Society

Thursday

The Spectator

How popular is the British royal family?

Austere environment Who introduced the word ‘austerity’ into the political lexicon? While chiefly associated with attacks on the Conservatives, and subsequently Reform UK, by Labour and other left-wing parties, it was David Cameron who brought the word back into common parlance. In a speech to the Conservative party forum on 26 April 2009 he declared: ‘The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.’ He went on to say: ‘We’ve made it clear that a Conservative government would spend less than Labour. We’re not frightened of their idiotic ritual chants about “cuts”.’ An analysis by the LSE found that in the election year of 2010, right-leaning thinktanks

John Power

Why are psychiatrists scared of sectioning dangerous patients?

The police initially treated last weekend’s stabbings on a train near Huntingdon as a possible terror attack, before confirming it wasn’t. Since then, it has been widely reported that the suspect, Anthony Williams, told one of his victims that ‘the devil’s not going to win’ as she pleaded with him not to stab her. So instead of terrorism, the outlines of another familiar British tragedy have begun to take shape: a violent outburst by a man apparently in the grip of severe mental illness. Why would someone with severe mental illness be able to roam in public? It is partly because of underfunded public services. The number of mental health

Harriet Sergeant

The inconvenient truth about cannabis and mental illness

Mash’s older brother was the same age as Anthony Williams when he slaughtered a stranger in a brutal and random attack. He was in the grip of a psychotic disorder caused by cannabis. We do not yet know what drove Williams, a 32-year-old African Caribbean man, to allegedly try to murder ten people during a 14-minute knife rampage on a train. But Mash is in no doubt cannabis often plays a part in attacks like these. ‘In my community smoking weed is normalised,’ he says. ‘We laugh and joke about hearing voices or having a “para” [a paranoid fit].’ He counts on his fingers: ‘Two brothers, two cousins and multiple

James Chiavarini

How not to train a truffle dog

For the first time in decades, King Charles has a new pet dog, a lagotto Romagnolo called Snuff. Queen Camilla is said to have given him the puppy, perhaps more for her benefit than his. She is thought to be mad about foraging for fungi, especially in the area surrounding her home in Wiltshire, where the chalky terroir is famous for an abundance of Burgundy truffles. Snuff is the perfect breed to find them. The lagotto hails from my home region of Emilia Romagna, and in recent years the dogs have surpassed pigs as the go-to tool for truffling. I can only surmise too many fingers were lost retrieving a

Luke McShane

St Louis showdown

Magnus Carlsen headed the field at the Clutch Chess Champions Showdown, a quadrangular rapid tournament held at the St Louis Chess Club last month. The Norwegian, who became a father in September, always seems motivated playing at fast time limits and his opposition in St Louis was of the highest calibre – Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Gukesh Dommaraju. At the Norway Chess tournament in June, Gukesh, the 19-year-old reigning world champion, caused Carlsen to bang the table in frustration after turning around a hopeless position. But in St Louis, Gukesh salvaged just one draw from six games against Carlsen. Combined with 3.5-2.5 scorelines against Caruana and Nakamura, that added

Luke McShane

No. 875

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1858 Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 10 November. There is a prize of a £20 John Lewis voucher 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…Qd1!! 2 Qxd1 Bxc3# No better is 2 Bd2 Bxc3+ Last week’s winner Stephen Smith, Messing, Essex

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: It’s a con

For Competition 3424 you were invited to write a short story for which ‘Conman’ could be the title, containing a dozen words of four or more letters beginning with con or man. This produced a larger-than-usual entry in which all were fairly evenly matched, making it tricky to whittle it down to the six below who are rewarded with £25 John Lewis vouchers. Consider the lilies… he murmured, contemplating his reflection in Suzanne’s mirror. Like them he looked good, but unlike them he could sow, though his seeds were romance, and as for spinning – that was his metier. From their first date (contact, he called it) she’d been consumed

Nicholas Farrell

My family dinner table debates about Gaza

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was in the Land Rover Defender with Rita, my youngest daughter (16), parked up near Dante’s tomb in the old city as we drank coffee from paper cups before she began her day at art school. On a wall in front of us that had possibly been there since the Romans, and definitely since the Renaissance, was scrawled in black spray paint: ‘Palestina libera dal fiume al mare!’ – Free Palestine from the river to the sea! I asked Rita what mark she’d got in her English literature oral test on Romeo and Juliet. I’d helped her prepare. I’d even found the correct Italian word for

Fire

2728: Friends and relations

Eight unclued solutions, including a pair, are of a kind. Across 11    Most excellent expert admitting: ‘Everyone can be beaten!’ (9) 12    Left centre of Kyoto for coastal city (5) 13    Game playing isn’t tenable (5,6) 14    My elderly grandma always danced the leads (4) 18    Dish of noodles King and I tucked into (7) 19    Recalled old letter about a minute charm (7) 23    Rowing over a piece of jewellery (6) 24    Dramatic hurricane masks sound of birds (5) 27    Turned up old brooch (5) 29    Famous sisters of Eleanor, possibly having lots of tea? (6) 31    In a sly manner, crook left yard (6) 34    Occasion to eat,

Melissa Kite

Did our B&B guests smell a rat?

As I was showing a couple from Lincolnshire to their room, I smelt a rat. I don’t mean metaphorically, about them. I mean that halfway down the hallway, as I walked two paying guests from the front door towards the staircase, the most overwhelming stench of rotting carcass wafted upwards from the floor, right next to the fancy dresser displaying the tourist leaflets. I glanced at them nervously to see whether they had noticed. They were telling me about their house-hunting. They wanted to move to West Cork to go off grid and get in touch with nature. That’s handy, I thought, because nature is currently rotting under the floorboards.

The Spectator

2725: Tandemonium? - solution

The eight unclued lights comprise four symmetrically placed ‘cycling pairs’, as cryptically hinted at by the title. First prize Abi Williams, Newton Abbot Runners-up Richard Warren, Coventry; Pam Bealby, Stockton on Tees

Robin Oakley

After 30 years, it’s farewell to The Turf

It was Frank Johnson who as The Spectator’s editor asked me to mix my then day job as the BBC’s political editor with writing this column. For someone starstruck by racing as a 12-year-old, bicycle propped against the old Hurst Park racecourse wall to watch the jousting jockeys in their myriad colours flash by, the opportunity was irresistible. It felt like a pass into a magic world: mingling in the winners’ enclosure with the titans of the sport, arriving at bustling stable-yards in the early hours amid the swish of brooms and clatter of buckets, relishing frosty mornings on downland turf as strings of skittish two-year-olds learned their trade. Memories

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 8 November 2025

England’s ladies bridge has a grand past, with many international titles and gold medals to its name, but obviously the same players can’t go on forever. It would appear that the future may also be looking bright as many girls and young women discover how fascinating and obsessing bridge can be. We have, without doubt, a very strong pair coming through the ranks. When Dido Coley and Lily Kearney won the Lady Milne trials last year, not many had heard of them. Last week they repeated the feat and I watched them on BBO whenever they were shown. I was very impressed. They have a well worked out, modern bidding

Toby Young

Lord Young goes to Washington

I’m writing this from Washington, D.C., where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and thinktankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old. Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist,

Roger Alton

The maverick magnificence of Henry Pollock

‘Gosh he seems full of himself’ was how my friend’s wife reacted when she came in to see Henry Pollock celebrating his stunning try against the Aussies at the weekend. And she was spot on too: 20-year-old Pollock, England rugby’s latest prodigy, whips up emotions, not least the desire from anyone who has played against him – and plenty who haven’t – to give him a good belting. He’s swaggering, confident, brash, with rockstar charisma and a bleached blond mop, and he can wind up opponents until they need a bomb disposal expert to calm them down. Referees might soon want to tell him to rein it in. That’s youth

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Do we turn up at a party even though no written invitation arrived? 

Q. An extremely old friend is a successful purveyor of high-end goods. Last time we saw him he invited us to a forthcoming Christmas party in Mayfair for his clients and people who have helped him get clients. We never got the email invitation, so I texted him and he said: ‘Oh I’m so sorry, I didn’t send it. I’ll do it today.’ But two weeks later, still no sign of it. Do we just go to the party or not? If we don’t go we fear he might be cross that we had ‘taken offence’ when no written invitation arrived. Yet we also fear that he may have decided

Tanya Gold

Bagels that even New York can’t beat: Panzer’s Delicatessen reviewed

That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get. I keep telling non-Jewish friends: when we burn, you will burn with us. Though I mean it as consolation, they tend to run. St John’s Wood has always existed on the edge of hysteria. Edwardian psychopaths put their mistresses here, and I once went to a children’s birthday party where Peppa Pig couldn’t park, and

The Spectator

Stench of failure: Britain’s shameful surrender in the war on drugs

The New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was that rare figure in politics – a progressive who followed the facts. The contrast between his grown-up moral clarity and the adolescent ideological posturing of New York City’s latest Democrat darling, Zohran Mamdani, could not be starker. Moynihan was a welfare reformer who knew that incentivising work, not subsidising idleness, was the route out of poverty. He was a resolute supporter of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, backing the victims of two millennia of prejudice against terrorists and tyrants. By way of contrast, Mamdani demonises that state as a proxy for what he considers the wider western sins of colonialism and

Mary Wakefield

We have to stop looking away

I learnt not to intervene on a late summer’s afternoon nine years ago. My son was still a baby and I was pushing him in his pram across a busy road in a responsible way, only after the green ‘walk’ man had lit up. I was about halfway over when a boy of about 14 on a moped scorched through the lights and past us, nearly hitting the pram. I yelled at him, and as I yelled felt the spirit of civic duty rise within me. If we middle-aged mothers don’t set the kids straight, who will? The boy skidded to a stop and turned to face me. I can’t