The Battle for Britain | 9 March 2024
Society
Thursday
Formula 1 is a breeding ground for scandal
Well, who could have guessed it? So the world of Formula 1 isn’t a clean-living sanctuary of good behaviour that makes a Convocation of Bishops look like the court of Caligula. Here’s a slice of F1 life: a prominent motor-racing executive walks into a room of pretty young marketing girls: ‘What’s the difference between an erection and a Ferrari?’ he asks. ‘I don’t have a Ferrari.’ Followers of the latest Formula 1: Drive to Survive series on Netflix – featuring some of the least likeable people on the planet – will have enjoyed the Wildean exchanges when Lance Stroll, the Canadian driver for Aston Martin, returns to racing after breaking
Confessions of a closeted bourgeois boy
Recently, I got very stoned. I haven’t been that stoned since I was at Woodstock. Or was it the first Glastonbury festival? Or maybe Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight? I can’t remember, but that’s dope for you. The curious thing is, I don’t take drugs any more. I hate getting high. It’s like your brain is seasick. But there I was at a party and the hostess offered me an apple-flavoured, cannabis-infused gummie. Without thinking, I swallowed it – just as if I’d been offered a canapé. Someone later told me I ran out of the party yelling: ‘Help! I’m going to die!’ As soon as I did
Dear Mary: should I work with clients with bad taste?
Q. I used to work for a well-known decorator and have now branched out on my own. Some friends of my parents have asked me if I’d like to redecorate their reception rooms. They’re very nice people and I think they have partly given me the work to help me establish myself. I’m a few weeks into the project and the awkward thing is that they are pushing me into ordering fabrics etc that are pretty hideous, and I’m worried I shall be marked down by people who could be prospective clients as a decorator with no clue as to how to decorate a room with taste. – Name and
‘As good as you will find in London’: Noble Rot Mayfair, reviewed
Noble Rot, which is named for a sickness that afflicts grapes, a self-aware name for a restaurant in London, is becoming a chain. Don’t get me wrong. The Rots in Lamb’s Conduit Street and Greek Street (which replaced the Gay Hussar that died in sympathy with the intelligent left) are two of the best restaurants we have. My only complaint is that, like the Plastics in Mean Girls, they know how lovely they are and have their own promotional magazine. This food has a loving intensity to it, and it is as good as you will find in London Now they have expanded into Mayfair – but the least horrifying part,
I’m dreading our new friends finding out what I’m like
The oil man topped our tank and said his next drop was to the Ukrainian refugees in the next village who were getting their tank topped for free. I could hear him and the builder boyfriend chatting about this for some time and then the BB came back into the kitchen and put the pink of the invoice into my hand. I looked down to see that I was being charged just over €1,000 for a tank of oil. I don’t want to feel grateful to the EU. It might make me hate it less The electricity bill for the winter pinged into my email barely a few hours later
The family water stories that have become legends
Laikipia, Kenya When I met him as a boy, Terence Adamson was an elderly fellow whose face had been half torn away by one of his brother George’s famous lions. His disfigured features made him hard to look at, but Terence taught me how to dowse for water. He’d pick up any old stick and divine with that, or he used a pendulum or two metal rods held out in front of him as if gripping an imaginary steering wheel. In time I reckoned I could find water on my own with bent bits of coathanger wire, though I was hopeless at discovering much more than its presence. I used
What are frameworks for?
A brand new ‘robust’ framework was being woven and nailed together, so the Prime Minister announced at the end of last week. It’s barely a year since he presented the UK with a similar kind of structure, which he called the Windsor Framework. I imagined it to resemble in some way a Windsor chair. In 1766, the newspaper Jackson’s Oxford Journal (which still had more than a century of success ahead of it) declared that ‘the Bodleian Library has most confessedly been very much improved by the Introduction of Windsor-Chairs, so admirably calculated for Ornament and Repose’. The Windsor framework didn’t prove quite so reposeful. There is no agreement on
Two poisoned pawns
They say the best way to really know a subject is to write about it. I speculate it worked for the English grandmaster Danny Gormally, whose forthcoming book Tournament Battle Plan (Thinkers Publishing) perhaps inspired him to victory at the British Rapidplay Championships held in Peterborough earlier this month. It must be said that Gormally was also the top seed. He won the title in a blitz playoff, after his winning score of 9/11 in the main event was matched by the Irish teenager Trisha Kanyamarala, who was awarded the title of British Women’s Rapidplay champion. (The event was open to Irish citizens.) Her patient and tactically alert play allowed her to far
Bridge | 9 March 2024
A few new sponsors have sprung up lately, which is very exciting for the English bridge scene and means we can send teams to international events that the EBU (and practically every other bridge federation) can’t afford to sponsor. One of the best and most successful is Maggie Knottenbelt who, with her very good team, has just qualified to represent England in the Mixed European Teams in Denmark this June. Here is her team mate Michael Byrne, locked in an epic battle with a super-charged West defending (see diagram). West led the ♠J, East won the Ace and returned the ♠8 to the Queen and King. West knew there was
No. 791
Black to play. Royal-Gormally, British Rapidplay Championship, 2024. White’s last move, 26 f2-f3, was a fatal mistake. How did Gormally respond? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 11 March. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Rxe4! Black resigned. 1…dxe4 2 Qxf7+ (2 Nxf7+ Qf6 is less clear) Kh8 3 Qxe8+! Rxe8 4 Nf7+ Kg8 5 Nxg5 h6 6 Nxe4 Rxe4 7 Rd1 with a winning endgame. Last week’s winner Andrew Swift, Aylesbury
Spectator competition winners: sonnets with murder in mind
In Competition No. 3339 you were invited to submit a crime story in sonnet form. Poems that have the suggestion of a criminal act at their heart – Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, for example – were at the back of my mind when I set this challenge, and it attracted a terrific crop of entries. Hugh King’s Cluedo-inspired offering and Bill Greenwell’s Perry Mason-themed sonnet, which had echoes of Scooby-Doo (‘It was the janitor!), were unlucky to miss out on a prize, as were Bo Crowder, C. Paul Evans and Iain Morley. Those who did make the cut nab £20 and are printed below. ’Twas such a deed as no
‘Delicious, not glamorous’: how to make a pot roast
A pot roast is probably the antithesis of glamorous cooking. But that’s also sort of the point. For as long as we’ve been cooking meat, we’ve looked for ways to make the tougher cuts more tender and succulent. It’s the kind of cooking that every culture around the world has developed individually, a way of transforming the cheap and possibly unappetising into something delicious. The answer is simple, and relies on three elements: low heat, moisture and a lidded cooking vessel. A homely and economical way of bringing the best out of an unprepossessing joint Pot roast is the American way of slow-cooking whole joints of unforgiving meat, usually a piece
2644: Joinery
The unclued lights can be joined to form six pairs. Across 6 No intro to US showbiz approach? (7) 11 Left earlier than usual in mere sport (4) 12 Whiteness of marital bed, only partly (6) 14 Again announce gusto outside bar (9) 17 Translated phrase, Latin, gets round (7) 18 Something stuck in organ? Emergency room taking a call (7) 19 Jumble sale with 50% off – clothing must go first (6) 20 Horrid runt regularly scurries to teacher (10) 22 Perhaps enough said by Will’s back-pedalling fools (5) 30 Excellent quip at first counters anxiety (5) 33 Calmer yoga changes bone growth? (10) 36 Count destroys academics, both saving
2641: Mastermind – solution
Leonardo da Vinci (29/28) painted ‘Vitruvian Man’ (3A), ‘The Last Supper’ (1D), ‘Salvator Mundi’ (13D) and his masterpiece ‘Mona Lisa’(38/37). First prize Chris Edwards, Pudsey, Leeds Runners-up Hugh Green, Petersfield, Hampshire; Trish Baldwin, Chorley, Lancashire
Who fact checks the BBC’s fact-checkers?
Idon’t suppose it will surprise many Jewish people that BBC Verify – as staffed by people with ‘forensic investigative skills’ – used a rabid pro-Palestinian with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when adjudicating on an alleged Israeli attack against a Palestinian aid convoy in Gaza. Verify – a new unit which is, of course, pristine and even-handed – turned to a ‘journalist’ called Mahmoud Awadeyah for an unbiased description of exactly what happened to the convoy, unbothered by the fact that this is a man who danced a jig of joy when Israelis were killed in a rocket attack and warned them that there was more of the
Why do people resent the theatre?
By chance, I was living in New York when John McPhee published his New Yorker essay ‘Brigade de Cuisine’. It was 19 February 1979. It caused quite a stir. McPhee described in lip-smacking detail a restaurant which was situated somewhere upstate. He inflamed the reader’s imagination by detailing how delicious the food was without revealing the restaurant’s name or location. McPhee knew what he was up to. He succeeded in animating the most intense aspirational fantasy of middle-class Manhattan. There existed an ideal dinner place of which no one knew. It was, he said, run by a mysterious chef called Otto whose technique was so fast it ‘became a collage
Could I be on the National Trust Council?
The end of the Cold War offered the former communist countries the chance to live a western way of life. But it also brought back what was known as the ‘nationalities question’, so long suppressed by Soviet power. We in Britain think little about this. We can easily see why the slowdown in western arms supplies threatens Ukraine, but not why it spreads such confusion among Nato allies. It is because any retreat by the United States forces Europeans to make frightening choices. The 20th century showed that European powers were unable to resolve their own conflicts without American help. Post-war, the European Community did its bit, but the real
Portrait of the week: Budgets, by-elections and Big Brother
Home In the Budget, Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke of ‘long-term growth’. He cut National Insurance by 2p in the pound, saving the average worker £450 a year but pensioners nothing. A new ‘British Isa’ would allow an extra £5,000 a year tax-free investment. Tax arrangements for non-doms would be changed. The 28 per cent capital gains tax on property would go down to 24 per cent. Alcohol and fuel duty were frozen for a year; vaping would attract duty. He said the UK was on track to become the world’s next Silicon Valley and second only to Hollywood for film. The NHS would become ‘digitally integrated’
What do voters have to thank the Tories for?
Last November Jeremy Hunt announced what he proclaimed was ‘the biggest tax cut on work since the 1980s’. He cut employee National Insurance from 12 per cent to 10 per cent, yet to his great disappointment, the polls didn’t budge. This week he decided to double down, lowering NI again, to 8 per cent. ‘The UK now has the lowest effective personal tax rate since 1975,’ he said. It’s likely the public will still be unimpressed, because taxes are rising further. Hunt’s policies will in fact leave the UK with the highest overall tax burden since 1948. The headline rate may be falling, but the proportion of income subject to
