Society

Saturday

Tim Bonner

Rod Liddle is wrong about badgers

The latest of Rod Liddle’s diatribes will come as no surprise to anyone who recalls how he was sacked as editor of the Today programme after a gloriously chippy rant about our supporters in his Guardian column. But the distortion of opinion research needs to be exposed. Firstly he claims that ‘badgers are rarely cleanly shot’, which is untrue. But if he believes it, how does he justify his support for the hunting ban? The case for the ban was made (without any evidence whatsoever) that shooting foxes was preferable in terms of welfare than hunting them. If he is now persuaded that shooting medium-sized mammals is inherently cruel, will he join us in

Friday

Spectator Money

What have been the most expensive public inquiries in recent times?

The inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire could last years. What have been the most expensive public inquiries in recent times? Bloody Sunday £191.5m, 12.5 years Rosemary Nelson (N Ireland) £46.5m, 6.5 years Robert Hamill (also NI) £33m, 7 years Billy Wright (also NI) £30.5m, 6 years Harold Shipman Inquiry £21m, 4 years Chilcott Inquiry £13m, 8 years Leveson Inquiry £5.4m, 1 year  

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Does a tax rise make you work less? Or does it spur you to work harder?

History records many well conceived and apparently logical grand plans for the betterment of mankind. Sadly such ideas almost always fail. Why is this? One possibility is that they fail precisely because they are logical. The dictates of logic require the existence of universally applicable laws. But humans, unlike atoms, are not consistent enough in their affinities for such laws to hold very broadly. For example we are not remotely logical in whom we choose to help. Will wealthy Germans help poorer Germans? Yup. Greeks, however? No chance. Utilitarianism makes perfect sense — right up to the point you try to apply it. As Orwell said, ‘To an ordinary human

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Trump’s meddling shows why Leveson’s critics are right

For people who are meant to be professional communicators, journalists are hopeless at explaining themselves to the public. Everyone I know assumes that when we oppose the Leveson report we are supporting the Sun, the Mail and peeping Toms who hack phones and point lenses into other people’s bedrooms. The fact that the Guardian and Private Eye, who exposed the hacking scandal, are opposed to state regulation has been all but forgotten. Here’s why I, they and many others worry. The New York Times reports today that FBI officers investigating leaks about Trump’s dealing with Russia had seized the phone records of one of its reporters going back years. Of

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Is Alexander Nix gravely misunderstood?

Alexander Nix looks the part of a Bond villain: the sinister-sounding surname, the cut-glass accent and his position at the centre of a conspiracy theory involving Brexit, Trump and dodgy data. Even Steve Bannon – the man most people love to hate – thinks he is bad news. But have we all got the beleaguered former chief executive of Cambridge Analytica wrong? Is he actually the victim in the fallout surrounding his company’s downfall? You’d be forgiven for thinking so on the basis of his appearance in parliament this week. Nix’s time in front of the select committee was supposed to be a chance for MPs to pile in and

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Title background

Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana will be contesting their World Championship match in London in November. As I mentioned last week, there is no better guide to the entire history of the World Championship than the extraordinary series by Garry Kasparov. He catalogues the best games of every champion, demonstrating how each one represents the intellectual ethos of his day. This week’s game is the magnificent clash which led to Kasparov himself becoming the youngest ever world chess champion.   Karpov-Kasparov: World Championship, Moscow (Game 24) 1985; Sicilian Defence   1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 Nf6 5 Nc3 a6 6 Be2 e6 7 0-0

Raymond Keene

no. 509

Black to play. This is from Pillsbury-Lasker, St Petersburg 1895/96. Black has sacrificed two rooks for a bishop to drive the white king into the open. What is the correct move to conclude the attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 12 June 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 … Be4+ (2 Kf1 Bf5) Last week’s winner Douglas Morrison, Cambridge

The Spectator

Letters | 7 June 2018

A debate that won’t happen Sir: ‘Westminster is overdue an abortion debate’ (Leading article, June 2). Yes, but there is little point in a debate without the possibility of changing the law. Governments will not take up this issue, regarding it as a matter of individual conscience. In 1967 the Abortion Act was the result of David Steel’s private member’s bill. But, crucially, the Labour administration gave that bill government time in Parliament. Since then, every attempt to change the law in the light of medical advances concerning the viability of the foetus — even when a majority in the Commons seemed to favour change — has been easily ‘talked

Taki

High life | 7 June 2018

New York   This week 50 years ago saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a man I met a couple of times in the presence of Aristotle Onassis, whom some Brit clown-writer once dubbed Bobby’s murderer. (Bad books need to sell, and what better hook than a conspiracy theory implicating a totally innocent man?) I once witnessed Bobby, at a Susan Stein party, asking Onassis for funds — the 1968 election was coming up — and Ari showing Bobby his two empty trouser pockets. Bobby’s assassination did alter American politics. Violence, black anger and despair spilled out on to the streets of American cities. His death caused far more grief

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 7 June 2018

On Monday night I went to a party at the Crazy Horse nightclub in Paris thrown by the oligarch Vitaly Malkin. He’s written a 500-page philosophy book called Dangerous Illusions and threw the party to celebrate it’s simultaneous publication in five European countries. Essentially the book is a polemic against religion. Enjoy life while you can is the message: there ain’t no after-life. Why a Russian billionaire should go to the trouble of writing and publishing atheist polemic then invite me to the launch party, and pay for my travelling expenses and a hotel room, was mystifying, so I googled him. According to his Wikipedia profile, Vitaly Malkin is a

Melissa Kite

Real life | 7 June 2018

Dear customer, we are invading your privacy and sending you this unsolicited email in order to tell you that you are entitled to not get any unsolicited emails from us under new data privacy laws. Here at Easi-Equine (…or fill in name of company you have never contacted and never wanted to have anything to do with…) we take your privacy extremely seriously and we want you to know that we would never send you any emails you didn’t want, apart from this one and the 357 previous emails we sent you which you will find in your spam box. In order to make sure that we go on sending

Robin Oakley

The turf | 7 June 2018

In the previous 17 runnings of the Derby this century no fewer than nine had been won by horses trained in Ireland. The Ballydoyle genius Aidan O’Brien had won four out of the last six for ‘the lads’ behind the Coolmore operation, and with his Saxon Warrior (already the winner of this season’s 2,000 Guineas) the odds-on favourite at Epsom, and four more O’Brien horses in the field of 12, bookies and punters alike were expecting this year to be ‘déjà vu all over again’. The day before, O’Brien and the lads had won the Oaks, the fillies’ equivalent, with Forever Together, sired like so many of their winners by

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 7 June 2018

Talk about Custer’s Last Stand. My poor old team has been knocked out of all this year’s main tournaments — the Gold Cup (I’m still reeling), Hubert Phillips, the Schapiro Spring Foursomes (worst performance ever) — which left Crockford’s the only competition left in which to qualify for the final. To do that we went to the utterly charming village of West Marden (and I’m not an utterly-charming-village kind of gal) to play the semi-final against Lilias Lamont’s team. Forty-eight boards took seven hours to play and we emerged half-dead but victorious to qualify for the eight-team final at the beginning of September. Here [above] is Israeli international Dror Padon,

Toby Young Toby Young

I know all about unsold tickets and empty theatres

My heart goes out to Owen Jones. The left-wing journalist is one of the headliners at a Labour party fund-raiser scheduled for next Saturday and, at the time of writing, 85 per cent of tickets remain unsold. It is particularly embarrassing for Jones, given that Rod Liddle managed to sell out the London Palladium last month. As someone who has struggled to attract audiences to these sorts of things in the past, I have a few tips for Owen. First of all, don’t give tickets away, because those who have already bought them will ask for their money back. Unfortunately, that horse has already bolted in Owen’s case. Labour has

Dot Wordsworth

Unconscious bias

Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to unconscious bias what Roundup is to Japanese knotweed. ‘I have to say when you get to a certain stage it is not unconscious any more,’ commented Maria Miller on a decision to appoint the only man on a five-person shortlist for a place on the Bank of England monetary policy committee. Mrs Miller herself chairs the Commons Women and Equalities committee, which has two men among its 11 members, but that’s fine. She is most widely celebrated for her 32-second apology to the House in 2014 in which she said

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Diary – 7 June 2018

I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the US constitution, but what preoccupies me and the nation’s allotment-holders at the moment is news that the RHS is warning of a ‘bumper year for slugs’. The slimy little bastards not only ate every single lettuce seedling I planted last year, but they have taken to invading my kitchen in the night and dying extravagantly, and in a way that makes a stain, on hard-to-clean surfaces. The RHS is currently conducting trials on five different alleged slug repellents — copper tape, horticultural grit, pine bark, wool pellets and broken eggshells

Doc

2362: Men of note IV

The unclued lights are of a kind. Ignore all accents and diacritical marks throughout the puzzle. The fifth letter of each of the nine unclued lights reveal A BASS FUEL.   Across 5    Garden flowers heard of by the congregations (6) 9    It’s sure to happen when Close is dropped from cable television broadcast (10) 14    He protects some villa (Roman) (3) 16    Dud Scottish wicket-keeper drops Pakistan’s opener (6) 17    Sailing boat turned over in shallow waters (5) 18    Exams are no great loss, regularly (5) 22    Very large implement reportedly — a hammer, perhaps (7) 24    My old-hat confession comes to a dead end (7) 25    Tartan cloth

The Spectator

to 2359: Down

The unclued lights can be preceded by BLUE which was hidden at the start of the third row and had to be highlighted in blue. BADGE at 15A is the theme word not listed in Brewer or Chambers as a ‘blue’ phrase.   First prize Joy Verth, Newton Mearns, E. Renfrewshire Runners-up C.D. Dobbs, Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim; Oliver Miles, Oxford

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s hope RBS emerges as something worth owning shares in

At last the government has restarted the process of selling its stake in Royal Bank of Scotland. A first £2 billion sale in 2015 (of 5 per cent of the bank’s shares) took place at 330 pence per share, against a purchase price of 502 pence in the 2008 bailout. Those numbers looked so embarrassing for George Osborne that the sell-off file was consigned sine die to a Treasury basement; but now that RBS has returned to a slim profit after nine years of losses, Philip Hammond sold another £2.5 billion tranche on Monday, ahead of what his advisers evidently think will be a weaker stock market after the European summit, but at