Society

Monday

Ian Williams Ian Williams

How China weaponises its cuddly giant pandas

So Yang Guang and Tian Tian are on their way back to China. Rather like a pair of high-profile celebrities, the giant pandas travelled in convoy to Edinburgh airport this morning, with every detail of their last days in the UK scrutinised in dewy-eyed detail. They’re not travelling business class, not quite, but they do have specially constructed metal crates apparently complete with sliding padlock doors, bespoke pee trays and removable screens so the keepers accompanying them can check on them during the flight. ‘I think they’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll have a safe journey,’ said Rab Clark, the zoo’s blacksmith, who built the crates. Arguably the giant panda,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Newsnight’s fate is a bad omen for the BBC

Newsnight, we learned last week, is losing ten minutes off its running time, more than half its staff including its entire reporting team and is dropping its investigative films in favour of cheap ‘n’ easy studio-based debates.    The BBC’s news supremo Deborah Turness calls it ‘an important BBC brand’, but said ‘we’ve made the decision to reformat Newsnight as a 30-minute late-night news-making debate, discussion and interview programme’. She hasn’t quite taken the old captive bolt gun to it yet, then, but this sacred cow is definitely mooing anxiously as it makes its way down the slaughterhouse gangplank.   Newsnight has gone from being a must-watch to being the most missable programme on television I hate to say it, but: fair

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The thinking behind Rishi Sunak’s common sense Net Zero approach

Rishi Sunak has a new approach to Net Zero, defining himself against ‘zealots’ and acknowledging the side effects of proposed green taxes. He’s replacing the old, often hyperbolic precautionary-principle logic and bringing in the language of tradeoffs: stressing the importance of democratic consent and the futility of green taxes that voters will not accept and are likely to rebel against. The Prime Minister has just taken his case to the UN ‘Cop’ Climate Summit in Dubai and his short speech deserves more attention than it has received. The standard form, in such events, is for leaders to try to outdo each other in ‘dark green’ jeremiads and say ‘we’ must

Mark Piggott

Are people with Alzheimer’s being denied justice?

My mother, aged 75, has advanced Alzheimer’s. This is heart-breaking enough – she is now at a stage where she has terrifying visions, and keeps asking me, her only son, where her son Mark is. But twice in the past five years we have been denied justice in cases where people were suspected of taking advantage of mum because of her vulnerable state.  Until last October, mum was able to live with a modicum of independence with the help of care from a local authority team. Support workers came to visit twice a day, helping her with everyday essentials such as cleaning, eating, and shopping, and mum developed a real rapport with the team.

Niall Gooch

In defence of a ‘British culture’

From time to time, a would-be edgy Tweeter or columnist will shock us all by stating or suggesting that the boring white people who until the last third of the twentieth century made up almost the entire population of the United Kingdom, have no real culture to speak of. There is a twofold implication to this rhetorical ploy: that indigenous Britons should fall on their knees in eternal gratitude for the hitherto unknown liveliness and dynamism of the various diaspora communities who have made their homes here, and also that the demand that newcomers integrate into our way of life is meaningless because there is nothing into which the new

Saturday

Robert Service

Putin’s ‘loyalty cards’ are a new low for his regime

Loyalty cards in the West are used by supermarket chains to influence our shopping habits. They are fortunately absent from our politics, and we can freely speak our minds about public affairs, history and morality. In Russia it is different. The Russian TASS news agency reported on Wednesday that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has prepared a mandatory ‘loyalty agreement’ for all foreigners entering Russia. Our supermarkets do not demand a personal declaration of loyalty, and our governments make no such requirement of visiting foreigners. But travellers to Russian parts will run into as yet unspecified trouble if they are thought to engage in ‘distorting’ the record of Soviet people

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Why the far left sides with Hamas

The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics? No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the people of the world to accept ‘the sovereignty of Islam’ or face ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ if they refuse. You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country. Their kind will turn a blind eye in Palestine, but not

John Waters

Why Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is one of the strangest books ever

The 2023 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about it: it is a novel about a dystopian coup that takes down Ireland’s ‘liberal democracy’, not about the dystopian coup that was actually happening at the time it was written. By definition, most novels are stories rendered from imagined events, set in the past, present or future. But there are occasional examples that are fictionalised accounts of real events – almost always, by definition, from the past, and rather contradictorily termed ‘non-fiction novels’ – as well as imagined vistas from the future – almost always dystopias, most famously, George Orwell’s 1984.

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The parasitic poisonousness of Omid Scobie

I don’t remember exactly when I first read about the ancient courtier role of Groom of the Stool, but it’s a fascinating business. Here’s Wikipedia to explain:  ‘The Groom of the Stool was the most intimate of an English monarch’s courtiers, responsible for assisting in excretion. The physical intimacy of the role naturally led to his becoming a man in whom much confidence was placed by his royal master and with whom many royal secrets were shared as a matter of course. It is a matter of some debate as to whether the duties involved cleaning the king’s anus, but the groom is known to have been responsible for supplying

Fergus Butler-Gallie

The problem with climate protesting clergy

Received wisdom suggests that you would not expect a vicar to disrupt Divine Worship. Now, anybody who’s worked with the clergy up close will know that in this case, as in so many areas, received wisdom is wrong. Still, there was shock in news outlets and on social media this week when a gaggle of Christians, including clerics, disrupted Evensong at Chichester in the name of climate action.  Those clergy involved think they’re the children of the revolution when actually they’re the Primrose League Their general propensity for mischief aside, there should be absolutely no surprise at all that clergy were involved in this very particular protest. Clerics are predominately

Friday

Joanna Williams

When did publishers stop caring what their readers actually want?

It was easy to choose books for my young nieces and nephews this Christmas. First, I ruled out stories about boys who think they are girls, girls who dream of having their breasts removed, and pet rabbits unhappy at being misgendered. Then I rejected books telling toddlers how to be anti-racist and older children how to be allies to their black classmates. Feminist manuals on women who changed the world, all of which feature at least one woman who was actually male, went the same way as history books that divide the past into tales of victimised black people and evil white people. Worthy tomes about climate change, rising sea

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

Henry Kissinger saved us from a much worse world

‘If I give you a copy of my book,’ I said to Henry Kissinger two months ago, ‘which chapter will you read first?’ ‘I will look myself up in the index,’ he replied in that voice that sounded like a cement mixer on the blink, ‘and start there.’ He automatically assumed that a book I had written with General David Petraeus on the evolution of conflict from 1945 to Ukraine would of course make reference to his career, his opinions, his contribution to history. Anything else would be unthinkable. And of course he was right. Here is a man who in many ways fashioned the world we live in today,

Bruce Anderson

The Swiss appetite for wine gives them a good name

A friend was in town, who rebuts two instances of dull conventional wisdom. The first is that although Swiss Germans may have many qualities – they make excellent bankers – they have no joie de vivre. The Calvinist heritage persists. Second, that the Swiss are an implacably martial race. Other armies, especially the British, use humour to palliate the rigours of serving. The Swiss would be appalled by such frivolity, which may explain why no one has been in a hurry to assail their mountains. There was a serious French restaurant across the border, so he borrowed a tank and set off In both respects, Nick Sillich is a triumphant exception.

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Is Scotland waking up to the dire state of its NHS?

If the NHS is the closest thing we have to a religion, as Nigel Lawson reckoned, then Paul Gray is not just a blasphemer but an apostate. Professor Gray has called the NHS in Scotland ‘unsustainable’ and urged a public conversation about reform, including the use of the private sector. His intervention is significant because professor Gray was between 2013 and 2019 the chief executive of NHS Scotland. He is, to be clear, not proposing privatisation, merely urging a debate about delivery and funding. But even that is scandalous to a political establishment that prides itself on having less private sector involvement than there is south of the border. Professor

The Spectator

2630: Souvenir – solution

The puzzle appeared on 11 November 2023. The unclued lights reveal ‘The CENOTAPH and POPPY evoke REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY, once ARMISTICE DAY, the ARMISTICE being SIGNED at the ELEVENTH HOUR, ELEVENTH DAY and ELEVENTH MONTH’. First prize Victoria Estcourt, Tisbury, Wilts Runners-up John Harley, Norton, Stockton on Tees; M.D. Conway, Grimsby

Mr Magoo

2633: Highly critical

The unclued entries (two of one word, two of two words, two of three words) combine to form a quotation. Elsewhere, ignore two accents.         Across    1    Promotions to fix in commercial vehicles (12) 10    Eager pupil’s plea for online phenomenon (4) 12    Cockney dish rose, having turned end (3,1,4,2) 14    Remark further problem with concentration (3) 15    Angler uses this weight in river, they say (8) 17    Gold cloth piece is not silver – this might be either (5) 18    Win back billion, not having a scale again (7) 19    Understanding one? (6) 22    Analog ____ could be ‘slo-mo’, managed badly? (6) 24    A state surrounded by empty

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Mrs Malaprop’s Julius Caesar

In Competition No. 3327 you were invited to submit a rough resumé of the plot of a Shakespeare play such as might have been attemptedby a well-known fictional character of your choice. Literary sleuths featured prominently in the entry, with Poirot, Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes all making eye-catching appearances. A commendation to George Simmers for Professor McGonagall’s take on Macbeth and to John O’Byrne, who also gave us the Scottish Play, but through the eyes of Molly Bloom. The winners nab £25. Prince Hamlet is a melankoly dane who rite his girlfrend soppy poetry, chiz. He hav been played by many grate british actors from shaxpeere’s time to the

Luke McShane

No. 780

White to play. Lan Yao-Pia Cramling, Women’s European Team Ch, Budva 2023. Black has just made a serious error in grabbing the pawn on f3. How did White force a decisive gain of material? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 4 December. There is a prize of £20 for the firstcorrect answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1…Ng4! threatens …Qxh2#. If 2 Qxf4 Nxf2# or 2 fxg4 Qxe4+ wins Last week’s winner Frances Nestor, London SE12

Luke McShane

Montenegro’s revenge

Before the seventh round of the European Team Championship in Montenegro, I woke with a peculiar malaise I could not explain. Answer soon came, in an alarming salvo of diarrhoea. My hopes for an easy ride in my game against the German grandmaster Alexander Donchenko did not last long, and I landed in a tenable but thankless middlegame where all the winning chances lay with my young opponent. I clung on for a draw after 52 moves, shivering through the game in spite of ample layers of clothing. Straight after, I crawled into bed and fell asleep. That match, which we tied 2-2 against the eventual silver medallists, was played on

Dot Wordsworth

Stockton, Cleverly and scatological etymology

There’s a street in the City of London called Sherborne Lane. In the Middle Ages it was known as Shitteborwelane [Shitborough Lane] or Shitheburnlane. We philologists are accustomed to discussing vocabulary that is taboo because of its sexual or scatological references, and this place name is not rare in depending on a word that ‘is not generally acceptable in more formal contexts’, according to the OED. The House of Commons is a context more formal than most. But last week James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, was accused of calling out, ‘Because it’s a shithole’ in answer to Alex Cunningham, the Labour MP for Stockton North, who had asked why 34