Society

Wednesday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Help! My stepmother uses fabric conditioner

Q. My father missed my mother so much after 50 years together that, following her death, he married again. I make every effort with my new stepmother but we have nothing in common. To be frank, common is the operative word. What I really mind is that when he and I meet alone for our weekly lunches, this distinguished man now reeks of the fabric conditioner with which she washes his clothes. He lost his sense of smell years ago so has no idea what he smells like. How can I tell her that in the world into which she has married, fabric conditioner is never used? – Name and

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Cryptic crosswords are hard – but so is life

As regular readers will know, I am an inveterate fan of cryptic crosswords. At the everyday level, they are the perfect way to kill 20-50 minutes of otherwise boring time. There is a refined elegance to clue-setting: the best are little works of art. Crossword-solving also cultivates the useful talent of looking beneath the clue’s explicit surface meaning to the meaning lurking beneath – which trains solvers in the essential creative act of seeing the same thing from different perspectives. Cryptic crosswords instil the very important idea that problem-solving is rarely linear But there is perhaps something even more valuable about the habit. There are many ways of solving any given

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The importance of remembering the Holodomor

At the end of last week, the Holodomor was commemorated in Britain. There was a service at Westminster Abbey. But the chief point to notice is that no important British government or opposition representatives appeared. Nor, with the honourable exception of Stephen Fry, did any of the celebrities who infest causes such as ‘Free Palestine’. Almost everyone knows, thank goodness, what the Holocaust was. But even now, although Vladimir Putin is trying a small-scale repeat, have most people heard of the Holodomor? (If you haven’t, read Anne Applebaum’s astonishing Red Famine.) It was the largely deliberate starvation of about four million Ukrainians by Stalin in 1932-33, bringing death at a

Richard Madeley

Nigel Farage wants to be crowned king of the Tories

One reason Nigel Farage is currently making such a successful Jungle Jim is because he doesn’t duck a discussion or swerve a question. Camp-mates – and viewers – may not like what he says, but they appreciate the direct response. It makes a change from most politicians. It doesn’t matter what question you ask them: if they can dodge it, they will. It’s almost a reflex and it drives me potty when I’m co-hosting Good Morning Britain. Me: ‘What’s the weather doing where you are, minister?’ Minister: ‘I want to pay tribute to the work of the Met Office. Without these skilled men and wom…’ Me: ‘I just want to know

Toby Young Toby Young

Even Tommy Robinson has the right to protest

I was at the march against antiSemitism in London on Sunday, but did not witness the arrest of Tommy Robinson. I’m thankful for that because I wouldn’t have known how to react in my capacity as head of the Free Speech Union. Whether the Met was right to arrest him (and subsequently charge him) requires careful thought and the fact that the answer isn’t obvious makes me sympathise with the operational commander who had to make a decision. Robinson is far from being an anti-Semite but he and his followers can appear menacing My gut says it was an abuse of police powers. Section 35 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Elgin Marbles madness, Israel/Hamas ceasefire and Oscar Pistorius freed

Home Net migration reached a record 745,000 last year, the Office for National Statistics said, 139,000 higher than the 606,000 it had previously given. Robert Jenrick, the minister for immigration, was reported to be ‘pressuring’ No. 10 with ideas for cutting immigration, such as by making a minimum salary of £35,000 a requirement for a work visa. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, had agreed with Suella Braverman, when she was home secretary, to raise the salary requirement to £40,000, according to a copy of their agreement seen by the Telegraph. Eight small boats carried 364 migrants to England on 26 November. Caolan Gormley, 26, from Co. Tyrone, was found guilty at the

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 2 December 2023

Both TGRs and Young Chelsea run highly successful League matches on alternate Wednesday evenings. Organised impeccably by Gitte Hecht-Johansen, you play 24 boards against the seven other teams in your division, the two teams coming last getting relegated. It is wonderful practice for players who want to test their bidding skills and declarer play in an informal and relaxed atmosphere. That’s not to say it’s a vicar’s tea party – just nicely in the middle with very tempting prize money to boot. Leading the field at TGRs is John Cox’s team who bid and made a slam on today’s hand. John was playing with his regular partner, Peter Taylor. The

Robin Oakley

In praise of Harry Cobden

For the past two years anybody who has asked Harry Cobden, Paul Nicholls’s stable jockey, which horse in the yard he was most looking forward to partnering, the answer has always been the same: Bravemansgame. But when declarations were made for the Grade 1 Betfair Chase at Haydock last weekend, the rider’s name attached to King George winner Bravemansgame was that of Daryl Jacob. Jacob was thus in line for the jockey’s share of the £112,000 prize. Cobden, said Nicholls, would be riding the yard’s entrants at Ascot instead. Although it was rapidly announced that Cobden was happy about the arrangement, a few eyebrows were raised and tails swished, particularly

Melissa Kite

I’m taking on the Hilton through its breakfast buffet

‘Have you ever eaten breakfast at the Hilton before?’ shouted the woman on the door of the restaurant, as a guest attempted to gain entry. She told me I could help myself to coffee and I said I would, because I had As he mumbled something, she shouted: ‘And how are you this morning?’ He mumbled something else, and looked scared. I was already sitting down, having dodged the Cerberus of the breakfast bar because, when I entered, she had been marching around the diners shouting, ‘Anything else? More coffee? No?’ and I managed to help myself to what I wanted from the buffet and choose a table. This did

The Spectator

Letters: it’s not rude to ask how someone’s name is pronounced

No control Sir: Your leading article (‘The welfare monster’, 25 November) has fallen into the increasingly common trap of posthumously attributing to Brexit voters imagined reasons for their voting to leave. No, we didn’t ‘in large part’ do so in a search for a better economic model. We did so to rid ourselves of the Brussels behemoth and regain control of our borders. The economically literate of us knew there would be an economic price, but we believed the break for freedom was worth the (allegedly temporary) drop in living standards. How wrong we were. Our borders are as porous as ever, the Whitehall leviathan squats on us more firmly

Owen Matthews

The heady, hedonistic summer in which I became a life-long foreigner

Rome I have spent almost all my adult life as a foreigner. When I graduated from Oxford I faced a stark choice: work for a living or leave the country. As I did not wish ever to have to get up in the morning, toil in an office or travel on public transport, the path was clear. I moved to Budapest with the intention of opening a bar. I feature in three novels as, respectively, a poseur, a snob and a persistent but inept seducer It was the summer of 1993, and the newly free nations of central Europe had become an irresistible magnet for self-styled bohemians from across the

Peter Jones

Why are we no longer proud of work

More and more people are giving up work on the grounds of their mental-health problems, allowing them to live off state benefits. That raises the question:  is there something about the nature of work today that makes it seem so unrewarding? In the ancient world there was no welfare system. The educated, wealthy elite apart (2 per cent), most had to survive off a plot of land or their manual skills (more than 340 occupations are recorded), hoping thereby to produce a surplus to meet other needs. What is striking is the pride in the work of their hands, especially by Roman freed slaves (freedmen), revealed on their grave monuments.

Harry Mount

The joy of an archive

It’s amazing how quickly you become ancient history. Thirty years after I left Oxford, my old college, Magdalen – alma mater of Oscar Wilde, Edward VIII and my fellow undergraduate George Osborne – sent out a request to former students. The college archivist asked for ‘Academic work. Records of student societies. College magazines and newsletters. Posters and programmes. Menus and tickets. We need them.’ Hard-copy memories have been increasingly replaced by digital records, as the British Library has discovered to its cost. It has just suffered a ransomware attack, paralysing its online systems. The library’s curator of digital publications, Giulia Carla Rossi, is concerned about the fragility of digital publications.

The Spectator

Why don’t Britons spend time in nature? 

School’s out Aslef members walked out on strike again this week, 18 months after this round of rail strikes began. But the unions still have a long way to catch up with Britain’s longest-ever strike, which lasted 25 years in the unlikely setting of the village of Burston, Norfolk. It began on 1 April 1914 when husband and wife teachers Kitty and Tom Higdon were dismissed from the village school over a fire Kitty had lit to dry out the clothes of children who had walked three miles in the rain. Many of the children, led by Violet Potter – the Greta Thunberg of her day – walked out in

Mark Mason

The biggest music feuds of all time

Sad news from the Hall and Oates camp, where ‘I Can’t Go For That’ has become ‘I Can’t Go Within A Specified Distance of You’, Daryl Hall having taken out a restraining order on John Oates. Actually, we don’t know whether a distance is specified, as the details of the order remain secret. But we do know that Hall last year called Oates ‘my business partner… not my creative partner… We’ve always been very separate, and that’s a really important thing for me’. Such discord is in the finest traditions of pop. The most famous feud was in the most famous band, or rather after it: John Lennon reacted to

Melanie Ferbreach

How I missed out on parenthood

‘Do you have children?’ This stock question still floors me. When confronted, I don the mask, breathe deeply, get a grip and try to answer honestly. It doesn’t always work out that way. In a supermarket queue, my bored fellow shopper seems happy with my breezy reply: ‘Yes! One’s at university, the other teaches English as a foreign language, online.’ Lying doesn’t come happily or naturally to my husband or me. Where it won’t land us in trouble, inventiveness has become our coping strategy for what seems a casual disregard of the possibility that we might not have children and that our childlessness might not be voluntary. When I must

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Lord Sumption is wrong: laws can change facts

It’s with triple reluctance that one disputes anything said or written by Jonathan Sumption. First, Lord Sumption is among the commentators I most admire, with an intellect against which it must be foolhardyto pit one’s own. Secondly, as a former Supreme Court justice, his legal expertise will be immense, whereas I only read law as an undergraduate, and that more than half a century ago. Thirdly, on the merits of the government’s proposal to declare Rwanda safe for asylum seekers in UK law, and perhaps ‘disapply’ any international convention that says otherwise, I actually agree with him: I, too, doubt the wisdom of the move. Statute has regularly done what

Ian Rankin

Madeira is wonderfully lacking in Scrooges

My wife and I arrived in Madeira for a week’s peace and quiet, but the driver from the airport had other ideas and was soon telling us how difficult it was to own a taxi these days. Cars are much more expensive to buy than in Spain, for example, and there is a lot of red tape involved in running a cab. He was happy to be out of the Madeiran capital, Funchal, where the police were busy doing spot-checks. Sure enough, his pal soon called to complain that he’d just been fined for some minor breach of regulations. Then we were on to Portuguese politics. The Prime Minister, Antonio

Alexander Larman

Harry, Meghan and the mystery of the ‘royal racist’

Ever since 2021’s absurd Oprah Winfrey interview, in which the Duchess of Sussex coyly suggested that a member of the Royal Family had speculated about what colour her then-unborn first child’s skin would be, there has been an egregious fascination with the identity of the notorious figure known only as ‘the royal racist’. Speculation has swirled around virtually every member of the Firm – if you want to edify yourself further, the words ‘royal family’ and ‘racist’ entered into the right search engine will eventually lead you to the probable culprit. But although their identity has been hiding in plain sight for a considerable period of time, there has been