Society

Thursday

Lavatch

2237: Experimental

One unclued light is a publication (two words). The others are relevant figures (all in Chambers) who appear in a form suggested by the publication’s title. Across 1 Maybe camping, emptied lavatory diligently (8) 8 Heartlessly shakes young animals (4) 12 Earl leaves part of UK, touring king’s avenues (5) 16 Bed of rock’s silicon lines (4) 17 Return dirty old dishes (5) 18 Letter by doctor, one giving lozenges (6) 24 Irritation on street a pain when running (6) 25 Hesitation, beset by dire last warnings (6) 27 I must enter large gallery with openings (7) 29 Implements silent reforms in country (8) 33 A fruit tree cut back

Lavatch

To 2234: A greater measure

MARCOBRUNNER (11) is composed of words whose definitions are 1D, 24, 32; 13, 17, 35; and 9, 29A, 38. First prize Peter Bond, Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire Runners-up Rebecca Mawle, Great Nolford, Warwickshire; Peter Maddox, Swansea

Charles Moore Charles Moore

I’ve come up with the perfect way to deal with TV Licensing officers

Faithful readers of this column will know that I do not have a television licence for my flat in London, because I do not have a television. As a result, I receive a couple of letters a month demanding that I prove my innocence, which I never answer because I do not see why I should. Indeed, they normally remain unopened. This week, however, I received one in a window envelope. Through the window, I could see the calendar for November and the 24th of the month circled in red. ‘We’re giving you ten days to get correctly licensed’, it said, and implied that if I did not do so it

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Jeremy Hunt’s catastrophic mistake

Is Jeremy Hunt spoiling for a fight with the wrong people? On the latest View from 22 podcast, Dr Clare Gerada debates this week’s Spectator cover feature on junior doctors with Fraser Nelson. Does the government have the right intentions about reforming the NHS? Why is the fight over working hours and pay for junior doctors proving so toxic? Are these doctors actually being offered an 11 per cent pay rise, or is this simply spin? And what does the row say about how the government is treating public sector employees? Christopher Buckley and Freddy Gray also discuss this week’s Republican presidential debate and whether Marco Rubio is the most likely candidate to receive the nomination. Is Donald Trump becoming a

Katia Florman

A trust betrayed

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Dr Clare Gerada and Fraser Nelson discuss the row over junior doctors” startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]Like many of my fellow junior doctors, I trusted a Conservative government with the NHS. If it’s to stay strong and up to date, a health service cannot remain static. It needs not just money but carefully thought-out reform — as well as a strong economy to support it. Just after the general election, David Cameron laid out the problem as he saw it: a ‘weekend effect’ where a patient admitted to hospital on a Sunday is 16 per cent more likely to die than one admitted on a Wednesday. ‘So seven-day care isn’t

Christopher Buckley

Donald Trump and the Republican cabaret show

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Christopher Buckley and Freddy Gray discuss the Republican nomination race” startat=1125] Listen [/audioplayer]Washington DC A friend of mine asked his father, aged 82: ‘Dad, at this stage of life, what do you enjoy most?’ Dad replied: ‘Voting Republican and being left alone by your mother.’ Surely an unimproveable definition of bliss. My friend told me this in the 1980s, long before the Republican nomination contest turned into reality TV. Would his dad still enjoy voting Republican? Look what choices he’d have — from among nearly 20 candidates, a veritable embarrassment of riches. Or is it best that Dad has since gone to his eternal rest and has been

Max Pemberton

The wrong cuts

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Dr Clare Gerada and Fraser Nelson discuss the row over junior doctors” startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]It has long been rumoured that when Jeremy Hunt took over as Health Secretary, Cameron told him to do one thing with the NHS: keep it out of the headlines. Given that the NHS is an enormous institution, the public take an avid interest in it and it is frequently rocked by scandals and financial difficulties, this was no easy task. Until a few weeks ago, Hunt had managed it with aplomb. And then the junior doctor fiasco happened. It has been cataclysmic, one of the worst public relations disasters to rock a government

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Seb Coe is a fine man… but his roasting over the Russian athletics scandal is justified

So Smiley was right all along: the bloody Russians were the baddest of the bad. The Pound report on the epic scale of their state-sponsored doping and cheating in athletics was indeed seismic. It can’t have come as that much of a surprise, though. In a remarkable investigation in July 2013, Martha Kelner and Nick Harris of the Mail on Sunday blew the lid on the whole cesspool of Russian corruption. This was the headline: Drugs, -bribery and the cover-up! -Russian athletes— including those who robbed Brits of medals — ‘ordered to dope by coaches’ and officials ‘demanded cash to mask positive tests’. Pretty much what we got this week

Ben Clatworthy

Secret ski resorts

Skiing holidays have a problem. They’ve lost their sense of adventure. Yes, the first flurries of winter which arrived recently provoke excitement, and the lure of the mountains is still strong. What’s lacking, however, is the sense of discovery, anticipation, and of reaching dizzying new heights. This is no surprise, for the Alps have been entertaining winter tourists since 1864 when a group of Englishmen visited St Moritz ‘out of season’ as a bet. In its infancy, skiing was the preserve of the aristocracy, who holidayed only in the most chic resorts — the likes of Courchevel, Cortina and St Moritz — perilously hurling themselves down the mountains wearing plus-fours. More

Lucy Vickery

Martian poetry

In Competition No. 2923 you were invited to describe an everyday object, in verse, from the point of view of a Martian. James Fenton coined the term Martian to describe the work of poets such as Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, whose poems cast familiar objects in an unfamiliar light. In his 1979 poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ Raine describes books, or ‘caxtons’ as he calls them, as ‘mechanical birds with many wings/ and some are treasured for their markings —/ they cause the eyes to melt/ or the body to shriek without pain…’ This was a challenging comp. Children are well suited to writing Martian but it’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Of course there’s no morality in top-level sport

Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had acquired was every bit as authentic as the one they had jubilantly renounced. So a separate toilet is surely otiose. And not just that, but the suggestion that they might need a separate toilet for micturition through their surgically emended private parts is surely offensive. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, may be in trouble, then, for announcing his intention to install these mysterious receptacles throughout the Palace of Westminster to service the hordes of transgendered workers wandering around with extravagant beehive hairdos and outsize stiletto heels.

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Send in the clones

How much do you love your dog? Do you secretly wish, as he or she grows older, that you could have another just the same? I’ll bet that tens of thousands of Brits feel this way — and soon their dreams could come true. When most of us last thought about it, cloning was an off-putting and futuristic prospect. Dolly the sheep was the poster girl, and things didn’t turn out too well for her. But times change, science creeps on, and last year a Brit called Rebecca Smith had her beloved dachshund, Winnie, cloned in South Korea. The going rate for Mini-Winnie would have been £60,000, but Rebecca won

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Here’s what’s wrong with the ‘public sector ethos’

An infuriating benefit of readers’ online comments beneath the efforts of a columnist like me is that as you read the responses an understanding dawns of the column you ought to have written. Some readers are stupid, unpleasant or obsessive; but most are not. As you learn their reactions you see where your argument was not clear, where you were short of information, and where you were simply wrong. But more than that, you sometimes tumble for the first time to where the nub of a problem that perhaps you danced around may lie. Last Saturday I wrote for the Times about the self-righteousness of spokesmen for public services threatened

Joe Baron

Lessons in jargon

‘Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we keep the PC on the QT? ’Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we’d all be put out in KP.’ How I cheered when Airman Adrian Cronauer mocked Lt Steven Hauk’s fondness for acronyms in Good Morning, Vietnam. Using jargon is an act of unconscionable self-indulgence. It is designed to make the user feel superior while saying not much, and Adrian, played by the late Robin Williams, spoke for millions of cheesed-off employees when he attacked it. Jargon, acronyms and corporate-speak — all too common in offices — should

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

If the world economy crashes again, blame the central bankers

Like the Christmas pudding sampled by Hercule Poirot at Kings Lacey — but six weeks early — our Spectator Money supplement contains a little treasure in every portion, and perhaps even a priceless gem. I particularly commend the essays by Warwick Lightfoot and Subitha Subramaniam on interest rates, and why central banks have become so hesitant to raise them. In recent days we’ve had an indication from Mark Carney of the Bank of England that UK rates will stay at their current low well into next year, maybe until 2017; in the US, strong job numbers have pumped expectations that the first rate rise for nine years will be delivered

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The EU referendum is not about identity. That’s why it is easy to vote to stay In

A few weeks ago, I suggested that many of the arguments that will be trotted out during the forthcoming – and lacklustre – EU referendum will be wholly familiar to anyone who paid attention to last year’s referendum on independence for Scotland. And so it is proving. Sensible people – of whom there are more than is sometimes realised – should be able to appreciate, even if they are minded to vote In, that leaving the EU would not be a disaster for Britain. In like fashion sensible Unionists – of whom there were also more than is sometimes appreciated – could concede that an independent Scotland was not doomed

Dan Hitchens

There’s nothing irrational about patriotism

In the run-up to Remembrance Day, my local branch of the Quakers has been displaying a sign on the front door. It reads, with ever-so-slightly combative bold type: ‘Remembering all who have lost their lives in war’. They’re willing to mourn, as long as they don’t have to be patriotic about it. Temperamentally, I’m with the Quakers on this one: I struggle to get emotional at national symbols like the royal wedding or the sight of the Union Flag. But I know people who are moved by these things, and I’m not sure this is because they’re less enlightened than me and the Quakers. It seems more likely that we’re

Douglas Murray

Why is the BBC letting the Islamic Human Rights Commission set the agenda?

The farcically named ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ has featured here many times before. The last time was earlier this year when this Khomeinist group decided to award their ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ award to the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo. At their ‘awards ceremony’ for this the IHRC even joked about what a shame it was that none of the staff of Charlie Hebdo were around to collect the award. Today the IHRC has thrown a smoke grenade into the public debate by issuing ‘findings’ claiming that the UK government’s counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies are having a ‘negative impact’ on British Muslims. The ‘work’ is the usual confection of non-research

Tuesday

The Spectator

Europe podcast special: what would Brexit mean for British business?

This podcast was sponsored by King & Wood Mallesons. Would a vote to leave the EU help or hinder British businesses? In this View from 22 special podcast, The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson discusses the upcoming EU referendum with Matthew Elliott, co-founder of the Vote Leave campaign, Richard Reed, the co-founder of Innocent Drinks and a patron of the Stronger In campaign, and Stephen Kon, senior partner at King & Wood Mallesons. How are British business feeling about a potential Brexit sometime before 2017? Aside from the major corporations, are smaller businesses more inclined towards remaining in or leaving the EU? Where does the greater danger lie: the uncertainty of leaving the