Society

Thursday

Luke McShane

Quite a problem

Forty minutes, two problems to solve. Earlier this month I was seated in an examination hall at Harrow school in London, taking part in the final of the Winton British Chess Solving Championship. This was the second solving challenge of the day: two ‘mate in 3’ problems. The first (see the puzzle below) was a beauty and I was delighted to crack it within ten minutes. So far so good, and I had half an hour left to tackle the second. That’s where I got stuck. For one thing, the irrational position (see diagram below) made me dizzy. Composed by Aleksandr Feoktistov in 1969, the task is for White to

Luke McShane

No. 839

White to play and mate in two moves. The original problem was a mate in three, composed by Godfrey Heathcote for British Chess Magazine in 1904. In this, the most beautiful variation, White has just two moves left to give mate. What is the first move? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 3 March. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher 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 Rxb7+! Rxb7 (or 1…Ka8 2 Rxb6 wins easily) 2 Qxa6+ Kb8 3 Qxb7 mate. Last week’s winner Andrew English, Abingdon

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: Stockpiling

For Competition 3388 you were invited to submit a poem written from the point of view of a prepper. While the topic of this challenge was a bit of a downer, the standard of your poems – inventive, sad and funny – was cheering. I was sorry not to be able to fit in Chris O’Carroll’s nod to the Beatles: ‘We’re the Ardent Preppers’ Chance Stockpile Band…’ and David Silverman’s twist on Masefield’s Cargoes: Wrinkle-cream of Nivea on discount offer: Packed, for life on sunny Exoplanet 59, With box sets of Homeland, Line of Duty, Game of Thrones and Last of the Summer Wine. There were near-misses, too, for Bill

Madrigal

2692: Flexibility

We welcome the duo called Madrigal to the compiling team this week. The unclued lights (including four of two words) can be arranged to provide a quotation (in ODQ) and its author. Across 10    Learn of American through grammar school covers (6,4) 12    African country’s note covering one rule (6) 13    First-rate head polled children (3-5) 16    Song featured in Top of the Pops, almost every week  (5) 17    Instrument Luke played on the railway with energy (7) 18    Newcomer, one that yearns in Scotland?  (7) 20    Pure wits dismantled reviews (5-3) 26    Impress English with praise (7) 28    Distribute evenly in New York for speed (7) 31    Cabalist crumbled

The Spectator

2689: Annus impuratus? – solution

The puzzle title alluded to a ‘base year’ and the message spelt out using unclued lights was ‘PUZZLE NUMBER is THIS YEAR, TWENTY TWENTY-FIVE, when WRITTEN IN BASE ELEVEN’. First prize R.J. Green, Guildford Runners-up John and Di Lee, Axminster; Kathleen Durber, Stoke-on-Trent

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The BBC’s Gaza farce takes another sinister turn

So the moral rot at the BBC appears to run even deeper than we thought. The storm over its Gaza documentary just got a whole lot worse. As if it wasn’t bad enough that this Israel-mauling hour of TV was fronted by the son of a leading member of Hamas, now we discover that the Beeb whitewashed the bigoted views of some of the doc’s participants. It omitted their Jew-bashing. This is as serious a breach of broadcasting ethics as I can remember. The film was swiftly mired in scandal Gaza: How To Survive a War Zone was first broadcast on BBC Two last week. The film was swiftly mired

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

My strange day with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

The day after the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to Israel, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) holds a protest outside Westminster Magistrates Court on the Marylebone Road. I am here for the hearing of Ben Jamal, director of the PSC. He is charged with failing to comply with a police request that the January 18th protest avoid the BBC as it is near a synagogue. (The Palestine movement thinks the BBC is a Zionist asset, despite it having to remove a documentary narrated by the son of a Hamas official last week.) The PSC couldn’t stay away and their leaders were charged with public order offences after

Tuesday

John Keiger John Keiger

How Macron beat Starmer to Trump

Emmanuel Macron’s lightning visit to the White House was a tour de force of French diplomatic energy, skill and bravado. Whether Macron has managed to convince Donald Trump of the need to involve Kyiv and Europe in US-Russian negotiations on the war in Ukraine will become clear in the next fortnight. But what it demonstrated forcefully was the striking humiliation of the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the slothful incompetence of diplomacy in London and Washington. It is a stark warning of how President Macron and the EU will run rings round the Labour government and its ‘reset’ with Brussels. The Labour government announced some two weeks ago a Keir Starmer visit

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Amanda Pritchard resigns as NHS boss

Amanda Pritchard is resigning as chief executive of NHS England, after three years in the job. Pritchard’s announcement, in the last few minutes, is not a huge surprise given there had not been a great deal of confidence among ministers and aides in the leadership of the NHS – though it is worth pointing out that this lack of confidence was not solely focused on Pritchard. Pritchard’s departure leaves Streeting and colleagues more exposed Pritchard had been very anxious to show that she was ready and willing to implement the reforms that Labour wanted to introduce, particularly the shift from acute, hospital-based care to preventive and community services. But she

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why Brits keep getting a tongue lashing from Team Trump

So much for the Special Relationship. Since Donald Trump took office in January, Brits have been taking quite a tongue-lashing from the US president’s team. Keir Starmer, who touches down in Washington on Thursday to meet Trump, has been nicknamed “two-tier Keir” by the president’s consigliere Elon Musk over his handling of grooming gangs. JD Vance, the vice president, also seems to have it in for Brits: Vance has mocked Rory Stewart (not something we need help with but thanks anyway, Veep); ‘The problem with Rory and people like him,’ wrote Vance, ‘is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130’. Vance spluttered

Monday

Martin Narey

In defence of short jail sentences

Mike Amesbury, the former Labour MP who has been sent to prison for ten weeks for punching a constituent in the street, is rather unlucky: the truth is that very few first-time offenders get locked up. It’s probable that those convicted of similar offences in the future may still be imprisoned. But the use of short prison sentences for non-violent offences, however numerous and persistent, are under threat. Very few first-time offenders get sent to prison David Gauke’s Sentencing Review, which is due to be published in full over the coming months, is likely to make it harder for magistrates to hand out short jail sentences. Shabana Mahmood, the Justice

Arabella Byrne

Is this the end of the White Van Man?

A third of van drivers under the age of 35 are privately educated – and nearly half hold foundation or university degrees, according to research published by Mercedes-Benz vans. These numbers not only suggest that the end is nigh for ‘White Van Man’, the apocryphal working-class, white-collar ‘tradie’, they also ask us to reconsider the labour market outcomes for those who attended fee-paying schools. I think we all know White Van Man but let me draw him just in case. In a meme on Reddit, the ‘White Van Man starter kit’ includes a picture of a dirty white van with ‘clean me’ written on the back door with someone’s fingerprints, a

Patrick West

Sam Fender is right about white privilege

Teaching working-class young men that they benefit from ‘white privilege’ is having a detrimental effect on a generation of boys, leading to feelings of negativity and worthlessness, and driving them into the hands of dangerous influencers such as Andrew Tate. This is the claim made by Sam Fender, the best-selling, 30-year-old musician from North Shields. As the singer told the Sunday Times yesterday, this teaching has resulted in boys from poor white backgrounds being ‘made to feel like they’re a problem’, with those from ‘nowhere towns’ being ‘shamed’ and told they weren’t underprivileged because of their skin colour. Consequently, this constant disparagement is leading many to seek consolation in misogynist

Angela Epstein

Working from home turned me into a terrible mum

Can the passage of time ever assuage parental guilt? After all, brooding over what can’t be changed is a pointless diversion. Unfortunately, guilt is a duplicitous bedfellow – and one which never sleeps. So even though, in my own case, my children are ‘all grown up’ (two married, one living abroad and one at university 100 miles from home), thoughts are often triggered about my deficiencies as a mother during their upbringing. Not least thanks to the ubiquity of the so-called work from home ‘revolution’, which frequently leads me to pick at the past.  You see, my name is Angela and working from home made me a bad mother. Not for

David Christopher Kaufman

Hamas’s hostage shows evoke a haunting comparison

Another weekend, another grotesque spectacle in Gaza. Hamas released its latest handful of Israeli hostages as part of the fragile ceasefire agreement which is expected to expire next week. As on many Saturdays before, Hamas paraded a trio of Israelis – Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, and Eliya Cohen – onto makeshift platforms emblazoned with multilingual propaganda declarations and decorative nationalistic flags. The Hamas production feels like nothing less than a slave auction in America’s South As cheering crowds looked on, the trio were then forced onto the stage, made to smile and wave as heavily-armed militants milled about, before finally being led to freedom by the Red Cross officials

Tom Slater Tom Slater

The British police are deeply hostile to free speech

Are you angry about bin collections? Potty about potholes? Incandescent about the behaviour of your local council or councillors? Well whatever you do, don’t post disparaging things about them on the internet. Unless you want a visit from the police, that is.  Yes, saying critical things about your elected local representatives is the latest thing that can get you in trouble with Britain’s speech police, if the experience of Helen Jones in Stockport is anything to go by. She was paid a visit by Greater Manchester Police last week, after she called on a local councillor to resign. The local councillor is Labour’s David Sedgwick, who has been implicated in the infamous

Sam Leith Sam Leith

AI needs to be regulated

On Tuesday, the government’s consultation on AI and copyright comes to an end. There doesn’t seem to be much hope that Sir Keir and his tech-dazzled colleagues will pay much attention to it, though: long before it came to an end they made clear that their preferred plan was to change copyright law so that big tech will be able to train their models for private profit on the copyright work of artists, writers and musicians without permission or compensation. Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson are the latest to raise their voices in opposition – joining a united chorus of the Society of Authors, which also opposes this reverse

Sunday

Theodore Dalrymple

The real problem with mental health benefits

A contributory factor to the continuing impoverishment of Britain is psychiatric diagnosis – or rather, the superstitious official belief in it. More than two thirds of Incapacity Benefit claims over the space of two years were for supposed psychiatric conditions. Psychiatric diagnosis has produced more invalids than the first world war. It is the foundry in which the mind-forg’d manacles are produced – mass-produced, in fact. The most common diagnoses – of depression and anxiety, for example – are completely dependent on what the patient tells the doctor. The doctor’s default position, quite rightly, is to believe what his patients tell him. Failure to do this can lead to disaster,

Tom Bower

The truth about Mohamed Al-Fayed

Even from the grave, Mohamed Al-Fayed dictated his obituary. When news of his death emerged in September 2023, Al-Fayed’s loyal spokesman Michael Cole pronounced that the former owner of Harrods had been ‘full of great humanity’. ‘Many people’, Cole said, ‘were beneficiaries of his kindness and generosity’. When I was approached by the BBC to give my verdict on Fayed, my contribution that he had been a ‘pimp, rapist, fraudster and a habitual liar’ didn’t make the cut. Even his name ‘Al’ Fayed was phoney, a concoction he dreamt up with his partner in crime, the Dubai ambassador Mahdi al Tajir in 1970. International travel for the Egyptian required endless visas,

Saturday

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Is New Addington Britain’s bleakest estate?

There’s blood spattered on the pavement but locals in New Addington, an estate in Croydon, southeast London, seem curiously unbothered. ‘I’ve had no problems,’ Eli, who lives around the corner from the latest stabbing, tells me.  Eli’s house is close to Rowdown Field, where last March a human head and other dismembered body parts were found. Sarah Mayhew, a 38-year-old mother of two, was murdered and her remains dumped here. Flowers and solar-powered candles are pinned to the side of a metal cargo container in the car park visited by her killer. Leftover police tape flutters in the wind. The roar of traffic from the main road shatters the silence.