Society

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Energy prices are coming down, but they should be cheaper

It is hard to remember that this time last year soon-to-be prime minister Liz Truss was on the verge of compromising her free market principles by dreaming up a scheme for the state to make an open-ended commitment to subsidise the energy bills of every household in Britain. At the time, there were dire predictions that households would be swamped by energy costs, forecasts for which were rising by the day. This morning, Ofgem has announced that the Energy Price Cap is to fall again, to a level at which the average household will see energy bills of £1,923 a year, down from £2,074 a year at present. The move won’t take

Thursday

Jawad Iqbal

It’s laughable for Greeks to say the Elgins are at risk

It is safe to say that there is very little chance of the Elgin Marbles turning up for sale on eBay anytime soon. Even those charged with running the British Museum, currently embroiled in a growing scandal over stolen and missing artefacts, would presumably spot them on the site. That is why it is simply laughable for Greek experts to claim the precious sculptures are at risk after the embarrassing disclosure of a series of thefts from the institution. Leading the charge is Despina Koutsoumba, the head of the Association of Greek Archaeologists, who argues the marbles would be far safer off in Greece. Well, she would think that, wouldn’t

Debbie Hayton

It’s the right time for GCSE grades to return to pre-Covid levels

For the first time in 27 years, I have no personal stake in the GCSE results that are released this morning. I did not teach Year 11 last year, so I will not be poring over statistics to explain the performance of my class to my superiors in school. Sadly, statistics, ‘value added data’ and performance metrics too often eclipse what today should be all about: young people who, perhaps for the first time in their education, were left in an exam hall with a sheet of questions and a ticking clock. When grade inflation strikes, no interest is ever paid on grades already in the bank As teachers we

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Luis Rubiales and the weirdness of a kiss

A kiss is just a kiss, no? But when it’s Jenni Hermoso, the forward of the victorious Spanish women’s football team, on the receiving end, and the president of the Spanish football federation, Luis Rubiales, doing the kissing, and it’s during the official post-match ceremony in front of an interested global audience… it’s different.  Immediately afterwards, Miss Hermoso declared that she ‘didn’t like it’. Rubiales was defiant. ‘It was a kiss between two friends celebrating something,’ he declared, calling his critics ‘idiots and stupid people’. He may have had in mind the minister of equality in Spain’s caretaker government, Irene Montero, who described the kiss as ‘a form of sexual

Bruce Anderson

What wine should you serve to a matador?

We were talking bulls. A friend of mine, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, is a remarkable character who can claim at least two distinctions. First, he must have been about the worst-behaved boy in the modern history of Eton College. He claims that this is an understatement and that he heads the role of infamy since the days of Henry VI. He was certainly put ‘on the Bill’ – that is, for a disciplinary interview with the headmaster – on 68 occasions. So he was fortunate that corporal punishment had been abolished before he arrived, though his career of rapscallionry was possibly not the strongest argument for its demise. A great wine, drawing

Dr Priyad Ariyaratnam

Why I won’t be joining the consultants on strike

I won’t be joining the consultants who are striking today. Though I fully support the legitimate concerns of my colleagues in the medical and other health professions taking part in industrial action across the NHS, I feel the toll this is taking on patients is unjustifiable.  This is not a decision I take lightly. When I was a junior doctor, I was very active in the original strikes that took place in 2016 opposing the new junior doctor contract. It is tempting to put this down to being young and naïve, but things were different back then: we were opposing the unilateral imposition of a new junior doctor contract rather than disputing an existing one; the healthcare

Robin Oakley

The fight over jockey saunas is heating up

When the nine equine athletes involved in the seven-furlong contest for Newbury’s Saturday highlight, the Group Two BetVictor Hungerford Stakes, strolled around the parade ring there was nowhere else in the world I would have preferred to be. As the sun gleamed off perfectly burnished coats and perfectly toned muscles rippled in sturdy hindquarters I wanted every one of them gift-wrapped and delivered to a paddock behind my garden. The classy Chindit, a Wootton Bassett colt trained by Richard Hannon, looked glorious. His stable companion Witch Hunter, sired like this year’s wonder-horse Paddington by Siyouni, gazed intelligently around him. Spain had a rare representative in the Lope de Vega colt

Mark Millar

How to shock a Satanist

I wish I could be like actors and pretend to be bored by press junkets, but the truth is I love the attention. My job as a Hollywood writer and producer mainly involves sitting in front of a computer and shouting at my kids, so free drinks, launch parties and people telling you how great you are is the perfect antidote to a room filled with empty Monster Munch packets and that urine sample you were meant to hand in to the doctor. Writers are such terrible narcissists. We not only expect complete strangers to be fascinated by our every thought; we want them to pay for the privilege. You

Wednesday

Georgia L. Gilholy

Northern Etons won’t ‘level up’ the country 

After more than two years of deliberating, the Department for Education has finally approved a batch of new free schools, including three sixth-form colleges that will be funded and mentored by Eton.   This trio of academies will be opened in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham – areas which contain some of Britain’s most deprived boroughs.    The Times has previously revealed that these colleges will all be ‘highly selective’ in terms of academic requirements, but will focus on recruiting pupils who live in particularly deprived areas or are on free school meals, to gear them toward the top universities.   Schemes like Eton’s are laudable, but they are little more than a sticking plaster on a blistering wound of a comprehensive

Steerpike Steerpike

NatWest’s CEO set for £2.4m payout after Farage scandal  

Very few people came out well of the Nigel Farage banking scandal – which saw the former Brexit party leader lose his Coutts bank account over his political views. In the end, Farage managed to claim two scalps over the affair, with both NatWest’s and Coutts’ CEOs forced into humiliating resignations. Still it may be that all is not lost for the NatWest chief – with reports today that she may be in line for a huge payoff. Despite resigning over what Dame Alison Rose herself admitted to being a ‘serious error in judgement’ – including sharing the personal banking details of the former MEP with a journalist – the bank has announced

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Scottish drug deaths, more strikes and the Lucy Letby verdict

Home The number of drug deaths in Scotland fell to 1,051 in 2022, the lowest since 2017, but still the worst record per head in Europe. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, who in March had pledged ‘to stop the boats once and for all’, said that ‘there is not one simple solution and it can’t be solved overnight’. On a sunny Monday, 661 migrants landed in Britain in 16 small boats; one man, on making landfall, made the Albanian eagle gesture popular among football supporters. England was defeated 1-0 by Spain in the final of the women’s football World Cup; the Spanish Prime Minister said that Spanish FA president Luis

The Spectator

Ulez expansion has gone ahead in defiance of evidence

London’s Ulez scheme has been expanded. A new network of cameras filming the traffic movements of millions of Londoners is now switched on. Old cars and vans, often used by sole traders, will be charged £12.50 a day if they pull out of their driveways. Keir Starmer had asked the London Mayor Sadiq Khan to ‘reflect’ on the policy after Labour lost the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election. Khan duly did, and concluded that he would stick to plan A. With 4,000 Londoners dying of air pollution every year, he said he had no option. But if that figure is correct, why has air pollution been mentioned in only one

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What a joke

The award for the funniest joke at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was won by Lorna Rose Treen, with this: ‘I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.’ There you go. It’s hard to know where to begin, isn’t it? Maybe with the fact that the joke doesn’t really work. Why would a zookeeper be a cheetah? Just because his work may involve looking after them? There’s no sense to it: the bloke just works in a zoo. If she’d said ‘I started dating a big cat – turned out he was a cheetah’, then that still wouldn’t be terribly funny but it would at least

Peter Jones

Why all Roman roads really did lead to Rome

Whatever the problems involved in building, let alone finishing, HS2, it is hoped that it will replicate what was ultimately achieved – prosperity, intentionally or not – by the 53,000 miles of roads with which Rome covered its empire (and so successfully that prosperity is now found wherever networks of Roman roads were established across Europe, including Cornwall). The first Roman road was the Via Appia (named after its proposer Appius Claudius), built in 312 bc. It connected Rome with the port of Brindisi 300 miles south; it also offered easy crossing to the wealthy Greek East. This became of great importance: travel by ship, far faster than by road,

Marcus Walker

Is the Church of England giving up on Sunday worship?

What a clash of the titans we witnessed at the weekend. The Lionesses vs Divine Worship on a Sunday morning. An unfortunate conflict of timings meant that just as the England women’s football team were limbering up to kick the first ball in Australia, church services in England were launching into their first hymn. The Church of England knew which side it was on. ‘I know lots of people will want to watch the match live. That is fine from the Church of England’s point of view. Others will prefer to go to church and avoid knowing the score until they can watch the match on catch-up, and that is

The Spectator

2616: Atomic scorers – solution

The thirteen unclued lights are the name of COMPOSERS whose initial letters are A to M. First prize Stephen Rice, London SW1 Runners-up C.R. Haigh, Hassocks, West Sussex; Lynne Gilchrist, Willoughby, NSW, Australia

Doc

2619: All Grieg to me

The unclued lights, (four of two words), when arranged correctly, yield a famous TV quotation. One word does double duty; ignore an apostrophe too.         Across    4    Oblige to provide lodgings? (11) 11    Spanish food of peas cooked with everybody inside (7) 14    Gave a present that’s not about to be old-fashioned (5) 19    Complaint made by one head about pupils (7) 21    Smoke in the Tube (4) 23    Whirlwind Frank making Tony hop (7) 24    Duck having twitch of the ear (4) 25    Yes, indeed. Under 50% (3,4) 30    Performers in drag? (3,4) 31    Army reserve repeated so long (2-2) 32    Angered, upset (7) 34    Zealously disregarding odd

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the worm who came back to life after 46,000 years

In Competition No. 3313, you were invited to supply a poem about the worms that were resurrected by scientists after being frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years. The tiny roundworms, buried deep underground since the late Pleistocene, were brought back to life by being immersed in water and transported to Germany – in a scientist’s pocket – to see what lessons the creatures might yield for 21st-century humanity. (They were, it was discovered, able to survive extreme low temperatures by entering a dormant state called cryptobiosis.) Their remarkable story produced a smart, lively and varied entry. A commendation to W.J. Webster’s limerick: A Pleistocene worm from Siberia, Dug

Richard Madeley

Don’t cancel Queen

Another week, another whitewash. The latest chunk of culture to be painted out of existence is ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, Queen’s 1978 hit. Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve never liked the song. I think it’s crude, patronising and misogynistic. It was pretty dated even on the day Queen recorded it. But that’s my problem. Millions loved it. That’s why it was track four on the band’s 1981 Greatest Hits album. But as Universal Records re-release Queen’s classic collection, FBG is track nothing. Track gone. Track ghosted. We’ve got to stop doing this neopuritanical cultural censorship, whether it be with songs, books (Enid Blyton’s PC-filtered Famous Five or P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves), fairy stories

Luke McShane

No. 766

White to play. Steiger-Stebbings, European Senior Team Championship, 2023. White played 1 h2-h4, and a draw was agreed a few moves later. What opportunity did he overlook? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 28 August. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qxf5+ Kxf5 2 Bd3 mate Last week’s winner Gordon Ironside, Wallington, Sutton