The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

In place of strife

France has been in a state of organised uprising this week, with 300,000 motorists taking to the streets and autoroutes to protest against rising fuel taxes. One protester has died, more than 400 have been injured and even more disruption is on the way. Watching Emmanuel Macron, you wouldn’t know it. He travelled to Berlin to commemorate Germany’s war dead, launching for the second time in a fortnight into his proposal for a single European army, and saying it was Europe’s duty to prevent the world ‘slipping into global chaos’ — apparently unable to recognise the chaotic scenes he had left behind.

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to 2383: Flagged

The unclued lights are presenters of BLUE PETER: individually at 39; pairs are 3/2, 7/22, 15A/15D, 15A/17, 25/14, and 32/31, with PETER at 15A doing double duty.   First prize C.E.

Friday

Thursday

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Barometer | 15 November 2018

Hard bitten A British tourist died after contracting rabies from a cat bite in Morocco. Whatever happened to the prominent anti-rabies posters at British ports? — The last case of rabies contracted in the UK was in 1922 but rising cross-Channel traffic led to a fear that infected animals could unwittingly be brought in. — A 1974 regulation introduced long spells of quarantine and those once-familiar posters, then restrictions were eased in the 1990s thanks to pet passports. — The last case of human infection in France was in 1923, but the country was not declared rabies-free until 2001 – a status it lost for two years from 2008. — Worldwide, rabies kills 59,000 people a year, 95 per cent in Africa or Asia and 99 per cent with infections from dogs.

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Letters | 15 November 2018

Hearts as well as heads Sir: Simon Jenkins suggests we should stop remembering and start forgetting about the first world war (‘Don’t mention the war’, 10 November). His beef is with artists in particular, claiming that art ‘drenches history in emotion’. He prefers to read history books. No one would argue against history books, but surely it is not a question of either/or. Artists tell a story in a different way from historians, often to a different audience. They can move people to want to find out more: to look in the box of letters in the attic, to find out about their family connection to the war, to think again about the past and how it impacts on our present. Good history books open our minds to new ideas and perspectives.

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Portrait of the Week – 15 November 2018

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, defended a 500-page technical draft of the agreement on withdrawal from the European Union. She met immediate opposition from the Democratic Unionists, from Jacob Rees-Mogg and from Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson’s brother Jo (a Remainer) had earlier resigned as a minister, calling Mrs May’s handling of Brexit a ‘failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis’. The BBC reported that several cabinet ministers had expressed doubts about her Chequers plan back in July. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, insisted that Brexit could not be stopped, but Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, said the option of a new referendum was still ‘on the table’.

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A bad deal

During last year’s general election campaign, Theresa May declared that ‘You can only deliver Brexit if you believe in Brexit’. Unfortunately, her deal proves this point. It was negotiated by a team of people who imagined their job to be a damage-limitation exercise. They did not see Brexit as an opportunity and this is reflected in the terms put before the cabinet. The deal falls far short of what was promised in May’s Lancaster House speech. She said she’d bring back a clean Brexit, taking Britain out of the Single Market, the Customs Union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The deal she ended up presenting to her cabinet will, in several important regards, fail all of these tests. But May has conveniently forgotten her tests.

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Trial and punishment

From ‘The Kaiser’, 16 November 1918: What is to be done with the Kaiser? For the question must certainly be answered. If we may venture to judge the feelings of our countrymen, we should say that, though there is no trace of a vindictive hostility towards any of the Germans who may seriously be trying to enter upon a better way of life, there is a very strong feeling that the Kaiser must be brought to trial. This is a perfectly logical conclusion. The British government have announced that all persons proved guilty of offences against the laws of humanity during the war shall be duly punished. It is unthinkable, therefore, that the Kaiser himself should be exempt.

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Books of the year – part two

Daniel Swift I feel as though I came late to the Sarah Moss party. Nobody told me she was this divided country’s most urgent novelist. Her themes: the cycles of history, male absurdity, the forms female subversion may take, in irony, sickness and sacrifice. It helps that she’s absurdly topical, and that she’s funny. Her new book, Ghost Wall (Granta, £12.99), is the shorter, spikier companion piece to her previous novel, The Tidal Zone. It is about ancient Britain and its re-enactment in the present day, and like all the novels I’ve loved best this year, it’s also a parable. Other parables: I was hugely moved by Jesse Ball’s allegorical Census (Granta, £14.

Thursday

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Barometer | 8 November 2018

It is cricket The use of a baseball expression, backstop, for possible arrangements over the Irish border could upset some Brexiteers. Yet the concept of a ‘backstop’ can be traced to a much more British game, cricket. The use of ‘backstop’ for what we would now call a wicket keeper was first recorded in the Oxford Dictionary in 1819. Seventy years later it cropped up in baseball, as a name for a fence rather than a person. When, in 1890, baseball players started calling the catcher a backstop too, the fence became, in effect, a backstop to the backstop. Big swims Ross Edgley became the first person to swim round the British coast, covering 1,791 miles in four months, starting and finishing in Margate.

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Letters | 8 November 2018

Hubris and nemesis Sir: Douglas Murray’s assessment of Angela Merkel’s decision to stand down as German Chancellor (‘Europe’s empty throne’, 3 November) suggests a certain symmetry with the fate of our own former Prime Minister. David Cameron also declared that he would leave office at a time of his own choosing, but circumstances conspired against him. Mutti shows a great deal of presumption in announcing she will stay until the next election. If German politics bears any resemblance to our own, the very act of announcing a long goodbye will ensure that she leaves before her chosen moment. Cameron brought about his own demise by hubris, thinking he could renegotiate the terms of EU membership.

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Lessons from America

Donald Trump can, at the very least, claim to have killed off political apathy. Americans this week voted in greater numbers than in any such elections of the past half-century — but it does not follow that this is an encouraging development. The midterm results were a blow for Trump, but not much of a blow. American politics is developing along the lines with which we are familiar: a cultural war, where voters are enthused not so much by what candidates have to say but because of tribal hatred of the opposition. President Trump has proved an even more incendiary figure than candidate Trump: he has not stopped campaigning or using Twitter to set the news agenda. His enemies have not stopped rising to his bait.

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Portrait of the week | 8 November 2018

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, set off for St Symphorien Military Cemetery in Mons, from which she was to join President Emmanuel Macron to lay wreaths at Thiepval for the centenary of the Armistice. Jeff Fairburn resigned as chief executive of Persimmon, the housing company, after his £75 million bonus attracted public comment. Marks & Spencer reported falling clothing and food sales. The New Look fashion chain increased the number of shops it planned to close from 60 to 85. British Airways passengers on a flight from Orlando, Florida, scheduled to reach London eight hours later, spent 77 hours on the journey, including an opportunity to sleep on the floor at JFK airport in New York.

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Giving thanks

From ‘Thanks be to God’, 16 November 1918: The thought that filled the mind of the nation on Monday, and has possessed it ever since, is the thought, Thanks be to God. Under a thousand names and forms, consciously and unconsciously, realized fully or only half realized, this has given unity to the nation and made the moment mighty. Not to have recorded this fact, and to have left unsaid what we have just said, would have been impossible. But it is equally impossible to say more. If it is true that the greatest truths demand the greatest care in their statement, it is also true that the greatest and most moving thoughts entertainable by man can only find the simplest expression… We profess deep gratitude, and we feel it.

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Books of the year – part one

Andrew Motion Short stories seem to fare better in the US than the UK, and among this year’s rich crop, Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck (Ecco, £20.70) is outstanding. Everything about Eisenberg’s writing is highly controlled — watchful, well-made — and everything it describes teeters on the verge of chaos or collapse. It makes for a brilliant mixture of a book — at once compact and capacious, eerily familiar and extremely strange. Roger Lewis One of my favourite authors is Laura Thompson. Her biographies of sundry Mitfords, of Agatha Christie and Lord Lucan (recently revised in the light of the unpleasant Countess’s demise) are brilliant and forensic.

Friday

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The winners of the Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2018 | 2 November 2018

Which UK companies are rewriting the rules and redefining their marketplaces? Earlier this year, The Spectator and Julius Baer launched the inaugural Economic Disruptor Awards to celebrate the most creative entrepreneurs in the UK. Over the past six months, over 100 nominations have been reviewed by our panel. Last night, we announced the winners at a gala dinner hosted by Andrew Neil, Chairman of The Spectator, and attended by over 120 guests from across the world of business. We are delighted to announce that the 2018 Economic Disruptor of the Year is Pockit – a low-cost, easy-access banking app aimed at helping Britain’s ‘unbanked’.