Society

Sunday

A.D. Baley

Socialism isn’t to blame for all of Venezuela’s woes

Contrary to the impression given by Jason Mitchell, Venezuela does not have a socialist economy (‘Maduro’s madness’). It has a ‘mixed’ economy (and therein lies some of its problems; such as food hoarding by private companies hostile to the regime). The private sector is large, and involved in numerous sectors within the economy; food distribution, pharmaceuticals and so on. The US sanctions against Venezuela have always been about regime change, and these sanctions amount to a blockade of the country. US and European banks have refused to handle Venezuelan payments for medical supplies, and pharmaceutical companies have refused to issue export certificates for cancer drugs — therefore stopping them being imported

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: pun for your life (poems about puns containing puns)

The latest challenge was to submit a poem about puns containing puns. Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan. Robert Schechter’s four-liner – ‘Opun and shut’ – caught my eye: As the punster’s puns were reaching a crescendo, I said, ‘Take your puns and stick them innuendo!’ Also displaying considerable punache were Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Sylvia Fairley, Michael Jameson and Joseph Houlihan. They narrowly lost out to the winners, printed below, who pocket £25 apiece. W.J. Webster snaffles

Saturday

D Reilly

The rise and fall of Jose Mourinho

If we were to discover Jose Mourinho lately fantasised during press conferences about mowing down the assembled hacks in a hail of semi-automatic gunfire while yelling at the top of his voice “SAY HELLO TO MY LEETLE FRIEND”, I think, on the whole, we’d understand. His rise, like that of the similarly arriviste Tony Montana in Scarface, has been both meteoric and, in its own way, violent, but now the white hot charisma that defined and propelled it seems very obviously to have burnt itself out. It must be hard on him. Mourinho’s arrival on the global consciousness in a shimmering aura of Latin arrogance back in 2004, all Hollywood

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Was Wonga all bad?

The wonder of Wonga is that it lasted so long. The arch-villain of the payday loan sector, which grew like a mutant fungus out of the wreckage of the financial crisis, once clocked up a record Representative Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on its loans to gullible and desperate cash-seekers of 5,853 per cent, and was ordered in 2014 to write off the debts of 330,000 delinquent borrowers who could never have passed proper ‘affordability’ checks. The imposition by the Financial Conduct Authority of a cap of 0.8 per cent per day on lending rates, plus limits on default charges, knocked out many smaller competitors, but Wonga (with a 30 per

Friday

Mike Fotis

Wonga’s been dealt a knockout blow. So what now?

After an eerily quiet year, payday loans are back in the headlines. The speedy demise of Wonga has sent shockwaves through the industry, and rumours of which firms may be next are spreading like wildfire. So what brought the great bogeyman of the payday loans industry, which at one point boasted a fifty per cent market share, to its knees? Was it the years of media scrutiny, tougher regulation, or the rise of Credit Unions? It’s rather ironic that the once mighty Wonga has been brought down by the ambulance chasers of the finance world, claims management firms. While other lenders may not want to admit it, they’ve all seen

James Innes-Smith

What’s the truth about men’s rights activists?

This year’s International Conference on Men’s Issues was due to be held at St Andrew’s Stadium, the home of Birmingham City Football Club. But at the eleventh hour the club pulled the plug on the event after it was decided that a conference on men’s issues wasn’t something a football club should be aligning itself with. This isn’t the first time the organisers have run into trouble. Two years ago, protesters fought for the conference to be cancelled, with some even reportedly threatening to burn down the venue if demands weren’t met. No wonder the organisers of this year’s event decided to keep the venue details secret until the last minute. But one

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Shak attack

The Azeri grandmaster Shakhriyar Mamedyarov has been distinguishing himself recently at both classical and speed chess time limits. Last month he emerged as the overwhelming winner of the elite tournament in Biel, taking first prize and defeating world champion Magnus Carlsen in their individual clash. Mamedyarov went on to St Louis where he took the bronze medal behind Hikaru Nakamura and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and in the process demonstrated an extraordinary originality in his choice of openings and power of attack. We join two of his games against former world title challenger Sergey Karjakin at the crucial moments.   Mamedyarov-Karjakin: St Louis Rapidplay 2018 (diagram 1)   18 Bh7 This proves good

Raymond Keene

no. 521

White to play. This is from Mamedyarov–Georgiadis, Biel 2018. Many of Mamedyarov’s games feature a kingside attack based upon a powerful bishop on the b2-square. Here, his next move led to a decisive increase in pressure against the black king. What was it? Answers to victoria@spectator.co.uk by Tuesday 4 September. 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 Qxd3 Last week’s winner James Payne, Barnby, Suffolk

The Spectator

Letters | 30 August 2018

Venezuelan sanctions Sir: Contrary to the impression given by Jason Mitchell, Venezuela does not have a socialist economy (‘Maduro’s madness’, 25 August). It has a ‘mixed’ economy (and therein lies some of its problems; such as food hoarding by private companies hostile to the regime). The private sector is large, and involved in numerous sectors within the economy; food distribution, pharmaceuticals and so on. The US sanctions against Venezuela have always been about regime change, and these sanctions amount to a blockade of the country. US and European banks have refused to handle Venezuelan payments for medical supplies, and pharmaceutical companies have refused to issue export certificates for cancer drugs —

Taki

High life | 30 August 2018

Gstaad The pastoral heaven of this place can get very dull during the summer months. Green hillsides, neat farmsteads, pleasing breezes, meadows bright with wild flowers amid white-capped mountain peaks; these are no substitute for pretty women or intellectual company. That is the bad news. The good news is that the nouveaux riches and terribly vulgar do not appear during the summer. They’re too busy sweating it out in the south of France or in Marbella. They do show up during the winter months, alas, but the low temperatures keep them covered in chinchillas. To see them in bathing costumes would be too much, even for someone like me who

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 30 August 2018

I was present in the room when Oscar encountered his father for the first time since returning from his fortnight in the south of France. Oscar doesn’t see his father often. I hoped that his father would be pleased to see his son and would kindly ask him how his holiday went. And if, as I hoped, he did ask how the holiday went, I wondered which of his holiday memories Oscar would describe to his father, and in which order. There was plenty to choose from. For a start there had been the extraordinary weather. Would he tell his father about the terrible heat and the car always like

Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 August 2018

When I made a joke about ragwort being like Islamic extremism, I expected someone to write in. I was fully braced for a complaint from a sympathiser of Islamic fundamentalism, saying look here, Missy, comparing our noble struggle to an invasive weed is beyond a joke. However, the modern world has surpassed my expectations and I have, in fact, had a complaint from a sympathiser of ragwort accusing me of hate speech against another species. The tenor of his complaint is broadly: how very dare I compare ragwort to Islamic extremism, because this is inflammatory and likely to incite hatred towards ragwort. I don’t think he’s joking. The charges against

Robin Oakley

The turf | 30 August 2018

Having spent most of my life among politicians I guess I have become unaccustomed to candour. The only example I remember was the Danish prime minister I interviewed for CNN before his country’s referendum on joining the euro. ‘Prime Minister, the trouble with referendums is that people often don’t answer the question. They vote on the popularity of the person asking it. Are you popular enough to win this referendum?’ ‘Probably not’, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen replied — and was proved correct when the Danes voted to stay out. In racing too we have all grown used to jockeys and trainers making excuses. ‘The ground didn’t suit him’, ‘He was short

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 30 August 2018

All the best players today are technically excellent in card play. They know all the odds and end plays to bring home their contract or thwart the opposition so the important differences are often in the bidding. Finding the best game, slam or partscore, played from the right hand, is vital. But there is another quality that separates great and genius, a quality you can’t learn, and that is imagination. The gift of seeing the whole picture and finding a winning line which is not necessarily technically conventional. Geir Helgemo is widely acknowledged as the world’s No. 1 supremo in solving problems imaginatively. Today’s hand comes from his book Bridge

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 August 2018

Q. I invited four younger colleagues, all in their mid to late thirties, to go for a meal at a rather special venue. I first invited A and B, who were sitting together at the time, then C and D, who were also sitting together. On the day, A and C arrived, expressing great enthusiasm and having dressed in their best; B and D simply did not turn up. When I mentioned it later, they breezily replied that they had had other plans. What I don’t understand is that when I gave the invitations out two people accepted and acted accordingly, while two agreed with near-identical wording, but failed to attend

Peter Jones

Antigone and algorithms

Hardly a day goes by without someone making excitable predictions about human progress and how, thanks to AI, we are all going to become algorithms served by robots. The ancients took a different view. All ancient man had available to him was what nature in its raw state offered. Only fire (e.g. cookery, metal-work) or man’s ingenuity (e.g. papyrus, concrete, the arch) could significantly alter it. But men could still fantasise about flying to the moon, or imagine a world in which ‘Every stream ran with wine; fish came to the house, baked themselves, and served themselves up at table; rivers of soup, swirling with meat chunks, flowed by the

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 30 August 2018

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, flew off to South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria accompanied by a trade delegation. In a speech in Cape Town she promised an extra £4 billion in British investment in Africa. ‘True partnerships are not about one party doing unto another,’ she said, but the achievement of ‘common goals’. The government announced plans for Britain’s own satellite navigation system if Brexit meant it was expelled from the European Union’s Galileo project. A gang flew men from Chile to burgle houses around London, said police who arrested 36 men in the past eight months, 16 of them being convicted and eight deported, with 12 leaving the

Dot Wordsworth

Slang of the 1880s

‘I want my money back,’ said my husband. ‘This is from the 1880s, not the 1980s.’ He looked up from my copy of Soho in the Eighties by my neighbour at the other end of the mag, Christopher Howse (CSH of Portrait of the Week, who also recalls his drinking days in the Coach and Horses).  My husband had not, of course, paid a penny for it. What caught his interest surprised me too. It was a canting song by W.E. Henley (author of ‘Invictus’: ‘I am the captain of my soul’), published in 1887 under the title (which Mr Howse doesn’t mention) ‘Villon’s Straight Tip to All Cross Coves’,

Doc

2374: Watch your step

The unclued lights (three of two words) are of a kind.   Across 1    Slices top of sausage in front of dogs (5) 6    Starting at Keele, say, in flames? (7, two words) 11    Former England captain has Alec Robins out (10, two words) 15    Heartless Valentine’s streamer (4) 17    Wild chatter has teeth on edge (7) 18    Drink Church of Scotland finally banned (3) 21    Matches for Spurs and the Hammers say (5) 24    Peterborough’s backed some network (4) 27    Spanish province drops green knitwear (4) 28    A hospital covered by me, just for now (5, two words) 33    City replay regularly (3) 35    Potentially profitable project is