Society

Thursday

Peter Jones

Keir Starmer and the ancient question of word vs deed

Sir Keir Starmer said that Britain had come to a fork in the road. As usual, he took it – the fork between his words and his actions. Athenians of the 5th C bc were fascinated by the implications of logos (‘speech, reason, argument’, cf. ‘logic’) and ergon (‘action/results’, cf. ‘erg’). While Homeric heroes (8th C bc) were ordered to excel as ‘speakers of words’ and ‘doers of deeds’ because that made them winners in both the political and military arenas, the statesman Pericles emphasised the high importance of the interaction between word and deed: ‘We do not think logos is an obstacle to action; no, the issue is the

Rachel Johnson

Jilly Cooper was utterly unrivalled

Jilly Cooper, the last great Englishwoman of my lifetime – after Queen Elizabeth II and Debo – has died. The lights are going out all over Rutshire. During her life, Jilly shone as an author, a friend and a person – the definition of effervescent. You had to meet her only once to become a founder member of the Jilly Cooper Adoration Society. When she wrote her last book, Tackle!, about a rural football club complete with ‘bitch invasions’ and ghastly Wags, I told her that, in a way, she was the beautiful game, only she gave entertainment to millions not by striking a ball but by putting one word

Luke McShane

Down to the wire

The momentum augured badly for Fabiano Caruana in the final match of the Grand Chess Tour, held in Sao Paulo earlier this month. In the first classical game against Maxime Vachier-Lagrave he blew a chance to take a commanding lead in the match, since wins in those slow games were weighted more than the subsequent rapid and blitz games (3:2:1 respectively). Worse still, he went on to lose one of the rapid games, leaving him needing a 3-1 victory in the blitz just to tie the match. Caruana explained after the match how he managed to keep his hopes alive. ‘If you think about it as having to win one

Luke McShane

No. 871

White to play. Cmiel – Leitner, European Senior (50+) Championship, October 2025. The situation looks hopeless, but White found a brilliant counterattack. Which move did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 13 October. 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 Bh3! After 1…Kd5or 1…Kd6 2 Qe6#, or 1…Kf6 2 Qg7# or 1…c4 2 Qd4# Last week’s winner Chris McSheehy, Hook

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Virtue-signalling

For Competition 3420 you were invited to submit a poem or short story incorporating that sentence of Emerson’s: ‘The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.’ Dr Johnson may have been the first to mention spoon counting, saying (according to Boswell) that ‘if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses, let us count our spoons’. In a large and very good entry, in which poetry prevailed, Alex Steelsmith, J.C.H. Mounsey, Tracy Davidson, Frank McDonald, Brian Murdoch, Adrian Fry, Sylvia Fairley and a few others missed out by a whisker. Those below win

Nicholas Farrell

My run-in with airport security

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Welcome back, signore!’ said the woman in uniform at the all-seeing security doorway which passengers must walk through to be allowed on a plane, as if it were the Holy Door of St Peter. I was about to fly from Rimini on the Adriatic coast, not far south of my home, to Gatwick for a church service in remembrance of my father who had died two days short of his 100th birthday in July. I was with three of my six children and felt flattered, especially in front of them, to be remembered, proudly and deservedly famous at the Aeroporto Internazionale di Rimini e San Marino Federico

Melissa Kite

The folly of solar panels

The house fell silent as the last of the tourists took their oat milk and pretend cheese from the guest fridge. Winter came in the nick of time. I’ve bitten my lip for six months while the B&B guests have forced their pro-Palestine, anti-Trump views on me, while refusing to eat normal food or use the dishwasher because, in leftie parlance, dishwashers cause neurological damage. ‘What does the shower cause?’ I wanted to ask some of them, who didn’t even use one towel or open one wrapped mini-soap in a week-long stay. Is soap carcinogenic now? Are you staging some sort of Gaza protest by not washing? The bookings dried

Robin Oakley

Gambling tax hikes could kill British racing

Back in the days when politicians were real flesh and blood rather than social media pushovers, I sat down with the then-chancellor Kenneth Clarke for a BBC interview. ‘Live or pre-record, Robin?’ he asked as we were mic’d up. I have long relished his reply when I confirmed it was the latter: ‘Pity. I always prefer the lives. It’s that extra frisson you get from feeling that, in a mere half-sentence, you can destroy your entire career.’ Many of us like to add a little risk to our lives – if you include playing the National Lottery some 22 million people in Britain have a gamble in the average month

Doc

2724: Word building

The unclued lights can be arranged to grow from 3 to 11 letters in length, each being an anagram of its predecessor and an extra letter. Across 7    Equipment for Bell, Athey and Trescothick initially (3) 13    Male folk star’s alarming words (7) 15    Pipe valley running through Britain (5) 16    Reportedly remained stolid (5) 17    Middle of emails edited (6) 18    Nameless President has time on the loo (5) 20    Brainboxes managed to infiltrate spy agency (6) 21    Thorpe, terrified somewhat of safe-cracker (5) 22    Doddery, maybe, when dancing in Aviemore? (7) 29    Hanging back in disarray (5) 30    English earl touring alps negotiated pass (6) 32    Blood carrier,

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 October 2025

Sometimes the stars align in such a wondrous way that the team they are favouring cannot go wrong. Such a line-up fell upon my team in last week’s World Bridge Tour in lovely Copenhagen. First star that kerchunked into our constellation was that I couldn’t play, which left six professionals with no weak link who couldn’t spot a Vienna Coup if it was staring her in the face. The second was having Denmark’s best pair playing with us: Dennis Bilde and Martin Schaltz. And all the other stars needed to win a top-level tournament, fell neatly into place. The play started with four days of qualification: the top four teams

Jake Wallis Simons

What is the West without the Jews?

To the studio! Podcasts, if you ask me, are the one good thing to have come out of the digital revolution. My new one, The Brink, which I present with hulking former Parachute Regiment officer Andrew Fox, has hosted three guests so far: American media supremo Bari Weiss, former Israel defence minister Yoav Gallant and Mossad spymaster Yossi Cohen. What are we? Well, we’re not Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. The highlights? Weiss observing that society is not facing a crisis of trust but of trustworthiness: ‘You should not trust something that’s not worthy of your trust.’ Then there was Gallant’s message to the West: ‘We all think war is

Tanya Gold

Palestinian nationalism has come to Cornwall

This is West Cornwall, land of fishing, jam first and Trotskyite crafters. There is a sizeable community of nutters yearning for a Cornish intifada: the freedom within, and the freedom without. The old joke is: the duchy is shaped like a Christmas stocking and all the nuts are in the toe. Extinction Rebellion (XR) used to be the big thing down here. My cleaner, a serious deal in XR, screamed at me when my husband put a Tory sign in our garden for the 2019 general election campaign – but fashions change. There are other things to be extinguished now. Since 7 October 2023, the nutters have embraced their own

Charles Moore

The frustrations of the Tory mindset

‘The facts of life are Conservative.’ This sentence is often attributed to Margaret Thatcher, whose centenary falls next week. The exact words are ‘The facts of life invariably do turn out to be Tory’ and were not hers. They appeared in the first major policy document produced under her leadership, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976). The author was probably Chris Patten, the document’s drafter and more of a ‘wordsmith’ – her coinage – than she. (There might even have been a deliberate Patten double-entendre of the sort that always escaped Mrs T since, in those days, the phrase ‘the facts of life’ meant the sex lessons given by embarrassed parents and

Douglas Murray

The increasing fear felt by Britain’s Jews

If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the day well – Tuesday was the second anniversary of the 7 October massacre, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage. Tuesday’s hate-fest was not, of course, an unusual event. The first demonstrations in support of the 7 October massacre of Jews took place in west London on the day of

The Spectator

What we need from our new Archbishop of Canterbury

There have been 106 Archbishops of Canterbury since Gregory the Great declared Augustine his ‘Apostle to the English’ in 597. Their number has included Catholics and Protestants, progressives and traditionalists, academics, politicians, even a tank commander. But none had ever been a woman. Sarah Mullally’s appointment is a historic moment for the Church but it comes at a moment of peril for Anglicanism. The Church of England seems to be in a state of perpetual crisis. Few would argue that it serves the world’s more than 100 million Anglicans well or that it sits at the heart of public life. Sunday attendance has fallen by 40 per cent in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Synagogue attack, pro-Palestine protests and a new Archbishop of Canterbury

Home Two men at a synagogue at Heaton Park in Manchester were killed on Yom Kippur when Jihad al-Shamie, 35, drove a car at bystanders and went on the attack with a knife. He was a British citizen of Syrian descent, on bail after being arrested on suspicion of rape. He was bravely prevented by those present from breaking into the main building. Police shot him dead; they also accidentally shot a worshipper who died, and wounded another. Six people were arrested on suspicion of terrorist offences. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, appealed for a pause in pro-Palestinian protests but police arrested 488 people around Trafalgar Square demonstrating on Saturday

Wednesday

Patrick West

The problem with Lenny Henry’s demand for reparations

The desire to seek restitution from those who have harmed or wronged us is normal. Our instinct for justice is inbuilt. Yet, in recent decades, there has emerged in the West a perverse distortion of this impulse: the demand for financial compensation from people who have done no wrong, made by people who have not been wronged. Long-established campaigns calling on Britain to pay reparations for slavery are founded on this strange premise, and the latest figure to join their ranks is Sir Lenny Henry. The comedian and actor makes his case in a new book, The Big Payback, co-authored with Marcus Ryder, a television executive and charity boss. He argues

Ian Acheson

Should Stephen Lawrence's killer be freed?

David Norris was convicted of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 and now wants to be released from prison. Should he be? That is a question the Parole Board will consider as Norris has now served the minimum custodial term of a life sentence imposed in 2011. This body has the power to direct his release or refuse it on the grounds of risk to the public. While it is independent of politics, the profile of the perpetrator and the seriousness of the case means the new Justice Secretary, David Lammy – who has described the murder of Lawrence as a ‘seminal moment’ in shaping his understanding

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry’s white saviour complex has been dealt another blow

You’ve got to feel sorry for Prince Harry. After some of the best headlines he’s had in years during his well-received return to Britain last month, that goodwill has swiftly been dismantled under a blizzard of bad publicity. There was the accusation that he or someone around him leaked sensitive information about his brief meeting with his father to the papers. And now the revelation that one of the charities he’s closely linked to, African Parks, has been described as no longer fit for purpose. Or, to be exact, ‘indelicate and disrespectful’. The calamitous and scandalous collapse of Sentebale earlier this year has now been followed by this less dramatic