Society

Saturday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Why won’t football clubs give English players a chance?

Watching the Chelsea v Arsenal match last Saturday I could spot one Englishman in the two starting line-ups: Ross Barkley, an England reject. I like our multicultural society as much as anyone, but this is taking things too far, no? It doesn’t chime with the euphoria of England reaching the World Cup semis and our younger national teams doing so well. There seems little will even to try to promote home-grown players. Poor Ruben Loftus-Cheek, who performed so well in Russia, has been hunting for a loan move from Chelsea just to get some game time. Sure, the days of a successful British-owned, British-managed team of largely British players are

Friday

The Spectator

Britain’s economy is not suffering as much as the doom-mongers insist

This piece first appeared as the leading article in The Spectator.  Economies run on confidence — as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed when he told Americans, in his first inaugural address during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, that they had ‘nothing to fear except fear itself’. If that confidence is lost, if people collectively start drawing in their horns, squirrelling money away because they fear turbulent economic times ahead, then recession can all too easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. No serious economist would dispute this theory. The puzzle is why the UK economy, riddled with Brexit anxieties, is in such good health. The Dutch prime minister said we

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

How Macron is reviving Marine Le Pen’s fortunes

It says much about Europe’s political establishment that Marine Le Pen has been charged over photographs she tweeted in 2015 to illustrate the barbarity of Isis. It was a stupid stunt of Le Pen’s, but not one worthy of prosecution and the political martyrdom that will ensue if she is convicted. Le Pen is facing the possibility of three years in prison and a fine of €75,000 (£66,000) because last year the European Parliament voted to strip her of immunity, thereby allowing a French judge to charge her with distributing “violent messages that incite terrorism or…seriously harm human dignity”. Meanwhile, as politicians and lawmakers conspire to send Le Pen down for

Studio Pow

Opportunity to invest in a star-packed thriller

SPONSORED BY The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) is a government-backed incentive aimed at encouraging private investment in strong developing British businesses. With the economic uncertainty surrounding Brexit, many see EIS as an excellent way to secure their future. Investment is only available to those who qualify as either high net-worth or sophisticated. Studio Pow is a film company that qualifies under the scheme. It has been featured in the Times, the Telegraph and Empire magazine, and its latest film Cordelia is the most exciting yet. Directed by four-time Bafta nominee Adrian Shergold, the film will star Sir Michael Gambon (Harry Potter), Catherine McCormack (Braveheart) and a host of other stars.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 August 2018

Not up to snuff Sir: The country is indeed crying out for expertise, as James Ball and Andrew Greenway wrote last week (‘The rise of the bluffocracy’, 18 August). But the main problem is with the civil service, not politicians. The civil service has traditionally wanted experts to be ‘on tap, not on top’. This attitude has done immense damage to Britain. Since 1970 the scientific civil service has been abolished in a series of reductions and privatisations. The result in 2001 was that there was nobody in government who had any clue about the epidemic of foot and mouth disease. In the education department there seems to be nobody

The Spectator

Barometer | 23 August 2018

Cultured tastes Dawn Butler accused Jamie Oliver of ‘cultural appropriation’ for coming up with his own recipe for jerk rice. Some other culturally appropriated dishes she might find hard to swallow: Chop suey is said to have been invented in 1896 — during a visit to New York by China’s US ambassador Li Hung Chang — to appeal to American and Chinese tastes. Balti was invented in Birmingham in the 1970s by restaurants to appeal to a clientele beyond the local Pakistani population. Fish and chips were first recorded in the East End in the 1860s, derived from the Jewish method of frying fish. High numbers The government took over

Taki

High life | 23 August 2018

This was a real surprise, and on my birthday (11 August) to boot: a grown man, whose parents I used to know and like, wrote in the sophisticated pages of The Spectator (‘Desperate Housewives’) that what women really want is a man with a big house. Golly, you don’t say, for God’s sake stop the presses! Better yet get off it, Cosmo, or pull the other one, no one is that naive, not nowadays anyway. I know I sound jaded, and I’m sure the writer was playing ‘born yesterday’, but just one week before his article I had commented how one can tell a man by the type of boat

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 23 August 2018

The Villa Carnignac art gallery is located on a Mediterranean island off the French Riviera called Porquerolles. Purpose-built to show off billionaire hedge-fund executive Edouard Carnignac’s modern art collection, the gallery opened in June. Monsieur Carnignac hung out at the Factory with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, is a freedom-loving, polo-playing child of the counter-culture who famously paid for an advertisement displayed in the leading papers of Europe on the same day urging former president Hollande to lay off taxing the rich. The off-shore location of his art gallery is vitally important. You don’t visit Villa Carnignac because you can’t think of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon.

Raymond Keene

Royal road

The mathematician Euclid once boldly informed King Ptolemy Soter I of Egypt that there was no royal road to geometry. However, a royal road to a UK visa does exist and it has just been granted to the family of nine-year-old prodigy Shreyas Royal, by means of the intervention of the Home Secretary himself.   A vigorous campaign has been in train for most of this year to prevent the Royal family from being deported in September. This included a charitable programme of chess tuition implemented by the experienced junior coach Julian Simpole, whose former pupils included Luke McShane and David Howell. Shreyas has been invited to make the ceremonial

Melissa Kite

Real life | 23 August 2018

After I had been glossing the woodwork for a few days, I started to feel light-headed. It hadn’t occurred to me that the paint was solvent-based, of course. Not until I caught sight of the writing on the tin one evening while painting a bedroom doorframe did it make sense. But it was too late, because I had inhaled enough of the stuff by then. The keeper arrived to find me neurotically painting architrave so that the paint lines were correct to the nearest millimetre. I was up against the wood so close my nose was virtually touching it, as if I were painting the Sistine chapel. And all the

Raymond Keene

no. 520

White to play. This position is from Nakamura-Mamedyarov, St Louis 2018. Unfortunately for Mamedyarov, he has just blundered in a winning position. How did Nakamura exploit his lapse? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 28 August 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 Bc4 Last week’s winner Richard England, London

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 23 August 2018

Long-married couples are notoriously intolerant of one another at the bridge table. It’s as if all their pent-up irritation comes bursting forth — no matter how humiliating for their partner. Frankly, some players are so mean to their spouses that if they behaved like that in everyday life, it would be classified as mental cruelty. It’s not always so bad, but even the happiest of couples snap sometimes. At least, that’s what I thought until I came across John and Lucy Phelan, from Ireland, at the Summer Festival. Their behaviour left me stunned: they weren’t just nice to each other, they were delightful. And it’s not like they’re newlyweds or

The Spectator

When fear fails

Economies run on confidence — as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed when he told Americans, in his first inaugural address during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, that they had ‘nothing to fear except fear itself’. If that confidence is lost, if people collectively start drawing in their horns, squirrelling money away because they fear turbulent economic times ahead, then recession can all too easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. No serious economist would dispute this theory. The puzzle is why the UK economy, riddled with Brexit anxieties, is in such good health. The Dutch prime minister said we were ‘collapsed’. The New York Times publishes frequent reports saying that

Toby Young Toby Young

Jerk rice – with a side serving of insanity

Earlier this week, the Labour MP Dawn Butler ‘called out’ Jamie Oliver for ‘appropriation’. His sin, according to the shadow minister for women and equalities, was to launch a product called Punchy Jerk Rice. ‘I’m just wondering do you know what #Jamaican #jerk actually is?’ she asked him on Twitter. ‘It’s not just a word you put before stuff to sell products… Your jerk rice is not OK. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’ The notion that it is problematic for white people to ‘appropriate’ the culture of other ethnic groups has become widespread on the left. Three years ago, Erika Christakis, a Yale lecturer, sparked protests after she

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 23 August 2018

Q. I live in a houseshare with two other people; one of whom I am very fond of and the other, not so much. She lies and cheats and is a terrible friend. She is a social climber extraordinaire who has abandoned her real friends. My other housemate is of the same opinion. The lease is coming up for renewal. We don’t want to move, so how do we get her out? She will not take this lying down. — Name and address withheld A. A calm three-step procedure will be necessary. Enlist the help of a monied friend, who has connections to both you and the good housemate. He

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Back to the Eighties

I wouldn’t normally visit Coq d’Argent, which I think means the chicken of money. It is a moderately famous restaurant in a pink and brown tower in the City of London, once owned, as so much has been, by Sir Terence Conran, and now by D&D, specialists in soulless food barns. As restaurants go, it feels unlucky. It has — how to put this? — a circular roof garden from which people sometimes throw themselves off. One was a restaurant critic, but his last meal was not at Coq d’Argent. That was at Hawksmoor in Spitalfields. He had good taste, then, and he quoted Samuel Johnson on Twitter as he

Dot Wordsworth

Relish the opportunity

The Sun gave a sad picture of British loneliness recently in a report about the national yearning to play a board game like Monopoly, which could only be fulfilled about five times a year when someone could be found to play it with. In passing, the paper remarked: ‘Two-thirds of Brits would also relish the opportunity to play a life-size version of their favourite board game.’ Whether or not this unlikely claim is true, there’s an awful lot of relishing going on these days, and opportunity is usually the thing relished. What, according to the Telegraph gardening pages, will you do with the opportunity for a relaxed afternoon in such

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 August 2018

Home Government finances were in surplus by £2 billion in July. Public sector net debt rose to £1,777.5 billion, equal to 84.3 per cent of GDP, £17.5 billion more than a year before, but less as a proportion of GDP than last year’s 86 per cent. Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, flew to Washington and made a speech urging the European Union to take stronger sanctions against Russia. President Vladimir Putin of Russia danced with Karin Kneissl, the new foreign minister of Austria, at her wedding, and then met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany at the Meseberg Palace near Berlin. The government took over the management of Birmingham prison from G4S midway through

Richard Madeley

Diary – 23 August 2018

Down here near Nice, you find most locals unsurprised by the catastrophic Genoa bridge collapse. The Italian border is only a few miles away but most people will find any excuse not to cross it — including my wife and me. In fact, these days we don’t go there at all. We haven’t done for years. Friends find this strange. After all, Italy’s closeness is one of the reasons we bought the place. So why do I fight shy of motoring through the long autostrada tunnel that runs under the pre-Alps, linking Menton to Ventimiglia? Because it’s bloody dangerous. Not on the scrupulously maintained French side, brightly lit with clearly

Lavatch

2373: Susurrus

Unclued lights are three groups of three words of a kind, each group defined by the name of a different main character from a novel. The fourth main character of the novel (6, two words) must be highlighted in the completed grid.   Across 1    I hope gas travels in passages in US (8) 8    Firms making fruit-producing plant (4) 12    Old character about to drink fill when wine’s new (9, two words) 15    Prisoner welcomes month, one that’s boiling (7) 17    Growl resounded around (4) 18    Rope from cafeteria tables (5) 19    A journalist retains right transferred once (7) 23    Drop of port wine, red, in mixture (8) 24