Society

Thursday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The then and now of footballers’ pay

I must have missed the memo when it became compulsory for major football matches to operate as a marketing opportunity for the game’s marquee players, but that was what we got at Kiev after Liverpool were outmuscled and outplayed by a flinty-eyed Real Madrid. After Ronaldo announced that his time at Madrid was in the past, then our very own Gareth Bale, he of the annoying man-bun and sublime skills, in a rather graceless piece of scene-stealing, decided to ask for a transfer. Live on TV. Well, you do the math. He is on £300,000 a week (or £600,000 depending on who you trust), but assuming someone somewhere has to

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 31 May 2018

Laikipia I wake at 4 a.m. these days. At that time you might hear a lion or a braying zebra, but the birds and bullfrogs are quiet under the constellations. False dawn comes an hour later with the liquid song of sandgrouse and the bustards cackling as they angle into the first light. Just before sunrise the birdsong becomes a sound cloud rising from the valley up on to the plains. The cattle spill out of the boma bellowing and mooing and then later, at seven, comes the sound of men’s voices arriving at work, diesel engines warming up, chickens, dogs barking. My father used to rise at 5.30 a.m.

Lucy Vickery

Self appraisal

In Competition No. 3050 you were invited to submit a school essay written by a well-known author, living or dead, about one of their works. The germ of this challenge was the revelation that the novelist Ian McEwan helped his son to write an A-level essay about one of his books (Enduring Love), only to be awarded a less than stellar ‘C+’. The winners below did rather better, and shoot straight to the top of the class, scooping £25 each. Teacher’s pet Alison Zucker gets a well-done sticker and the bonus fiver.   I read The Outsider today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I can’t remember. I don’t think very

Byron York

A failure to impeach

Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, would join his legal team in the Trump-Russia special counsel investigation. The 74-year-old Giuliani is not as sharp as he was, some said, and isn’t really a practising lawyer any more. How can you effectively defend the President by slipping out of fatcat dinners at New York steakhouses for quick hits on Fox News? That was then. Now, it appears hiring Giuliani was a key part of a new and effective Trump strategy. Just a few months ago, Trump was cooperating with special

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Papal surrender

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact

Tim Wigmore

The people’s cricket

Blame it on a marketing survey. In 2001, the England and Wales Cricket Board commissioned the biggest piece of market research in the game’s history. They were told cricket was ‘socially inaccessible’, and that there existed a vast swath of ‘cricket tolerators’ — those who didn’t hate the game yet didn’t attend matches. So the ECB decided to take cricket to them. Twenty20, which could be crammed in after work on a midsummer’s evening, was created in the summer of 2003. The new game followed a traditional path: born in England, but perfected abroad. After India overcame its initial opposition, the country inexorably became the home of T20. A decade

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Save us from ‘woke’ superheroes

Comics aren’t what they used to be. In 1976 I was 11 — the perfect target audience for probably the most subversive, gory and entertaining comic series in British history, the now legendary Action. The strips, often rip-offs of movies we readers were too young legally to see, were quite outrageously violent. Hook Jaw was about a heroic great white shark who eats everyone. Death Game 1999 was a death sport based on Rollerball. Kids Rule OK was about a post-apocalyptic world which made Lord of the Flies look like Mary Poppins. Hellman of Hammer Force was the second world war seen from the perspective of a German Panzer major.

Wednesday

Mike Fotis

Building societies are feeling the squeeze – but don’t discount these underdogs just yet

Barely a month goes by without a new banking firm popping up. And while some are interesting, and a few perhaps revolutionary, most have simply rolled out mortgage and savings products in an attempt to muscle in on the home turf of the UK’s building societies. Add to the mix a fast deteriorating High Street environment, and there’s little doubt that building societies are starting to feel the squeeze. But far from being cowed, the mutual sector is gearing up to take on the new kids on the block, in a battle that cuts to the heart of what our society in 2018 really stands for. Since the birth of

Matthew Lynn

Don’t blame the populists for Italy’s chaos

Bond yields are soaring. Stock markets are tanking. The banks are looking wobbly, and money is starting to drain out of Italy. To listen to the mainstream commentary on the Italian crisis part 782, you’d imagine that a wild and irresponsible ‘populist’ government had just been tamed by the financial markets. And that once some sensible suits backed by the IMF and the EU take back control in Rome order would be restored and everything will be back to normal. The trouble is, that is not quite the whole story. In fact, the markets have already worked out that Italy is leaving the euro, at least in its present form.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Roseanne Barr’s downfall is a victory over Trump culture

It’s always the ones you most expect. Roseanne Barr, an icon of Trump culture, has had her TV sitcom cancelled by ABC after she tweeted that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was the product of a union between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes. Jarrett is black and was born in Iran.  In the 1980s, Barr was a trailblazer for working-class female stand-ups. In the 1990s, she was ABC’s ratings queen, with a self-titled half-hour that spent seven seasons in the top ten despite her off-camera reputation as a tantrum-throwing termagant. Along came the twenty-something bubblegum sitcoms, Friends and its imitators, with their thin scripts and thinner

Tuesday

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

No wonder our productivity looks permanently sickly

With one state-imposed compliance exercise after another getting in the way of business, no wonder our productivity looks permanently sickly. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect this week, has imposed a huge bureaucratic burden on companies and charities — as well as, for those that do it properly, a sacrifice of valuable data — following hard upon the UK government’s demand last month for ‘gender pay gap’ statistics from every entity with more than 250 employees. On the other hand, what a rare pleasure it has been to delete so many GDPR-driven ‘Click here to stay in touch’ emails from people and organisations I never had any

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

How can Britain build more homes?

It is generally agreed that Britain is suffering from a housing crisis, with big cities such as London being particular flashpoints. This year in the capital, the number of renters exceeded the number of homeowners for the first time. In the country, home ownership rates stand at a 30-year-low. And the proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds who are renters has almost doubled in the last 10 years. At the same time, 1.8 million families with children live in rented homes with tenancies shorter than a year. Homelessness is also on the rise and house building has consistently fallen below the government’s target. But what is the policy solution to all

Joanna Williams

Morgan Freeman and the troubling direction of #MeToo

The film awards season is over and Cannes has been handed back to wealthy holiday-makers, yet the #MeToo movement shows no signs of slowing down. Morgan Freeman is the most recent addition to the ignominious list of film producers, directors and actors who have had accusations of sexual harassment made against them since #MeToo took off in October last year. Allegations against the 80 year-old Freeman, star of The Shawshank Redemption, emerged last week on the day before Harvey Weinstein handed himself into police in New York on charges of rape. The charges against Weinstein are serious; he should stand trial and, if found guilty, face a lengthy prison sentence. Yet the

Saturday

John Wolfe

Gaza’s desperate plight is a godsend for the jihadists

I must respond to Rod Liddle’s opinion on Gaza (‘Why this deluded affection for the Palestinians?’, which appeared in last week’s Spectator). I was in Shifa hospital for two quiet Fridays during the initial protests. Eighty-five per cent of bullet wounds were around the knee; the result of accurate sniper targeting. The first casualty I saw was a prepubertal boy with a bullet through the head; the first operation, a prepubertal boy with smashed bones and artery from a high velocity bullet that resulted in amputation. These were children. Their elder brothers have never left Gaza, and half are unemployed, living with contaminated water and with electricity for only six

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: playing Cluedo with Trudeau, getting it on with Macron…

This time round, competitors were asked to provide poems about a bromance. Pairings including Friedrich and Karl, Laurel and Hardy, Nigel and Donald lit up an entry that was witty, touching and generally pleasingly varied. I liked Chris O’Carroll’s ‘Boris and Donnie’, a twist on Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘Frankie and Johnny’. And Bill Greenwell had the same idea, only with David and Jonathan from the Book of Samuel as the loved-up duo. Commendations also go to Shirley Curran, Jonathan Pettman, A.C. Smith and John Morrison. Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry transported me back to the 1970s, when real men wore chunky cream-and-brown hand-knit cardigans. He and his fellow winners, printed below, are rewarded

Friday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

At last, a speedy police response

The founder of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, turned up in Leeds on Thursday to film people going into a grooming trial. He did not speak, chant, accost anyone or do anything other than point his mobile phone at attendees, from a distance. Nor was he with a crowd. Still, seven coppers turned up and bundled him into a paddy-wagon accusing him of a breach of the peace. I’m not remotely a fan of Robinson. But I do not like the idea that simply being Robinson is enough to get you arrested. Or that writing something in defence of Robinson puts you somehow beyond the pale. Also, wouldn’t it have

Steerpike Steerpike

The six tricks Mark Carney used to cook up his ‘Brexit costs you £900’ figure

Mr S has always been a great admirer of creative accounting: the tricks our politicians use to dress up 50p as £1. It’s not lying, per se. All the techniques need to be valid. But their effect is to mislead. Ed Balls was the great master of this dark art, George Osborne his less-subtle apprentice. Now Mark Carney is stepping in, claiming that the Brexit vote has somehow made people £900 a year worse off. How can he conjure up this figure, given that his doom-laden projections for the No vote have all been disproven? By using financial spin. A combination of language and statistical skills to “give an appearance

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Short shrift

On 10 May, Britain’s most famous grandmaster, Nigel Short, chose the pages of the Times to announce his surprise candidacy for the post of president of Fidé, the World Chess Federation. It is high time indeed that someone had the courage to attempt the clean-up of this organisation, whose bank account has recently been terminated with extreme prejudice by UBS.   It will be essential for Nigel’s prospects that he receives the fullest backing of the English Chess Federation and its highest officials. To stiffen their resolve in the face of foreign blandishments, I urge ‘all who love the game’ (in the ringing words of the Times editorial in support

Raymond Keene

no. 507

White to play. This position is from Short-Muir, Gibraltar Masters 2004. How did Short bring his kingside attack to a successful conclusion? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 29 May 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 Rxe7+ Last week’s winner Gareth Davies, Langstone, Newport