Society

Friday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: can we fight back against digital addiction?

It seems that everyone, young or old, has a smartphone these days. But why are the brightest in Silicon Valley taking screen time away from their children? Have they realised that we’re addicted? Also on this podcast, Tory MEPs recently voted in favour of the Viktor Orbán government in European Parliament. Are British Tories flirting with the far right? If they are, it could be because the Conservative Party has no attractive policies. Should we return to One Nation Toryism? First, it’s time for a wake-up call. Smartphones now seem so attached to us that they may as well be organically grown. Both adults and children are addicted, and it’s

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 20 September 2018

Stand by your plan Sir: Matthew Parris (‘Must the will of the people always be respected?’, 15 September) asks when it is permissible to seek to overturn a referendum result. He missed a crucial point, which is that the answer depends on the locus of the individual considering the question. To my mind an ordinary citizen is always free to campaign to overturn the result. An MP, possibly, but not when elected on a manifesto to implement said result or who when campaigning in the referendum said they would abide by the result. Any member of a government who has promised to implement the result must clearly do just that.

Raymond Keene

Interregnum

The only official interregnum in the reigns of the world chess champions was that between the death of Alekhine in 1946 and the accession of Botvinnik in 1948. There is, however, an unofficial interregnum which occurred when Bobby Fischer won the world title in 1972 but did not play a serious game of chess as champion and forfeited the title without play to Karpov in 1975. At this point, step forward Mikhail Tal. According to statistician John Ellis in the August issue of the British Chess Magazine, it was Tal who filled the void created by Fischer’s disappearance. From July 1972 to April 1973, according to the BCM, Tal played

Raymond Keene

no. 524

Black to play. This position is from Gurgenidze-Tal, Moscow 1957. What is the most direct way to break into the white position? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 25 September 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 … Qc1+ Last week’s winner Peter Hickling, Cromer, Norfolk

The Spectator

Barometer | 20 September 2018

Trans mission Equalities Minister Penny Mordaunt ordered research into a huge rise in referrals of under-18 girls to transgender services. What are the relative numbers of men and women seeking this help? — The Tavistock and Portman Trust reports a rise in gender identity referrals from 97 (41 per cent born female) in 2009-10 to 2,519 (72 per cent born female) in 2017-18. — A 2009 survey by the Gender Identity Research and Education Society found 80% seeking medical care for gender variance were born male and 20% female. — A 2015 study by the US Census Bureau revealed that 65% who had changed their social security gender identity were

Taki

High life | 20 September 2018

Perception and reality, truth and falsehood, black and white; nowadays the salivating chattering classes don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground, as they used to say in Brooklyn before the yuppies moved in. Take, for example, the latest kerfuffle about the moon landing 49 years ago. I remember it well because it was summer, I had just acquired my first sailing boat —thanks to good old dad, naturally — and the Americans, under the great president Richard Nixon, were going to land and walk on the moon. As everyone but a few doubters knows, Neil Armstrong was the first to take a step on its cheesy-looking surface,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 20 September 2018

Moving day. The contents of a hillside shack to be moved four miles to a cave house perched high on a cliff above the village. The cave house’s only access from the road below is a steep, narrow and stony footpath. Three removal men for the job: me plus two French day-labourers. The elder of the Frenchmen, Philippe, was 67. I called him Philippe Phillop because that’s what he wore. He is a patriotic Parisian and his character, I would say, is the Parisian equivalent of a chirpy cockney. The same ready wit, the same cynicism born of urban poverty. He did not, however, find my nickname for him as

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 September 2018

The little lodger is moving in. I chose her after an exhaustive search of twentysomethings looking for accommodation, during which I met a terrifying selection of millennials and members of generation snowflake. The highlight has to be the 22-year-old engineer who came with his parents. They toured the house and inspected the room on offer. They then fixed me with a withering stare and, as the lad stood by saying nothing, fired at me the most frightening list of questions I can imagine being asked about a prospective lodging situation. ‘And where will we sleep when we come to stay?’ was the first, asked by the mother, a very nice

Max Hastings

Diary – 20 September 2018

The Hastingses have idyllic lives but, like most seventysomethings, we find ourselves in ever-closer proximity to mortality. We hold season tickets for hospital and care-home visits, funerals and memorial services. Prostates are a staple of dinner-party conversation. We have not got quite as far as the 94-year-old contemporary of the painter Raoul Millais, who quavered in the churchyard after the two had bidden farewell to a friend: ‘Hardly worth you and I going home from here, is it, Raoul?’ But we are mindful of La Rochefoucauld’s observation that compassion represents the intelligent anticipation of one’s own troubles to come. When my old friend Christopher Bland was diagnosed with the cancer

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 20 September 2018

Home Britain was overwhelmed by Brexitry. Before flying off to an EU summit in Salzburg, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, interviewed on Panorama, said that if Parliament did not ratify the Chequers plan, ‘I think that the alternative to that will be having no deal.’ The International Monetary Fund warned against ‘a no-deal Brexit on WTO terms that would entail substantial costs for the UK economy’. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: ‘We must heed the clear warnings of the IMF.’ Mr Hammond was said to have suggested in cabinet that Britain might have to remain a member of the EU beyond 29 March next year, but he

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 20 September 2018

Around this time each September, I get to say, ‘I’m off to Tangier for a few days to play high-stakes bridge’ — which always makes my life sounds wonderfully Bond-esque. The invitation comes from my generous friend Stuart Wheeler, and really is as glamorous as it sounds: stunning house and gardens, pool, Pimm’s… But what really stands out is how convivial everyone is — I mean, for a group of bridge players. Playground-style bickering is far more normal. But then Stuart’s guests are mostly Portland members, who are famously courteous; they’re only half-kidding when they insist just two comments are allowed after a hand: ‘Well played’ and ‘Bad luck’. Andrew

The Spectator

Trading blows

Donald Trump campaigned as an unrepentant protectionist and, on the face of it, he has lived up to his word. He has torn up the US-Pacific free- trade partnership, threatened the European Union with trade wars and imposed tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of imports from China. As you might expect, Beijing’s retaliation has been immediate — as has the damage. American cherry growers, for example, estimate that they have lost about $85 million after suffering retaliatory surcharges. Farmers are now having to be bailed out by the US government. Yet this week Trump has doubled down, introducing tariffs on another 6,000 Chinese imports. When China responds in kind,

Toby Young Toby Young

As I suspected, my defects can’t be cured

I’ve just finished making a one-hour documentary about character for Radio 4 that’s due to be broadcast on Saturday at 8 p.m. It starts with the premise that there’s been a decline in what we think of as British values — honesty, fortitude, duty, modesty, charity, hard work, good manners, a sense of fair play, etc. — and asks whether anything can be done to restore them. Should they be taught in schools? Do parenting classes help? Or is the younger generation doomed to sink into a morass of indolence and vice? I was originally commissioned to present it because I’ve written about character before, as well as helped set

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 20 September 2018

Q. A neighbour, a wonderful old friend in his late eighties, is a marvellous raconteur. As a family we have enjoyed his company for years. Our problem is that our children have entered their mid-teens and become pompous and intolerant. When we entertain at lunchtime they and their friends ruin the atmosphere by trying to gag our friend, complaining that his remarks are racist, homophobic, snobbish — the works. They particularly object to his imitation of foreign accents, one of his party turns. We love our children but this is causing tension at the table. What do you suggest? — E.D.G., Calne A. Explain to your children that it is

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Cuisine for cadavers

Politicians are having a terrible time of late, along with the rest of us — it’s not much fun watching the remnants of the post-war consensus shatter — and so here is Albert Roux consoling them with a new, glossy restaurant on the door-step of their rotting legislature palace. Food at the Palace of Westminster is not the best, although Corbynistas think it is. They think peers bathe in champagne while laughing and that MPs don’t have to butter their own toast. Well they will learn post-Revolution. They will learn to use a butter knife and how to talk righteously to a nationalised media. It’s called Roux at Parliament Square,

Dot Wordsworth

Whiter than white

A detective superintendent has been placed on ‘restricted duties’ while the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigates a complaint that he used the phrase whiter than white at a briefing. An ‘insider’ told the Evening Standard: ‘It may have been a poor use of language but this is not what the misconduct process is for.’ What nonsense. It is isn’t ‘a poor use of language’ at all. We may take it that the phrase was used figuratively. Literally, whiter than white has been used of necks, teeth and faces for three or four hundred years. In the figurative sense, I cannot find anything definite before 1962, about the time when

Doc

2377: In order

The dozen unclued lights can be arranged in a specific sequence when preceded by or followed by their sequence indicators which do not appear in the puzzle. But, two clued solutions happen to include the second word of the sequence! All but one (at 19, with an apostrophe) of the dozen resulting phrases can be verified in Brewer or Chambers. Ignore two accents, and 15D includes an abbreviation.   Across 1 Talk of money for hidden store (5) 10 Hurry up and organise a change of home (10, four words) 11 Firebomb constituent buddy found in Asian country (6) 12 Hardly protection from the rain (7) 14 For separating an

Angelos Sofocleous

How I was hounded off campus for saying ‘women don’t have penises’

What harm can it do saying that women don’t have penises? Quite a lot, actually, if my experience is anything to go on. After sharing a statement with that message on Twitter, along with a screenshot from a Spectator article, the backlash was swift. Less than a month after sending that tweet, I had lost my position as president-elect of Humanist Students as well as my role as assistant editor of Durham University’s philosophy society’s undergraduate journal, Critique. I was also given the boot as co-editor-in-chief of Durham University’s online student magazine, the Bubble. All for saying something that many people would surely agree with. The reaction against me was extreme,