The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Crunch time

For anyone considering a career in economic forecasting, the Bank of England’s inflation report for August 2007 ought to be required reading. A graph illustrating its Monetary Policy Committee’s ‘best collective judgment’ of annual economic growth two years ahead is fixed around a central prediction of 2.5 per cent, with extreme boundaries of 0.8 per cent and 4.2 per cent. But after two years, economic growth was running at –5.6 per cent, and the economy had just completed its fifth consecutive quarter of negative growth. The finest minds of Threadneedle Street could not see two years ahead.

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to 2318: Groundwork

SOIL (9) — cryptically indicated by ISLAND IN THE SUN (1A), the title of a SONG (40) recorded by HARRY BELAFONTE (43) — defines each of the other unclued lights.   First prize Mrs P. Newbury, Linlithgow, West Lothian Runners-up C.

Thursday

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Barometer | 27 July 2017

But me no butts Boris Johnson, being taught a Maori head-to-head greeting, joked that it might be ‘misinterpreted in a pub in Glasgow’. But did he offend the wrong city? In 2007 the OED appealed for details on the origin of ‘Glasgow kiss’, meaning a headbutt. Then, its earliest known first use was in the Financial Times in 1987, whereas ‘Liverpool kiss’ (meaning the same thing) was traced back to 1944. The appeal pushed back the Glasgow first use, but only by five years to 1982, when the Daily Mirror said: ‘Glasgow has its own way of welcoming people... there is a broken bottle gripped in the first of greeting. Or there’s the Glasgow kiss — a sharp whack on the nose with the forehead.

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Letters | 27 July 2017

Bugs bite back Sir: Matthew Parris is quite right to say that we Leavers would prefer independence in reduced circumstances to affluent federalism (‘Dear Leavebugs, it’s time to admit your mistake’, 22 July). But he is wrong to suggest that our preference is a guilty secret, or that it should be. Many of us despaired at the narrowness of both referendum campaigns, which made no attempt at addressing our ‘spiritual’ concerns about EU membership, or indeed the equally spiritual hopes of the Remainers. Spiritual, moral and cultural questions are at the root of all politics and economics, and any debate which leaves them out is empty.

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Portrait of the week | 27 July 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, invited the media to take a photograph of her beginning a holiday with her husband Philip at Lake Garda before pressing on to Switzerland for some walking. David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, resisted demands by Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament Brexit negotiator, that the European Court of Justice should retain jurisdiction over EU migrants in Britain. BMW said a fully electric Mini is to be built at Cowley in Oxford, with motors made in Germany and shipped over for assembly. The government announced plans to ban new diesel and petrol cars and vans from 2040. The number of people over 90 with a driving licence reached 100,000.

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Playing chicken

Besides being important in themselves, the trade talks between Britain and the United States which began this week are symbolic of the opportunities that should become available as we leave the European Union. For years we have dealt with the US, our biggest single customer, under burdensome tariffs and other regulation — but we had no choice. The EU handled trade policy and it never succeeded in completing a trade deal with any of its major trade partners. Britain, by contrast, has always been more global than Europe in its outlook. The vote for Brexit was, among other things, a vote to raise our sights to more distant horizons. At the time of the referendum, a bilateral trade deal with the US looked unlikely for political reasons.

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to 2317:370

The answer to the subtraction sum in the title is 1947. So all the unclued lights are celebrities who celebrate their 70th birthday this year. The first letter of each clue, read in order, announce Doc’s 70th birthday.   First prize Emma Wood, Loscoe, Heanor, Derbyshire Runners-up Tom Richards, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire; George D.

Wednesday

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Stop playing chicken with Britain’s free-trade future

Besides being important in themselves, the trade talks between Britain and the United States which began this week are symbolic of the opportunities that should become available as we leave the European Union. For years we have dealt with the US, our biggest single customer, under burdensome tariffs and other regulation — but we had no choice. The EU handled trade policy and it never succeeded in completing a trade deal with any of its major trade partners. Britain, by contrast, has always been more global than Europe in its outlook. The vote for Brexit was, among other things, a vote to raise our sights to more distant horizons. At the time of the referendum, a bilateral trade deal with the US looked unlikely for political reasons.

Thursday

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Barometer | 20 July 2017

Smash the orange Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said the government’s Brexit plans could ‘fall apart like a chocolate orange’. But the point of a chocolate orange is that it doesn’t fall apart easily at all. Launched by Terry’s of York in 1932, many of its TV adverts have emphasised this theme: 1978 ‘Tap it and unwrap it’ — yokel shown tapping it lightly against tree trunk. 1998 ‘Whack and unwrap’ — man shown thumping it against a wall. 2010 ‘Smash it to pieces, love it to bits’ — several people struggle to break the orange, including a secretary with a phone and man who whacks it on a glass coffee table, breaking the table.

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Letters | 20 July 2017

Yes to Boris Sir: Get Boris (15 July)! Get Boris to be prime minister, in fact. He is the only possible candidate for the Conservatives who has the flair, the experience, the ideas and the sense of humour to rescue the party and the country from its current malaise. That he has opposition there is no doubt — but then so did Winston Churchill when he was recalled by Lloyd George in 1917 to be minister of munitions, and again in 1940 when he became prime minister. To sideline him at this time would be foolish in the extreme and a further example of the party’s ineptitude.

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Portrait of the week | 20 July 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, told MPs before the summer recess: ‘No backbiting, no carping. The choice is me or Jeremy Corbyn. Nobody wants that.’ Her remarks followed a spate of leaks and negative briefings from cabinet ministers. It was said that Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had called public-sector workers ‘overpaid’. He responded by warning cabinet colleagues against leaking, but maintained a 10 per cent pay disparity was a ‘simple fact’.

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Let May govern

It used to be said that loyalty was the Conservatives’ secret weapon. While other parties might descend into internecine warfare, the Tories would always, when circumstances demanded, show just enough respect for their leader. The words ‘loyalty’ and ‘Conservative’, -however, lost their natural affinity during the Major years. Since then, to borrow a phrase from the left, the leadership of the party has descended into a state of permanent revolution. After the failure of her general election campaign, Theresa May seems to have become a tortured prisoner of her cabinet. Talks of leaks are exaggerated.

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No. 2316: Divine alteration

Redundant words were 12A virgin, 16A crazy, 38A mammal, 18D state, 21D greed, 25D tendon, 34D extremist. These respectively defined 14A vestal, 20D lunatic, 6D marsupial, 23D Indiana, 33A cupidity, 15A paxwax, 41A absolutist. Roman gods (underlined) in these words were turned into their Greek equivalents.

Wednesday

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Kemi Badenoch: from African immigrant to Essex MP, I’ve lived the ‘British dream’

Our former Spectator colleague Kemi Badenoch gave her maiden speech in the House of Commons earlier on today. It was, in part, a response to the new Corbynista MPs who have been denouncing parliament. Here’s an edited version of what she had to say:- I am often inexplicably mistaken for a member of the Labour Party. I can’t think why. I’m a Conservative – to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant. Born in Wimbledon, yes, but I grew up in Nigeria. I chose to make the United Kingdom my home. Growing up in Nigeria I saw real poverty and experienced it. Going without electricity, doing my homework by candlelight because the state electricity board could not provide power.

Thursday

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Barometer | 13 July 2017

The joy of Sixtus Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg and his wife announced the birth of their sixth child, a son called Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher. But is that appropriate? — A sixth child ought to be ‘Sextus’. Five popes were called Sixtus but the name is believed to derive from a Greek word meaning ‘polished’. — Among the living, there is Sixtus Henry of Bourbon-Parma, whom some believe to be the rightful monarch of Spain, and Sixtus Preiss, a Viennese hip-hop artist whose work includes Samba Feelin Beein This, Trilingual Dance Sexperience and, appropriately, given the Tory performance in the general election, What a Fine Mess We’ve Made of This.

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Letters | 13 July 2017

Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the anti-Brexit campaign and the persistent underestimation of the United Kingdom’s strengths (‘Down with declinism’, 8 July). It is ironic that the heirs of the old 19th-century Liberal party, the Liberal Democrats, are among its principal proponents, for declinism goes back even further than the 1880s cited in his article. Fearful of the advances demonstrated at the Paris International Exposition of 1867 by continental countries in engineering (e.g.

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Hope in Mosul

For the title of world’s most benighted city, Mosul takes some beating. Liberated from Saddam Hussein by US forces in 2003, the ancient Assyrian town was pummelled by years of insurgency before being seized by Isis in 2014 and its population subjected to militant theocracy. It has no water supply, no infrastructure, it has been gutted by occupation and there are some 850,000 displaced citizens. The Iraqi government’s long and bloody battle to regain what remains of Mosul culminated this week in a visit by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to declare victory. Many will find it hard to see anything to celebrate, given the destruction that has been wrought in the nine-month campaign to free the city from Isis control.

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Portrait of the week | 13 July 2017

Home In her first big speech since the general election, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘I say to the other parties in the House of Commons… come forward with your own views and ideas.’ She was responding to a government-commissioned review of modern working practices by Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, and a former adviser to Tony Blair. The report was hostile to payment in cash and suggested that immigrant visas might insist on non-cash payment for work. Unemployment fell by 64,000 to 1.49 million. A leading article in the Evening Standard, edited by one of Mrs May’s enemies, George Osborne, commented on the position of David Davis: ‘For the first time in his political career he is trying to be loyal.

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to 2315: Trunk call

4, 40, 43, 1, 3, 16 and 17 were all examples of PORTMANTEAU words, into which are packed the sense (and sound) of two other words.   First prize F. Whitehead, Harrogate, N. Yorks Runners-up Mark Rowntree, London SE10; D.G.