Society

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 26 July 2018

Maasai Mara   Last night the hyenas made off with our fudge cake. We are camped with a group of four families on the banks of the Mara river, waiting for the wildebeest migration. During the night hours, tucked up in our sleeping bags, only slivers of canvas divide us from the African bush. It is very exciting to be roused from slumber by hyenas cackling as they canter between the guy ropes of the tents. You lie there listening to pods of hippo chortling, to the elephant and the lion, and baboons barking in the trees. This morning everybody said how well they had slept. It must be the

Lee Langley

Hot and bothered

Success as a rare books dealer, academic, publisher, broadcaster and author of several non-fiction books — at 70, Rick Gekoski had ticked all the boxes. Time to relax, perhaps? Gekoski thought otherwise: he wrote his first novel, published last year, a quirky black farce mutating into a revelation of love and loss. Heaped with praise, Darke has since been shortlisted for two best first novel prizes. A triumph, then. Followed by the familiar fate of the second novel — heightened expectations. Darke was a witty metro-politan narrative with a sharp literary edge. A Long Island Story is warmer, more leisurely, awash with period background; an affectionate portrait of the author’s

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Public sector pay rise masks political row to come

The Downing Street media grid must be a rather dismal affair these days, with announcements planned that barely get any attention at all thanks to a combination of Brexit and another minister being on the brink of resignation. But one story that has come off reasonably well is today’s public sector pay award. Ministers have confirmed that around one million workers in the health service, schools, armed forces and so on will receive a raise of between 1.5 and 3.5 per cent. Obviously, this works nicely politically because everyone loves a pay rise. But the small print of this announcement reveals that it’s not going to make life dramatically easier

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Hancock’s health hour

Matt Hancock has been ambitious for a big Cabinet job for a good while. He’s finally got it, and today the new Health Secretary had his first outing in the Commons with departmental questions. Every new Secretary of State wants to make their mark on the job, showing how they’re different to their predecessor, and setting out their priorities for the portfolio. Jeremy Hunt was particularly good at the latter, making patient safety his focus as Health Secretary. Hancock has clearly paid attention to how the longest-serving Health Secretary approached the job, and last week gave a speech setting out three priorities: workforce, technology and prevention. His message was clear

Simon Marcus

Could this summer see a repeat of the 2011 riots? | 24 July 2018

The heatwave is on and reports of London’s crime wave are widespread, with crime up dramatically in the last year: could a repeat of the 2011 riots be on the cards? Predicting riots is tricky but sometimes there are clues: the weather plays a part; and so too does the economy, community cohesion, social morals and other factors that can combine to lead to outbreaks of widespread disorder, just as they did seven years ago on the streets of the capital. Of course, 2011 wasn’t the only time people intent on violence have taken to the streets of Britain in recent years. The 1958 race riots, the ‘summer of 1968’, further race riots in

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The trouble with social prescribing for mental illness

It’s a measure of how much the debate around mental health has changed that Matt Hancock’s latest announcement on social prescribing for mental illness isn’t being written up as mere quackery. The Health and Social Care Secretary today pledged a £4.5 million fund for these schemes, which include gardening, arts clubs, running and so on. Hancock is worried about possible over-prescription of anti-depressants and the associated risk of diagnosis creep, whereby people who are not depressed but quite understandably struggling with life events such as a bereavement are given a medical diagnosis and handed pills that aren’t really going to help them. As I’ve written before, anti-depressants are not without

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Forget the ‘Beatles’: here’s what happens to most British jihadi suspects | 23 July 2018

What happens to Brits who’ve returned from fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq? Most would expect that they’d immediately fall into the criminal justice system, and wouldn’t then emerge for a very long time. Today it emerged that Home Secretary Sajid Javid had dropped Britain’s blanket opposition to the death penalty so that two Isis fighters from the group dubbed the ‘Beatles’ could be sent to the US. But in most cases, the question isn’t where someone will face justice, but whether they can face justice at all. We know that there are hundreds of people who have returned from fighting for Islamic State. But what is less

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the day the internet died

Your latest challenge was to compose a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’. Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless. Here’s a quick burst: Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside, And Facebook Russian’s sharing what is most classified. Singin’ it’s the day the internet died – Amazon took pure cyanide. John O’Byrne was good too, as was Jim Lawley, but they were just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each. Frank Upton Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Elon Musk: Genius or jerk?

Elon Musk, the California-based entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric car, the SpaceX commercial rocket venture and several other wacky start-ups, made a fool of himself with his attempt to intervene in the Thai cave rescue and subsequent Twitter spat, but there’s no doubt he’s an original thinker and a remarkable businessman. If the futuristic Tesla is a fine feat of technology, what’s more impressive is that the company is not only still in business after 15 years without turning a profit and having lost at least $3.5 billion since 2015, but that its market capitalisation, at $52 billion, is bigger than Ford’s at $42 billion. Tesla built more than 100,000

Friday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Are female prisoners at risk from transgender inmates?

Earlier this week, it was reported that an inmate in HM Prison New Hall, a women’s prison, had been charged with sexually assaulting four female inmates. According to the Sun, the inmate is transgender. Born male and still possessing male anatomy including male genitals, she now identifies as female. Because of that “identification”, the inmate was housed in the female prison estate; in broad terms, the Ministry of Justice says that transgender prisoners should be housed in the part of the prison system that corresponds to their gender identity.  That policy has many implications, one of which is that it is possible for a person with male anatomy, hormones and outlook, to be confined

Mark Mason

How ‘safe’ is the Bank of England?

‘Safe as the Bank of England.’ So goes the old phrase. And yes, with walls 8ft thick, the Old Lady is pretty impregnable. Even the keys to her vaults are more than a foot long (the locks also now incorporate voice-activated software). Until 1973 the building was guarded at night by soldiers from the Brigade of Guards, who received a pint of beer with their dinner there. With all this security, how can you hope to get in? One answer came in 1836, when the directors received an anonymous letter inviting them to meet the letter writer in the bullion room late one night. At the agreed hour they heard

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The importance of ethical banking

When I first visited Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, I was struck by a set of black-and-white posters in the shopping concourse advertising the Co-op Bank’s ethical banking stance: essentially, no lending to arms, tobacco, gambling or oil companies, or to regimes that disrespected human rights. A cynic might have argued that it was all about virtue signalling (before we learned that phrase) in the sense that no landmine manufacturer or brutal Third World dictator had ever been known to pop into a Co-op branch, ask for a loan and be met with a polite refusal and a copy of the policy. But it was a smart exercise in

Thursday

Raymond Keene

Mental sport

Sporting commentators frequently resort to chess metaphors to convey the flavour of a particular contest. In the case of football, chess tends to be wheeled out as a comparison when nothing much is happening. Tennis commentators, in contrast, and somewhat more perceptively, deploy the chess metaphor to convey mental toughness.   I have for some time regarded Judit Polgar as the Serena Williams of the chessboard. A major difference, though, is that on the physical battlefield Serena would stand no chance against Djokovic, Federer or Nadal. On the mental plane, however, Judit has defeated, among others, Carlsen, Kasparov, Anand, Korchnoi and Short.   A new book, Strike Like Judit!, by Charles Hertan (New in Chess)

Raymond Keene

no. 515

Black to play. This is from Carlsen-Polgar, Mexico 2012. Judit had been struggling in this game but when Carlsen slipped up she was quick to spot the opportunity. Black’s next destroyed the white position. What was it? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 24 July or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. 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 … Rc7 Last week’s winner Markus Kobler, Sevenoaks, Kent

Peter Jones

Strangers and brothers

Everyone talks about the importance of ‘charisma’ in a politician. But while it may take one a long way with the voters, it does not necessarily cut much mustard in parliament unless bolstered by other strengths. The Romans provided a useful checklist. Boris, still popular in the country but now, despite high office, in self-exile after failing to win over colleagues to his Brexit views, might care to contemplate them. Top priority were amici, political allies among the great and good. These would automatically include those joined by blood, marriage or other associations, but needed to spread much further into networks of relationships incorporating men from a wide range of

David Starkey

Diary – 19 July 2018

It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else that history had thrown at them in the past thousand years. Through the great west doors, which had been left open for ventilation, I could glimpse the ruins of the adjacent Norman castle, bleached white by the intense sunshine. In front of me were the serried ranks of prep school pupils at their speech day and I was presenting the prizes. The boys were in blazers; the girls in boaters and the staff were gowned. The head opined sensibly and the dean prayed. The organ thundered; the choir sang exquisitely

Toby Young Toby Young

The rebirth of Radical Chic

Are we witnessing the rebirth of Radical Chic? That was the term coined by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay about the party given by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein for the Black Panthers at their 13-room penthouse apartment on Park Avenue. It described a weird trend, beginning in the late 1960s and peaking in the early 1970s, whereby the crème de la crème of New York’s moneyed elite embraced radical left-wing causes, such as the anti-war movement and black power. They did so without irony, seemingly oblivious to the absurdity of trying to ‘stick it to the man’ while living on trust funds established by their robber baron forefathers. It

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 July 2018

Home The administration of Theresa May, the Prime Minister, staggered on, as Conservative MPs exchanged angry words in the Commons, with supporters of Brexit and its enemies voting in turn against government bills. The government even failed to shorten the parliamentary session by five days to avoid trouble, instead provoking threats of defeat on the adjournment debate. An amendment to the Trade Bill seeking to impose a customs union on the government was defeated by 307 to 301, thanks to four Labour MPs who voted with the government. Guto Bebb resigned as minister for defence procurement to vote against the government on amendments that it accepted to the Customs Bill.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 19 July 2018

Q. A dear friend of my husband, a shy bachelor, is an acquired taste. Once you acquire it you are addicted, but he can make a bad impression on first meeting. This is because he normally always has dried food or some other kind of detritus which seems to collect around the corners of his mouth. None of his old friends notice this any more, nor do we tease him — as I said, he’s a tiny bit shy and rather ‘paranoid’. We adore him but do refer to him as ‘Sir Les’ (Patterson) among ourselves. The problem is that he and I are shortly both scheduled to meet someone