Society

Thursday

Tony Lodge

Gavin Williamson is right: Britain’s energy supply is threatened by Russia

Gavin Williamson’s warning that the Russian Bear is sizing up the UK’s energy infrastructure is important as it brings long overdue attention to a troubling drift in UK energy policy. Britain’s electricity market is increasingly slanted in favour of importing more electricity from Europe and against securing investment in new power plants at home. Billions of pounds of domestic energy plant investment have consequently been put at risk, which will undermine the future security of supply and risk price rises. It is important to appreciate our growing reliance on imported electricity, as well as the fact that current planning will quadruple this dependency with consequences for prices, competition and security

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 3 February

Good grief, I’m glad that’s over. Dry January, that is. The worst thing was that for most of it I slept terribly and invariably woke with what can only be described as a hangover: throbbing head, aching eyes and dreadful feelings of remorse for having drunk too much the night before (not to mention for having behaved appallingly and for owing a large number of folk some pretty hearty apologies). It would slowly dawn on me, though, that I had drunk nothing but Badoit and that I hadn’t, after all, been at the Presidents Club bash and that I needn’t reproach myself. I’m now happy as a lark having jumped

Bruce Anderson

The true island spirit

Arran, in the Firth of Clyde, is an island whose charms vary with the seasons. In summer, the hills are verdant. By midwinter, there is a grandeur of rock and snow. These days, the attractions are enhanced by a better class of visitor. Time was, when it suffered from proximity to Glasgow, but the Gorbals-ites who want to start the morning with a cocktail of Buckfast and Irn-Bru now do so in Torremolinos. So: gentle sounds, sweet airs and a formidable amount of history. For centuries, Arran was on the front line in the constant warfare between Norsemen, Gaels, the lowland kings of Scotland and aristocratic factions. It is near

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Presidents Club was on to something

There exist in the annals of salesmanship certain ideas that are both highly immoral and wickedly clever. Before P. T. Barnum attached his name to circuses, he ran Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan. From 1841 until its destruction by fire in 1865, this received more than 38 million visitors, each paying 25c. The entry fee entitled visitors to stay all day; congestion often prevented new paying visitors from being admitted, so to hasten traffic to the exits, Barnum placed signs throughout reading ‘To The Egress’ or, according to some reports, ‘The Great Egress’. Enticed by the prospect of seeing what they imagined was some exotic bird, less literate guests followed

Mark Mason

Beagles

Harvey’s finest moment, he would tell you, was the chicken kiev. I’d just made the garlic butter and inserted it into the chicken breast when the phone rang. The call went on for a while, after which I returned. No chicken breast. ‘Must have put it in the fridge,’ I thought, and began to look. Only then did I glance across at the dog. His expression said: ‘You’re going to work it out in a moment, aren’t you?’ It’s the beagle’s defining characteristic: a yearning to become the widest animal known to man. ‘Taking candy from a child’ isn’t just a phrase for a beagle, it’s a way of life.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa’s choice

The Brexit ‘inner cabinet’ met on Monday. It was meant to be an important meeting, one which made some real progress on deciding what kind of economic relationship with the EU the UK is seeking. Senior civil servants had been told that the crucial topic of the Irish border would be on the agenda. This is one of the hardest parts of the Brexit equation to solve, and the answer will reveal plenty about the kind of trade deal the UK is seeking and the trade-offs it is prepared to make. But when the agenda for the meeting was circulated on Friday night, Ireland was not there. This left only

Lucy Vickery

Presidential patter

In Competition No. 3033 you were invited to take as your first line ‘I am the very model of a Very Stable Genius’ and continue for up to a further 15.   It seemed about time for a challenge to mark Trump’s first year in office, and what better as a springboard than the Donald’s own words. Long lines mean fewer entries, which is a shame because the standard was terrific. Honourable mentions go to Carolyn Beckingham, John Beaton, Brian Murdoch and Ann Alexander. The winners take £25. I am the very model of a Very Stable Genius. To castigate my temperament is nasty, fake and hee-nius. There’s Lincoln and

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Ikea’s real genius: making furniture disposable

By all accounts, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was my kind of guy: may he rest in peace (on an Askvoll standard double). Like me, he was a skinflint. For a multibillionaire to buy his clothes at flea markets and select his groceries from supermarket quick-sale shelves is charming. About his retail wares, I’m more ambivalent. Look, hats off to Ingvar for making halfway-attractive furniture available to the hoi polloi at affordable prices. Yet every time I’ve succumbed to the allure of a cheap-and-cheerful Ikea design, I’ve ended up hating it. Part of the problem is the look. Cheap-and-cheerful is not my bag. I’m more into cheap-and-morose. In a profile a

Cosmo Landesman

MenToo

These are tough times for what I call the #MeToo Men — those white, liberal, high-minded men who pride themselves on being good feminists. Disgusted with Trump and horrified by Harvey, they want to show solidarity and be good allies to the women of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. So they wear their feminist hearts on their sleeves and their Time’s Up pins in their lapels — and they wear them with pride. But pride comes before the fall, especially if you try to parade your feminist credentials in public. Just ask actor James Franco and comedian Aziz Ansari. After appearing at the recent Golden Globe awards, both of

Jason Mitchell

Inside out

‘I murder people!’ says Elanger matter-of-factly in response to my question about what he does for a living. From the comfort of my home in the UK, I have managed to get in touch, through contacts of contacts on Facebook, with someone serving 19 years in prison for double murder in Venezuela. The country has some of the most notorious jails in the world. Inside one of them, Elanger has got hold of a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo. Between 2010 and 2014, I lived in a student city called Mérida in the Venezuelan Andes. It is a beautiful old colonial town and was a fun place, full of bars and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The real reason hospitals threw back that Presidents Club cash

I visited St Thomas’ Hospital on Monday, to discuss fundraising for a cardiology research project. On the way in, I spotted an acquaintance taking her little boy for tests; she was busy explaining why the doctors needed to do what they were about to do, so I didn’t interrupt. I also spotted a block on the map labelled ‘future site of Evelina Children’s Hospital’, and my thoughts turned to the £650,000 pledged for Evelina at the Presidents Club dinner: £400,000 of it in an auction bid from the restaurant tycoon Richard Caring to secure naming rights on a high-dependency unit. In the furore over the all-male club’s treatment of female

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Stop trying to make football perfect

They’ve got this new thing in football. It’s called the Video Assistant Referee and it is designed to make the game, at the highest level, pristine and free from human error. This is, to my mind, a mistaken aspiration in a game that relies on human error for its excitement, especially when the England goalkeeper Joe Hart is playing. Anyway, what happens is this. When the referee isn’t sure about some crucial incident on the pitch, he summons another referee via a headset to help him. The other referee is many miles away, watching the match on the television. The ref stops the game and wanders over to have a

Simon Ings

A robot to love

‘I gotta be me,’ Sammy Davis Jr. croons as the android Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) steadies her horse, stands up on her stirrups, takes aim with her Winchester, and picks off her human masters one by one. The trailer’s out at last and the futuristic TV series Westworld is set to return in the spring. It’s a prescient show, but not in the ways you might expect. It’s not about robot domination. Westworld is about an uprising of pleasure cyborgs in a futuristic resort. It is, for all its gunplay, about love. And that makes it a very timely show indeed. In the real world, robots are actually being

Wednesday

Spectator Money

The cost of eating out

Four Japanese tourists complained to police after their restaurant meal of fish, steak and water cost £243 per head in Venice. Places where they could eat for a little more per head: Paris three-course collection menu at Restaurant le Meurice £335 Maldives Ithaa Undersea Restaurant £360 Lausanne Restaurant Crissier £290 Or if they wanted to economise: Chelsea seasonal inspiration menu at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay £185

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

How much could Dry January have saved you?

January 31st means two things: firstly, the dreaded day on which your self-assessment tax return is due. And secondly – and probably more cause for celebration – is the fact that it’s the final day of Dry January. For those who gave up alcohol for the month, tonight – being the last day of January – is the last day that they need deprive themselves any longer. (Let’s face it: you might need a drink after wading through the long-winded HMRC process, after all). But is the whole ‘Dry January’ thing a gimmick? Perhaps, to a certain extent. On the other hand, it certainly won’t do you any harm. There’s

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May must lead or go

The Brexit ‘inner cabinet’ met on Monday. It was meant to be an important meeting, one which made some real progress on deciding what kind of economic relationship with the EU the UK is seeking. Senior civil servants had been told that the crucial topic of the Irish border would be on the agenda. This is one of the hardest parts of the Brexit equation to solve, and the answer will reveal plenty about the kind of trade deal the UK is seeking and the trade-offs it is prepared to make. But when the agenda for the meeting was circulated on Friday night, Ireland was not there. This left only

Tuesday

Spectator Money

Best Buys: One year fixed rate bonds

If you’ve got a chunk of money that you don’t mind having locked away for a set amount of time, fixed rate bonds can often give a better rate of return than most accounts. Here are this week’s picks of the best one year fixed rate bonds on the market at the moment. Data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk

Steerpike Steerpike

John Humphrys has the last laugh at Oldie of the Year

John Humphrys has had a rough time of late. Not only has the Today programme anchor voluntarily taken three pay cuts – with his salary thought to have been cut from £649,000 to under £300,000 – he has received little credit for it. Humphrys has come under flak from all sides after a conversation in which he joked about a female colleague’s warnings over the gender pay gap at the BBC was leaked to the Sun. The comments irked Tracey Crouch – a government minister – so much that she refused appear on Today. So Mr S is pleased to report that Humphrys has finally found a safe space. The BBC

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Are Labour MPs in line for their own Haringey-style showdown?

The centrist faction in the Labour Party has been pretty quiet since the snap election, with most MPs who opposed Jeremy Corbyn trying to focus either on Brexit or local issues and avoiding confrontations with the leadership at all costs. But today’s news from Haringey suggests that this isn’t likely to hold. The council’s leader Claire Kober has quit after almost a decade in charge, blaming ‘sexism’ and ‘bullying’ from Momentum members who have been campaigning against a regeneration plan that they are ideologically opposed to. Kober is also furious with the Labour’s National Executive Committee for trying to interfere in local democracy too, after it instructed Haringey Council to

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Feminists have a new target: working-class women

So this week two things have got feminists cheering and whooping. First, the coming together of BBC women to demand a hike in their already eye-watering levels of pay. And secondly, the erasure of the walk-on women from darts, the sacking, effectively, of these beautiful, usually working-class women who bring a touch of glamour to a game dominated by portly blokes fond of their lager. Feminists applaud the wealthy, well-educated women of the Beeb who demand more money yet care not one jot for poorer women who, courtesy of the 21st-century lust for destroying outdated or allegedly offensive things, have just lost a source of their income. How brilliantly revealing.