Society

Saturday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Writing home

From ‘Convalescents—Some Portraits’, The Spectator, 12 June 1915: No. 12. hardly spoke any French. He was very fat, middle-aged, and placid, his face perfectly round, and his whole form almost spherical. A farthing and a penny and two matches could be arranged to form an excellent representation of his silhouette. We discovered that he was a reservist, and a market gardener by trade. He was a most industrious creature, and could be made perfectly happy by being given little jobs to do in the garden. He haltingly explained that before the war he had had two big greenhouses; then, shaking his head sadly, “Maintenant tout cassé, Mam’selle.” Like the sad

Friday

Douglas Murray

Is there absolutely nothing that can spook the diversity advocates?

Today’s Times carries an interesting story. A new report from the Department of Education reveals that: ‘Almost one in three of England’s primary school children is from an ethnic minority – the highest level yet.  One pupil in five speaks English as a second language.’ There follows some information about how these numbers are putting an ‘unprecedented pressure’ on schools which now ‘struggle to cope’ after a 2.1 per cent increase in pupils at state primary schools in one year alone. The extraordinary thing about stories like this is that they just sail by.  No politician has anything much to say about it.  Someone in the media might write a

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Fine producers who don’t employ disabled actors and actors will just learn how to fake disability

Jenny Sealey, director of Graeae Theatre Company, has had a brainwave. Fine producers who don’t employ disabled actors. She’s particularly concerned about the failure of opera directors to hire performers with impaired sight and hearing: ‘There is no diversity whatsoever inside those opera houses. And that is disgusting.’ She wants her new fines siphoned into ‘a training pot so that we can be training deaf and disabled artists.’ Her company, by the way, trains such performers. And that’s fair enough. Nick your rivals’ lunch and eat it yourself. Standard practice in most industries. But the Sealy Code may not prove entirely workable. First of all, fines need to be policed

Steerpike Steerpike

Jonathan Aitken says farewell to Alan Rusbridger

Sore heads over at the Guardian this morning after yet another leaving party for Alan Rusbridger. In what Mr S makes to be Rusbridger’s third leaving do, politicians and celebrities gathered at the Battlebridge Room of Kings Place to raise a glass to the departed editor. Ed Miliband chatted away to Benedict Cumberbatch over a bottle of Sol, while Chuka Umunna and Harriet Harman tucked into the prosecco. No sign of any of the Labour leadership contenders, but a smattering of Tories were in attendance, including Lord Grade and David Davis. Perhaps the most surprising appearance was from Jonathan Aitken – after all, it was Rusbridger’s dogged pursuit of the disgraced former Tory MP

Steerpike Steerpike

Jemima Goldsmith: my Tinder has ‘loads of Pakistanis and people with beards’

Jemima Goldsmith’s love life has been well documented by the red tops in recent years, with her former loves including Imran Khan and Russell Brand. So Mr S was pleased to hear that – in the name of research – she has been adopting a new approach and experimenting with the dating app Tinder. Goldsmith took to the stage at Vanity Fair‘s digital summit to conduct a Q&A with the app’s founder Sean Rad. Things started off politely with Jemima, who is the sister of Zac Goldsmith, quizzing Rad over why he had come up with the idea for the app, which has over 50 million active users: ‘I think meeting people should be

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The Industrial Reserve

From ‘The Industrial Reserve’, The Spectator, 12 June 1915: The Industrial Reserve (227 Strand, W.C.), which was started eight weeks ago, and has already placed over nine hundred men in useful employment, directly or indirectly concerned with war work. These men are for the most part drawn from classes who do not ordinarily come into the labour market. Many of them are middle-class men normally engaged in business or professions who have lost their work through the dis- organization caused by the war, but who, being useful with their hands, are able to take on skilled or semi- skilled work in munition factories. Many others are retired artisans who have

Thursday

Taki

High life | 11 June 2015

There’s nothing to add to Martin Vander Weyer’s item about Hellas of two weeks ago in these here pages except a Yogi Berra pearl, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ The Greek drama will go on and on until the brinkmanship is exhausted. The EU has blinked, as I thought it would. Although Greek accounting arabesques have been known to shame the Bolshoi — Goldman Sachs taught the modern Hellenes how to legally cook the books and screw Brussels, something we are now paying the price for — we Greeks have contributed a few things apart from cheating and not paying our taxes. As Michael Daley wrote in a letter

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 June 2015

On Sunday morning, I was kicking a football in the back garden with my grandson. I had bought him his first pair of football boots, Optimum Tribals, junior size 11, blue and orange, each boot furnished with six very adult-looking steel studs: four on the sole, two at the back of the heel. We were shirtless. With a football at his feet and his shirt off, my grandson is transformed from an intelligent, biddable boy who is perhaps overly concerned with questions of right and wrong into an arrogant, argumentative liar given to pettish sulks. He tackles like a terrier gone berserk during a rat hunt. It wasn’t long before

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 June 2015

Andrew (Bertie) Black started his bridge life many moons ago but stopped to found Betfair, which became the world’s largest internet betting exchange. Well now, some 15 years later, and clearly not one to do things by halves, he’s back with a mighty strong team behind him, plays every tournament on the circuit and they have just claimed their first trophy — Young Chelsea’s London Super League. Today’s hand was much discussed in the customary post mortem after the match. It was played by Phil King and certainly contributed to the Black team’s victory: West led ♠4 and Phil tried the Jack from dummy, covered by East’s Queen. He ducked

Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 June 2015

The doctor eyed me suspiciously as I walked into her consulting room. ‘Ye-es?’ she said, nervously, eyeing me up and down, after I knocked softly and entered apologetically, as I always do. Whenever I go to see her, my GP gives the impression of being taken totally by surprise, and put to astonishing inconvenience, by my seeking her opinion on a medical matter, even though she is advertising herself as a general practitioner and has, I am assuming, various qualifications in this field. ‘Ye-es?’ she said, looking mortified, terrified and outraged on every level as I made my way to the chair by her desk. She never says anything else

Robin Oakley

Frankie’s back

Nothing has been lost since William Powell Frith painted his Derby Day panorama in 1858: today, instead of the carriages and corseted courtesans, the acrobats and pickpockets, he could cram his canvas with scarlet-lipped ladies in shades posing for selfies; with men in impeccable morning dress coping no better with greasy hamburgers than Ed Miliband did with his bacon sandwich; and with strolling musicians, from a moustached one-man band to the smartly co-ordinated Dukebox Singers, a sextet of ladies bravely striking up their acapella harmonies against the racing hubbub. But this year it really was all about the racing. Only two men in horse-racing history have been instantly recognisable to

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 11 June 2015

It’s June, and the country-house summer opera festivals are now in full swing. Glyndebourne, which opened the season last month, has now been joined by its leading emulators — Garsington in Oxfordshire, The Grange in Hampshire and Longborough in Gloucestershire; and next month a newcomer, Winslow Hall Opera in Buckinghamshire, will be putting on La Traviata with much the same cast that shone last year in its greatly admired production of Lucia di Lammermoor. The gentry in dinner jackets and long dresses are already flouncing about on lawns throughout England. It’s always seemed odd to me that people should wear evening dress for the opera in the countryside in the

The Spectator

Letters | 11 June 2015

The long arm of the FBI Sir: The White House may be less willing than it was to play the role of the world’s policeman in international affairs, but the FBI seems eager to be the world’s cop. No doubt, as Martin Vander Weyer has noted (Any other business, 6 May), the US Attorney General has been ‘careful to assert that many of the allegedly corrupt schemes of the Fifa officials so far arrested were planned in the US, and that US banking and “wire” services were used.’ Still, we are told that the FBI is also investigating matters such as the award of the next two world cups to

Peter Jones

The game of survival

Apparently Fifa emperor Sepp Blatter received a ten-minute standing ovation from his 400 staff when he addressed them after his resignation. But why? Were they expressing sorrow at his departure? Relief? Or prudently watching their backs? Life was never easy around the Roman emperor either, whether he was among the people or in the imperial court. When the shamelessly dissolute Nero performed on-stage, his claqueurs made sure the applause went on and on. The historian Tacitus tells us that people from out of town or the provinces, ‘shocked at the outrageous spectacle, found that their unpractised hands were not up to the degrading task’ and consequently disrupted the professional applauders.

Raymond Keene

Triple tie

This week I conclude my coverage of the Fidé (World Chess Federation) Grand Prix which finished last month in Khanty-Mansiysk. Three shared first place: Dmitri Jakovenko, Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura. Although Jakovenko emerged in pole position on tie-break, it was Caruana and Nakamura who qualified for next year’s Candidates tournament to determine a challenger to world champion Magnus Carlsen by virtue of their superior scores in the overall series.   Here are some of the decisive moments from this important event.   Caruana-Tomashevsky: Khanty-Mansiysk 2015 (see diagram 1)   White’s king is safer than Black’s and he has powerful central play. Caruana quickly converted these advantages. 31 e6 Re7

Raymond Keene

No. 366

Black to play. This is from Rodriguez-Xiong, California 2012. How does Black finish off? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 16 June or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 … h5+ Last week’s winner Jonathan Tymms, Wilstone, Herts

Toby Young Toby Young

The Canadian Ed Miliband

I’ve been reading Fire and Ashes, Michael Ignatieff’s account of his disastrous foray into politics, in an attempt to understand where it all went wrong for Ed Miliband. In combination with the election postmortems and interviews with the people in Miliband’s inner circle, it’s extremely illuminating. For those unfamiliar with his story, Ignatieff is a left-wing Harvard professor who in 2004 received a surprise visit by three ‘men in black’ — high-ups in the Liberal party of Canada who sounded him out about making a run for the leadership. Beyond working on Pierre Trudeau’s campaign as a student in 1968, Ignatieff was a political virgin, but the three fixers thought

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 11 June 2015

Q. My parents brought me up to write only my name in a visitors’ book. However, following a recent long weekend in the house of a friend’s father, I was last to sign and found the other guests had all written lengthy gushing tributes to our host. If I didn’t follow suit, my own entry would seem unenthusiastic. The upshot was that I compromised and wrote my name and ‘thank you so much’. What should I have done? —N.M., Fonthill, Wilts A. You should have stuck to your guns and signed only your name. You could have explained to the others that since your predecessors had far exceeded your own

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Grills just want to have fun

The Beaumont Hotel is a bright white cake in the silent part of Mayfair, where the only sound is Patek Philippe watches, tick-tocking. We are in the eye of the storm, where it should be quiet; of the cacophony of Selfridges, just to the north, we hear nothing. It is the first hotel from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, creators of the Delaunay, the Wolseley, Brasserie Zédel and Fischer’s. The façade is so languid, pristine and self-satisfied that it could — no, should — be Swiss, even if it was once an Avis garage wrought in Art Deco. It reminds me of the Beau-Rivage Palace on Lake Geneva, a hotel

Dot Wordsworth

Trigger

A notion is going about that, just as readers of film reviews receive spoiler alerts, so readers of anything should get a trigger warning. Otherwise something nasty in the woodshed might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder or worse. ‘I use the phrase trigger warning myself,’ wrote Kate Maltby in a Spectator blog the other day, ‘to warn Facebook friends that they may not wish to click on a link because it is likely to automatically “trigger” flashbacks for survivors of trauma.’ That’s kind, and luckily I am not triggered by split infinitives. But she and fellow admirers of the classics are shocked by a demand from four students at Columbia University