Royal shame

Nine-year-old Shreyas Royal, widely regarded as the UK’s best hope to become a future world chess champion, is being deported from the country next month because his father, although in regular employment, does not have earnings that reach the necessary threshold of £120,000 per annum. The chess world is in uproar about this, not least because Shreyas has already been invited to make the ceremonial first move in the Carlsen-Caruana World Championship match to be held in London at the College, Holborn, in November.
The case has attracted acid comment from John Cleese on social media and the former chess champion Rachel Reeves MP has written an eloquent plea to the Home Secretary Sajid Javid requesting clemency. My prediction, which I fervently hope is totally wrong, will be that officialdom refuses to listen and that this supremely talented boy will be expelled from this country. An example of Shreyas’s great talent arose in the following position from the Major Open section of this year’s British Championship where he crashed through with the Rf6 sacrificial theme which formed the topic of this column last week.