Society

Thursday

28 May 2015

No. 364

Black to play. This is from Westman-Walther, Havana 1966. Black has the possibility of a discovered check against the white king. How can he make the most of this? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 2 June or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Re4 Last week’s winner Robert Tove, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Spectator

Letters | 28 May 2015

Why we don’t need mayors Sir: There are a number of arguments against Steve Hilton’s call for more than 10,000 mayors (‘We need 10,000 mayors’, 23 May). One is that such an idea ruptures the whole tradition of British municipal administration, under which a system of elected councils is maintained to which executive officers are answerable. Another is that it may be doubted whether there is enough administrative talent available to exercise a substituent mayoral system effectively and efficiently. Politics will always get in the way, for one thing — a factor that our present system of councils takes into account. Form is not so far encouraging, either. Mr Hilton

The Spectator

Barometer | 28 May 2015

Steam privatisation Cunard celebrated its 175th birthday by sailing three liners down the Mersey. The formation of the Cunard Line was an early triumph of privatisation. — The Post Office had been operating a monthly service to New York with sailing brigs since 1756. In 1836 a parliamentary committee decided that a steamship service should replace it, and that it would be more efficient for the Admiralty to put it out to tender to private operators. — Samuel Cunard defeated the Great Western Steamship Company and the St George Steam Packet Company by offering a fortnightly service from Liverpool for an annual subsidy of £55,000. The service, which at first only

Robin Oakley

Flat pack

Getting to Goodwood last Saturday was an achievement in itself. On the Bank Holiday weekend I calculated a cross-country route from Oxfordshire to avoid the traffic. All went well until my satnav threw a hissy fit at my variations. Its female voice, that of an eager hockey mistress contemplating a career change to dominatrix, instructed me to take the fourth turning off a roundabout that possessed only three. Shortly afterwards came a peremptory order to ‘turn right’ off a long straight road that offered no exit, so I switched her off and navigated the old-fashioned way with a map. Even then there were problems: when I stopped in one leafy

Taki

High life | 28 May 2015

An operation on my hand after a karate injury has had me reading more than usual. I even attempted Don DeLillo’s Underworld, but soon gave up. Truman Capote famously said that On the Road was typing, not writing, but old Jack Kerouac was Jane Austen compared with some contemporary novelists. Making it sound easy is the hardest thing in writing, and today’s modernists sure make it look easier than easy. But they’re also sloppy, self-indulgent and at times incomprehensible. What I don’t get is how one can enjoy a novel when the plot is not clear. When the reader doesn’t know what’s real and what’s imagined, it’s time to regress

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 28 May 2015

On 26 June there is a party at the Spectator office at 22 Old Queen Street to launch a paperback collection of Low life columns. If you would like to come, please send an account, in about 800 words, to editor@spectator.co.uk by 15 June of your worst or funniest debacle when intoxicated. If more than 12 readers send a story, then the senders of the 12 best stories will be invited. The following, for example, is an account of what happened to me only last week. At the literary festival bar I ran into a writer I’d met a couple of times at parties. He was perched at the bar and waved me over,

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 28 May 2015

If you live in or around London you can play a pairs duplicate every night (or day) of the week to suit your standard. Teams is another story. Until the London Super League started about six years ago, there was no duplicate to accommodate teams who wanted to play regularly and competitively. Now we have two great leagues — the LSL at Young Chelsea and TGR’s Superleague. There are two divisions in both so anyone can join without feeling intimidated. Last Wednesday saw the final match at TGRs and, as always, the top three teams were very close. My team squeaked a win which — as we were facing relegation

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 May 2015

Andy the tech guy looked delighted when I told him I had done the stupidest thing ever. He is one of those whizz kids who hungers for interestingly impossible technological problems. The more obscure the devastation I have wrought to a gadget the better he likes it. He was very excited when I blew the brains out of my laptop by opening 27 windows, then slamming the lid down without closing any of them. On that occasion, he ran a programme called a ‘Defraggler’, which I think must be like a defibrillator for laptops. He licked his lips as I sat down in front of him with the smashed BlackBerry.

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 28 May 2015

From reading the newspapers you might get the impression that honeybees were on the way to extinction. In Europe, it is said, the number of honeybee colonies has fallen in a few years by a quarter. In the United States, it has halved since the 1940s. Nobody knows exactly why. The experts blame any number of things, from pesticides to climate change, from disease-bearing parasites to the loss of those plants on which bees like to feed. They all agree, however, that the disappearance of the bee would be a disaster. Bees don’t just make honey and beeswax. Eighty per cent of all plant species depend on them for pollination.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 May 2015

Amnesty International and others have placed a large newspaper advertisement telling Michael Gove ‘Don’t Scrap Our Human Rights’. The ad asserts that ‘A government cannot give human rights or take them away’, which, if true, makes one wonder how it can scrap them. Human rights are philosophically a confused idea; but their political power consists in the fact that anyone questioning them can be made to look nasty. People who love making new laws — particularly new laws that cost money — therefore like to present these laws as human rights. Article 29 of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, for example, says ‘Everyone has the right of access to

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 28 May 2015

Q. I felt uncomfortable during a dinner for 20 in a private house. The young man on my left had failed to turn to the woman on his left when it was time to do so and instead stared vaguely down the table with his back slightly turned to her. She looked devastated. I wonder what I could have said, without sounding nanny-like, to remind this youth of his manners and his special duty, as one of those staying in the house, to make those locals who had been invited in feel particularly welcome. I know the man’s parents vaguely and they know how to behave, but I had never

Tanya Gold

High anxiety

Fenchurch is a restaurant that is scared of terrorists. It cowers at the top of 20 Fenchurch Street, a skyscraper which looks like an enormous and unfashionable Nokia 3120 mobile telephone; has it been designed explicitly to telephone for assistance? But who would it telephone? The Shard? I cannot imagine the Shard doing anything for anyone. It is 525 foot high blah and replaces a building that was only 299 foot high blah and so deserved to fail, being so mean and little; I never tire of the rampant Freudian anxiety of property developers and their architect slaves, because, like the phenomenon of the competitive super-yacht, it tells me they,

Dot Wordsworth

Eurovision-speak

Like a reluctantly remembered nightmare, last week’s Eurovision Song Contest already seems very distant. But, in the manner of the Sand people in Star Wars, the nations of Eurovision will no doubt soon be back, and in greater numbers. Disappointingly, with scarcely an alien tongue displayed apart from Montenegrin, the chosen language was poor English. Since it is hard (for those not native speakers) to make out the sense of songs in English, the logic seemed to be to write them nonsensically from the outset. Sweden’s winning song had a thing about natural history, but showed a feeble grasp of fundamentals. ‘Go sing it like a hummingbird,’ it said, ‘The

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 May 2015

Home A Bill to enable a referendum on whether voters wanted Britain to ‘remain’ in the European Union figured in the Queen’s Speech. Another Bill prohibited any rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020. Tenants of housing associations would be given the right to buy their homes. Provision for Scottish devolution was promised in fulfilment of the recommendations of the cross-party Smith Commission. A ‘powerhouse’ in the north was to come into being through cities being given powers over housing, transport, planning and policing. Laws on strikes would be tightened. Red tape for business would be reduced, and a new quango set up to invigilate late

Toby Young

Sturgeon doth protest too much, me thinks

I couldn’t believe it when Nicola Sturgeon called for the resignation of Alistair Carmichael, the former Scottish Secretary, over his role in the leaked memo affair. As readers will recall, the Daily Telegraph published a confidential document during the election campaign that purported to be an account of a conversation between Sturgeon and Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador, in which Sturgeon said she’d prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. Carmichael has now owned up to leaking the document, which originated in the Scottish Office, but this isn’t the cause of Sturgeon’s outrage. No, Carmichael’s sin was denying all knowledge of the leak when asked about it at

Matt Ridley

Diary – 28 May 2015

Martin Williams, former head of the government’s air quality science unit, has declared that the reason we have a problem with air pollution now is that ‘policy has been focused on climate change, and reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of much else, for most of the past two decades. Diesel was seen as a good thing because it produces less CO2, so we gave people incentives to buy diesel cars.’ Yet another example of how the global warming obsession has been bad for the environment — like subsidising biofuels, which encourage cutting down rainforests; or windfarms, which kill eagles and spoil landscapes; or denying coal-fired electricity to Africa, where

Columba

2213: Surprising

A phrase, formed by four unclued lights, incorporates a definition of the other unclued lights and an indication of the way in which they are entered. Two unclued lights are hyphened. Across 7 Nun, see, has to thank saint (6) 12 Rude man I’d sadly not held in high regard (9) 13 Festival taking shape in chaos (5) 15 New start for team in dark English strip (9) 16 Silence almost complete around pod (6) 20 Relative amateur after good chance missing nothing (7) 21 Cotton worn by eastern artist (6) 22 Left behind baron in middle bracket (6) 24

Columba

To 2210: Game Theory

The future is not for parties ‘playing politics’ (16 29 1A 15) is a quotation by Woodrow Wilson. 1A provides a cryptic indication of 5, 13, 23 and 28. First prize Stephen Saunders, Midford, Bath Runners-up F.J. Bentley, Tiverton, Devon; Ian Dempsey, Oldwick, New Jersey

Douglas Murray

Liberty’s ‘Human Rights’ campaign uses luvvies to spread misinformation

Does anybody else remember life in Britain before the year 2000? Despite the distressing increase in the number of walking, talking human beings one meets who were born since the millennium, there must be some other people who remember those times. Yet what a picture of that era is now being painted. Take the incredibly glitzy and celeb-driven campaign currently running thanks to the campaign group ‘Liberty’. No less a site than The Spectator has run the ads. And understandably so. For they are not only well-funded but feature the icons of our time. Each video consists of a star like Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon Callow or Vanessa Redgrave reading out

Ella Whelan

Women don’t need police protection on the Tube

The Tube isn’t an obvious political arena, but recently, it has become the backdrop for a number of flashy feminist statements. Last year, a blog which pictured women eating on the Tube provoked outrage among female activists, who held a picnic on the Circle line in protest. More recently, the infamous Protein World adverts, which supposedly encouraged body-shaming, were defaced before they were eventually banned. Yesterday, TFL announced that more than 100 police officers will be on patrol once London Underground’s 24-hour service begins. Her Majesty’s finest will be accompanied by extra Community Support Officers and the installation of a further 13,000 CCTV cameras. What call is there for such precautionary measures? A big call

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