Society

No. 846

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, Detroit Free Press, 1877. Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal addressand allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Rb3! wins, as 1…Qxb3 2 Qd4+ leads to mate, or 1…Qf6 2 Qxc2 wins the rook. Last week’s winner John Shipley, Tyn Y Gongl, Anglesey

Spectator Competition: Comrades

Comp. 3395 yielded many fine entries in which Animal Farm became a satire on office politics. Deserving of a mention: David Silverman for his White House version featuring a ‘prize wild boar, one E. Long-Tusk’ and ‘two American XL Bullies, Don and Shady’; and Sue Pickard’s scenario in which two workers, Pinko and Porky, ‘inspired by a motivational speaker, Major Boar’, wreak havoc. Also William Linfoot, J.C.H. Mounsey and Nicholas Lee. The £25 vouchers go to those below. Napoleon had opted to WFH that morning, drafting a presentation for a forthcoming mandatory Inclusion and Wellbeing workshop. Clover, a part–timer on account of caring responsibilities she wasn’t prepared to specify outside

2699: Summer Dresses II

Unclued lights, singly or correctly paired, are of a kind.  One light does double duty. Across 1    Son becomes aware of cutter (6) 5    One who digests fish first (6) 10    Ancient Briton’s edged axe (4) 11    I don’t approve of expert? It’s possible (10) 15    Deck sport when turning round river (5) 17    County flags appear on these (6) 20    Humiliated and embarrassed to lose husband (6) 22    First section cut out of thin trousers (5) 23    Like a system to identify individual Brit oddly resorting to crime (9) 28    Once preying, almost going mad (5) 30    For drink, shrub (6) 32    A dry Martini essentially repelled saint (6)

Why are student debaters being asked for their pronouns?

When the UK’s biggest school debate competition told us to declare our gender pronouns, I knew my team had lost the contest before it had even begun. Hundreds of children are told to do this every year.  Things were already uncomfortable. When I took part in regional rounds for this competition in 2018, run by the prestigious Oxford Union, there was only one other pair of state school students in the room. We weren’t as polished, and didn’t sound as impressive. It’s not easy at that age when you’ve had no proper training and you’ve come from somewhere that doesn’t really teach you public speaking.  After being asked to declare his pronouns, in

Stephen Daisley

The Supreme Court ruling is a victory for women

The Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the Equality Act is a victory for women, proper statutory interpretation and the reality-based community. It started with the Scottish government trying to take something away from women. The Gender Representation on Public Boards Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2018, required 50 per cent of non-executive appointments to public boards to be women. But the act defined ‘woman’ to include ‘a person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment’ provided that person was ‘living as a woman’ and intended to undergo ‘a process… of becoming female’. In theory, this could have meant that a public board could

There’s an obvious reason pre-school children are falling behind

Something is rotten in the state of British schools. According to primary school teachers, one in four Reception students are not toilet trained, more than a third cannot dress themselves, and half cannot sit still. Children are missing a range of developmental milestones, increasingly demonstrating poor language skills, delays in basic motor functions, and a lack of core strength (there are stories of perfectly able-bodied children not knowing how to use stairs or hold a pencil). Now a government-backed website, Starting Reception, has been created by a collaboration of early-years and education organisations to help define ‘school-readiness’. The idea is to outline key skills to parents that children should practise

Julie Burchill

Aimee Lou Wood should stop moaning about her teeth

Back in the twentieth century, there was a trend for beautiful female film stars to compare themselves to comical or unattractive animals. Michelle Pfeiffer insisted that she looked like a duck; Uma Thurman claimed to resemble a hammer-head shark. Not just actresses; there was a song by Pink, in which the then 23-year-old, size-ten blonde babe with the snub nose and big eyes beat herself up for not being conventionally pretty like Britney Spears. Most excruciating of all was Nigella Lawson’s reference to her – look away now – ‘sticky-out tummy’. It’s hard to imagine a more condescending attempt by a sexy woman to cuddle up to the fatso-demographic, for

Are plus-size ballerinas the future?

Iain Mackay, a former ballet dancer who is now artistic director of the Royal Ballet School, told the Times in a recent interview that ‘bigger ballerinas… are the future of the art form,’ and that ballet ‘has moved away from the “slim” female fixture.’ It’s essential that we move away from ballet students being body shamed by their teachers, as illustrated by the 2023 Panorama investigation, The Dark Side of Ballet Schools. A similar scandal emerged when it was alleged that children at Vienna State Opera’s ballet academy were told to smoke to suppress their appetite. It’s not just size that destroys the dreams of many aspiring ballet dancers. Any number

How Mario Vargas Llosa was inspired by Thatcher

Most writers – like the vast majority of actors, artists and other luminaries of our culture – belong to the political left, but the death aged 89 of the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa reminds us that this is not always the case. Most unusually for a Latin American author, Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, was not only a proud Thatcherite conservative, but himself came within an ace of winning his troubled country’s presidency after temporarily laying down his pen and entering the political arena. But like his great Colombian rival in literature, the Marxist novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (who Vargas Llosa once

In defence of rats

Reports of rats in Birmingham that are ‘bigger than cats’ are now making international headlines. The New York Times, NBC News and CNN have all weighed in on the city’s rodent problem, as the strike action by bin workers rolls on. Rat panic seems to be setting in. An MP said the rodents are ‘dancing in the streets’ of Birmingham, the Telegraph reported that a man’s Mercedes was ‘completely written off’ by rats and there have been fears about ‘nuclear rats’ overrunning the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor in Somerset. ‘You see them just sat there, looking at you,’ a source at the plant told the Observer. Meanwhile, animal rights

Does Taiwan have a free speech problem?

These are jittery times in Zhongzheng, Taiwan’s Westminster. The island’s most important supporter, the United States, is now led by a man who resents, rather than is grateful for, the island’s enormous high-tech exports to the US. A few commentators wonder out loud whether Taiwan has become too economically dependent on America. There’s another large economy nearby that would happily boost ties. Then there’s the military drills. The two Chinese characters for ‘Liberation’ have dominated the front pages here recently: some in reference to Trump’s tariffs bonanza, others referring to two days of surprise live-fire exercises by the People’s Liberation Army around the island. The median line in the Taiwan

Gareth Roberts

The sad death of ITV

The slow death of ITV makes for painful viewing. In its glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, the channel had a salty naughtiness, a thrilling random quality. Its kids’ shows were raucous or even scary, its crime dramas were raunchy, its quizzes and games were sparkly and crass and its highbrow offerings were spicy. The channel had an edge to it; watching ITV was aspirational and fun. It was cool. ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same generic thrillers But ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same kind of generic gloomy thriller; at the moment it’s tempting us with

Why are violent prisoners continuing to offend in jail?

Even for our broken prison service it’s been a terrible few days. On Saturday the jihadi terrorist Hashem Abedi used boiling oil and ‘homemade weapons’ in an assault at HMP Frankland which hospitalised three prison officers, the Prison Officers’ Association has said. Given the severity of the injuries, with one man suffering a severed artery in his neck and the other being stabbed at least five times in the chest, it’s only thanks to luck that no staff were killed. Then, this morning, it emerged that John Mansfield, a convicted murderer serving his sentence at HMP Whitemoor, was killed by another inmate on Sunday. While few will shed tears for

Why is the army fixing Birmingham’s bin crisis?

‘Join the Army and see the world’ used to be the War Office’s boast. In those inter-war years it meant Egypt, Malta, Jamaica and Hong Kong, but for a lucky few recipients of the King’s shilling their next deployment will be to organise rubbish collections in Birmingham. The government has announced that a ‘small number of office-based military personnel with operational planning expertise’ will assist Birmingham City Council in dealing with the effects of a month-long strike by refuse workers. At the end of March the council declared a major incident, with up to 20,000 tonnes of rubbish lying in the city’s streets and reports of rats the size of

Ross Clark

Good riddance to Cambridge’s May balls

I’m not usually one to hold back from damning the woke and progressive forces which lie within my alma mater, the University of Cambridge. An initiative by the geography department to decolonise the study of icebergs in the Canadian north was the final straw. But there is one conservative cause that I won’t be putting my name to: saving the May Ball. Several colleges are reported to have cancelled their balls this year in reaction to poor ticket sales and students complaining that the events are ‘extortionate, overpriced and exclusive’. Trinity college, one of the few whose balls survive, is charging £280 for a ticket. At Cambridge’s lower-rent end, Robinson

How Rory McIlroy banished his Masters demons

Eighteen years ago, half his lifetime away, Rory McIlroy made his debut as a professional golfer at the British Masters at The Belfry, Sutton Coldfield. The Northern Irish teenager began with a respectable round of 69 and finished 42nd to earn a shade over £10,000. He said he would spend his first pay cheque on taking his then girlfriend to the cinema and put the rest towards buying a house near his mum, ‘so she can still do my washing’. Late last night, McIlroy won £3.2 million at another Masters, the American major in Augusta, Georgia, taking his career winnings to about £120 million. But the money was the least

Gavin Mortimer

How the kebab mafia took over the French high street

Last week, the police in Britain launched a three-week operation codenamed ‘Machinize’. It began with nearly 300 raids on nail salons, vape shops and barbershops, which in recent years have become a common sight on British high streets Thirty-five arrests were made and 97 people suspected of being victims of modern slavery were placed under police protection. More than £1 million was frozen, money the police believe is ‘dirty’, generated by Albanian and Kurdish gangs that control much of Britan’s organised crime such as drugs and prostitution. They also are heavily involved in the people smuggling business, a fact noted in 2022 by Dan O’Mahoney, then the Clandestine Channel Threat