The Battle for Britain | 14 September 2024
Society
Thursday
Is protest counterproductive?
If I had my life again and was asked to choose a superpower, I’d like to come back as one of those people who can enjoy crowds. As superpowers go, I acknowledge this isn’t all that rare, given the bizarre popularity of events such as Glastonbury, or the widespread compulsion to buy Oasis tickets. But what qualifies it as a superpower for me is that I cannot imagine myself enjoying being in a crowd any more than I can envisage having the power of telekinesis or levitation. I don’t really understand why people pay huge amounts of money to watch live sporting events when you can watch them on television
Dear Mary: How do I get the treadmill hogs to move?
Q. I made a number of friends with other mothers when my sons were at school, and we have carried on meeting up for regular lunches. I can’t afford these now, as even ‘cheap’ restaurants seem to cost £35, but I can’t entertain at home for various reasons. What do you suggest? – A.T., London SW12 A. Church halls are an under-exploited source of tasty lunches. The premises are usually clean and spacious and the atmosphere tends to be pleasant. At the Ascension Church in Balham, for example, you can have a cosy two-course lunch of toasties or wraps followed by cake and a drink for as little as £12.
Spectator Competition: Lore of the jungle
Competition 3366 took inspiration from the Bandar-log in The Jungle Book, those monkeys who chant: ‘We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.’ You were invited to riff on this last sentence. Donald Trump cropped up a bit, presumably because his utterances have a Bandar-log ring to them. There were a lot of excellent entries, and too many runners-up to namecheck everyone, but the winners get £25. Like wolves we keep within the pack, Cohesion’s our priority, We’ve no desire to stray off track Or break from the majority.
The wonder of wine from the Mosel
Conservatives used to be good at inspiring a mass membership, underpinned by organisations. Before the first world war, the Primrose League had a million members. Shortly after the second war, the party’s membership, including the Young Conservatives, reached three million. This is partly explained by the social mores of the day. The range of available leisure activities was much smaller, there was no television, and parents were happy for their daughters to join the YCs, the assumption being that the girl would meet a nice type of young man. It is easy to understand why German oenophiles insist Riesling is the greatest grape of all All that is redolent of
Are you ‘very demure’?
‘Very tasty,’ said my husband. ‘Very sweet.’ In a catchphrase from 1940 that must surely predate even his long tale of years, he had found an echo for one that has in recent days attracted millions on TikTok. The difference is that today it is called a meme. ‘You see how I do my make-up for work?’ says Jools Lebron in a video. ‘Very demure. Very mindful.’ It is funny, if it is funny, because the deadpan cosmetics tutorial is delivered by Jools Lebron, a great fat trans woman. The audience is addressed as ‘divas’. They are told: ‘I don’t come to work with a green-cut crease. I don’t look
2671: Canned madras
Nine unclued lights (including two of three words and three of two with one in short form, ignore an apostrophe) have been seen on 35. A clued light gives a further example also in short form and must be shaded. Elsewhere, ignore an accent. Across 1 Stupid gents boy cleaned out (5) 10 Queen and peer she’d seduced, knight stops and berates (10) 11 Plaster over wounds starts to come off (6) 12 Trees the French philosopher hugs (7) 14 Senior soldier adult axed dead in Morse? (5) 15 Geordie washes down muddy Sandy without a bit of soap (5) 16 King gripped
2668: Obit VII – solution
The BOWLER (7) was DEREK (26) Underwood (synonym of COPSE (32)), nicknamed ‘Deadly’, who died on 15 April 2024. The four victims were MUSHTAQ MOHAMMAD, SUNIL GAVASKAR, GRAHAM DOWLING and GARRY SOBERS. First prize Robert Bailey, Norwich Runners-up Dorothy Mulvenna, Lancaster; Bill Stewart, Leicester
Will the toughest problem in maths ever be solved?
For many, not just mathematicians, the Riemann hypothesis is the very definition of a supremely difficult problem that might be forever beyond our intellect. Most mathematicians had given up on it, being pessimistic about making any headway. But recently, the first progress – although not a solution – in more than 50 years has been made. The 165-year-old hypothesis was bequeathed to us by German mathematician Berhard Riemann. It deals with prime numbers – numbers that can only be divided by themselves and 1. For example, 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19 and so on to infinity. Has our universe taken only one pathway out of a possible mathematical
Are you a hotel buffet bandit?
Last week, on a Swedish train somewhere between Linkoping and Mjolby, as I struggled to open a bag of cheesy doofers that was to serve as my lunch, my travel companions began unwrapping their own picnics. Some, like me, had made hasty and unappetising purchases at the station. Others had carefully curated lunches, assembled earlier in the day from our hotel’s lavish breakfast buffet. Well-filled rolls, pieces of fruit, pastries. In they tucked. Germans may be on the march at dawn, annexing sun loungers, but it’s the Brits who secrete breakfast goods I was suddenly aware of a frisson of stance-taking rippling through our group. There were those who regarded
How to manage migration like the Swedish
In the end, the German state of Thuringia did not fall into the hands of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The party won the most votes in the recent election but was unable to form a coalition, meaning that Björn Höcke will not be the state’s minister-president. This is ideal for him: he can cry foul, claim to represent the true voice of Germany and point to a conspiracy to keep him out of power. His incendiary strain of politics proved more popular than the more moderate version of the AfD in Saxony, which held elections the same day. These will all be lessons taken into consideration ahead of
Portrait of the week: State pension to rise, prisoners released early and a new owner for The Spectator
Home The government won by 348 to 228 a Commons vote on limiting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners to those who qualified by poverty: 52 Labour MPs didn’t vote, one voted with the opposition; five MPs suspended from the Labour party also voted with the opposition. Three million people who began receiving the ‘new’ state pension after 2016 will be given £460 a year more from April 2025, in line with wage growth of 4 per cent. A bill was published to exclude the 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Mel Stride was knocked out of the contest for the leadership of the Conservative party; Robert Jenrick, with
A new chapter for The Spectator
For the past year or so, I’ve been involved in selling The Spectator as well as editing it. A long auction involving moguls, sheikhs and an act of parliament has finally produced a winner. The financier Sir Paul Marshall has become the 14th proprietor of this magazine. His faith in our prospects is reflected in the size of the deal: £100 million, five times what we were valued at when we split from the Daily Telegraph in 2005. We had 22 interested parties, some of the greatest names in British and European publishing, all bidding each other up. The result stands as a spectacular vindication of what my colleagues have achieved. I
The BBC’s strange silence
In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a little behind the inventiveness of the top American chancers. It is quite possible that, through the best of intentions, I will appear before a tribunal one of these days The case brought by Mr Deans against RBG Holdings was one of racial discrimination. He alleged that on one occasion the firm’s senior partner, Ian Rosenblatt,
Rachel Reeves is right to cut the winter fuel payment
Gordon Brown introduced the winter fuel payment shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997, following his party’s landslide victory. Rachel Reeves abolished the winter fuel payment shortly after becoming Chancellor in 2024, following her party’s landslide victory. Since others are shy of saying so, I want to point out that Mr Brown was wrong and Ms Reeves is right. The payment was a wasteful gimmick, addressing a problem better handled by the benefit system. If at least 80 per cent of the beneficiaries of something intended for the poor are not poor, the winter payment is ridiculous. Mr Brown loved such special devices because he instinctively liked to
Wednesday
Is this the worst tribute so far to Queen Elizabeth II?
An official tribute to the late, much-missed Queen Elizabeth II will, in years to come, be unveiled in London’s St James’s Park. But progress on the memorial is far from speedy. The design of the statue or sculpture will not be revealed by the Queen Elizabeth Memorial Committee until 2026. Even then, there is every chance that something dreadfully inappropriate or misjudged will end up being chosen. After all, memorial statues have the potential to go hideously wrong, as the latest example – a sculpture of the late Queen, Prince Philip and two corgis – recently unveiled in Antrim County Gardens in Belfast, has so unfortunately demonstrated. Brennan’s dismal sculpture
Australia’s social media ban for children won’t work
I was born in the final years of the baby boom. To my generation of children, a social network was our mothers gossiping over the back fence or at the shops. Parents cannot contract out their responsibilities to government But, thanks to a miracle of nature and science, I’m also a father later in life, blessed with a five-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, who is happy, intelligent, and learning fast and precociously about the world around her. She is also, however, happy to be glued to a screen, and can find her way around an iPad and YouTube on my phone. Whether I want her to or not, it won’t be all
Hamas has been defeated – but the fight goes on
Has Hamas finally been defeated in Gaza, nearly a year after it launched the most deadly attack in Israel’s history? Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has proclaimed that Hamas no longer has a military capacity in Gaza. Hamas has indeed suffered a considerable blow since October. Many of its tunnels – one of its greatest strategic assists – have been destroyed entirely or partially. Many of its commanders have been killed. Two of its top three leaders, Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa have been eliminated, as was the organisation’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran. Although the precise number of killed Hamas terrorists is not known, it is substantial.
When will the families of Lucy Letby’s victims be allowed to move on?
When Lucy Letby was convicted last year of murdering seven infants and attempting to kill seven others it seemed that the parents of her victims had at last secured justice. But in recent months, Letby’s crimes – for which she is serving 15 whole-life sentences – have become the subject of heated debate. Victims’ families have said that the campaign to free the killer nurse has made them question humanity. ‘All of this noise has caused enormous additional distress to the parents who have already suffered far too much’ Letby’s crimes are now, once again, back in the headlines, as the public inquiry set up to examine what happened at the Countess
Tuesday
The Apple case is a huge win for the European Commission
Apple must pay €13 billion (£11 billion) in unpaid taxes, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled, bringing to an end a long-running dispute involving the tech company and the government of Ireland. The ruling by the EU’s top court is a huge win for the European Commission (and the outgoing Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager) against aggressive tax planning by large multinational companies. It is a major blow to the Irish government. Following the publication of the judgment, the Irish government seemed positively disappointed The case has a long and convoluted history. In 2016, the Commission determined that subsidiary companies belonging to the Apple Group had, historically, received tax advantages that
