Society

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Matt Hancock’s World Cup struggle

Ahead of England’s crunch World Cup game against Belgium tonight, you might expect that support for the Three Lions is reaching fever pitch in the cabinet. Not so, Mr S is sad to report. Theresa May is more of a cricket fan, while Boris has been busy talking down England’s chances. It seems that culture secretary, Matt Hancock, is also failing to get excited about the football. At a party organised by the department for culture, media and sport for England’s opening game against Tunisia, Hancock seemed more interested in fiddling with a virtual reality set than paying attention to the game, Steerpike hears. “He’s more of a cricket man”

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 28 June 2018

Laikipia, Kenya A minotaur head glowers at me through the bathroom window while I am brushing my teeth in the morning. It’s George the bull, who wants his ears scratched. After I get dressed, it’s time to select a cattle stick, known here as a finbo, from an umbrella stand stuffed with crooks, wands, withies, shillelagh-like cudgels and rods that a biblical prophet might have forgotten had he come to supper. I choose my favourite, a finbo that balances perfectly in the hand like a drum major’s malacca cane. Outside, a Jersey bullock is sprawled on the garden path, chewing the cud. I open the gate, passing under the skull

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Never mind VAR – this is a fabulous World Cup

Let’s talk about VAR, why don’t we? We love the World Cup though the football is getting bonkers. The scoring of a goal or a penalty decision or just a foul is merely a starting point for negotiation, as players compete to be the quickest with the ‘check the TV’ hand signals after every tiny incident. You can pop out for a cup of tea and come back to find the whole landscape of the game has changed, with the course of the match rewritten like Bobby Ewing’s murder in the 1980s. ‘I thought South Korea were five goals down?’ ‘No, that didn’t really happen: they’re 2-1 up now but

Matthew Lynn

Businesses should try and shape Brexit – not fight it

Airbus will abandon the UK. The car factories will all be closed down. Trade will grind to a halt, we will run out of food and medicines, and Harry Kane will be sold to Real Madrid and made captain of Spain instead of England. Okay, I made that last one up, but all the others are among the dire warnings that big business have issued over Brexit in the last few weeks. Project Fear III, or IV, or possibly XXVII by now, keeps coming back. Right now, it seems to have as many sequels as Jurassic World, and with plot-lines that are about as original. That, however, is a mistake,

Michael Hann

I can’t wait for England to be knocked out of the World Cup

On Monday evening, I watched a man in a smart shirt and trousers put his friend in a headlock while bellowing at the top of his voice. In the central London pub I was in, guttural roars filled the room; the floor shook with people jumping up and down. A few minutes later and a few hundred yards away, people – well, overwhelmingly men – flooded on to Tottenham Court Road to stop the traffic and share their emotions with drivers. They didn’t just hail them from the pavement; they stepped in front of cars until they decided each driver had witnessed enough of their ritual. This happened because Harry

Steerpike Steerpike

Two years on: six of the worst Brexit predictions

It’s just over two years since the UK voted to leave the European Union in what proved to be a shock result that caught both politicians and commentators off guard. Unlike Lord Ashdown’s hat-eating, or Matthew Goodwin’s book eating after the two most recent General Elections, many didn’t get held accountable to their off the mark Brexit predictions. Happily, Mr S is on hand to correct that. Steerpike has compiled a list of some of the Brexit predictions that failed to come true: 1. JP Morgan: Scotland will leave the UK and get a new currency Days after the EU referendum, investment company JP Morgan announced in an email to

Lucy Vickery

Double vision | 28 June 2018

In Competition No. 3054 you were invited to compose double dactyls about double acts. I didn’t include the rules about double dactyls as it takes up space and I’ve done it before — and in any case they are easily Googled. Most of you seemed thoroughly at home with the form, and in a large, lively and accomplished entry double dactylic duos from time present (Trump and Melania, Declan and Anthony) and time past (Boney and Josephine) rubbed shoulders with the literary (Regan and Goneril), the musical (Gilbert and Sullivan, Simon and Garfunkel) and the comical (Stanley and Oliver). George Simmers and Mae Scanlan are highly commended. The winners, printed

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Feminist children’s books

A friend of mine who commissions book reviews has added a sub-category to the list of titles coming up: ‘femtrend’, books about the female condition from a feminist perspective. ‘Grit lit is over,’ she says wearily, referring to edgy books about the marginalised. ‘Now publishers can’t get enough of the feminist trend about women who for centuries have been airbrushed out of history by toxic masculinity and oppressive patriarchy. Airbrushing the toxic white male. Female tribes. Modern courtesan. Now it’s draining down into children’s books too.’ It started with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, a collection of accounts of inspirational role models; Malala, Maya Angelou et al, which was

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A cry for help

There is an au pair drought in the UK. Since the 2016 Referendum there has been a 75 per cent drop in applications by foreign girls to work for UK families. Agencies testify that they can’t find girls for their clients, who must turn to other forms of childcare beyond the rare girl keen to ‘learn English’, grandparents, if they can be dragged out of restaurants, and baby-sitting apps like Bambino, Bubble and UrbanSitter. There is a campaign to #SaveAuPairs. Its web page is illustrated with a cartoon featuring a ginger child screaming for its au pair and Theresa May washing up plates, which makes me wonder if this campaign

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Save me from Red Hen Syndrome

Anxious to find out what food they served at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, I clicked on the relevant site and was transported immediately to a discount motorcycle website entirely in Korean, or Japanese, or maybe Chinese. I don’t know — I can’t tell the difference between those respective hieroglyphics. Maybe that was the point: the restaurant was weeding out people like me who have never bothered to distinguish between different oriental alphabets and are therefore racist and banned from the Red Hen, probably for life. More likely, though, is that the site has been hacked by clever and jubilant Trump supporters. The Red Hen is where the

Leo McKinstry

The road less travelled

I have never been an adventurous soul. As an infant in Belfast, I would lie motionless for hours on the kitchen table of our family home, devoid of any curiosity to wander. On one occasion an anxious neighbour, having spied my immobile pose through a window, knocked on the front door to express her concern. ‘Don’t worry. He’s often like that. He won’t be moving anywhere,’ replied my mother. I have carried that inertia into adulthood, reflected in my profound dislike of travel. There is not a shred of wanderlust within me. I never fantasise about visiting distant lands, never leaf longingly through the travel supplements. Most people yearn to

Tim Wigmore

The Fifa paradox

In 1930, Jules Rimet, the creator of the Football World Cup, crossed the Atlantic in a steamship to attend the inaugural competition in Uruguay. In his bag he carried a small trophy, the World Cup; in his heart he carried the belief that the World Cup could unite nations and smooth nationalism. ‘Men will be able to meet in confidence without hatred in their hearts and without an insult on their lips,’ he declared. Rimet would have been horrified by what the World Cup has become. A tournament that has funded the endemic corruption and racketeering within Fifa exposed by the FBI. A tournament whose dubious hosts — Russia this

Wednesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The sexism in our prisons the government is happy to ignore

There is one form of female under-representation which no-one seems concerned about – the fact that a mere 4.5 per cent of the prison population is made up of women. No one says we must rebalance that so as to make it 50-50 by 2025, or whatever. It just seems to be accepted that men are more prone to greed, lust and violence, and that greater numbers of them deserve to be behind bars. I guess that is right. If we have 20 times more male offenders than female ones, then I want the prison population to reflect that. But why the need to readjust the criminal justice system in

The Spectator

Full text: Liz Truss’s LSE lecture – ‘I want to take a zero-tolerance approach to wasteful spend’

As an economics geek, and a committed free marketer, I’ve always admired the London School of Economics. Despite its left-wing reputation, it was the academic home of Hayek. But even more than that, it produced my husband, Hugh O’Leary. It means that whenever I want a late night discussion about supply side reform or econometrics, there’s always someone on hand. And why do I love this stuff? Because I care about freedom. I’ve never liked being told what to do. And I don’t like to see other people being told what to do. Britain is a country that is raucous and rowdy. We have a younger generation of self-starters growing

Tuesday

Spectator Money

Best Buys: Five-year fixed rate mortgages

If you’re on the hunt for a mortgage, a fixed rate one will ensure that your repayments stay the same. Here are some of the best rates available for five-year fixed rate mortgages on the market at the moment, according to data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.

Monday

Simon Marcus

Is transgender ideology making the UK’s mental health crisis worse? | 25 June 2018

There is a mental health crisis in the UK. The symptoms are often body related, and the causes are complex, but a new orthodoxy now labels some of these people as transgender. This means that instead of getting psychological care, increasing numbers are encouraged to take potentially dangerous hormones on their way to transitioning gender. The World Health Organisation’s recent ruling that it will no longer classify being transgender as a mental illness is hailed by some as a progressive step forward. But could this shift in thinking actually compound matters and mean that transgender patients’ other medical issues are ignored? There has undoubtedly been a cultural change on the

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s inability to care what his critics think is paying off

Donald Trump is becoming a restaurant critic. This morning he weighed in on the Red Hen restaurant, which is located in Virginia and denied service over the weekend to his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. According to Trump: It’s understandable if the Trump administration is feeling somewhat henpecked. A newly aroused left is engaging in an increasingly aggressive campaign of public shaming against Trump administration officials, much of which appears to centre on denying them meals at fine dining establishments. Both Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior adviser Stephen Miller have been singled out for public opprobrium. Moreover, in Florida, the state attorney general and Trump ally

Sunday

Nigel Ash

Can publishers prioritise both talent and diversity?

The CEO of Penguin Random House, Tom Weldon, says in his letter to The Spectator last week that his ‘diversity’ goals are needed because ‘some authors face more barriers than others in getting published’. Coming after his assertion that talent is the first and foremost consideration for a publisher, the most obvious barrier is surely a lack of it. Rather like a penguin itself, no other publishing yardstick can fly. This letter appeared in this week’s Spectator

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The bad points of England’s 6-1 victory against Panama

But on the down side…… 1. Still too little quality and threat from open play. 2.  Raheem Sterling is very short of confidence for someone with a bad muthafucka AK47 tattooed on his leg. 3. The defence can still be horrendously dilatory and loose. As we saw with the Panama goal and three times in the first half when we gave the ball away pointlessly. 4. When Jordan Henderson tries to pass it forwards rather than sideways, it always goes out of play. I think it’s important that when your team wins 6-1, you sift through the entrails for the bad points. On the other hand, this is England’s best

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: #MeToo lit

Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel prompted me to invite you to provide an extract from a well-known work that might be considered sexist by today’s standards and rework it for the #MeToo age. Highlights in a thoroughly enjoyable entry included Brian Allgar’s Constance Chatterley instructing Mellors in the importance of foreplay, Paul Freeman’s recasting of Orwell’s antihero as Weinstein Smith and Hugh King addressing the gender stereotyping in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The worthy winners, printed below, earn £20 each. Sylvia Smith/Sonnet 18 ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; Well, frankly, Will, I’d rather you did NOT. You’ll find some