Society

Thursday

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Wild time

For Competition 3404 you were invited to design your own Midsummer rites. There were fewer entries than usual, all of them very good. I was sorry not to have room for Mark Ambrose’s ritual involving a small white ball (‘Eighteen is the sacred number. We assemble before dawn and climb the hill to a wooded glade’). Other runners-up: Tracy Davidson, Paul Freeman, Sue Pickard, George Simmers, Bill Greenwell and Joseph Houlihan. The £25 vouchers go to the following. Midsummer Saturday at Frizinghall begins early with the ritual of Waking the Sleepers, in which locals salute the rising sun with power tools, mowers, car alarms and pressure washers. Next comes the

La Jerezana

2708: On the shelf

Two of the eight unclued entries, appropriately placed, were likened to two others by a name hidden in the grid. The other four unclued entries are thematic. Unchecked letters could be arranged to spell ‘NO VAIN OAP MISBELIEVER, HIM’. Across 1 Treated ATMs etc like cash cows (4,7) 7 Tailless parasite twitching (3) 13   In France you rent by day, as instructed (7) 15   Shy cat leaving second small rodent (5) 17   Deliver German plough (6) 18   Absolute maniacs shedding clothes (5) 20   Reportedly conceal girl in hotels (6) 21   Tiny creature, part of agamid genus (5) 22   Cleanse thoroughly and prevent case of gangrene (7) 27   Finish work corralling

Catriona Olding

My first ever blind date

Four of us go for lunch once a month. My hippy ceramist neighbour, Geoffrey, is a foodie and one of the best cooks I know. He was born a few years after the second world war and, along with his brother, who went on to become a Michelin-starred chef, developed an interest in food from his English, Belgian and Italian grandparents and Swiss mother. I couldn’t afford to heat the little painting studio downstairs this winter and have only sold one work since November, so our choice of restaurants has been necessarily modest. The menus include dishes made with items from the end of the butcher’s counter that I, vegetarian

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

A man’s restaurant: Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand reviewed

The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station is George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece: his Albert Memorial in Hyde Park (a big dead prince under a big gold cross) has just too much sex to it. Late Victorian architecture seethes with erotica. The facetious will say imperialism was really just penetration, and there’s something in that. It is now the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London – oh, the fretted imaginings of marketing departments – and, on a more conscious level, the closest you will get to the great age of rail, though spliced with plastic now. The modern station is ugly and translucent and sells face cream to tourists, and buns.

Melissa Kite

Why must B&B guests give us advice?

‘You could mow all this lawn here and it would look a treat,’ said the arborist, returning from a stroll around the grounds, which were looking resplendent in the sunshine. ‘Yes, yes, mow the grass. Good idea,’ I said, for the builder boyfriend has told me I have to agree with the customers. No matter what they say, no matter how obvious their suggestions, just smile and say ‘Good idea.’ Old houses are like horses. Passing strangers feel ownership of them. Once they encounter them, they proclaim how they would care for them, because they decide from their soulful look that the owners must be neglecting them – when the

Dot Wordsworth

The politics of ‘rocket boosters’

Sir Keir Starmer said the other day that he wanted to put rocket boosters under AI. It’s not the only thing he wants to put rocket boosters under. In September he said that ‘new planning passports will put rocket boosters under housebuilding’. He wasn’t the only one. When it was his turn to be prime minister, Rishi Sunak promised to ‘put rocket boosters’ under construction in areas that were already built up. Usually rocket boosters are put under things, but Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, was more anatomical in his thoughts, praising a youth mobility scheme that would ‘put rocket boosters up businesses in London’. Even so, in

Robin Oakley

Is racing becoming too predictable?

An inquest into the Derby in the Oakley household was to be expected. Mrs Oakley, who bets about as often as you will hear Liz Truss say ‘I’m sorry: I got it wrong’, called me at Epsom this year asking for a fiver each way on Lambourn. Since the ten-time Derby winning trainer Aidan O’Brien had two more favoured candidates in Dela-croix and The Lion In Winter, I persuaded her to think otherwise and had some explaining to do after his Lambourn came home a comfortable 13-2 winner in the hands of the veteran jockey Wayne Lordan. What has also surprised me is the downbeat tone of reactions elsewhere to

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 21 June 2025

A few years ago I went to Dallas with my team to play in the Summer National, the main event being the Spingold, a knockout tournament which attracts some of the best teams in the world. We did rather well and found ourselves in the quarter finals, and our opponents were Marty Fleisher’s team of world champs. Marty plays with Chip Martel, and before we started he announced that he thinks for a few minutes when dummy goes down, even if it’s a simple hand, to work out his plan. What a good idea, I thought. The next thing I knew, I went 4 off vul in an unusual NT

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: War in the Middle East, drought in Yorkshire and a knighthood for Beckham

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs (which he had previously opposed) on the recommendation of Baroness Casey of Blackstock, who had been asked to audit the matter. His announcement came after four men born in Pakistan and three Rochdale-born taxi drivers of Asian descent were convicted of offences against two teenage girls who were repeatedly raped and assaulted in Rochdale from 2001 to 2006. The Casey report said that Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire had ‘disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation’. At the G7 summit in Canada, Sir Keir

Ian Rankin

Beware taking up running in your fifties

Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia’s most

The Spectator

How often do plane crashes have sole survivors?

Sole survivors A 40-year-old British man, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, was the sole survivor of the crash of an Air India jet shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad en route to Gatwick. A surprising number of aircraft disasters have had a sole survivor – at least five others where more than 100 were killed. — On 16 August 1987 a four-year-old girl, Cecilia Cichan, survived the crash of North West Airlines flight 255 shortly after takeoff from Detroit; it killed 156. The plane’s wing flaps had not been extended (a suggested cause of the Air India disaster). — On 6 March 2003, a 28-year-old soldier, Youcef Djillali, survived the crash of Air

Michael Gove

Why the Tories should oppose regime change

As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of trying to advance shonky argument with a series of unevidenced assertions, a dodgy graph and the words ‘levelling up’ on every page in bold. Told that the prospect of a judicial review should mean shelving a policy, I’d write on the submission: ‘If the legal advice says no, get a better lawyer.’ Informed by officials

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My modest proposal

It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart our floundering economy. The United Kingdom has made great strides of late in this area, recently overtaking France in the number of abortions performed annually, the figures showing the largest increase since this sort of stuff was legalised. The door, then, is already ajar. All we need to do is push a little. Our elected representatives were intent on doing just that this week by voting for an amendment that will now decriminalise abortion right up to the day of birth. I don’t wish to seem churlish, but to me

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The tangled bureaucracy of appointing an Archbishop

Cardinals elected the new Pope within a fortnight but it will take almost a year to choose our next Archbishop of Canterbury. The beloved Anglican interregnum is intended to ‘take soundings’. These are unproductive if held in an echo chamber. The chairman of the Crown Nominations Commission for the successor to Justin Welby, Lord Evans of Weardale, is an efficient and discreet public servant. But most of the large group of voting members, including both its C of E bishops (York, Norwich), come from the fastest-declining part of the Church, its liberal wing. Thanks to Welby’s reforms, the commission now has no fewer than five members from the wider Anglican

The Spectator

The unvarnished truth about rape gangs

Some crimes are so horrific that our instinct is to look away. And there can be few as appalling as those perpetrated by the rape gangs whose activities Dame Louise Casey reported on this week. Girls as young as ten were beaten and sexually abused. They were tortured with baseball bats, knives and meat cleavers. They were urinated on, had cigarettes stubbed out on them, were burned by lighters and branded on their buttocks. Some contracted venereal diseases. One 12-year-old was compelled to undergo an abortion. These crimes weren’t rare, but sustained and widespread, carried out in up to 50 towns and cities across Britain over decades. The perpetrators were

Wednesday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why are young Christians returning to tradition?

41 min listen

Today’s Holy Smoke is a curtain-raiser for ‘Recovering the Sacred’, a Spectator event at St Bartholow-the-Great in the City of London in which a panel of experts will explore the rediscovery of traditional worship and theology by young Anglicans and Catholics. The event will be held on Tuesday 8th July; for more details, and to book tickets, go to: spectator.co.uk/church In today’s episode Damian Thompson talks to Anglican James Vitali and Catholic Georgia Clarke, two Generation Z professionals bursting with enthusiasm for their faith. It’s an exhilarating discussion; don’t miss it.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Alexander Larman

Should we worry about the Princess of Wales?

The announcement, when it came, was a strangely botched one. The official Ascot carriage list had stated at 12 p.m. that the Prince and Princess of Wales would be riding in the second carriage in the royal procession, accompanied by their friends Mr and Mrs Justin Rose. It was already known that Prince William would be presenting the prizes at today’s race meeting, so there was inevitable excitement at his presence and that of his wife. Catherine always brings a touch of glamour to whatever occasion she graces, helped by, of course, the finest couture that money could buy. So it was an unexpected and disappointing change, made half an

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

MPs have opened the door to infanticide

Well, it’s hello to prenatal infanticide now that Tonia Antoniazzi’s amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill has passed the Commons after all of two hours’ debate with 379 MPs voting in favour. Can we get our heads round what that means? Nothing a woman does in relation to her own pregnancy can make her liable to prosecution. At the same age of gestation when premature babies are admitted to neonatal wards with a very good chance of survival, less fortunate foetuses can be killed with impunity by their own mothers. So anyone like Carla Foster, who aborted her baby Lily at 32 weeks’ gestation, will now get off free.

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Why liberals ignored the grooming gang scandal

For many years, liberals refused to talk about the grooming gangs scandal. The systematic sexual abuse and rape of hundreds, possibly thousands, of vulnerable children by offenders from ethnic minorities was a story that too many people were happy to ignore. There was an effective prohibition on discussing it in left and liberal circles. Grooming gangs was a subject guaranteed to silence a dinner party. So, we decided to pretend that it wasn’t happening. Finally, the so-called great and the good have woken up to a scandal that was happening in plain sight Finally, the so-called great and the good have woken up to a scandal that was happening in