Society

Thursday

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 4 August

Our Spectator Winemaker Lunches are extremely cheery affairs, held in the boardroom at 22 Old Queen Street. There are never more than 16 of us — a dozen or so readers plus the winemaker and your humble correspondent — and, during a cold, four-course Forman & Field lunch, we enjoy around six or seven different wines. Spittoons are scoffed at and consumption runs at an average and rather impressive one bottle per head, despite which I’m delighted to report that we’ve never run dry. We do sometimes resort to flicking the lights at meal’s end, though, just to remind readers they have homes to go to. The following six wines

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Bigots of the world, unite!

If Jews would get out of Israel and also stop drinking the blood of gentile children, perhaps the rest of the world would like them a little more. That seems to be the fairly broad view among the Hamas groupies on the white British left as well as throughout almost the entire Islamic world. But in particular within the left of the Labour party, which has imbibed this foul ideology for a long while (dating back to the Cold War). A member of the party’s National Executive Committee, Peter Willsman, has blamed Jewish supporters of Donald Trump for fabricating claims of anti-Semitism against Labour. Willsman then asked fellow members if

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Wealth vs freedom

H.L. Mencken once said that a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband. The anthropologist David Graeber takes a slightly different view. When I interviewed him about his wonderful book Bullshit Jobs, he explained that, rather like the Laffer curve, there is an optimal amount of wealth for anyone to have: if you have too little wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money. If, on the other hand, you have too much wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money. I’d always noticed a similar middle ground with cars. You want a car that’s nice enough not to fret about whether it

Bruce Anderson

Mindful drinking

When I was at school, some time before the last ice age, the final day of term was a quasi-holiday. There might be slide shows, and I remember my housemaster introducing me to Klee and Mondrian (I am still unconvinced about Mondrian). Today, it is all very different. I gather that once the exams are over, the brats are sent on trips or expeditions. The fear is that if they were confined to barracks, they would wreck the place. The Tory high command (if there is one) clearly needs to consult a cunning modern schoolmaster. In the final days of the last term, Conservative MPs came close to sabotage and

Robert Tombs

Holiday Notebook

Sharing a plate of oysters with a three-year-old: where could this be but France, where children are brought up not to be faddish. The fads are for adults. It’s a relief to be away from Cambridge, where summer is bad for the soul. I find myself getting constantly annoyed: with suicidal cyclists, psychopathic taxi drivers, imbecilic pedestrians and double-decker buses allowed to hurtle through narrow streets belching diesel fumes. And hundreds of thousands of tourists trooping gormlessly up and down King’s Parade with not much to do. Here in Biarritz, the streets are calm, the traffic is regulated and people do not shout at each other in the street —

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

What’s bad for slick estate agents is good for working Londoners

Those twice-weekly sales emails from Foxtons that the recent GDPR clean-up has failed to stop have lately been spattered with the words ‘recent price reduction’ in big red capitals. Hence no surprise that the glossy estate agent and bellwether of London residential property has just reported a first-half loss of £2.8 million, compared to £3.8 million profit in the first half of last year and reflecting a sharp drop in sales revenues. Chief executive Nic Budden says his marketplace ‘is undergoing a sustained period of very low activity levels’. Foxtons’ flotation in 2013 at an absurd valuation of £650 million was the strongest possible indicator of overheating house prices at

Michael Henderson

Forever stumped

‘There can be no summer in this land without cricket’, wrote Neville Cardus, whose rhapsodic vision of the game lies at the heart of its mythology. Hardly a week goes by without somebody borrowing a phrase or two from Cardus to emphasise what cricket means to England — or used to mean, for the modern landscape is very different. When England play their 1,000th Test match this week, against India at Edgbaston, it will be the only first-class cricket to be found anywhere in the kingdom. Between 28 June and 19 August, seven plump weeks at the height of summer, spectators have only one round of championship matches to enjoy,

Will Heaven

A tale of two abbeys

Twenty years ago, Douai, a monastic boarding school in West Berkshire, shocked parents with an announcement that it was ‘no longer viable’. Pupil numbers had fallen through the floor — below 200 — and the sums didn’t add up. So four centuries of history were brought to an end and the boys were sent packing. Now those in the know worry about two more prestigious institutions — Ampleforth, the so-called Catholic Eton in North Yorkshire, and Downside, its more modest Somerset relation. As a former pupil of the latter I’ve been hoping the rumours are unfounded. The school, like Ampleforth, is a remarkable place that produces nice, well-rounded boys and

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

No apology is ever enough for the digital mob

Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a marathon crawl on the belly like a reptile, who can flop onto the floor in a pose of the greatest prostration, and who can bend over the farthest, pants down, while begging to have large pieces of furniture shoved up the backside. Athletic displays of public remorse also constitute an increasingly popular spectator sport. The young American poet Anders Carlson–Wee was excited at first about getting ‘How-To’ published in a July issue of the Nation, a storied New Statesman-style weekly. The poetry I read in a year would fit on

Lucy Vickery

That’s chemistry

In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s system for classifying the chemical elements, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!’ Your entries were witty and well-turned, with many a nod to Tom Lehrer, whom I also had in mind when I set this challenge. Honourable mentions go to Frank McDonald’s smart acrostic, as well as to Martin Elster, Nicholas Stone and Christine Michael. The winners, printed below, snaffle £25 each.  

Wednesday

Andy Chamberlain

Two steps back: the Taylor Review one year on

Citizens of nowhere. ‘Keeping pace with the changing world of work’. Two phrases you might just about remember from 2016, when they were strands of the abortive ‘May-ist’ ideology. They must now seem aeons away to the embattled Prime Minister. If her plan to ‘build a new united Britain’ is draining away faster than you can say Boris Johnson, so too is her commitment to reforming modern work – particularly self-employment. This month was the one-year anniversary of the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices. First commissioned back in those heady days when it looked like the May Government would have at least some policies beyond Brexit, its conclusion turned

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Fewer British workers are sick, so why isn’t the Guardian celebrating?

I know the Guardian is desperate to stop Brexit and will dredge up anything to try to back its case – daily running fanciful predictions of economic Armageddon made by think-tanks as if they were fact, even though those same think tanks have been hopelessly wrong in the past. But honestly, there comes a point when even the newspaper’s editors must be beginning to realise that their demented doom-mongering is making them look ridiculous.     This week the Office of National Statistics (ONS) put out figures showing yet another decline in the number of days lost to sickness by British workers. It is now down to an average of 4.1 days

Tuesday

Josephine Bartosch

The limits of Stonewall’s tolerance | 31 July 2018

‘Acceptance without exception’ is the aspirational slogan emblazoned across the website, merchandise and literature of Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT charity.  The problem is that there are exceptions. Those who are not accepted include those who refuse to believe that a person can change their sex simply by saying: ‘I identify as.’ The fractious nature of the LGBT alliance – and Stonewall’s intolerance for dissenting voices within the community – is becoming increasingly clear. At this year’s London Pride, a group of protestors from ‘Get the ‘L’ Out’ made their feelings known by marching to the front of the parade with banners, including one reading ‘Transactivism Erases Lesbians.’ The actions of

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why the Supreme Court’s ruling on vegetative patients worries me

The Supreme Court ruling yesterday that a man in a vegetative state could have his feeding and hydration tubes removed so as to bring about his death was, obviously, redundant in his case. The man concerned, a banker in his fifties, is already dead – having earlier suffered a heart attack which left him brain damaged – but the wheels of justice ground inexorably on anyway. But the striking thing about the ruling, delivered by Lady Black, that food and hydration can be withdrawn from a patient in a persistent vegetative state, PVS, without the consent of the Court of Protection, is that we have absolutely no idea how many

Sunday

Madeleine Kearns

Fr Morris won’t be the last priest to be expelled from campus for having the ‘wrong’ beliefs

In her column in this week’s Spectator, Mary Wakefield writes about Father Mark Morris, who was fired from his post in Glasgow Caledonian University for having a prayer meeting in response to a recent gay pride march. Mary Wakefield points out that there is more to this story than meets the eye. She’s not alone in wondering: How can a priest be dismissed for stating the Catholic Church’s position (and off-campus besides)? And why have we returned to the days where clergymen are expelled from campus, on ideological grounds? The case of Fr Morris is worth examining because he’s the first clergyman to be caught up in the new campus

Saturday

Danny Orbach

Hitler’s would-be assassins weren’t war criminals

In a Spectator article, Matthew Olex-Szczytowski argued that the German officers who tried to kill Hitler, did so only to save Germany from defeat, and were themselves Nazi war criminals. The first argument is blatantly wrong. In fact, the conspirators tried to overthrow Hitler long before defeat was imminent. The first attempt to assassinate the Führer took place in 1938, one year before the war. The conspirators tried again in 1939 and 1940, when the Nazi regime was still triumphant. Many of them joined the movement in order to oppose Hitler’s genocidal policies. Their resistance to the Holocaust and the crimes against Poles and Russians is documented in wartime diaries,

Thursday

Taki

High life | 26 July 2018

Reading is the best antidote to debauchery I know of, and I’ve been hitting the books lately. History mostly. Once upon a time I used to read novels. Back then I found real magic embedded in the prose of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Maugham, Leo T and Fyodor D, Waugh, Greene, and John O’Hara’s potboilers about upper-class swells. I was friendly with Irwin Shaw and James Jones, of The Young Lions and From Here To Eternity fame and read both men assiduously. Shaw and Jones were tough guys, army vets, and Hemingway types. Yet it was Fitzgerald, whose indelible stamp of grace, haunted my youth. Dick Diver and Tender Is The Night

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 26 July 2018

Towering above this medieval French village is dun-coloured cliff of volcanic rock, dramatically floodlit at night, topped by two ancient lookout towers. A wide waterfall once flowed over this cliff and at night the floodlights pick out the grooves and caverns worn away over thousands of years. For the last couple of millennia these caverns have been the dwelling places of all sorts of refugees and paupers and one of the larger ones was turned into a hospice for old soldiers of Napoleon’s citizen army. The rock is too hard and impervious to allow for much modification of the cavern walls, but a rough stone wall with window and doorway

Melissa Kite

Real life | 26 July 2018

Stefano came back to paint the front of the house. I have never been so pleased to see his red and white van. He emerged with a startling new crew cut instead of his wavy black hair. He was wearing a red and white T-shirt with his company logo on it. But otherwise, he was the same. He grinned a wide grin and held out his enormous hand to shake mine. ‘Hello boss,’ he said. ‘I’m not the boss,’ I said, ‘You’re the boss.’ He laughed. He has not been here for six months since he helped me finish the major works inside the house after the builder boyfriend walked