The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Who has lost the most money in human history? 

From our UK edition

Billion-dollar losers Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old founder of FTX, saw his wealth plummet from $16 bn to zero when the company collapsed. Other big fortunes lost: – Masayoshi Son, founder of Softbank, lost paper wealth of around $70 bn (in today’s money) during the dotcom crash of 2000-2. The company later floated and now he is reckoned by Forbes to be worth $22.8 bn. – Yasumitsu Shigeta, founder of mobile phone company Hikari Tsushin, lost a paper fortune of $42 bn in the dotcom crash, but thanks to a partial recovery in shares he is now worth $3.4 bn, says Forbes. – John Rockefeller, the oil magnate and America’s richest man at the time of the Wall Street Crash, is reckoned to have lost the equivalent of $10 bn.

The Spectator

Letters: Camilla should not be called ‘Queen Consort’

From our UK edition

Zero sense Sir: Ross Clark’s article (‘Hot air’, 12 November) neatly sums up some of the fallacies of the net zero target. Electricity generation currently fulfils about 20 per cent of the UK’s total energy demand – of which at best 40 per cent is covered by wind, solar, and hydro: i.e. 8 per cent of total energy demand is fulfilled from renewable sources. Are we really expected to believe that in the next 27 years electricity generation from renewables will grow 12.5 times – or from any source five times – and that the infrastructure will be put in place to deliver it? James Fairbairn Oxford Thank you, Jeremy Sir: I lunched today with friends, one fighting the unwinnable battle against Motor Neurone Disease.

Wednesday

The Spectator

2578: Torture – solution

From our UK edition

The word is ‘rack’. In the order of the headwords in Chambers, their meanings are indicated by: FRAMEWORK (41), VENGEANCE (4A), DECANT (15D), BONES (1A), GAIT (25), MIST (17), DRINK (42) and SKIN (24). RACK in CRACKED (13) was to be shaded, Title: a further meaning of rack1.

Brandon Robshaw

Repudiations

From our UK edition

The first, essential task: repudiate your parents. Reject their values and advice. Make clear they have no right to legislate.   There will be rows, of course, but that’s the price.  The later task: reject the youthful you. Remove the smirk from that conceited face. It may take tens of years to see this through.  Slow and painful, like shedding a carapace. The final, urgent task: repudiate the first repudiation. Try to mend the damage that you wrought. If not too late. Assuming they’re still there to re-befriend.

The Spectator

The new era of austerity

From our UK edition

It’s the Chancellor who will deliver next week’s Autumn Statement, but every-one knows it will have been ghost-written by Rishi Sunak. When Jeremy Hunt ran for party leader, his own proposal was to take corporation tax from 19 per cent to 15 per cent. Now, he wishes to raise it to 25 per cent. When Hunt speaks next week, we should imagine Sunak’s voice. Liz Truss spooked the markets by combining unexpected tax cuts with a spending splurge bigger than Sunak’s furlough scheme: a £10 billion-a-month subsidy on energy prices, going even to the richest. This was a shock, sprung on markets at a time when interest rates were rising globally. About two-thirds of the interest rate rises that emerged under Truss would probably have happened anyway, but politically this is irrelevant.

The Spectator

Letters: The triple lock must be saved

From our UK edition

Running the asylum Sir: The interview with Robert Buckland must be the most depressing article I have read for a long time (‘Let them contribute’, 5 November). He notes that the many months of lockdown when no one came into the country presented the perfect opportunity to cut the asylum backlog. Instead it got bigger. He suggests reforming the system so that all information material to a case must be presented upfront, instead of cases being subject to endless appeals. (There’s also the fact that many asylum claimants have confused matters by tossing their passports in the sea during their transit.) One wonders how the Tories allowed this mess to develop, and why they can’t take commonsense steps (including his own suggestions) to resolve it.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Williamson resigns, nurses strike and Norwegian royal quits

From our UK edition

Home Sir Gavin Williamson resigned from the cabinet as minister without portfolio following publication of texts he had sent (annoyed at not being invited to the Queen’s funeral) to the chief whip Wendy Morton, full of swear words. ‘There is a price for everything.’ A former civil servant said that Sir Gavin had told him to slit his throat, which he denied. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, agreed with Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, £35 billion of tax cuts and £25 billion of tax rises, in time for the Office for Budget Responsibility to peruse the proposals before the Autumn Statement next Thursday. The Bank of England had raised interest rates by 0.75 percentage points to 3 per cent.

The Spectator

Books of the year II – chosen by our regular reviewers

From our UK edition

Andrew Lycett Describing how individuals get drawn, often haphazardly, into a bloody conflict such as the English Civil War is not an easy task. But Jessie Childs manages it superbly in The Siege of Loyalty House (Bodley Head, £25), which tingles with a discerning historical imagination. Lily Dunn’s memoir Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99), about her mixed reactions to her beloved dad’s dive into a religious cult and subsequent alcoholism, is notable for its emotional truthfulness, sure sense of time and place and appealing tone of delivery. The novel which gave me most pleasure was Winchelsea by Alex Preston (Canongate, £14.99), a rip-roaring yarn about smugglers and seafarers in Romney Marsh and its coastal hinterland in the 18th century.

The Spectator

Who first started burning fossil fuels?

From our UK edition

Carbon dating Did burning fossil fuels begin with the industrial revolution, or is there someone else from whom we could claim reparations for carbon emissions?  — Artefacts made from coal and dated to 4000 bc have been uncovered in the Shenyang province of north-eastern China, with a formalised industry using coal for copper-smelting in operation by 1000 bc. In Britain, coal has been traced to bronze-age funeral pyres lit prior to 2000 bc. The Romans began mining for coal in the Midlands, and the first deep coal mine was opened in Ashby de la Zouch around 1450 ad. The earliest-known oil product is asphalt used in the construction of the walls of Babylon c. 2000 ad. China probably started using oil as a fuel in around 400 bc.

Tuesday

Wednesday

Claudine Toutoungi

unreliable narrator

From our UK edition

and where yesterday I lay broiling in the vat of my bedroom  today a sneaky little breeze tickles my soles — Coo-ee! Only me!  shifty at first but soon breeze picks up speed with What — did you think I was gone for good? That me and my three ‘e’s had  danced our final conga around your curtains and hightailed it  out of the element once and for all? Finita la commedia?  Leaving you with only the hot, hot heat to tan your hide?  My God, you’re a tragedian. I bet you spent the whole 48 hour heatwave being Blanche Dubois around the place, fainting  and drawing cold baths. Don’t tell me. I bet you were writing poetry.  Oh God, you were. Oh you have to have your psychodrama, don’t you?

The Spectator

Books of the Year I — chosen by our regular reviewers

From our UK edition

Philip Hensher There were some very good novels this year, but they came from surprising directions. It is astonishing that one as original as Kate Barker-Mawjee’s The Coldest Place on Earth (Conrad Press, £9.99) couldn’t find a major publisher. A friend recommended this wonderfully controlled and evocatively written novel about a heart coming to life in the depths of Siberia.  I always enjoy Mick Herron’s half-arsed spy thrillers, but Bad Actors (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) took a big step into literary excellence. The dazzling, Conrad-like structure turned an entertainment into a major literary statement. Sheila Llewellyn’s Winter in Tabriz (Hodder & Stoughton, £8.

The Spectator

Letters: Where past PMs went wrong

From our UK edition

Catalogue of disasters Sir: Matthew Parris, in his article ‘The real cause of all the chaos’ (29 October), asks of our last three prime ministers: ‘What big thing did any of these unfortunate souls do wrong?’ In a spirit of helpfulness: Mrs May: net zero by 2050, derisory defence spending. Mr Johnson: hospital clearances, lockdown, vaccine mandates, derisory defence spending. Ms Truss: tax cuts without public sector spending cuts. As a consequence of these three, Britain is not so far away from having to go cap in hand to the IMF once more, and is again confronted by war in Europe as a result of the failure of conventional deterrence.

Claudine Toutoungi

Some day I want to be Peter Sellers

From our UK edition

in his Clouseau-era. I want to get home knowing at any minute I might karate chop Burt Kwouk as he comes flying round the corner or trap his trouser-tie in the fridge door or flip up the fold-down bed on his head — basically I want to triumph frequently by freakish misadventure. And I want a beige mac and to take liberties with my vowels and I want a range of disguises for every occasion (including one involving lederhosen) and a lava lamp and always at least one eccentric, vastly rich admirer who finds me fascinating. And I want terrible timing that’s also somehow — sublime and I want to be the badass buffoon who might snap the evil villain’s snooker cue but doesn’t break a sweat.

The Spectator

Has Elon Musk picked up a turkey in Twitter?

From our UK edition

Talking gobblers Has Elon Musk picked up a turkey in Twitter? – Musk paid $54.2 per share. The share price reached $41.57 on its first day of trading in 2013. It slumped to $14.62 in April 2016 and peaked at $77.06 in February 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, it claimed 229 million active daily users, a rise of 15.9% year on year. There were 39.6 million users in the US. – In Q1 2022 the company raised $1.2 billion in revenue: $1.11 billion from advertising and £94 million from subscriptions. However, in the same quarter the company ran up $1.33 billion in costs. Dirty Cop How are Cop conferences doing at cutting their own carbon emissions?

The Spectator

What Scholz should bear in mind on his trip to Beijing

From our UK edition

Olaf Scholz will be in Beijing this weekend, making the first visit of a western leader to China since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. What might at any other time be regarded as a routine piece of diplomatic outreach is instead a matter of deep concern. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has just cemented his position as dictator-for-life at the Chinese Communist party’s 20th congress. Beijing has followed this up with a series of high-profile visits from countries taking Chinese money for major infrastructure projects. The President of Vietnam arrived on Monday, the Presidents of Tanzania and Pakistan on Wednesday. This will culminate in Scholz’s arrival, the first G7 leader to accept Xi’s invitation. China’s sphere of influence is truly global.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A migrant crisis in Manston, elections for Northern Ireland and Matt Hancock heads for the jungle

From our UK edition

Home Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, spoke in the Commons of an ‘invasion on our southern coast’ by migrants in small boats. ‘Let’s stop pretending that they are all refugees in distress,’ she said. ‘The whole country knows that is not true.’ She was reacting to a crisis at a migrant processing centre in Manston, Kent, built for 1,600 but housing 4,000. David Neal, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, called it ‘really dangerous’. He said an Afghan family had lived in a marquee there for 32 days. It was made more crowded after migrants were moved following an attack with three petrol bombs on a Border Force migrant centre in Dover by a man in a car who then killed himself. On Saturday alone, 990 migrants crossed the Channel.

Euron Griffith

The Non-Discovery of San Francisco Bay

From our UK edition

Drake, the clot, missed it by a mile. That hook of rock failed to snag  his sails into the only gap for a  thousand miles and the Ohlone breathed  easy in their skins unaware of the  Great Inevitable whilst the dew  on the antelope’s nose lay undisturbed.  Salmon knew the river  would not deepen. The eagle’s shadow rippled like a whisper over desert ridges. Grassland rolled a parody of Atlantic waves. Crow and Lakota  were still safe behind the Appalachians  which dipped to the farms of the Puritans  and the graves of the Seminole.  One curious soul raised his head,  wondered what lay beyond the forest and the valleys. To the west.

Stephen Bone

The short-lived bloom of Monica Rose

From our UK edition

In her, oily tongued Hughie found his perfect foil: a cockney sparrow, whose pixie cut and skinny frame won the hearts of millions in the age of monochrome. Her money more than doubling as she made the ratings soar, bringing with it a rags-to-riches change. The sky seemed the limit, yet something in her ached for her lost world of nine-to-five, round the corner local, down-to-earth mates. Until finding herself broken on the wheel of flashbulb fame, she threw in the towel, hoping to return to her old, ordinary ways. Instead, uprooted for too long, she withered, took to God and pills, deadheading herself with an overdose on one light-starved, February day.