Society

Thursday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Gastropolitics give us food for thought

An Iranian friend of mine recently brought me some gaz from Isfahan. Commonly known as Persian nougat, gaz is perhaps the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. The only thing to avoid is learning how it is made. Pistachio nuts are mixed with ‘honeydew’ collected from the angebin plant of the Zagros mountains, a sticky white substance often believed to be the manna of the Bible. It sounds glorious. That is until my friend told me that honeydew is not the sap of the plant — but is exuded from the anus of an insect which feeds on it. So one of the tastiest things on the planet turns

Bruce Anderson

That woman’s got me drinking

It is enough to make a man turn to drink. On a distinctly non-abstemious day, I was sitting in one of my favourite places on earth. It is not a great garden, merely a characteristically English one: roses, benign verdancy and the joyous sunshine of gentle summer. My dear friends have just finished restoring their late medieval house. It is not a great house, merely a classically English one. Chillingham Castle, the Wakefield family’s seat in Northumberland, which resplends in grandeur, was described by Walter Scott as bearing the rust of the Barons’ wars. This place, by contrast, is more a case of the gentle patina of manorial peace over

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 23 June

Readers will, I’m sure, remember the excellent Merlot-rich Sang du Sanglier from Ch. de Fayolle that we offered here with FromVineyardsDirect recently. Well, crikey, the 2016 Ch. de Fayolle Blanc (1), its sister wine, is every bit as toothsome. A blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon (just a bit) from low-yielding, naturally farmed, herbicide-free vineyards in Bergerac near Bordeaux, it’s crisp, clean and refreshing. The Sauvignon gives a lively touch of citrus, grass and herbs while the Sémillon adds depth, character and a certain roundedness. A white Graves of this quality from down the road would be twice the price. £9.95 down from £10.95. And if classic, beautifully made, artisanal

William Cook

New Jersey

When my American friends invited us to stay with them in New Jersey, my 13-year-old daughter was thrilled. She’d never been to the States before, and she couldn’t wait to see Manhattan. I had to break the news to her that there were no skyscrapers where we’d be staying. Plainfield, New Jersey, is an easy commute from New York City, but it feels like a world away. Clapboard houses with star spangled banners: this is the real America. You’d never know Penn Station was just an hour away by train. I took my daughter into NYC, and we did all the touristy things proper travel writers look down on: we

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Don’t fight racism with racism

Dear 2016 WriteNow mentees, Thanks so much for your open letter to me. It seems only good manners for me to write back. You’re rightly proud of having been admitted to a challenging programme at Penguin Random House that mentors gifted young minority authors and helps to cultivate their talents. My own publisher, HarperCollins, runs a similar programme, which enjoys my full support. Such proactive outreach is exactly the approach I endorse for helping to vary the voices on our bookshelves. That is why my column of a fortnight ago said not one discouraging word about WriteNow. Indeed, I made no reference to your programme whatsoever. Apologies to Spectator readers,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The myth and menace of cryptocurrencies

‘So, Professor Shin, tell us what you really think about cryptocurrencies.’ I’m guessing that’s the brief the Bank for International Settlements (the Basel-based central bank of central banks) gave economist Hyun-Song Shin to write a chapter for its annual report, published this week. His response delivers a serious kicking to the whole befuddled concept of ‘permissionless’ online currencies that ‘promise to replace trust in long-standing institutions such as commercial and central banks’. For a start, he argues, Bitcoin and its ilk are an environmental disaster because their systems consume enough electricity to power Switzerland. More importantly, their potential to replace state-backed money, is limited by three factors: scale (crypto computing

Simon Barnes

The joy of bird-listening

Here’s a rum thing: you can tell the quality of a piece of land with your eyes closed. Your ears alone will tell you if it’s any good or not. And this, as it happens, was good land. I was attempting to explain this concept to a group of disparate individuals, among them land-owners, gamekeepers, shoot-owners, farm workers, solicitors, an official from the National Farming Union, an RSPB warden, someone from Norfolk Wildlife Trust, a local councillor and a person who sells agricultural equipment. So I delegated the explanation to a goldcrest. This is the smallest bird in the northern hemisphere and weighs about a quarter of an ounce. It

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The straight dope | 21 June 2018

Was there ever a more fatuous contribution to a political debate than Lord Hague following up the case of 12-year-old Billy Caldwell — the boy whose mother says he needs cannabis oil to control his epilepsy — with a demand for recreational cannabis to be legalised? But the former foreign secretary has done us a favour of sorts. He has inadvertently explained why Billy Caldwell has become such a cause célèbre over the past few days: the drug-legalisation lobby has cottoned on to his huge propaganda potential. The reason why cannabis oil is not licensed for use as a treatment for epilepsy in Britain has nothing to do with the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Lost in the NHS maze

Next month the National Health Service turns 70. The institution is greatly loved, and not for nothing. The fear of ill-health runs deep in most of us and is ineradicable; but the fear of not being able to afford treatment, which must haunt most of the world’s population, has been abolished in Britain — and for that inestimable benefit we have the NHS to thank. It is, of course, possible to overrate the quality of this country’s health care. Many do. All things considered, and in a world of first-, second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-rate medical provision, I’d say we British get a second-rate health service for the price of

Paul Wood

Britain’s collusion

 Washington, DC Reports say the head of GCHQ flew to the US to hand deliver this incendiary material to the CIA When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu visited London in 1978, the British government did some serious sucking up. Ceausescu was an egomaniac and possibly crazy. When he went hunting outside Bucharest, his body-guards shot game with machine guns so he could be photographed at the end of the day with a shoulder-high pile of dead animals. He was also said to be a germophobe, sterilising his hand with pure alcohol if it touched a door handle. The French president telephoned the Queen to warn her that when the Ceausescus

Cosmo Landesman

Bringing sexy back

Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin famously wrote, began in 1963. And listening to contemporary commentators, you’d think that it came to an end in 2017 with the birth of the #MeToo movement. For these voices of doom, the end of the erotic is nigh; Britain is on the brink of sexual apocalypse. The recent news that Netflix has banned flirtation from film sets — along with lingering hugs, requests for phone numbers and extensive touching — is for these commentators just the latest example of #MeToo sexual correctness gone mad. They fear we are witnessing the making of a bland new world where the rules and regulations governing social relations between

Peter Oborne

Tariq Ramadan and the integrity of French justice

For the last four months, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan has been rotting in a French jail, like Jean Valjean. He stands accused of rape by several women who came forward during the #MeToo scandal. One says that in a hotel room in Paris in the spring of 2012, the world-renowned Swiss scholar of Islam “choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die”. Another has reportedly described “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, rape with an object and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair to the bathtub and urinated on”. If Ramadan is guilty of these despicable acts, he must face the full

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Trump is ‘vice-signalling’ over immigration – and it’s going to work

The stories are filed, the pictures are posted, and the media verdict is almost unanimous: separating children from their parents is wrong, it is unAmerican, and President Donald Trump is going to suffer for it. His administration is baby-snatching. The ‘optics’ are terrible, say the hyperventilating PR men and Washington know-alls. But if everybody stops to breathe for a moment, they should stop to recognise that, on this issue, as on so much else, Donald Trump is winning the politics. Call it vice-signalling. The President and Kirstjen Nielsen are making clear that, even if it means being seen to be inhuman, they are taking voter concerns about massive immigration seriously.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Brexit has become England’s white whale

Brexit must happen. Of course it must, for the people have decreed it should and, in this instance, their command cannot, as it can be in other circumstances, be countermanded. That leaves ample room for argument over the precise shape of Brexit – for it turns out there are many kinds of Brexit – but the essence of the matter is clear: Brexit must mean Brexit. It is possible to be sanguine about this and to recognise that even as the net impact of Brexit is likely to be negative in an economic sense, some sectors of the economy may benefit from it. In many areas, there is undoubtedly an

Douglas Murray

The true cost of the Stepford Students

It has become abundantly clear in recent years that becoming a Social Justice Warrior (SJW) is bad for your health. But recent developments in north America suggest that it is also very bad for your bottom line. It is now three years since the University of Missouri underwent a prominent bout of SJW-itis. On that occasion various students at the university demanded that the college President should resign, acknowledge his ‘white male privilege’ and henceforth organise both faculty and staff along strictly racialist lines. Instead of telling these students who the grown-ups were, and where to go, the university authorities repeatedly bowed to radical student pressure. During the ensuing protests,

Wednesday

Ryan Whelan

Will Christopher Chope block the upskirting bill again?

I represent Gina Martin, the 26-year-old who founded the campaign to make upskirting a specific sexual offence under English law. Last Friday, much to the dismay of his colleagues, Sir Christopher Chope blocked a bill in support of Gina’s campaign. When he shouted ‘object’, Chope was not then aware of the detail of the bill, the furore his decision would cause – or indeed what upskirting actually was.   Chope has now written for The Spectator and given interviews to the Times and ITV News, as well as his constituency paper the Daily Echo. His position remains that his objection to the upskirting bill has nothing to do with its merits

Toby Young Toby Young

Should women be paid for doing the housework?

According to a new study published by some feminist academics at the Australian National University, women risk damaging their health if they work more than 34 hours a week. That’s not because women are the weaker sex, obviously, but because they do more housework and childcare than men, effectively working just as hard but dividing their labour between the office and home. On the back of this, the report’s authors have called for women to be paid the same for working a 34-hour week as men are for a 47-hour week. Until this happens, according to the researchers, women are being forced to choose between their health and gender equality.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Emmanuel Macron was right to scold his over-friendly fan

Obviously, one mocks little President Macron for telling a teenager to call him ‘Monsieur le President’. How long before the French will have to say ‘Vive l’Empereur!’? But I do have a sneaking sympathy for the man one must not call ‘Manu’. The presumption of modern culture that everyone is on first-name terms makes people confused because they come to believe they really are friends with ‘Harry and Meghan’, or whoever it may be. The famous people thus addressed are also unhappy, because they cannot remember who they do and don’t know, and because they feel that people are trying to own them. Full, formal modes of address provide a

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Has straight sex become shameful?

Heterosexuality is marginalised by our liberal arts culture. Not by culture in general: it still allows boy-meets-girl to be celebrated by the masses, sort of (Love Island, Harry and Meghan). But liberal arts culture scorns the crude mechanical drudge of heterosexual coupling. Last night I saw a short monologue on BBC4, one of the series called Snatches, which is part of the Hear Her series. It was about a Liverpudlian typist, circa 1963, discovering the joys of the orgasm. But of course without the aid of a dull old man: it was a female colleague who initiated her. It was well written, well acted, and I make no complaint about

Tuesday

Christopher Chope

Christopher Chope: My fetish for Parliamentary procedure

All hell broke loose after I prevented several Private Members’ Bills receiving approval at Second Reading ‘on the nod’.  Despite the campaigner behind one of those Bills, Gina Martin, accepting the principled reasons for my objections, many on social media chose to believe otherwise.  Fortunately by Monday the Government had agreed that there should be a Government Bill in Government time to consider the legislation to ban the offensive and unacceptable practice of ‘upskirting’ which has been banned in Scotland since 2009.  My intervention has ensured that the legislation will have proper scrutiny and a much speedier passage to enactment.  This is because unless the Government was intent on breaking