Society

Thursday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Italian without the heat or drama

Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love the Westway because it takes you away from Hammersmith. Even so, it possesses the River Café — it is not a café — a famous and influential Italian restaurant. It was ten when Tony Blair came to power, but inside it is as if he were still here, playing air guitar while chatting about PPP. It is inaccessible, taunting its clientele to go to Hammersmith. It feels as if it takes more than an hour to get to the River Café from anywhere that is not Hammersmith. How do they

Dot Wordsworth

Wrap up warm

In June 1873, Oswald Cockayne shot himself. He was in a state of melancholy, having been dismissed by King’s College School, after 32 years’ service, for discussing matters avoided by other masters when they appeared in Greek and Latin passages, ‘in direct opposition to the feeling of the age’. No improper acts had occurred. Cockayne was a clergyman and a pioneer philologist whose pupils included the great W.W. Skeat and Henry Sweet. His father’s name was Cockin. Perhaps he had changed the spelling to avoid offending the ‘feeling of the age’. The word cocaine was not invented until 1874. But the Land of Cockayne was a medieval fantasy world of pleasure.

Taki

High life | 8 March 2018

Gstaad The muffled sound of falling snow is ever-present. It makes the dreary beautiful and turns the bleak into magic. Happiness is waking up to a winter wonderland. From where I am, I can’t hear the shrieks of children sledding nearby but I can see the odd off-piste skier and the traces they leave. I can no longer handle deep snow, just powder. But I can still shoot down any piste once I’ve had a drink or two. For amusement I listen to the news: flights grounded, trains cancelled, cars backed up on motorways, people stocking up on food and drink as if an atom bomb had been detonated over

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 8 March 2018

Earbuds in. Speed walking to Grant Lazlo’s ‘Heard It Through The Grapevine’. A corridor, a left fork, a moving walkway, a rack of free newspapers — from which I extracted an Evening Standard without stopping — and here, sooner than I’d imagined, was Gate 52. It was a quarter past five in the evening. The Gatwick to Nice easyJet flight was scheduled to take off at 17.40. Looking through the plate-glass windows, I could see that all vestiges of snow had disappeared from the runways, which were dry and lit by evening sunshine. The cross-country journey to Gatwick last Wednesday had begun at 9 a.m. in a blizzard in Devon.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 March 2018

‘I bet Brian May isn’t lying on his back in a field shelter wondering how long it’s going to take for the snow to cover him and whether the horses will just poo right on top of his frozen head,’ I thought. Then, groaning in agony, another annoying thought surfaced in the annals of my resentment banks: ‘I bet Ricky Gervais hasn’t just schlepped a 30-litre container of water from his upstairs shower to a field of horses because the troughs are frozen and not refilling.’ Basically, it was tormenting me almost as badly as the pain in my wrenched back thinking about all the lefties applauded as ‘animal heroes’

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 8 March 2018

I’ve never forgotten a conversation I had some years ago with the talented, blunt-talking Norwegian player Espen Erichsen. We were discussing the dangers of getting demoralised at the bridge table. You make a couple of idiotic mistakes, your confidence takes a knock, your judgment grows cloudy, and soon you’re playing worse than ever. We’ve all been there. Well, not all. Espen is a top professional: he would never succumb to those sort of emotions. But he recognises them in others. And far from expressing any sympathy, he gave me a piece of advice which I must say took me aback: ‘When a man is down, you must kick him.’ I

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 8 March 2018

Q. Recently I held a party at which some people were meeting each other for the first time. One social-climbing couple, who I do not know well and invited only to pay them back for their own recent party, subsequently emailed to ask for the contact details of the most influential and elevated of my acquaintance. I resisted replying, but then they emailed again suggesting that they hold a dinner and invite my social lions, along with my husband and myself. I am feeling somewhat under siege, as well as mildly outraged. But I know that if some friends I knew better (and liked more) had asked for the same

The Spectator

The spying game | 8 March 2018

The apparent chemical attack on a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in an English cathedral city could be straight from a cold war thriller. Unfortunately, though, the case is not going to be solved in 500 pages — nor will it be solved by July, when the Foreign Secretary has threatened to withdraw a British delegation of dignitaries, if not the English team, from the opening ceremony of the World Cup. It was inevitable, as soon as Sergei Skripal was taken acutely ill on a bench in Salisbury, that fingers would point at Vladimir Putin. He did, after all, pass a law to give the FSB, the successor organisation

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 8 March 2018

Home Sergei Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia were found in a state of collapse on a bench outside a shopping centre in Salisbury. Mr Skripal, a retired Russian military intelligence officer, was jailed by Russia in 2006 on charges of giving secrets to MI6; he was deported in a swap of spies in 2010. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, said that the incident had ‘echoes of the death of Alexander Litvinenko’. Public Health England threatened food manufacturers and supermarkets with new laws unless they reduced the calories in portions of crisps, pizzas and pies. In a speech on Brexit at Mansion House (intended, before the snow came, to

Pabulum

2349: Novel

Clockwise round the grid from 3 run the names (7,4,5,6,8,8,5,6) of four characters in a novel followed by the initials of its author. Two pairs of unclued lights (20/39 and 11/26) each combine to form an anagram of the novel’s title.   Across 8    Aged saint keeps working a long long time (5) 9    Weed with shoot and bit of leaf (7, hyphened) 10    Tattoo’s ending as spectators exit (7) 12    Digest fish with butt of wine (4) 14    In Gabon Herbert developed bleaching agent (10) 15    Fat Inez reduced after plain cycling (8) 18    One fifth of journos worry about columns (5) 19    Utterly trust vacuous boy on oath

Tim Wyatt

Justin Welby’s stance on sharia law is a welcome relief

Justin Welby is right to take a stand against his predecessor, Rowan Williams’ most controversial announcement: that Britain should introduce sharia law. Ten years ago last month, Williams suggested parts of Islamic sharia law should be incorporated into British law. He argued that some kind of “constructive accommodation” was not only possible but desirable to better integrate British Muslims. The idea provoked almost universal condemnation, and now Williams’s successor has thankfully knocked down Williams’ poorly thought through stance. This isn’t to say, of course, that Muslims, mosques and halal food are not all welcome in Britain—diversity makes us richer. But law is another matter. Reconciling any two legal frameworks within

Christopher De Bellaigue

The prince of PR…

This week, Mohammad bin Salman, also known as MBS, is on his not-quite-state visit to Britain. A parade down the Mall and a state banquet could only be afforded to his father, old King Salman, who made MBS crown prince last June and has given him unprecedented latitude to liberalise Saudi society, lock up his enemies and light fireworks abroad. MBS arrived in London on Wednesday fresh from visiting one friend, Egypt’s General Sisi, and will go on to see another, Donald Trump, on 19 March. Theresa May’s aim will be to show that Britain can thrive outside the EU, but she should think twice before co-opting this new strongman

The Spectator

to 2346: the name of the game

The unclued entries are all names for pontoon; extra words in 27, 31, 33, 34 and 36 needed the letters S, G, O, U, R to become WHIST, BRIDGE, SOLO, AUCTION, CONTRACT. Auction, auction bridge, bridge, bridge whist, contract, contract bridge, solo, solo whist and whist are all card-games listed in Chambers. PONTOON is a BRIDGE.   First prize Rhiannon Hales, Ilfracombe, Devon Runners-up John Renwick, Ramsgate, Kent; R. Dickinson, Lewes, East Sussex

Steerpike Steerpike

Truss takes over No 11

To mark International Women’s Day, Liz Truss took over the Treasury for one night only. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury kicked off the celebrations at No 11 with a speech praising Destiny’s Child, the American girl group: ‘I can’t put it better than Destiny’s Child when they sang “all the honeys making money”‘ While Truss’s speech was primarily focussed on encouraging the women of the world to open their minds to finance (and liberty) – it also appeared to have a message for Philip Hammond. Truss told a room of female businesswomen and hacks that there was still much work to do for women’s progress. She noted that while

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Prince Charming

On this week’s episode of The Spectator Podcast, we look at the new Saudi Crown Prince as he visits the UK. Is he the great moderniser that some imagine, or are we sweeping the more unpleasant elements of his regime under the carpet? We also consider the many strands of Labour’s Brexit position, and look at a rocky week for British sport. First, Mohammed bin Salman, known to some as MBS, is making his first trip to the UK this week since assuming the role of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince last year. He has been heralded by some as the radical modernising force that the country has been calling for,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Poor Cathy Newman is the prisoner of the age

Almost eight million people have now watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with Jordan Peterson. This figure must be unique in the history of Channel 4 News online. Only a few minutes were broadcast on the original news programme, but Channel 4 then put out the full half-hour on YouTube, perhaps miscalculating the effects of watching the allegedly ‘transphobic’ Canadian clinical psychologist whose book 12 Rules for Life is selling out. I think what the majority of the eight million appreciate is that Peterson’s performance is noble. He attempts a clear exposition of his views about the differences between women and men. Despite every effort by Cathy Newman, he succeeds. Her

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Domestic abuse is undergoing the same revolution as mental health

Over the past ten years, mental health has gone from being one of those problems that no-one liked to talk about to something politicians tussle over to show they are the most committed. There is still a stigma floating around certain conditions, and people are still struggling to access the basic treatment that they need. But it is clear that society is growing better at understanding these illnesses – and is becoming angrier that there is not better provision for caring for them. That same slow shift is now starting with domestic abuse. Like mental illness, its victims have often been dismissed as either being flawed or in some way

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Knighting Wiggins so early was just asking for trouble

The incomparable Roger Bannister, whose passing marks the end of our links with a vanished age of sporting innocence, could have been knighted in 1954, such were his achievements in that year. He was eventually knighted 21 years later, in 1975: he could have been knighted for services to medicine or athletics, or both. We have started to play fast and loose with knighthoods. Bradley Wiggins and David Brailsford were both knighted at the end of 2012, the year of the London Olympics and Wiggo’s epic win in the Tour de France. Not looking such a bright idea now though. Wiggo and Brailsford are perfect examples of the rule that

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 8 March 2018

Laikipia Off Madagascar the other day the Indian Ocean gave birth to a little storm called 11S. As its gyre turned clockwise over the sea, 11S gained momentum until it was a huge vortex of thunder and lightning christened Tropical Cyclone Dumazile. Like a naughty lover yanking away the shower curtain so that everything in the bathroom is sprayed with hot water, Dumazile pulled the entire weather system of mainland Africa eastwards. The effect was to suck the clouds from the steamy jungles of Congo’s river basin across the equator and dump their entire contents over our farm in highland Kenya. There was I enjoying the dry season. ‘How’s the