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Friday

Penworthy

Five bets for Champions Day at Ascot

As a general betting principle, the idea of ‘horses for courses’ is a good one. It is indisputable that some horses run better at one course than another. This may be because of the nature of the track – undulating or flat, sharp bends or straight – or simply the make-up of the ground itself, particularly if the difference is as striking as between grass and an all-weather artificial surface. I have no idea why DOCKLANDS runs so well at Ascot but there is no doubt he is several lengths better at the Berkshire track than anywhere else in the country. His form figures from seven runs at Ascot now

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Celebrity sex isn’t what it used to be

Reading about the break-up of the 19-year marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, I was interested in some comments from our old mate ‘A. Source’ about the possible cause. According to the Sun: ‘Keith put a brave face on Nicole’s raunchy screen roles and all the comments she’d make about her sexuality. But he didn’t react well when people teased him about Nicole getting it on with hunky younger guys, albeit only on camera, and it was a sensitive topic that became a real issue as time wore on.’ It’s true that Kidman – 58 – has made a speciality in recent years of getting her kit off in order

John Sturgis

Am I the last man in Europe still wearing a beret?

I first wore a beret for a fancy dress competition at my infant school summer fete in June 1975. My mother had entered me in the ‘topical’ category and tapped into the media furore around the nationwide referendum a week earlier over whether or not the UK should join what would become the EU – an issue that has managed to remain topical. My costume consisted of said beret (borrowed) paired with a stripy top, an extravagant moustache drawn on with charcoal from a burned cork and a string of onions hung around my neck. And I was pushing a bicycle. This was to ape the so-called ‘Onion Johnnies’, the itinerant

Wednesday

Nigel Jones

Real British values

An upper-middle-class former banker friend recently attended a Reform UK selection meeting for council candidates in a decaying southern coastal town. Although he is a man of the world who once worked on oil rigs and in a shoe shop, my banker friend professed himself ‘shocked’ by the standards of dress and deportment of the other would-be candidates. Naturally all were overweight and tattooed, and all were dressed in shorts, baseball caps and hooded tracksuit tops – the standard everyday uniform of most British men under the age of 60. They were, it is fair to say, an average representation of the male members of what was once called ‘the

Druin Burch

The consolation of the quince

My quince tree thrives – proof that nature can overcome adversity. I planted it, and I am a bad gardener. Childhood hours spent waiting for my mother to finish watching Gardeners’ World left me with fond memories of Percy Thrower, but in place of horticultural skill I inherited indolent incompetence. Our garden did not seem so big when we moved from a flat a decade ago. But for most of the second half of the 20th century, the former occupant of our house had been a keen gardener. Carefully planted beds, it turns out, need care, which I have failed to provide. Each spring I wage a blood feud with

James Hanning

The eccentric who turned a village into a kingdom of books

My wife put it in her usual succinct way: ‘Why do you want to write a book about such a sleazeball?’ I couldn’t really say. The late Richard Booth, second-hand bookseller and former self-crowned king of Hay-on-Wye, was not instantly lovable. Some found him the essence of unlovability. He was scruffy, disorganised, egocentric, impetuous, hopeless with money and capricious. At times he was rude, promiscuous, bad-tempered, small-minded, boring, bombastic, unscrupulous and unaware of the upset he could cause. Yet most of his staff – those who survived the whim of iron – loved him for his good heart, his childlike enthusiasm, his humour, ingenuousness, irreverence, shyness and kindness. He created

Tuesday

The Spectator

Speaker Series: An evening with Charles Moore

Watch Spectator chairman Charles Moore and assistant editor Isabel Hardman discuss Charles’s new Centenary Edition of Margaret Thatcher’s biography, exclusively for Spectator subscribers. Charles will reflect on Thatcher’s legacy, draw sharp parallels with today’s political landscape and ask where conservatism – with its split between the Conservatives and Reform – goes from here. Beforehand, Charles, along with Kate Ehrman, will present his short semi-dramatisation The Fall of Margaret Thatcher: A Whodunnit, a retelling of Thatcher’s last three days in office.

Bijan Omrani

Canterbury Cathedral’s graffiti heresy

There was confusion in Canterbury Cathedral this week as the Dean and Chapter gave permission for this most venerable shrine of world Christendom to be redecorated in the manner of the M4 Chiswick flyover. Photographs appeared of the cathedral’s ancient walls and columns irregularly plastered in jagged and bulbous graffiti, picked out in the sort of gaudy palette you might see in an amusement arcade. Even vice president J.D. Vance has questioned whether this is the right way to treat the house of God, saying the graffiti made a ‘beautiful historical building really ugly’. It soon transpired that this graffiti spattered over the site of Becket’s martyrdom was in fact

Michael Henderson

The scourge of the blurb

‘Books are a load of crap’, wrote Larkin the librarian, for a bit of fun. But some books are not very good, no matter what guff they put on the cover. Those promotional blurbs, where adverbs and adjectives jostle for supremacy, are often as false as Judas. Shami Chakrabarti, for instance, plugs With the Law on Our Side, the new book by Lady Hale, as ‘accessible, forensic, and breathtakingly humane’. Line-and-length humanity is clearly for those poor souls below the salt. Her ladyship is a grandee with a natty brooch, and must therefore be breathtakingly humane. It’s verbal sludge. Also, do the publishers really think that Little Bo Peep’s approval

Sean Thomas

The madness and myth of the Faroe Islands

I am five minutes out of the Faroe Islands’ windy, stomach-churning airport when the world twists into legend. It looks like Lord of the Rings but more menacing. Ten minutes later it’s a nightmare of single-track tunnels – go slooooow – carved into the earth by crazed dwarfs with too much time on their hands. Five minutes after that it’s Tolkien again, but redrafted by a boozed-up Norse god: dramatic buttes crumble into the Atlantic, mad farmers are ploughing near-vertical slopes, and waterfalls leap joyously from enormous cliffs to dissolve into lacy surf 300 yards below. The land here feels tormented, as if the sky and the sea endured a

Monday

Alec Marsh

Bring back elitism

Elitism has had a bad press in recent years. The concept has, alas, been tainted by its association with the numerous elites who have corrupted it by allowing self-interest and prejudice to become self-perpetuating. It’s been sullied by its association with old school ties and masonic-style handshakes – by closed networks which work to exclude those who happen to fall outside the pre-determined in-group. So no wonder we don’t like it any more. Who would? But its gravest sin of all has been its role in pulling up the drawbridge to protect privilege in general, through a kind of unspoken fish-knife test. If you don’t know what it’s for, you

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

I left my heart – and my dignity – in Belfast

Call me crazy, but I’ve always loved Belfast. Even when it was grim, scary and unlovable, I loved Belfast. It doubtless helped that when I came to know it, I was courting a local girl. I loved it because she loved it and, well, I loved it even after she chucked me. The people, the bars, the craic – gosh, the very air – invariably get under my skin. I’ve always felt at home in the city’s embrace. And now that Belfast is no longer grim, scary and unlovable – and long since my Colleen came to love another and long since I came to love another too – I