Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My World Cup plea to Putin

Here is a letter which I sent today to the Russian Embassy. Please keep your fingers crossed for me. To: His Excellency Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko Dear Mr Yakovenko, I hope you are well. As you are aware, the World Cup is in progress and both of our sides are doing unexpectedly well in what has been an exciting and extremely enjoyable tournament. You are probably also aware that should England, by some miracle, reach the final, no dignitaries from my country will be present, as would normally be the case. They have effectively boycotted the event. No Prime Minister, no member of the cabinet, no Royals – not even the

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Raheem Sterling’s article is brilliant but did he actually write it?

England’s Raheem Sterling has underwhelmed so far at the World Cup. Off the pitch, however, he is winning new fans. The Manchester City winger’s essay blog, ‘It was all a dream’, tells the story of his father’s murder and his mother’s subsequent struggles to make ends meet. It’s brilliantly written, tugs at the heart strings and there’s a happy ending: Sterling, the ten-year-old boy who had to help his mother clean hotel toilets, now earns hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and is idolised by football fans the world over. Sterling isn’t the only footballer recently to have shown a previously unknown talent for writing. His fellow Premier League player

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The ‘Stop Trump’ blimps

Last summer, the crowds in the fields at Glastonbury Festival filmed themselves chanting ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. It was the fashionable political statement of the summer. This year, there’s no Glastonbury — those fields lie fallow — and Corbyn-mania suddenly feels very 2017. Britain’s Instagram-addled middle classes are eager for a substitute form of mass entertainment dressed up as radicalism. How else do you stay cool and smug in this hot weather? The answer, apparently, is to join the protests against Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, as he visits Britain next week. Britain’s ‘Stop Trump’ campaign has been busy organising a ‘carnival of resistance’, and it

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Should people be forced to be gay?

At last I have found a summer festival I can attend in good faith without the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn turning up. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there seemed to be no festive gatherings planned which Corbyn wouldn’t attend, with his retinue of Trot imbeciles. In response, the philosopher Roger Scruton very kindly invited me to join him at a shindig hosted by the psychopathic tweed-jacketed fox-stranglers of the Countryside Alliance. It was a generous offer and I hope Roger will take it in good part if I say I would rather perform a colonoscopy on Diane Abbott than mix with that lot. Instead, I have found

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 7 July

My dear old alma mater Berry Bros & Rudd broke with Spectator Wine Club tradition recently by offering a six-bottle box rather than the more usual dozen bottles. It was such a hit with readers that they asked to do it again this week. Needless to say, the thirstier among you desperate for a full dozen can simply sign up for two cases. I strongly recommend that you do, since the wines — a delightfully eclectic selection — are first rate and, given that Berry’s are offering free delivery and have knocked a bit off here and there, there’s a saving of some £20 to be had on the normal

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The price of looking busy

The behavioural scientist Dan Ariely once found himself chatting to a locksmith with a curious problem. The better he became at replacing locks, the less he got paid. In the early days, he explained, he might wrestle for hours with a jammed lock, but because his inexperience made his job look difficult, his customers would pay without demur, often adding a tip. Eventually, however, he became highly expert, and could fix the same problem in minutes. Now his customers resented paying his call-out fee, and never tipped him at all. Thirty years ago, companies buying a mainframe computer soon outgrew their first machine. The firm would duly write an huge

Lucy Vickery

Question time | 5 July 2018

In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.   My boyfriend says I should ‘give in’ to his advances. What’s your advice?   Some boyfriend; some cheek. I would observe that many of his ilk have tried to break down such defences, but few have succeeded, at least not honourably. Upon resistance rests your future. Upon the strength of your redoubt rests the probity

The Spectator

The Spectator’s Mission

190 years of The Spectator   5 July 1828   The principal object of a Newspaper is to convey intelligence. It is proposed in The Spectator to give this, the first and most prominent place, to a report of all the leading occurrences of the week. In this department, the reader may always expect a summary account of every public proceeding, or transaction of interest, whether the scene may lie at home or abroad.

Bruce Anderson

London’s perfect Paris brasserie

We order some French things better in London — often, admittedly, with French help. A grenouille friend recently took me to lunch at the Beaujolais Club just off Charing Cross Road. He said that it overwhelmed him with nostalgia. As a child, living in Paris, if the family were in town for the weekend, it was just the sort of brasserie in which they would have Sunday lunch (cook’s day off). Traditional dishes; proper bourgeois cooking; wine, no premiers crus, but solid, dependable bottles from solid, dependable growers — who were often friends or relatives of the owners. The children demonstrated their command of table manners and served an apprenticeship

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Keep off the grass

The autumn squill, Scilla autumnalis, has bright bluebell-coloured starry flowers. It is rare in the British Isles. It is also tiny, so small that most people could easily clodhop straight over it without noticing how lovely it is. I nearly did just that when I went looking for it in Surrey last summer until a kindly local botanist helped me find it flowering away on a grass verge. I went home pleased to have met such a minutely pretty wild flower. But a few days later, the kindly local botanist got in touch again, distraught. The local council had strimmed the verge where the autumn squills grew, and they were

James Bartholomew

The awful rise of ‘virtue signalling’

190 years of The Spectator   18 April 2015 Go to a branch of Whole Foods, the American-owned grocery shop, and you will see huge posters advertising Whole Foods, of course, but — more precisely — advertising how virtuous Whole Foods is: ‘We are part of a growing consciousness that is bigger than food — one that champions what’s good.’ This is a particularly blatant example of the increasingly common phenomenon of what might be called ‘virtue signalling’ — indicating that you are kind, decent and virtuous. We British do it, too. But we are more sophisticated, or underhand. Mishal Husain was particularly aggressive to Nigel Farage on the Today

Christian Wolmar

False start | 5 July 2018

I was worried that going to the autonomous vehicle exhibition in Stuttgart would be tantamount to an atheist walking into St Peter’s while the Pope was conducting a mass. There is something religious about the fervour with which adherents to the driverless credo practise their faith and promise us a new kingdom. Their proselytising has indeed convinced many. Politicians are making outlandish statements, such as Jesse Norman’s two weeks ago, that ‘Our entire use of roads is to be revolutionised by autonomous vehicles’, and pouring large sums — a promised £180 million so far — into bizarre research projects such as the development of strange robot cars slower than a

Nicholas Coleridge

The new club of rich young men

190 years of The Spectator   15 March 1986   It is difficult to estimate the number of young investment bankers, stockbrokers and commodity brokers earning £100,000 a year. Perhaps there are only a couple of thousand, but they are so mobile and noisy that they give the impression of being far more numerous. Most are aged between 26 and 34, and two years ago they were being paid £25,000, in some cases even less, until the opening up of the City markets precipitated an epidemic of headhunting and concomitant salaries. In this respect they resemble the lucky winners on Leslie Crowther’s television quiz The Price is Right, in which

The Spectator

Out – and into the World

190 years of The Spectator   4 June 1975   At no time during the campaign have the opponents of our membership of the EEC been remotely as unbalanced, as hysterical or as deliberately personally insulting as those in the opposite camp. Naturally, as in any vigorously fought campaign, there have been some fibs and half-truths on both sides; and each partisan has looked eagerly at evidence which may have several possible interpretations in order to find material that will support his cause. But nothing on the anti-Market side has even begun to equal the tirade of personal insults, and the sickening appeal to fear, that has characterised everything the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The term ‘marriage’ needs to be untangled

Rebecca Steinfeld (37) and Charles Keidan (41) have a moral objection to marriage. They’ve been together since 2010, have two very small children, but haven’t tied the knot. This, they say, is because the law doesn’t offer a knot they’re comfortable tying. ‘Charlie and I see each other as partners already in life, and we want to have the status of being partners in law,’ says Rebecca. They hold (and you may agree or disagree but it’s not a crazy view) that the concept described by the word ‘marriage’ is asymmetrical between the man and the woman, and inextricably tangled with religion and with cultural attitudes this couple (and others)

The Spectator

Sweeping the streets

190 years of The Spectator   6 September 1957 There are two ways of looking at sexual immorality. One is to regard all illicit intercourse as a crime; the other is to regard it as a sin but not as something which concerns the State unless it has obvious anti-social consequences. The first has been out of fashion since the 17th century, when adultery was still a capital offence, and in most civilised countries the second attitude now prevails. But in England for the last 80 years there has been one notable exception. Since the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 homosexual actions between consenting males have been criminal, even

The Spectator

Review: Mr Oscar Wilde’s poems

190 years of The Spectator   13 August 1881 The reading of this book fills us with alarm. It is evidently the work of a clever man, as well as of an educated man, but it is not only a book containing poems which ought never to have been conceived, still less published, but it is almost wholly without thoughts worthy of the name, entirely devoid of true passion, with very few vestiges even of genuine emotion, and constituted entirely out of sensuous images and pictures strung together often with so little true art that they remind one more of a number of totally different species of blossoms accumulated on

The Spectator

The duty of England and the American crisis

190 years of The Spectator   1 June 1861 The time has arrived when the national will on the American quarrel ought to be expressed. A party, numerous in Parliament and powerful in the press, is beginning to intrigue for the recognition of the South. They are aided by the fears of the cotton dealers, who dread an intermission of their supplies, by the anxiety of commercial men, who see their best market summarily closed, and by the abiding dislike of the aristocracy for the men and manners of the North. For the moment, their object is apparently to deprecate debate. They dare not as yet brave openly the prejudices

The Spectator

To our non-political readers

190 years of The Spectator   21 May 1831   Lucretius tells us, in some famous lines, that it is a pleasant thing to watch the sea in a tempest, from the shore: it is a far more gratifying employment to be throwing out Manby’s lifesaving apparatus, and saving the sinking mariners from the wreck. We have more than once observed, that it is difficult to be a mere spectator in times like these. It is all very well, in the piping times of domestic content, to sit still and report progress; but when, as in the great business of Reform, everything is at stake, it is the duty of

David Butterfield

No mere Spectator

Although The Spectator (literally) defined ‘The Establishment’, it has never been its organ. In fact, it was founded as a vehicle for root-and-branch reform that sought from the outset to upend the establishment. Its first editor, the Scottish firebrand Robert Stephen Rintoul, argued that, in spite of the magazine’s pointedly chosen title, ‘It is difficult to be a mere spectator in times like these.’ Its pages complained bitterly about an out-of-touch establishment: that too many ‘of the bons mots vented in the House of Commons appear stale and flat by the time they have travelled as far as Wellington Street’. The remedy it sought was the Great Reform Act, whose