Society

Friday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: John McDonnell vs the clueless Tories

As we head into Conservative Party Conference, Theresa May has never looked more alone. We talk to Iain Duncan Smith and James Forsyth about a Prime Minister abandoned. And while chaos reigns in the Conservative Party, Labour is gearing up, led by a pragmatic but radical Shadow Chancellor. Just who is John McDonnell? And last, why is Tesco’s new discount retailer so Brexity? First, the Prime Minister may be celebrating her 62nd birthday at Conservative Party Conference with thousands of party members, but Theresa May has never seemed more alone. At home, neither Brexiteers or Remainers have any sympathy for her while they try to push their vision of Brexit;

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Rod Liddle takes Corbyn to task on Question Time

Corbynista cheerleader Ian Lavery is used to dishing it out, but on the evidence of last night’s Question Time he is not quite so good at knowing what to do when it comes back at him. The Labour MP got a taste of his own medicine after Rod Liddle took him to task over the ‘raft of hypocrites’ in his party: ‘Thornberry, Abbott, Chakrabarti, all of who don’t want you to send your kids to private or selective schools but do so for their kids. And for Corbyn and McDonnell who have given support and succour to every possible hostile, violent anti-democrat terrorist regime that they can: IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah,

Steerpike Steerpike

Militant councillor Derek Hatton rejoins the Labour Party

When Dawn Butler made eye-catching comments last week at Labour conference praising the Militant-led, hard-left Liverpool council of the 1980s, it was presumed she was either talking off script, or courting the Momentum vote for a potential deputy leadership bid. But could she have been indicating a change of direction for the Labour party instead? It seemed to be confirmed last night, when Derek Hatton, the former deputy leader of the Militant council, announced that he had been readmitted to the Labour Party. The Liverpudlian Trotskyist has been banned from Labour for over thirty years, after Neil Kinnock purged his faction from the Party. Hatton was directly involved in the

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Catholic right will go to any lengths to discredit the Pope

There comes a point in the tsunami of abuse allegations about the Catholic clergy when you have to say, stop it right there. The latest cleric to have been accused of abuse is in fact dead: my friend, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who died last year. A conservative Italian blogger – and by conservative I mean not a particular fan of Pope Francis – Mario Tosatti, and the website LifeSite, have claimed that Francis quashed an investigation by the Cardinal Gerhard Muller, into allegations against Cardinal Cormac in 2013. The allegations are from a British woman who claimed that, back in the 1960s when she was 13 or 14, she was

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Batumi Olympiad

The Chess Olympiad for national teams is now underway in Batumi, Georgia. Over 200 teams are competing and the lavish opening ceremony was attended by 5,000 spectators. This is certainly an indication of the increasing popularity of chess, paradoxically fuelled by the advent of computer technology. There are now 11 million online chess games played worldwide every day, and 600 million active chess players. Probably the most celebrated game ever played in a Chess Olympiad was the following clash between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer.   Spassky-Fischer: Siegen Olympiad 1970; Grünfeld Defence   1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 Nc3 d5 4 cxd5 Nxd5 5 e4 Nxc3 6 bxc3 Bg7 7

Raymond Keene

no. 525

White to play. This position is from Rogers-Milos, Manila Olympiad 1992. How can White do better than recapturing on c3? Answers to me at the Spectator by Tuesday 2 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 … Qxh3 Last week’s winner Julius Haswell, Richmond, London

The Spectator

Letters | 27 September 2018

Neutral technology Sir: Jenny McCartney’s ‘wake-up call’ (22 September) reminded me of a 19th-century Scientific American piece I discovered describing a dangerous new trend ‘which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body’. The fad? Chess. I grew up bingeing on video games and cable TV. I heard similar concerns to Jenny’s from my parents, who were scolded for listening to The Beatles. Before them, books were seen as promoting sedentary behaviour. New technologies are neutral — they reflect both the light and dark sides of human nature. It is worth remembering that smartphones have helped get youngsters

Prue Leith

Diary – 27 September 2018

Is it just my age, or has summer always galloped past with indecent haste? No sooner do the reluctant leaves force themselves into the cold, like early morning runners, head down, braving the rain, than they are over, looking dusty and tired, turning yellow, spent. I know how they feel. My chief complaint is cramp. I don’t think anyone is researching cramp. It’s not life-threatening and so of no interest to big pharma or the medics. But it sure as hell interests me. Leaping up five times a night yelping as thigh, calf and foot take turns is torture. And before any kind reader suggests magnesium, salt, phosphorous, calcium, warm

Dot Wordsworth

Embolden

Embolden is a word in a million. In other words it is quite common. Using data from Google Books, the Oxford English Dictionary has put it in a band of words that are used with a frequency of between 0.1 and 0.99 per million. About 11 per cent of words fall in this band. The most frequent words, in Band 8, occurring more than 1,000 times per million, are exemplified by the, he, and, from and some. The only noun among these most common words is time. Embolden falls in Band 4, among words generally recognised by newspaper readers such as candlestick, rodeo and embouchure. A larger proportion, 20 per

Toby Young Toby Young

Of course the young like socialism – they’re taught to

It beggars belief that Jeremy Corbyn can, with a straight face, announce that capitalism has failed and we’d all be better off under socialism. ‘The super-rich are on borrowed time,’ he said at the Labour party conference. He’s going to tax the rich until their pips squeak, overlooking the fact that the coalition government’s decision to lower the top rate of tax from 50 per cent to 45 per cent actually boosted tax revenues. The taxes paid by the top 1 per cent of income earners are now responsible for 28 per cent of the total tax take, higher than it ever was under Labour. Coincidentally, 28 per cent of the total

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 27 September 2018

Q. My husband and I have been invited to the birthday party of a distinguished public figure with whom we have had a discreet, or, at least unboasted of, relationship over many years. The invitation is displayed on the dresser in our kitchen. Recently a woman visitor to our house saw the invitation and cried: ‘Wow! How did you two get invited to that?’ Mary, I felt her astonishment was not only maladroit but also passive aggressive. How should I have replied to her veiled insult? — Name and address withheld A. You might have responded: ‘Oh dear. I’m sorry. Have you not been invited? The only reason we’ve been

Taki

High life | 27 September 2018

The grandest view of Gstaad and the surrounding Saanen valley bar none — and that includes the vista from my high-up-on-the-hill farm — belongs to an imposing house that was originally a sanatorium but is now a home for the blind. It’s ironic that it is located where only eagles dare, but its residents are unable to view the sights. Such are the jokes that fate plays on mankind. I had just finished a very hard training session and was looking up the mountain at the blind people’s home, which looks like a very luxurious hotel from the outside. My heart went out to the poor folks inside, blind to

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 27 September 2018

I have a friend here in this French village to which we moved just over a week ago. He is a veteran foreign correspondent, still working but also spending time tending his beloved garden, olive grove and small vineyard, from which he bottles and labels about 450 bottles of red each year. He is a proud journalist of the old school, which is to say that he is sober and serious when in pursuit of his story, and neither when not. With his fund of unprintable stories, his undiminished zest for current affairs, and his 450 bottles cooling under the stone stairs of his 18th-century house, he is the best

Melissa Kite

Real life | 27 September 2018

‘I’m just going to pop yourself on hold,’ said the girl from the online shopping firm who was trying to find my amazing disappearing bed. First a bed I ordered arrived with half of it missing. Then, when I rang to complain, they upgraded me to a better bed by way of apology and when that bed came, it had half missing too. Now I had two halves of two different beds: the headboard half of one, and the frame half of another. But one entire matching bed had I none. And all that being as it may, the lack of a complete bed was as nothing compared with the

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 27 September 2018

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, held a special cabinet to retrieve something from the wreckage of the Brexit policy she had imposed at Chequers this summer. Mrs May had shown surprise at a summit in Salzburg four days earlier when the EU rejected her proposals. ‘The suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work,’ said Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council. He then posted a picture on Instagram of himself and Mrs May with a cakestand and the caption: ‘A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.’ Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, said that this was ‘insulting the British people’. The next day, Mrs May had made

Robin Oakley

The turf | 27 September 2018

Mill Reef, who won the Derby, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the Eclipse and the King George by far enough for jockey Geoff Lewis to declare ‘daylight was second’, was one of my first equine heroes. One image has always stuck in my mind. Trainer Ian Balding sent Mill Reef and a companion out on a watered gallop at Lamorlaye for a final pipe-opener before the Arc. Afterwards the trainer walked over the ground and noted that on the firmer patches, while the companion’s hoof prints were clearly visible, there was no trace of where Mill Reef had run. On the softer patches, the other horse had cut in

Columba

2378: Boundary

One unclued light, a term for a boundary of an area whose name is formed by two unclued lights, is a 19 of five items (one of which consists of two words, and one of which is hyphened) reading clockwise in the perimeter. Letters in corner squares and those adjacent to them could make CLAN GRANT END.   Across 11    Bird turning and not following man (5) 12    Camel? See it in Cairo on tour (4) 13    Rock in railroad carriage (5) 14    Be angry with burden, offloading old stock (7) 15    Report about standard of money, not very welcoming (10) 17    Smart books

Sofia Svensson

Putin is bound to get the last laugh over the Salisbury poisoning

What was Vladimir Putin playing at? Earlier this month, he sent Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov on to state television to say they were not spies at all, just tourists who had travelled 3,000 miles to see Salisbury Cathedral while staying in the wrong city. Exposing them in this way would mean it would only be a matter of time before it emerged that Boshirov was, in fact, not who he claimed he was. Unsurprisingly, Boshirov is actually Anatoliy Chepiga: not a sports nutritionist but a decorated GRU Colonel. He was awarded Hero of the Russian Federation, Russia’s highest state award, which was most likely handed to him by Putin

Linden Kemkaran

The delights of divorce

Looking around at my immediate group of female friends I notice a marked difference between the seven or so of us who are married with kids, and the three who have left their husbands and are going it alone. Guess which group appears to be more content? Yes, it’s the divorcees. I have been a long term, close up observer of the lives that my newly single friends carve out for themselves and I have to say, I’m envious. The Sunday Times finds that 53 per cent of women report that they are “much happier” post-divorce. This does not surprise me. Once the initial split has occurred (interestingly in my

Colin Greenwood

Frozen in time

In May 1845, HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror set sail for the Arctic, never to be seen again. Erebus, named after a Greek god of darkness, was herself cast into oblivion for the next 170 years, until she was found in 2014, by sonar, submerged off the Arctic coast of Canada. Immediately after her disappearance, ten years and £28 million (in today’s money) were spent looking for her. It was during a golden period for British exploring, between the end of the Napoleonic Wars of 1815 and the Crimean War of 1854, with a Royal Navy that had shrunk from 145,000 men to 19,000. Instead of fighting