Society

Thursday

Miles Goslett

David Cameron cannot escape blame for the Kids Company scandal

Today’s National Audit Office report into the collapse of Kids Company shines new light on the scandal. It shows that the charity received at least £46 million of public money during its 19 year existence despite repeated warnings from civil servants that funding it was unwise. The report also shows that ministers thought they knew best, and that many senior politicians ignored the concerns being raised. These MPs happily approved of the public purse being dipped into at the request of the charity’s founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh, and her chairman of trustees, BBC executive Alan Yentob, while at the same time other charitable organisations were given far less. Whether the state should bankroll

Sebastian Payne

Chilcot Report will be published in June or July 2016

Finally, Sir John Chilcot has announced when his inquiry into the Iraq war will arrive. He has written to the Prime Minister this morning to say the findings of his inquiry will be published in June or July next year. After years of increasing pressure from the public and government, Chilcot says the text will be finished the week commencing 18 April 2016 and the report will then be checked by national security staff. When it finally arrives, it is going to be a long read: ‘The very considerable size of our report – more than two million words in total — means it will take some weeks to prepare the report for printing and publication. For

Melissa Kite

Forty is a feminist issue

If Emily Hill is right in her cover piece for the magazine last week headlined ‘The end of feminism’, then women like me are in a whole world of trouble. And by women like me, I mean women over 40. The nub of Ms Hill’s argument was that all the big battles are won. She quoted the sparkling achievements of ‘women in their twenties’ and also ‘the under-40s’, who are out-earning men. What happens to women after they have broken through the glass ceiling is a question for an older, more cynical female writer. At your service. While agreeing with a lot of what Ms Hill says about the pettiness

Hans Kundnani

Germany’s dark night of the soul

As Angela Merkel approaches her tenth anniversary in power, Germans are talking about a possible Kanzlerinnendämmerung — a ‘twilight of the chancellors’. Anger is growing at Merkel’s handling of the migration crisis. Germany, which has only recently reconciled itself to the idea that it is a ‘country of immigration’, must now integrate vast numbers of asylum seekers, beginning with the million who are expected to arrive this year. At the same time, the country has been hit by two huge corruption scandals, involving Volkswagen and the DFB, the German football federation. The odds are that Merkel will survive — it’s hard to see at the moment who can replace her.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Joubert’s the man to sort out Syria

Not since Walter Palmer, a cudddly Minnesota dentist, put down his drill and vanished off the face of the earth having made sure that Cecil the Lion took a crossbow bolt for the team, has there been a disappearance quite like it. I refer of course to Craig Joubert, the hapless Durban-born referee last seen leaving scorch marks in the Twickenham turf as he sprinted for safety after mistakenly (as it turns out) awarding the Australians a penalty in the last minute of the Rugby World Cup quarter-final against Scotland. Now Joubert has been chucked under the bus by World Rugby, the governing body, who agree that he shouldn’t have

Claudia Massie

The Lake District

Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling is the best thing in the Lake District. I lived near Wigton, just north of the fells, for two years and escaping the shadow of the clingfilm factory to witness generations of champions, all called Brocklebank, do writhy battle on the Cumbrian turf was a delight. Fools might think that the embroidered pants worn by competitors over their white suits indicate a camp, silly sport, but they are wrong. It is a noble art and its practitioners are heroes; legends of the Lakes. The terminology is as thrilling as the bouts: swinging hype, hank, cross buttock, inside click. (The latter is a particularly devilish move.) While

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Character assassination

Here are three truths about play-writing. A script without an interval will be structurally flawed. A vague, whimsical title means a vague, whimsical drama. And a play about Alzheimer’s will self-destruct for the obvious reason that drama is an examination of character while Alzheimer’s is an effacement of character, so the paint evaporates before it reaches the canvas. A fourth truth is that subsidised theatres know nothing of the first three. So that explains Plaques and Tangles at the Royal Court, which runs for 110 uninterrupted minutes, without the variations of mood generated by an interval, and which examines a case of early-onset dementia. Megan is a married librarian with

The Spectator

From the archives: W.G. Grace’s legacy on the Western Front

From ‘W.G.’, The Spectator, 30 October 1915: The late Dr. W.G. Grace had become in his lifetime a legend, and he is likely to remain a legend as long as Englishmen play games. Never was such a cricketer; and it is almost safe to say that there will never be such a cricketer again, for the perfection of pitches and the high organisation of the game have left less scope than there used to be for a man to achieve so great a mastery over his fellows. In this respect cricket is like war; in first-class cricket, as in war among first-class Powers, there is the same human material for personal ascendancy,

Mario Reading

The years of pain

I remember the exact day my illness first declared itself. Twenty-seven years ago. Thursday 20 October 1988. My then wife and I were at a viewing of Harry Hook’s The Kitchen Toto at the Strode Theatre in Street when I felt a sudden, crippling pain in my back. Being 35 and a grown-up, I tried to ignore it. But the pain came back when we went for a pizza that evening, and I ended up crawling to the gents’, mewling and cawing. It took me 11 days to summon up the courage to go to my GP. ‘I’m having terrible pain on the left of my spine. I passed something

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The hatred that Amis and Corbyn share

Everyone loves an underdog. It doesn’t matter how incompetent they might be — indeed, incompetence works in their favour. You do not expect underdogs to be adept, do you? It doesn’t really matter how vile, otiose or absurd their beliefs are, either. So long as they are up against someone more powerful, a certain sentimental section of the population will be rooting for them. Look at the Palestinians, for example. And look at Jeremy Bloody Corbyn. My wife — a Tory — said to me the other day: ‘You lot want to watch it. I’m beginning to feel sorry for the bloke. The sympathy votes will be stacking up.’ We

Lucy Vickery

Fictihew

In Competition No. 2921 you were invited to write a clerihew about a fictional character. The clerihew is a comic four-line (AABB) biographical poem characterised by metrical irregularity and awkward rhyme. The first line is often the subject’s name. Or, to put it another way: E.C. Bentley Quite accidently Invented this form of wit, And this is it. (Anon) Here is another Bentley-inspired clerihew, this one written by Michael Curl: E.C. Bentley Mused while he ought to have studied intently; It was this muse That inspired clerihews. There was much to applaud in an entry full of wit and whimsy. Those printed below fought off stiff opposition to bag £8

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Are we all potential cyberterrorists now?

Hollywood got there first, of course. Back in 1983, before most of us even learned — then forgot again — what a modem was, Matthew Broderick starred in the seminal and brilliant WarGames. He played a computer hacker; a teenager who goes hunting for games on the global computer network that isn’t quite called the internet, yet. Unwittingly, he instead hacks into Norad, the North American Aerospace Defense Command and, via a convoluted series of events we need not go into here, very nearly sparks World War Three. Various angry generals assume, first of all, that he is the Russians. Then they assume he must at least be working for

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Without a word of advice, Paul Methuen set me free

At the time he will barely have noticed me. In his mid-forties and (to me at 18) middle-aged, he was our host at a dinner in his beautiful old house in Kingston, Jamaica: a wooden mansion that in its time had seen the town spread up from the harbour and push back the sugar plantations. But as you’d expect from a man for whom garden design was a passion, Paul’s house had kept its generous grounds from the age of sugar. Everything about Paul Methuen was generous: from his hospitality, to the sheer variety of his guests, to his warm and wicked sense of mischief and the measures of the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

TalkTalk shows us the internet is only three clicks from anarchy

I’m not a customer of TalkTalk, the phone company which revealed last week that a hacker had potentially compromised the personal data of four million users. But I feel I’m on the front line of the cyberwar nevertheless. In August, someone unknown to me tried to spend £1,200 at House of Fraser on my credit card account. The bank, to its credit, sniffed a fraud, rejected the transaction, cancelled the card and invited me to speak to a nice young man in India who talked me through the corrective procedure, including deleting a false email address inserted by the fraudster and setting up a new password to add extra security

Tuesday

Dan Hitchens

Free speech is the natural ally of transgender rights

Transgender men and women have a powerful story to tell. Their experiences are often heartrending: we should be appalled that nearly half of young trans people have attempted suicide. Meanwhile, there is compelling neuroscientific evidence to suggest that male and female can overlap, and that for some people gender dysphoria is no more eradicable from their nature than, say, being an introvert. How all this plays out, in terms of law and culture and surgery and public bathrooms, is another series of questions. But the basic point – that trans people should be listened to and helped, and neither explained as a problem nor scorned and marginalised – is a

Douglas Murray

How can multiculturalism both cause and cure racism?

In recent weeks there have been two prominent examples of what some people in Britain term ‘Islamophobia’. The first involved a woman on a London bus shouting to two identifiably Muslim women that they should ‘go back to their own country.’  She goes on to call them ‘Fucking Isis bitches’. The whole ugly scene was recorded by another passenger and widely trailed around the internet, subsequently leading to a woman’s arrest. The second incident was also filmed on a passenger’s phone and took place on a London bus a few days later.  On this occasion a passenger levelled an equally expletive-laden rant at a man sitting opposite him, also inviting the man to

Monday

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Once upon a time… history lessons weren’t so fragmented

What might a bright working-class boy from south London have learnt in his school history lessons a hundred years ago? We know something of his curriculum from notes made by the poet and painter David Jones about his own Edwardian education – paternalist, imperialist, chauvinist – at Brockley Road School, a state-funded secondary from 1906-1909. Summing up the ethos of his school history lessons he made this list: Below the belt / Natives / Sportsman / Whiteman / Boxing / Lower Deck / Club / English woman-hood / Dr Livingstone / North West Passage  / ‘but not the six hundred’ / Stock exchange / Slave trade / …sun never sets

Sebastian Payne

Bernard Jenkin: a sugar tax would help soften tax credits blow

George Osborne and the government are apparently in ‘listening mode’ about tax credits and Bernard Jenkin has something to say. The Tory chair of the Public Administration select committee has a novel proposition for how to fund a way to soften the blow of the cuts. In my piece for Politico Europe today, Jenkin tells me: ‘I think Osborne should carry on with the cuts but ameliorate the introduction for those worst affected. It would show he is listening and compassionate If he needs the extra revenue and cannot find other short-term savings, he should be considering the Sugar Tax.’ The idea of a tax on sugary foods and drinks has been advocated

Sebastian Payne

Nicky Morgan and Lucy Powell pointlessly square off over childcare and tax credits

Nicky Morgan and Lucy Powell appear to be the most ill-tempered pair regularly going head-to-head at the Dispatch Box. At Education Questions today, Powell asked about the government’s childcare plans and how it intends to help those who’s tax credits will be cut. Morgan answered by going on the attack: ‘I would believe the honourable lady’s concerns just a little more if it hadn’t been for her party’s peers in the other place, who voted against the Childcare Bill last week and delayed the introduction of the bill and the new scheme’. ‘Perhaps they wouldn’t have done that if she had adequate funding in place?’ Powell hit back. Morgan then

The Spectator

Technology podcast special: the disruptive impact of digital innovation

This podcast was sponsored by King and Wood Mallesons. Is technological change a good thing for the British economy? In this View from 22 special podcast, The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson discusses the disruptive impact of new technologies with Julian David, CEO of Tech UK, Andrew Pinnington, CEO of Hailo and Rob Day, a partner at King and Wood Mallesons. What does digital innovation look like and what can businesses do, if anything, to prepare for it? How is the British economy coping with the speed of technological changes through new innovations like Uber and Airbnb? Which industries have struggled the most to cope with new innovations? And are big or small businesses most likely