Society

Wednesday

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 15 July 2023

Geir Helgemo, widely considered to be the best player in the world, regularly gets followed around by a posse of devoted fans (myself included) who ask him questions about various points of play. ‘How do you always “guess” where every card is?’ is one that particularly interests me, as the ability to ‘read’ the cards is the major difference between the expert and the amateur. ‘It’s almost never a guess,’ says Geir as the posse gasps, ‘but rather about the absorption of clues from the auction and play to piece together the most likely lay-out.’ Take this hand: You arrive peacefully in 2♠️, and West leads the ♥️2 to East’s

Melissa Kite

Maybe the village will be sad to see us go after all

‘You certainly gave us a run for our money,’ said the village elder, serving us with what appeared to be the official goodbye statement. I was sick of that old navy dressing gown myself. Shortly afterwards I got him a new one from Sainsbury’s The builder boyfriend was flabbergasted. He had been walking across the green with the spaniels when this gentleman, a leading light in the community, came towards him. He braced for impact because the last time they engaged outside the house it had not gone well. The builder b had, on that occasion, been wearing his old navy-blue towelling dressing gown and was putting out the bins.

Taki

I know how Jonny Bairstow feels

A poor little Greek boy writing about cricket etiquette is like Harry Sussex lecturing on discretion, but never mind. As everyone but Joe Biden knows by now, Jonny Bairstow was given out recently during the second test match at Lord’s. For any of you out in Baja California who might have missed it, the Brit ducked a bouncer and left his crease, thinking the ball was dead. The Aussie keeper threw the ball at the stumps and all hell broke loose as Jonny was called out. For you American fans, the equivalent is a base runner being caught off base by a hidden ball trick, get it? What is the

Debbie Hayton

Caster Semenya shouldn’t be able to compete in women’s events

Who can compete in women’s sports? This week’s decision by the European Court of Human Rights further complicates the debate. Judges in Strasbourg upheld Caster Semenya’s appeal against World Athletics regulations that requited athletes like Semenya to lower their testosterone levels to be allowed to compete with women. The court ruled that those regulations were ‘a source of discrimination’ for Semenya ‘by the manner in which they were exercised and by their effects’, and the regulations were ‘incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights’.  Let’s be clear, while sports’ governing bodies operate the most stringent of anti-doping measures, it was a bizarre decision to impose a compulsory doping regime on Caster

Caster Semenya

Tuesday

Andrew Tettenborn

The BBC presenter feeding frenzy

Rishi Sunak has touched down at the Nato summit, but there’s only one question journalists want to ask him about: the allegations that a BBC presenter paid a young person for explicit photos. The claims are ‘shocking and concerning’, the Prime Minister said, adding that he has been assured the BBC’s investigation will be ‘rigorous and swift’. Yet amidst the ongoing and frantic speculation – and endless chatter on social media – the silence from officialdom, the police and the news media as to who the man at the centre of the story actually is has been deafening. A veritable feeding frenzy continues online, not to mention on foreign websites

Sean Thomas

America’s fierce guilt for slavery is understandable – we mustn’t import it

I love American roadtrips. They are the ideal way to visit 96 per cent of the country, which is determinedly built (for good or ill) around the desires of the car driver. The brilliant roads, the endless motels, the hideous car lots that blight most of the cities (making parking a doddle, even if they ruin the actual towns), they all ensure that driving is easefully delightful. Even in the most nondescript hotel in the most ahistoric corner of America, you will happen upon the surreal, haunting legacy of slavery A roadtrip is also the best way to understand America, and my recent trip along and around the Mason-Dixon Line

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

Why are we so obsessed with TV presenters?

The mucky allegations about a ‘household name’ BBC star – who is said to have paid thousands of pounds to a teenager for sexually explicit pictures – has exposed our obsession with TV presenters. We invite these people into our homes every day. Stars we never meet become familiar, a part of our lives and daily routines. Now, for one of these presenters, their world has come crashing down, and we can’t get enough of it. There are plenty of questions hanging over this story: we still don’t know the identity of the presenter concerned, even if social media is awash with a list of suspects. And we don’t know

Matthew Scott

The police haven’t learned from the Carl Beech fiasco

It has been announced that ‘Opertion Soteria’ is to be extended from five pilot areas to every police force in the country. Operation Soteria is the name given to a supposedly new method of investigating rape and other serious sexual allegations. A report into the results of the Soteria pilots, written by the academics who were largely responsible for devising Operation Soteria in the first place, concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they had been a great success. The Soteria approach may indeed increase the rape conviction rate, but it will do so by convicting more innocent people In Hellenistic religions, a soteria was a ‘sacrifice or series of sacrifices performed in expectation of… deliverance from a crisis.’ The crisis from which Operation Soteria is supposed to deliver us is an epidemic of rape. Whether

Monday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

How did Trans Pride allow itself to become a front for misogyny?

On Saturday, in Trafalgar Square, a man called for violence against women. Specifically, it seems, intellectually curious women, those unruly harridans who refuse to bow down to certain beliefs. Punch them ‘in the fucking face’, he bellowed into a mic. The heaving mob around him cheered. An electric current of hate seemed to flow through their ranks. Some punched the air, others laughed, taking delight in their leader’s invitation to hit ‘bad’ women. It had the vibe of a witch-hunt. This is what medieval mob gatherings must have felt like, when pious, pitchfork-wielding men headed out to apprehend ‘demonic’ women. Only this 2023 mob were not wearing witchfinders’ hats or

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

Teenage boy arrested after teacher stabbed

A teenage boy is being questioned on suspicion of attempted murder after a male teacher was stabbed at a Gloucestershire secondary school this morning. The teacher was attacked in a corridor and suffered a single wound, Gloucestershire Police assistant chief constable Richard Ocone said at a press conference this afternoon. The teacher is in a stable condition. The suspect was arrested at around 11 a.m. – two hours after the attack – by firearms officers in Stoke Orchard, around five miles from the school. Ocone added that the motivation is unclear – but it is not thought to be terror-related. The parent of an eight-year-old at Tewkesbury Academy told the BBC

Julie Bindel

The CPS has completely caved to gender ideology

It would appear that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has finally caved completely to gender ideology. New CPS guidelines for prosecutors spell out that it could be a criminal offence for spouses to refuse to fund their partner’s gender surgery. In the new guidance, the CPS has listed certain behaviours, such as ‘withholding money for transitioning’ that might be classed as coercive control. To put it in context, coercive control is a serious offence punishable by up to five years in prison. Surely the CPS has better priorities than threatening women with criminal convictions if they refuse to bow to transgender ideology? I was one of the feminists that fought

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Trans activists don’t help themselves

I’ve tried to stay out of the trans-rights conversation, honestly I have. There are a number of reasons for this, and not all of them are laziness and cowardice. The main thing is that – though it bears on some important points of principle – it directly affects a relatively tiny proportion of the population and it already gets more coverage than almost any other issue up to and including a major European war.   Gee whiz, holding that centrist line gets harder And for most of the people who get involved in this conversation as journalists, commentators and activists, it rapidly becomes a full-time job. There are a lot

Sunday

Daniel French

God the ‘Father’ isn’t sexist

Calling God ‘Father’ may be ‘problematic’, pronounced the Archbishop of York at Friday’s formal opening of the General Synod. Watching the live stream, I did a double take and had to rewind a few seconds to play it back. Did he really just say this? Archbishop Stephen Cottrell explained his reasoning: ‘For all of us who have laboured too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life…’ Who is the ‘us’ here? Is it too personal to ask what in Cottrell’s history has been oppressive? Can he really claim to have laboured under the patriarchy? The calculation is that there needs to be a revolution so that the unchurched masses, especially

Lawrence Goldman

The trouble with Tate Britain

Tate Britain has had a facelift. The gallery describes its ‘rehang’, unveiled in May, as a chance for visitors to ‘discover over 800 works by over 350 artists spanning six centuries’. Unfortunately, Tate Britain’s painful historical sensitivity – and its selective amnesia – make it difficult to enjoy the artwork. The gallery’s Room 6, ‘Revolution and Reform 1776-1833’, provides one of the most egregious examples. A frieze around the walls is accompanied by a chronology of the period that ends: ‘1833. Slavery is abolished in Britain’. I kept looking up, imagining my eyes were deceiving me. In 1833, there had been no slaves in Britain for years. In 1772 and 1778,

Patrick West

The problem with the word ‘problematic’

There have been groans of derision following the proclamation by the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterell, that the opening lines to the Lord’s Prayer – ‘Our Father’ – might be ‘problematic’, owing to their ‘patriarchal’ connotations. Yet the cries of mockery and exasperation on social media, though justified, have also been mostly predictable. After all, trendy Anglican clerics have been with us for decades, forever providing us with a source of mirth and vexation. The Church of England has form here. What is novel is the Archbishop’s deployment of the word ‘problematic’. In this, he reveals that he really is with the zeitgeist, and really is down with the kids.

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The BBC is falling short on its climate protest coverage

According to a YouGov poll this week 64 per cent have an unfavourable view of Just Stop Oil (only 17 per cent have a positive view and the rest aren’t sure). Unfortunately, however, none of these people appear to feature in the contacts books of BBC producers. The Today programme this morning attempted to have a discussion on the tactics of Just Stop Oil on disrupting sports events such as Wimbledon and Ashes test matches. The whole exercise was somewhat hampered by the fact that the two guests which the BBC saw fit to invite, Chris Packham and Lord Deben, could hardly bring themselves to say a negative word about the

Friday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Escaping the atheist hell of North Korea

15 min listen

For 75 years, the most anti-Christian regime in modern history has thrown its citizens into prison camps if they are suspected of the slightest dissent. Ten per cent of people live in modern slavery; perhaps 200,000 are behind bars. I’m talking about North Korea, of course – a regime even more abhorrent than Stalinist Russia, but which attracts suspiciously little attention from Western governments and churches unless they feel threatened by its nuclear arsenal.  My guest in this episode of Holy Smoke is Timothy Cho, a Christian human rights activist who escaped from North Korea. Even as a child, he was sentenced to forced labour for the crime of watching

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

When will Jolyon Maugham take the hint?

So Jolyon Maugham loses again. The crusading barrister is now almost as famous for losing cases as he is for battering to death a defenceless fox. And he hasn’t disappointed with his latest legal shenanigans. The appeal against the LGB Alliance’s charitable status, which was spearheaded by troubled trans charity Mermaids and backed by Maugham’s Good Law Project, has been comprehensively dismissed. Clearly the gays are not as easy to beat as a fox. We must be grateful for every flash of sanity in these strange times. And the tribunal’s decision not to rescind the LGB Alliance’s charitable status is very sane indeed. The judges ruled that Mermaids and the

Debbie Hayton

Mermaids’ loss is a victory for a free society

This morning’s news that the LGB Alliance has won its case to retain its charitable status is a victory and a relief for everyone who wants to live in a free and progressive society. That status was challenged by Mermaids and Jolyon Maugham’s so-called Good Law Project. Their argument seemed to be that it was not acceptable for gay and lesbian people to set up a charity to promote gay and lesbian rights. If LGB Alliance had lost, we might as well have returned to the 1950s when same-sex attraction was practically unspeakable. The incessant attempts to publicly shame LGB Alliance have been both astonishing and appalling This dreadful case

Tom Goodenough

A history buff’s guide to Berlin in 48 hours

There’s no better city for the history buff than Berlin. Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler’s armies have marched through. Albert Einstein taught in the city. Karl Marx studied there. Lenin journeyed across the city on his way to change Russia – and the world. The Brothers Grimm dreamed up their stories there. Mankind’s worst genocide was hatched in the city. And the world nearly ended there when Russian tanks faced off against the Americans during the height of the Cold War. The city carries the ‘stigmata of Prussian militarism, Weimar decadence, Nazi evil, Stalinist oppression and tawdry capitalist excess,’ as Jan Morris put it. For the first-time visitor to Berlin, things