Society

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Will inclusion sink ‘man overboard’?

‘We’re not throwing man overboard overboard,’ says the Royal Yachting Association. ‘It’s a universally recognised term that we want people to use in an emergency.’ It has little choice, since man overboard is incorporated in international treaties. So the association recommends its use only when following safety procedures, ‘until this is able to change’. Until that happy day, the RYA has issued a slim volume,  Inclusive Language Guidance, with a sort of phrasebook thrown in. A sample is: ‘Ze went sailing yesterday. Zir boat is green. That boat belongs to zem.’ This indicates not that the speaker is German, or perhaps from Somerset, but that the person being spoken about

Luke McShane

Miracles

‘When you play professional chess… you have to always believe in miracles. Especially if you are a player like me who’s not really good.’ A couple of rounds before the end of the Fide Grand Swiss, held in Samarkand in early September, Anish Giri gave a typically modest assessment of his chances of taking one of the coveted top two spots. Those qualify players for the 2026 Candidates’ tournament, whose winner earns the right to challenge for the world championship. By any normal standards, Giri is really good – an absolute top player for more than a decade who peaked at no. 3 in the world. But the Grand Swiss

Luke McShane

No. 869

White to play. Anish Giri-Viktor Laznicka, France 2010. Black’s king is in obvious peril, and Giri found the only move which wins by force. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 29 September. 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…Ne2+! wins the Rf4, as 2 Qxe2 Qxg2# or 2 Rxe2 Qc1+ leads to mate. Last week’s winner Alan Norman, Impington, Cambridge

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: Trivial pursuits

For Competition 3418 you were invited to provide a pompous leading article on a trivial subject. The ubiquity of ‘Hi’ replacing ‘Dear’; conjoined teabags; the apostrophe (ban it!); the semi-colon (save it!): all featured in a medium-sized, accomplished entry. The half-dozen below stood out and earn their authors the £25 John Lewis vouchers. Our readers will be aware of our unblemished record in reading the runes. And if there is one certain indicator of the unravelling of the fabric of western civilisation, surely it is the unending decline in quality of clothes pegs. Regardless of the emporium from which they are purchased, both plastic and wooden pegs are so woefully

Pabulum

2722: Victimby Pabulum

‘31D’ is a line thrice uttered by the victim of ‘37A/34D/9D’ where his 14A grew. Remaining unclued lights give his name and how he was addressed by his son (two words) and the name of his son’s tragic friend. Across 1    Rave over wrestling tournament (5) 4    Wolf conquering war god frightens away (6,3) 10    Autoclaved plastic with small cavities (10) 11    Doctor came in as Uncle Sam’s sickly (6) 12    Tess’s husband or French activist poet (7) 15    Snarl from grey dullard (5) 16    Fare on tinware for forty (6) 22    Maybe saboteur had sabotaged earlier (8) 23    Cynical type

The Spectator

2719: What’s in a Name? – solution

MADRIGAL (the compiler) is linked by MAD (completing words phrases: BRAINED, COW DISEASE and WORT), RIG (meanings: SWINDLE, EQUIP and ARTIC) and AL (abbreviation for: ALABAMA, ALUMINIUM and ALBANIA). First prize Will Devison, Shaldon, Devon Runners-up Don Thompson, Bolton; Phillip Wickens, Faygate, W. Sussex

Jeffrey Archer

What Nigel Farage told me

I recently attended the Young Dancer of the Year competition at the Royal Opera House, organised by the formidable Jacquie Brunjes. Sixteen young girls and boys aged 14 to 16 who had won a place in the final, all strutted their stuff in the hope of becoming the eventual winner. I watched each performance with a keen amateur eye, and selected my three to be awarded prizes, and not one of them made it to the final. Dame Arlene Phillips selected Cooper Filby, and I asked her afterwards if he had a chance of making it on to the professional stage. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘The standard of young dancers

Rod Liddle

Let’s just ignore the Church of England

How important do you think it is to know what the Church of England thought about that ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London two weeks ago? There is a very good argument for saying it is about as meaningful and relevant as finding out what Bonnie Blue, that young lady touring the country flat on her back and welcoming anyone who fancies a bit of frictionless poking, thinks about the fractious border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia. There are many institutions in this country that are irrelevant to the great mass of citizens, but few more resolutely so than our established Church. That it is antithetical to the beliefs and

Charles Moore

Pine martens for Palestine

How can the nature sector respond to the genocide in Gaza? These are not my words. They appear in the subject box of an email which has been sent to members of the Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), though not, I think, by the WCL itself. It invites recipients to an ‘open forum for discussion and support’ on Zoom on 30 September. It seems that the Mammal Society, which supports pine martens, dormice etc, is involved. A sane answer to the subject box question would be a) that there is no genocide in Gaza and b) that the ‘nature sector’ has other duties. But the email tries to answer its

Theodore Dalrymple

The folly of psychology

A young Chinese girl, at school in an English-speaking country, approached me after I gave a talk at a conference and asked for my advice about what she should study. I knew nothing of her, except that she was pretty, with beautiful dark eyes, and was almost certainly of high intelligence. I was touched by her naive assumption that I would answer benevolently and in her best interests. It suggested that she had not yet encountered much of human malignity. ‘What are you interested in?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking of history and psychology.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘definitely not psychology, at all costs not psychology.’ My answer emerged spontaneously, without

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Recognition for Palestine, second runway for Gatwick and questions over Epstein for Fergie

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that Britain had recognised a Palestinian state. France, Portugal, Canada and Australia did likewise. Before President Donald Trump of the United States was sent safely home, the government said it had secured £150 billion worth of US investment. Baroness Berger succeeded in establishing a select committee to examine the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, after it passed its second reading in the Lords. The Ethiopian asylum seeker whose arrest for sexually assaulting a woman and a 14-year-old girl provoked protests outside a migrant hotel in Epping was jailed for 12 months. The Home Office was looking into hundreds of thousands

The Spectator

This is Shabana Mahmood’s moment

What is the point of Keir Starmer? He was the means by which the Labour party could suffocate the hard left and assume the mantle of respectability and, in due course, power. But he lacked, and has never acquired, a governing philosophy. He was handed a landslide by an electorate determined to eject the Conservatives from office with ruthless force. Yet he has contrived to forfeit the authority it lent him and now rivals the government he supplanted in unpopularity and lack of direction. The men and women who engineered his ascent to the leadership, and delivered the majority he has acquired but does not command, have always known his

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

Who were the real bigots in Epping?

Imagine if, following the rape charges against Harvey Weinstein, a mob of angry people had rallied to his defence. Imagine if this smug, seething crowd had raged against the women who accused Weinstein of sexual offences. Imagine if they wagged their fingers in the women’s faces. Imagine they branded the women troublemakers. Imagine they went so far as to taunt the women by displaying banners saying: ‘Rich movie producers welcome here!’ Local women rallied around a girl, just 14, who had accused a man of sexually assaulting her. And those women were demonised We would have been appalled, right? Well, that very thing happened in Epping. Local women rallied around

Sam Olsen

Donald Trump's new world order

The United Nations General Assembly is meant to showcase international consensus. This week it became a stage for its fiercest critic as Donald Trump returned to New York not to flatter the global order, but to flay it. He accused the UN of bankrolling migration, derided climate policy as hoax, and warned that if Russia refused to end its war, America would impose ‘powerful tariffs’ and force Europe to do the same. The rest of Donald Trump’s UN speech made the pattern impossible to miss Later the same day, after meeting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump struck a different but complementary note: Ukraine, he declared, could recover all of its

David Shipley

The Quran knife attack is a travesty of justice

In June we discovered that England has an Islamic blasphemy law, when a court convicted Hamit Coskun for the ‘crime’ of burning a Quran. Now we’ve learned that it’s even worse. Not only will the law punish you if you offend the institution of Islam, but it will also treat Muslims who respond violently with the lightest of touches. For when Hamit burned that Quran outside the Turkish embassy earlier this year, he was attacked. A man named Moussa Kadri argued with Hamit, said he was going to kill him, left the scene and returned with a knife. Kadri then slashed at Hamit with the knife, knocked him to the floor

James Snell

Are airports safe?

Stansted airport is in trouble. First, its operators say, there was a small fire in one of the lounges. This was quickly dealt with in the early hours, but it produced a lot of smoke in the interim. And then, apparently because of a problem with signals on the rails, all trains to and from Stansted have been cancelled. This is a major problem; Stansted is a major airport. There’s no reason, at this moment in time, to think any of this is out of the ordinary. There have been a fair number of mysterious fires in Britain lately – in warehouses and other places – and there have been plots, according to authorities

Ross Clark

You won't believe the latest ruse to make the case for digital ID

‘The British public is running out of patience with a state that does not work, where interactions with public services are beset by inconveniences and delays even as outcomes slip and costs rise.’ The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is not wrong there, but what is its solution? Not to sack the state’s clock-watchers who only want to work four days a week and only from home, or the beach. Not to break up underperforming state monopolies and introduce some more business-minded discipline into public services. No, as is so often the case with the former prime minister’s think tank, the solution lies in Digital ID. Give us a

Liz Walsh

Ireland's presidential election is a farce

The Irish presidential election was already an anti-democratic farce even before the combined left candidate lobbed an incendiary device into the mix. Catherine Connolly’s comments on BBC describing Hamas as ‘part of the fabric of Palestinian people’ – and her opinion that Keir Starmer is wrong to exclude Hamas from a new Palestinian state – has not gone down well. Fourteen interminably long years of suffocating sanctimony from Michael D. Higgins will come to an end. But will Ireland’s new president be any better? For the first time in 14 years, the Irish people get to elect a new president of Ireland next month. Fourteen interminably long years of suffocating sanctimony

Kristina Murkett

Why kids won’t learn languages

The English have always had a terrible reputation when it comes to learning languages. Think of the stereotype of the sunburnt Brit abroad butchering ‘una cerveza, por favor,’ or P. G. Wodehouse’s description of the ‘shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.’ It appears, however, that our monolingualism is worse than ever, at least in schools. New data has revealed that a third of state sixth-forms in England do not have a single person studying French, German or Spanish A-level – in the West Midlands the rate was as high as 47 per cent. The requirement to study a language at GCSE level was

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Is Charlie Kirk a Christian martyr?

This feels deeply inappropriate, I thought, as I started watching Erika Kirk’s hagiographic eulogy. I am watching a grieving widow in order to analyse her performance, and pass judgement on her message. Her husband was brutally murdered just ten days ago – let her grieve. Don’t use her as journalistic material. But anyone who chooses to speak of the most serious matters, in whatever circumstances, is subject to criticism. Being a victim of some terrible act of violence is no exemption. Victim status does not authorise one to tell a nation what the essence of Christianity is, for example, and expect one’s account to be unchallenged. Her forgiveness of her