The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 15 November 2018

From our UK edition

Hard bitten A British tourist died after contracting rabies from a cat bite in Morocco. Whatever happened to the prominent anti-rabies posters at British ports? — The last case of rabies contracted in the UK was in 1922 but rising cross-Channel traffic led to a fear that infected animals could unwittingly be brought in. — A 1974 regulation introduced long spells of quarantine and those once-familiar posters, then restrictions were eased in the 1990s thanks to pet passports. — The last case of human infection in France was in 1923, but the country was not declared rabies-free until 2001 – a status it lost for two years from 2008. — Worldwide, rabies kills 59,000 people a year, 95 per cent in Africa or Asia and 99 per cent with infections from dogs.

The Spectator

Letters | 15 November 2018

From our UK edition

Hearts as well as heads Sir: Simon Jenkins suggests we should stop remembering and start forgetting about the first world war (‘Don’t mention the war’, 10 November). His beef is with artists in particular, claiming that art ‘drenches history in emotion’. He prefers to read history books. No one would argue against history books, but surely it is not a question of either/or. Artists tell a story in a different way from historians, often to a different audience. They can move people to want to find out more: to look in the box of letters in the attic, to find out about their family connection to the war, to think again about the past and how it impacts on our present. Good history books open our minds to new ideas and perspectives.

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 15 November 2018

From our UK edition

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, defended a 500-page technical draft of the agreement on withdrawal from the European Union. She met immediate opposition from the Democratic Unionists, from Jacob Rees-Mogg and from Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson’s brother Jo (a Remainer) had earlier resigned as a minister, calling Mrs May’s handling of Brexit a ‘failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis’. The BBC reported that several cabinet ministers had expressed doubts about her Chequers plan back in July. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, insisted that Brexit could not be stopped, but Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, said the option of a new referendum was still ‘on the table’.

The Spectator

A bad deal

From our UK edition

During last year’s general election campaign, Theresa May declared that ‘You can only deliver Brexit if you believe in Brexit’. Unfortunately, her deal proves this point. It was negotiated by a team of people who imagined their job to be a damage-limitation exercise. They did not see Brexit as an opportunity and this is reflected in the terms put before the cabinet. The deal falls far short of what was promised in May’s Lancaster House speech. She said she’d bring back a clean Brexit, taking Britain out of the Single Market, the Customs Union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The deal she ended up presenting to her cabinet will, in several important regards, fail all of these tests. But May has conveniently forgotten her tests.

The Spectator

Trial and punishment

From our UK edition

From ‘The Kaiser’, 16 November 1918: What is to be done with the Kaiser? For the question must certainly be answered. If we may venture to judge the feelings of our countrymen, we should say that, though there is no trace of a vindictive hostility towards any of the Germans who may seriously be trying to enter upon a better way of life, there is a very strong feeling that the Kaiser must be brought to trial. This is a perfectly logical conclusion. The British government have announced that all persons proved guilty of offences against the laws of humanity during the war shall be duly punished. It is unthinkable, therefore, that the Kaiser himself should be exempt.

The Spectator

Books of the year – part two

From our UK edition

Daniel Swift I feel as though I came late to the Sarah Moss party. Nobody told me she was this divided country’s most urgent novelist. Her themes: the cycles of history, male absurdity, the forms female subversion may take, in irony, sickness and sacrifice. It helps that she’s absurdly topical, and that she’s funny. Her new book, Ghost Wall (Granta, £12.99), is the shorter, spikier companion piece to her previous novel, The Tidal Zone. It is about ancient Britain and its re-enactment in the present day, and like all the novels I’ve loved best this year, it’s also a parable. Other parables: I was hugely moved by Jesse Ball’s allegorical Census (Granta, £14.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 8 November 2018

From our UK edition

It is cricket The use of a baseball expression, backstop, for possible arrangements over the Irish border could upset some Brexiteers. Yet the concept of a ‘backstop’ can be traced to a much more British game, cricket. The use of ‘backstop’ for what we would now call a wicket keeper was first recorded in the Oxford Dictionary in 1819. Seventy years later it cropped up in baseball, as a name for a fence rather than a person. When, in 1890, baseball players started calling the catcher a backstop too, the fence became, in effect, a backstop to the backstop. Big swims Ross Edgley became the first person to swim round the British coast, covering 1,791 miles in four months, starting and finishing in Margate.

The Spectator

Letters | 8 November 2018

From our UK edition

Hubris and nemesis Sir: Douglas Murray’s assessment of Angela Merkel’s decision to stand down as German Chancellor (‘Europe’s empty throne’, 3 November) suggests a certain symmetry with the fate of our own former Prime Minister. David Cameron also declared that he would leave office at a time of his own choosing, but circumstances conspired against him. Mutti shows a great deal of presumption in announcing she will stay until the next election. If German politics bears any resemblance to our own, the very act of announcing a long goodbye will ensure that she leaves before her chosen moment. Cameron brought about his own demise by hubris, thinking he could renegotiate the terms of EU membership.

The Spectator

Lessons from America

From our UK edition

Donald Trump can, at the very least, claim to have killed off political apathy. Americans this week voted in greater numbers than in any such elections of the past half-century — but it does not follow that this is an encouraging development. The midterm results were a blow for Trump, but not much of a blow. American politics is developing along the lines with which we are familiar: a cultural war, where voters are enthused not so much by what candidates have to say but because of tribal hatred of the opposition. President Trump has proved an even more incendiary figure than candidate Trump: he has not stopped campaigning or using Twitter to set the news agenda. His enemies have not stopped rising to his bait.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 8 November 2018

From our UK edition

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, set off for St Symphorien Military Cemetery in Mons, from which she was to join President Emmanuel Macron to lay wreaths at Thiepval for the centenary of the Armistice. Jeff Fairburn resigned as chief executive of Persimmon, the housing company, after his £75 million bonus attracted public comment. Marks & Spencer reported falling clothing and food sales. The New Look fashion chain increased the number of shops it planned to close from 60 to 85. British Airways passengers on a flight from Orlando, Florida, scheduled to reach London eight hours later, spent 77 hours on the journey, including an opportunity to sleep on the floor at JFK airport in New York.

The Spectator

to 2381: Step changes

From our UK edition

The word ladder connecting UNITED and STATES goes: UNITES (1D), URITES (18), WRITES (7D), WHITES (34), WHILES (30A), WHALES (7A), SHALES (10), STALES (31).

The Spectator

Giving thanks

From our UK edition

From ‘Thanks be to God’, 16 November 1918: The thought that filled the mind of the nation on Monday, and has possessed it ever since, is the thought, Thanks be to God. Under a thousand names and forms, consciously and unconsciously, realized fully or only half realized, this has given unity to the nation and made the moment mighty. Not to have recorded this fact, and to have left unsaid what we have just said, would have been impossible. But it is equally impossible to say more. If it is true that the greatest truths demand the greatest care in their statement, it is also true that the greatest and most moving thoughts entertainable by man can only find the simplest expression… We profess deep gratitude, and we feel it.

The Spectator

Books of the year – part one

From our UK edition

Andrew Motion Short stories seem to fare better in the US than the UK, and among this year’s rich crop, Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck (Ecco, £20.70) is outstanding. Everything about Eisenberg’s writing is highly controlled — watchful, well-made — and everything it describes teeters on the verge of chaos or collapse. It makes for a brilliant mixture of a book — at once compact and capacious, eerily familiar and extremely strange. Roger Lewis One of my favourite authors is Laura Thompson. Her biographies of sundry Mitfords, of Agatha Christie and Lord Lucan (recently revised in the light of the unpleasant Countess’s demise) are brilliant and forensic.

Friday

The Spectator

The winners of the Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2018 | 2 November 2018

From our UK edition

Which UK companies are rewriting the rules and redefining their marketplaces? Earlier this year, The Spectator and Julius Baer launched the inaugural Economic Disruptor Awards to celebrate the most creative entrepreneurs in the UK. Over the past six months, over 100 nominations have been reviewed by our panel. Last night, we announced the winners at a gala dinner hosted by Andrew Neil, Chairman of The Spectator, and attended by over 120 guests from across the world of business. We are delighted to announce that the 2018 Economic Disruptor of the Year is Pockit – a low-cost, easy-access banking app aimed at helping Britain’s ‘unbanked’.

The Spectator

The winners of the Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2018

From our UK edition

Which UK companies are rewriting the rules and redefining their marketplaces? Earlier this year, The Spectator and Julius Baer launched the inaugural Economic Disruptor Awards to celebrate the most creative entrepreneurs in the UK. Over the past six months, over 100 nominations have been reviewed by our panel. Last night, we announced the winners at a gala dinner hosted by Andrew Neil, Chairman of The Spectator, and attended by over 120 guests from across the world of business. We are delighted to announce that the 2018 Economic Disruptor of the Year is Pockit – a low-cost, easy-access banking app aimed at helping Britain’s ‘unbanked’.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 1 November 2018

From our UK edition

On the wagon A ‘caravan’ of several thousand Central American migrants was reported to be travelling through Mexico towards the southern US border. The concept of a caravan comes from karwan, a Persian word for a group of merchants who would travel together to take advantage of safety in numbers. In its turn it is believed to have derived from the Sanskrit word for camel. It is first recorded in English in the late 17th century for a large number of people travelling together, and soon afterwards became a word for a covered wagon — predating the motor car by two centuries.

The Spectator

Letters | 1 November 2018

From our UK edition

Political vitriol Sir: Vitriol and incivility seem to be everywhere in politics just now. In the last issue (27 October) John R. MacArthur linked a ‘rise in national coarseness’ to the election of Donald Trump, while Freddy Gray hints at a longer historical perspective when he writes that American politics ‘has always been unpleasant’. That ‘always’ is not hyperbole: in Alexander Hamilton Ron Chernow describes in vivid detail the ‘vile partisanship’ of the 1790s, stoked by newspapers that were often ‘scurrilous and inaccurate’. ‘Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,’ said Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States.