkie’s eaten mollusc (10) 13 Everything taken into account, at last, endlessly (5, two words) 14 Holiday son’s taken from country in empty spaces (5) 15 Everybody in work makes useful by-product (7, two words) 17 Cheat I rumbled beginning to look honest (7) 19 Colonnade to put in square area (4) 22 Stones swapping vocal parts – they make records fast (6) 24 Shrinking, like clothes after dry-cleaning? (9) 25 Take

Michael Heath

The Battle for Britain – 18 October 2018

The Spectator

to 2378: Boundary

LIMES (22), a term for a boundary of the ROMAN EMPIRE (7 30), is a DEFINITION (19) of five items reading clockwise in the perimeter. First prize Geoff Telfer, Shipley, W. Yorks Runners-up R.B. Briercliffe, Onchan, Isle of Man; John Light, Applestone, Surrey

Martin Vander Weyer

From Faangs to Baangs – why it makes sense to go for gold

The current stock-market correction has been steaming down the track since August and I claim no wisdom for having predicted it: the FTSE100 dipped below 7,000 at the start of the week, having shed all of the 10 per cent it had gained since it began to surge in April. Weaker UK growth forecasts from the EY Item Club, reflecting the impact of the Brexit impasse on business and consumer confidence, are just one factor in the autumnal mood. But let’s cheer ourselves up with a round of applause for our veteran investor Robin Andrews, whose ‘Faangs to Banngs’ trading idea I offered you on 1 September. His proposition was

Brendan O’Neill

Michael Moore couldn’t be more wrong about Brexit

How unfortunate that the person who once wrote a book called Stupid White Men now sounds an awful lot like a stupid white man. Yes, it’s Michael Moore, the dishevelled American filmmaker, who wasn’t in Britain for five minutes before he was making the most basic of factual errors. ‘You can’t leave Europe!’, he told the British people via an interview with Channel 4 News. Someone buy this bozo a dictionary. We aren’t leaving Europe, Michael — we’re leaving the EU. Moore is one of those leftists who has been scratching their chins for years over the failure of ordinary people to revolt against their uncaring, neoliberal overlords and yet when Brits did

Melanie McDonagh

How was the ‘pimping out’ of an autistic girl allowed to happen?

It is very hard to read the Times’s lead story today about the alleged sexual exploitation of a young autistic woman with the consent of her carers, a court and the local council. Perhaps I have an excess of sensibility, but it made me feel ill. The case, if accurately reported, strikes me as being in the Rochdale/Rotherham league of sexual abuse, except that instead of the female victim concerned being a young girl, she is autistic, 23, with severe learning difficulties and an IQ of 52. The story is as follows: ‘A young autistic woman was allowed to have sex with numerous men because her carers were said to

Jonathan Ray

Alcohol Consumption

Broadcaster Adrian Chiles has got us all clutching our livers in alarm (if we can find them: Chiles thought his was in his back) thanks to his confessional BBC documentary Drinkers Like Me, which details his longstanding reliance on alcohol. Chiles admits candidly that he drinks anything up to 100 units of alcohol a week, whereas the recommended level in the UK for both men and women is 14, a unit being 8g of pure alcohol, that’s to say a shot of whisky, a third of a pint of beer or half a 175ml glass of red wine. Just for your info – make of it what you will –

James Kirkup

Even our MPs are afraid of the transgender mob

What are MPs thinking? It’s easy to assume, in the age of Twitter, that we know more about the positions our politicians take than ever before: quite a few of them, after all, spend rather too much time online telling us what they think about stuff. That has changed political journalism, but not always to the improvement of public understanding of politics. Journalism-by-Twitter, after all, runs the risk of missing the thoughts and opinions that MPs don’t put online. One of the issues that most MPs don’t tweet about is trangenderism and the laws and rules around gender. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I write so much about those

Brendan O’Neill

The problem with hate crime

It always amazes me that people think it is normal and acceptable to have hate-crime legislation. To have laws which allow for the harsher punishment of people who entertain prejudiced thoughts while committing an offence. To have it written into the actual statute books that the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates Buddhism can be punished more severely than the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates that individual Buddhist for some reason. When are we going to twig that this represents the punishment of thought, of ideology, of belief (warped belief, but still)? I don’t like that Britain has become a country in which people, especially

Gavin Mortimer

France is fracturing but Macron remains in denial

As chalices go, few are as poisoned as the one Emmanuel Macron has just handed Christophe Castaner. Minister of the interior is one of the most challenging posts in government. The former Socialist MP has cultivated an image over the years of a political tough guy, in contrast to his predecessor, the diminutive Gérard Collomb. But what passes for tough in the National Assembly won’t intimidate the tough guys in France’s inner cities. During his eighteen months in the post, Collomb was a diligent minister, but in the end the 71-year-old was worn down by the enormity of his task. He parted with a message that should cause his successor

Gavin Mortimer

Grosse negligence

A decade ago a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat took the Anglophone world by storm. It was a bestseller in Britain and America because, as the blurb explained, the French author ‘unlocks the simple secrets’ of why her people aren’t fat. So here is my sequel: Why French Kids Don’t Get Fat. Admittedly, there are a few who look like they know their way to the boulangerie, but in general most are slim, healthy and fit. The stats back me up. Last year, the French ministry of health reported that obesity levels among nine- and ten-year-olds had fallen to just 3.6 per cent. In Britain, an official report

Roger Alton

Injury time

Eddie Jones’s sorrows as England’s rugby coach certainly keep coming in big battalions. Now the giant battered No 8 Billy Vunipola is out of the autumn internationals, and maybe longer. His brother Mako is hurt too, along with Sam Simmonds, Jamie George, former skipper Chris Robshaw, Joe Marler (retired) as well as Uncle Tom Cobley, the noted back row forager. They won’t go away, though, these injuries. How do you get people to want to excel at a game not where you ‘might’ get injured but ‘will’ get injured, probably badly? Rugby at school level is an excellent game. The best players representing lst XVs in the Schools Cup are

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 20 October

We’re with Yapp Bros this week and so popular with readers is the Domaine Gaujal, Picpoul de Pinet (1) that we’ve offered three previous vintages of it before, selling out every time. I’m delighted, then, to waft the 2017 under your beaks, for it’s another cracker. As you know, Picpoul is the grape (known locally as ‘lip-stinger’) and Pinet is the place, one of just six communes on the shores of Languedoc-Roussillon’s Bassin de Thau that makes this deliciously invigorating wine. Ludovic Gaujal is an 11th-generation vigneron and has conjured up a wine full of citrus freshness, herbs and nuts and with a long, satisfying, slightly savoury finish. £10.75 down

Mark Mason

Davenports Magic

It’s a very fitting place for a magic shop. Hidden away in the maze of pedestrian tunnels that lead from Covent Garden to Charing Cross station, Davenports certainly takes some finding. But that’s to the good — a complete absence of passing trade means they no longer have to stock stink bombs and novelties, as they did in their old location opposite the British Museum. These days Davenports concentrate solely on the proper stuff. The shelves boast Svengali decks and thumb tips, gimmicks like the Raven (it’s a beauty), and instructional DVDs and books by everyone from David Devant to Roy Walton. If those names are familiar to you, you’re

Damian Thompson

The steady ship

Every Monday and Thursday afternoon when I was growing up, a drum roll would sound throughout suburban Britain. ‘Damian? Blue Peter!’ my mother would call out, in a voice that made it clear that my presence was required in front of the television. Blue Peter — 60 years old this week — was top of the very short list of programmes of which my parents approved. We lived in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. You can’t beat that for a Blue Peter-ish address. Our house was mock Tudor; my father worked for the Prudential. My younger sister and I, pupils at modest private day schools, slotted perfectly into the middle-middle-class

Mark Palmer

Durban Notebook

No one likes uncertainty and in Britain we’ve got more than our fair share. But spare a thought for South Africa, where the uncertainty is in danger of morphing into national paralysis. ‘What are your plans for the future?’ I ask a friend who lives near Durban. ‘We have no plans. We might be packing up next year and heading out.’ A lot rests on next year. The general election appears to be set for May and with every day the pressure on President Cyril Ramaphosa increases. The 65-year-old millionaire is stuck between the rock of his more militant ANC supporters and the hard place of those impatient for root-and-branch

Rod Liddle

Good news – now everyone can be a victim

We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to put this right a little by drawing your attention to last week’s 2018 Maste rs Track Cycling World Championship — in particular the sprint category for 35- to 44-year-old women. The gold medal was won, in Herculean style, by the Canadian Rachel McKinnon. Her appearance on the podium provoked some discussion. It wasn’t simply that Rachel was quite obviously a man, but that she hadn’t even the grace to disguise herself very much. Usually when men transition, they put a bit of effort into it — maybe some lippy, a

Cosmo Landesman

Virtuous vice

It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender, feminism and sexual exploitation — and still gets to walk on the wild side. Political principles tend to get in the way of politically incorrect passions. You like to watch porn, but as a good feminist man you know that porn exploits women. You like to take cocaine, but it exploits poor Latin American farmers and enriches corrupt drug cartels. And maybe you have a secret passion for prostitutes, but you hate the idea that you’re paying for sex with some underage Albanian who’s been trafficked for your gratification. No

Martin Vander Weyer

Why I’m boycotting ‘Davos in the Desert’

James Delingpole

Hell hath no fury like an irate teenage girl

Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas — the annual festival of free speech staged at London’s Barbican by Claire Fox. It’s a wonderful event, where ex-revolutionary communists like Claire rub shoulders with Thatcher-ite radicals like me and we’re reminded how much we have in common. I feel right at home among the bright, engaged, friendly crowds and when I speak I generally get a warm reception. But there are always exceptions, aren’t there? On this occasion the trouble came from a bloc of teenage girls in the audience for my panel. Judging by their accents and dress