Society

So Sepp Blatter has substituted himself hardly 30 seconds into the second half, or rather the fifth half. But his rhinoceros skin still doesn’t seem to have been breached. His parting shot contained a bewildering statement: ‘We need a limitation on mandates and terms of office. I have fought for these changes but my efforts have been counteracted.’ If so, then why didn’t he take a lead by the simple expedient of not standing for a fifth term as Fifa president last week? It is a bit rich insisting on standing for an office and then claiming that you had spent your previous term fighting to abolish your right to

Every few years, Action on Smoking and Health draws up a wish list of all the policies it would introduce if it was king for the day. It then spends the next few years lobbying ferociously and watches with a satisfied smirk as every single one of their brainwaves becomes the law of the land. The manifesto of this tiny pressure group is, in effect, the manifesto of whichever party is in power. The only difference is that governments often ignore their own manifesto commitments (such as Labour’s 2005 pledge to exempt private members clubs from the smoking ban) whereas the ASH manifesto is always implemented to the letter. ASH’s

It’s tough being a vigilante, as Michael Widen in St Mary Bourne village has discovered to his cost. Mr Widen has been monitoring drivers with his own speed camera, and then reporting them to police. People in the local pub have started calling him a speed Nazi and there are mutterings in the village that he should have taken up bridge like other pensioners, rather than become a grass roots traffic officer. The Spectator has quite often taken the side of people who take the law into their own hands, especially in the early ‘90s, when the police didn’t seem to be able to do much about crime. Paul Johnson

How pleasing that the sleazebags at Fifa are finally getting their comeuppance. We have all known what has been going on for years: dodgy deals in hotels, backhanders to secure votes. Who could disagree with the judgement of Greg Dyke, chairman of the FA when he suggested: ‘There is no way of rebuilding trust in Fifa while Sepp Blatter is still there.’ If we won’t go, let’s boycott the World Cup until Fifa is governed like, er, our own upstanding football establishment. That’s the problem. Yes, of course Fifa is a fetid pit of corruption, but we can’t exactly claim the moral high ground, not with our own history of bungs, match-fixing scandals

Numerous commentators have noted how the Irish marriage referendum was influenced by big business, especially Californian-based companies like Google. It’s one of the curious trends of recent years that big business, once considered the enemy of ‘the Left’, is now its greatest proponent; or at least the dominant strain of Leftism, social justice liberalism. Silicon Valley is the most extreme example of this, an industry that is young, dynamic and universally socially liberal; but elsewhere most politically interested billionaires in the West tend to be more liberal than the population, whether it’s George Soros funding various social justice causes or other Democrat-supporting moguls. In contrast, with the exception of the Bangladeshi

There are some odd opening moves in chess, such as 1 a3 and 1 g4. The former was used by Adolf Anderssen to win a game against Paul Morphy in their 1858 match, while the latter has been developed into an entire system by the English international master Michael Basman. Perhaps the weirdest of all is 1 h4, the topic of a new book, Shuffleduck, by Ken Norbury. It is conceivable that it might be possible to weld 1 h4 into a kind of system, as Basman has done with 1 g4. However, this book points out how an early h4 can form part of a strategic design, in particular