The Battle for Britain | 24 July 2021
Society
Thursday
Spectator competition winners: W.S. Gilbert’s guide to wedded bliss
In Competition No. 3208, you were invited to submit a recipe for marital bliss on behalf of an author of your choice. Pausing only to give an honourable mention to Simon Hunter, I pass you over to this week’s terrific winners who each nab £25. I am the very model of a guide to conjugality Advising every blushing bride to face up to reality. If you can follow my advice and act with due humility You’re guaranteed a life that’s spent in unalloyed tranquillity. While testing your endurance when he uses the ‘facilities’, The seat’s still raised, but don’t complain; it might invoke hostilities. Be sure he always has his
I enjoy making a nuisance of myself for a good cause
The scaffolding pole across the public footpath led to a farcical conversation with the local council. I had been walking the dogs down this well-used path close to where we keep the horses when I discovered that the pole, which is attached to a post on either side of the path and which has been there for some years, was now padlocked to one of the posts so that I could no longer move it to go through. I rang it in, thinking I was being a good citizen. But no. This act of public service opened up the seventh circle of administrative hell. The staff at the rights of
My 46 days on the road with John Woodcock
Although it was a miracle that he survived until a few weeks before his 95th birthday, the death of John Woodcock, the unrivalled cricket correspondent of the Times from 1954 to 1988, has left an enormous hole in many people’s lives, not least my own. I first met Wooders, as he was known to one and all, at a party at the old Hyde Park hotel in Knightsbridge in May 1962. Two days later as a result of our conversation, I found myself at the Bat and Ball ground in Gravesend on behalf of the Times, without ever before having written a word in anger, trying to put together 500
Organic food isn’t better for us – or the environment
It is mystifying to me that organic food is still widely seen as healthier, more sustainable and, most absurdly, safer than non-organic food. Following the publication of part two of Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy last week, the organic movement was quick to suggest that organic food and farming offer a way to achieve the strategy’s vision. ‘The recommendations of the National Food Strategy offer genuine hope that by embracing agroecological and organic farming, and adopting a healthier and more sustainable diet, we can address the climate, nature and health crises,’ said Helen Browning, chief executive of the Soil Association, Britain’s most vocal organic lobbying organisation. Browning also highlighted the
Jockeys suffer online abuse just like footballers
At least England’s defeat in the European Cup final has spared us the sight of Boris Johnson, who can scent a photo opportunity at 4,000 yards over the horizon, indulging in any more embarrassing antics in a No. 10 football shirt. Not that he is the only prime minister to have sought to ingratiate himself with football-followers. As BBC political editor in Tony Blair’s time, I learned that the government was thinking of supporting a World Cup bid and fixed an interview with sports minister Tony Banks. Later, to gauge just how much government commitment there was, I spoke to Alastair Campbell in Downing Street. That night Banks called me:
A very annoying guide to the Somme battlefields
We arranged to meet the second, more expensive, guide of our Somme battlefield visit at the Thiepval Memorial visitor centre car park. He arrived punctually. The foreign correspondent climbed in the back of his car and I got in the front. As he drove us past Lutyens’ masterpiece, instead of genuflecting towards it, the guide launched tunelessly into a repetitive mumbled refrain while thumping an imaginary bass drum with an imaginary foot pedal. ‘What’s that you’re singing?’ I asked. ‘Oh, nothing really. I’m just enjoying myself,’ he said. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘What’s the song?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied tetchily. After a brief respite, the tempo and indistinct vocal
In praise of Patmos
Patmos I’m in Patmos with four grandchildren, two children, and a wife. I know, I know, it sounds very lower–middle-class and only Bournemouth and some sunbeds are missing, but who cares. Children have friends, and grandchildren even younger friends, so it’s not all gloom and doom. The princely Schwarzenbergs are here — the mother is Greek — and so is half of Vienna, not to mention Florence, Venice and Rome. At dinner the other night up at the piazza, which holds about 40 tables, there was not a single Philip Green-type among the guests, and looking back I cannot remember having had a more pleasant dinner setting ever, other than
The 2020s will be boring, not roaring
Earlier this year, I noted the suggestion (made by an American academic and run with by a swathe of the British press) that we may be about to enter a party decade. The claim was that much as the Great War was followed by the Roaring Twenties, so the Covid era might be followed by a roaring 2020s. Advocates of the theory might point to the queues of young people waiting to get into the country’s nightclubs at one minute past midnight on Monday’s so-called ‘freedom day’. But I would suggest that there is more evidence accumulating in the opposite direction. Far from roaring, I would say it is more
The strange death of the English garden
Gardening is dead. It had been ailing for a long time and it sometimes looked as though it might pull through. But I knew it had finally kicked the bucket when the last of the three patches of grass I used to be able to see behind my house was replaced with a plastic lawn. Then there was a ghastly death rattle: plastic ivy was draped over an electric gate which serves to let the owner’s car into the paved area formerly known as the front garden. And that came after the arrival of dozens of plastic balls in the neighbourhood. They are supposed to be imitations of Buxus sempervirens
The ancient Greeks had no time for losers
Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the fine arts. Baron de Coubertin, who dreamt up the modern Olympic Games, took a different view. He admired the spirit of games on the playing fields of Eton and thought that they might provide a model for games of the sort he imagined the ancient Greeks enjoyed at Olympia: competitive but amateur, fair, wholesome, played for the sake of it and also, he hoped, acting as a stimulus to world peace. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Olympic Games, founded in 776 bc, celebrated Zeus, god of Mount Olympus,
Bridge | 24 July 2021
Bridge is a game you can never fully master, which is why it’s so endlessly stimulating. No sooner have you puffed your way up one learning curve than another beckons, harder than the last. Over the past two decades (and more), I’ve read countless bridge books and strived to sharpen my game by every means possible. Like most of us, I’m still far short of where I want to be. Yet it’s only in the past few years that I’ve realised that what matters most — at an advanced level — is not cardplay or defence. No, watch the stars and you’ll soon see: championships are won or lost in
Solution to 2513: Golden anniversary
The announcement reads: ‘Fifty years ago, on July the third, Jac’s first crossword in this series was published.’ The shaded squares (from top to bottom) can be arranged to reveal SMURF, SARAH (Hayes, aka La Jerezana) MR MAGOO, MASS, COLUMBA, DOC, PABULUM, MARK (Kelmanson, aka CheeseCracker), ASCOT, RICHARD (Browne, aka Fieldfare) and JAMES (Brydon, aka Lavatch). First prize Ian Dempsey, Oldwick, New Jersey Runners-up Iain Tulloch, Glasgow; Stephen Rice, London SW1V
2516: Such childish vocabulary
The nouns from the first sentence of a book (in the ODQ) appear as unclued lights — apart from two. One of these two is revealed by extracting one or two letters at a time from six normal solutions, leaving real words as entries. The other appears diagonally in the grid and must be highlighted. Two of these unclued lights also appear in the title of the book. Elsewhere, ignore an accent. Across 1 Lark serving man truffles? (5) 4 Lothario excited almost all maidens (9, two words) 11 Suits altered with European woven fabric (6) 12 Sleep for moment in time, like Shakespeare’s night? (7) 14 Genus of flowers:
Kasparov’s tailspin
In a game between top players, the opening moves signify not only the battleground they have embraced, but also the terrain they have avoided. In his prime, Garry Kasparov’s opponents would often duck the most critical choices, fearing the champion’s formidable advantage in home analysis of complex positions. But those who yielded an inch at the outset faced an uphill struggle of a different sort, and Kasparov won countless games from that psychological vantage point. Since his retirement in 2005, Kasparov has made sporadic appearances in speed events against the world elite, with respectable results. But his appearance earlier this month at the Grand Chess Tour’s blitz event in Zagreb
No. 663
White to play. A variation from Grandelius – Xiong, Fide World Cup, Sochi 2021. With an accurate queen check,White can force an exchange of queens and march the h2-pawn. Which check should White choose? Answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 26 July. 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 Qa8! After 1…Rg7 2 Qh1# or, 2 Qg8# against any other move. Last week’s winner Bernard T. Golding, Whitley Bay
The truth about Nick Gibb, history and ‘dead white men’
In 1983, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a great American sociologist and politician, wrote: ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’ Then the internet happened. Anyone who has spent five minutes online, especially on a social media site, is aware that everyone now has their own facts, carefully chosen to support whatever argument or narrative they favour. Any contested issue that’s debated online (i.e. all of them) sees people on different sides of the argument adduce statistics, quotations and any other material helpful to their cause. Take this stuff far enough and you get people prioritising subjective experience above objective fact. Oprah Winfrey captured the subjective, hyper-individual
Wednesday
Boris should follow New York’s example and ditch vaccine passports
Is making young people show vaccine passports to get into nightclubs a good idea? Boris Johnson’s motivation in doing so appears to be that this is a good way to entice under 30s to get their jabs. In reality, the policy is illiberal, shows no gratitude for the sacrifices young people have already made during this pandemic, and should go against all of our British sensibilities. There’s also a better alternative: one demonstrated in New York. I’ve been based in the United States for the past six months and Boris could learn a thing or two from the freedom-loving Yankees. Here, proof of vaccination is not required for entry into nightclubs, as I
How Leni Riefenstahl shaped the modern Olympics
It’s an uncomfortable truth, but the Olympic Games in their modern form were pretty much invented by the Nazis. They came up with the idea of the torch relay, for example, the one that begins in Olympia and ends with the lighting of the cauldron at the opening ceremony. But it wasn’t the events at the 1936 Olympics that were new, so much as the way they were presented and filmed. Even today, the style of coverage owes much to Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite filmmaker and arguably the most gifted and influential female director of the 20th century. Her ground-breaking techniques, as seen in her cinematic masterpiece Olympia, included low
Marion Millar and Scotland’s growing hostility to women
Women in Scotland are angry. Yesterday, hundreds gathered by the McLennan Arch on Glasgow Green where their sense of betrayal was palpable. The gathering was precipitated by the ongoing case against Marion Millar, a businesswoman from Airdrie, who came under police investigation after objections were raised about six of her tweets from 2019. She was charged under the Communications Act and faces up to six months in prison if convicted. According to a report by the Times, the messages investigated by officers are understood to include a retweeted photograph of a bow of ribbons in the green, white and purple colours of the Suffragettes, tied around a tree outside the