The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Doctors on strike, Labour on the attack and Tupperware in trouble

From our UK edition

Home President Joe Biden of the United States visited Northern Ireland, shook hands with party leaders, talked with Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (though not about a trade agreement), and went on to the Republic of Ireland, for the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The accountancy firm Johnston Carmichael resigned as auditors to the Scottish National party. Its decision coincided with a police search of the SNP’s headquarters in Edinburgh following the arrest and release without charge of Peter Murrell, the party’s former chief executive and the husband of Nicola Sturgeon, who was the SNP leader and first minister.

The Spectator

Letters: The C of E has become too broad a church

From our UK edition

Too broad a Church Sir: I am not implacably hostile to Justin Welby; I share Christian empathy with the Archbishop’s earnest struggles to attract a spiritually dead nation back to the Church of England as described by Dan Hitchens’s article (‘The lost shepherds’, 8 April). However I cannot agree with his strategy. A liberal church is doomed to failure because it’s selling something that we already have. I ask our bishops: what is the Church’s USP? What does it offer that we can’t get elsewhere? The Church used to stand apart as a bastion against a hostile world, but if all it does is follow along behind modern secular fads then it is admitting its own redundancy. If you permit everything, you stand for nothing.

Tuesday

The Spectator

The legacy of Nigel Lawson

From our UK edition

Nigel Lawson was the most consequential chancellor in modern British history. He gave the world a case study in how to overturn a failed consensus. He was guided throughout his political career by the political principles articulated when he was editor of this magazine. His legacy is so rich that it offers a wide choice of lessons, three of which stand out for Rishi Sunak today. The first is one that the Prime Minister himself writes about in his article – the importance of preparing for battles. Lawson wanted lasting change and realised that radicalism is pointless without strategy. Tax can only ever be a reflection of the spending rate: to cut tax revenue without spending restraint will only ever lead to the restoration of high taxes.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Delays in Dover, decline in house prices and Donald Trump in the dock

From our UK edition

Home Britain joined Australia, Japan and nine other countries in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the CPTPP. Kemi Badenoch, Business and Trade Secretary, said that projections of its contribution to the growth of the UK economy, of 0.08 per cent over a decade, didn’t tell the whole story. Teachers voted for more strikes; the Passport Office began five weeks of strikes. The Food Standards Agency investigated allegations that a meat supplier falsely labelled foreign pork as British and mixed rotting and fresh meat. In March, house prices were 3.1 per cent less than a year before, according to the Nationwide – the largest annual decline since July 2009. In March, the pound gained 3 per cent against the dollar.

The Spectator

Letters: The positive case for daycare

From our UK edition

Major mistake Sir: Douglas Murray (‘Our poor deluded MPs’, 1 April) contends that John Major is widely regarded as ‘one of the worst prime ministers in living memory’. If so, that seems unfair. Although a greyish figure, Major had to operate with a narrow parliamentary majority and a fractious party. It is often forgotten that he was instrumental in establishing the foundations of peace in Northern Ireland, for which Tony Blair is perhaps given too much credit. Moreover, it is difficult to name any of Major’s successors who didn’t leave No. 10 without black marks on their record. Ranking PMs is something for history.

The Spectator

How deadly is the Grand National?

From our UK edition

Falling at fences Activists from an animal rights group were secretly filmed apparently plotting to disrupt the Grand National, protesting in part at the number of horses killed at the event. – Since 1839, 88 horses have died either during the race or were put down as a result of injuries. Four died in the past decade and nine in the decade before that. The deadliest race was 1954, when the event was held on soft ground. Of the 29 horses entered, only nine finished. Four died. The longest periods without a fatality were 1908-22, 1892-1900, 1873-81, 1961-66 and 2013-18. State of the unions How much are public sector unions costing the taxpayer?

The Spectator

2596: charades – solution

From our UK edition

RUNNERS (10), ANSWER (28) and MEADOW (29D) defined FIELD; PROVISIONS (18), MANAGE (38) and PASSENGER (30) defined FARE; and THRUSH (11), PICNIC (16) and COMPILER (20) defined FIELDFARE (above the grid) First prize Steve Reszetniak, Margate, Kent Runners-up Alan Norman, Impington, Cambridge; Amanda Spielman, London SW4.

Wednesday

The Spectator

The lessons of the trans debate

From our UK edition

The World Athletics Council has taken the decisive step of announcing that transgender women who underwent male puberty before their transition will henceforth be excluded from female events. The decision has been made, according to the council, to ‘protect the future of the female category’. World rugby has already made a similar ruling and other sports are expected to follow suit. It has been a long and heated debate, but a consensus is emerging on the side of common sense. Those who overreached on this issue are counting the cost. Nicola Sturgeon’s bizarre gender self-ID law that would have granted women’s rights to anyone who wanted to claim them went on to sink her premiership.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Scotland’s new First Minister, Prince Harry’s day in court and Amsterdam’s campaign against British men

From our UK edition

Home Humza Yousaf was elected leader of the Scottish National party, beating Kate Forbes by 52 per cent to 48 per cent after Ash Regan was eliminated; MSPs then elected him First Minister. Of 19 transgender prisoners in custody in Scotland, 12 began their transition ‘after their date of admission’, according to data obtained under Freedom of Information laws. The National Executive Committee of the Labour party voted 22 to 12 to bar Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate at the next election. The terrorism threat level in Northern Ireland was raised from substantial to severe, meaning an attack was highly likely.

John Levett

Bottle

From our UK edition

He wakes. Alive. No cash. No phone. Down from their ash trees squirrels nose through drink and dope enough to stone a wood’s astonishment of crows. He stirs and gives the crows a scare. Pinned up with lamps, tar paper sky flaps open at a corner where, tipped out of dusk, moths flicker by, skim rings around him, put to flight such stars as steel-capped boots might spark, shake out the red from each tail light before their wings fold into bark; its scabbed and corrugated face that mocks him as, still pissed, he tries to wave down cars or, flailing, chase light vanishing inside cats’ eyes, gone searching for an end, a trick with ampoule, vial or blister pack or, waiting for its twist and click, the white top of a childproof cap.

The Spectator

Who was the first April Fool?

From our UK edition

Fooling about When did the tradition of 1 April pranks begin? One theory is that it derives from the ancient Roman festival of Hilaria, which involved games and pranks – although that was held on the spring equinox, which falls more than a week earlier than 1 April.  — In Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, a fox fools a cockerel ‘since March began thirty days and two’. Another explanation is that ‘All Fools’ Day’ referred to backward country folk in 16th-century France who didn’t realise that the adoption of the Julian calendar had moved New Year’s Day from 25 March (a week’s festivities used to end on 1 April) to 1 January. However, the first reference to a ‘poisson d’Avril’ was in a poem from 1508, before the calendar change was made.

The Spectator

Letters: Speak up for our children

From our UK edition

Care of children Sir: At last people, namely Harriet Sergeant (‘The ghost children’, 25 March) and Rod Liddle (‘Childcare: an inconvenient truth’), are speaking up for the children. In so many areas of life today we sacrifice our children for the sake of our adult fetishes and fancies. The only people who have no political voice are our children. I am not suggesting that we lower the voting age to five; only that we try to do our best on their behalf. Why not spend the money that is going to provide 30 hours of childcare per week for babies over nine months old simply to pay the mothers to stay at home and look after them themselves? I can tell you which the babies would prefer.

John Levett

My friend Proudhon

From our UK edition

I painted beaches, seasides, shores or waves dashed on a harbour wall, a mackerel sky, a signature, to peddle to the gullible, until the seasons ran aground with darkly varnished fishing smacks or chalk-white gulls soared to astound the cliffs that threw their shadows back. My friend Proudhon said property was theft and so each rock and shell, each stone turned over by the sea, was never mine to lift or sell; as if I’d stumbled on by chance, light-fingered, dawn’s exuberance, pickpocketing, as morning came, sienna, cobalt, cadmium.

Thursday

The Spectator

Innovator of the Year Awards 2023 – entries close 16 June

From our UK edition

The Spectator’s prestigious Economic Innovator of the Year Awards, in partnership with Investec, are now in their sixth year. These Awards, celebrating the shining talents of British entrepreneurship and widely recognised in business and investment communities throughout the UK, have attracted growing numbers of entries year by year. Potential winners are passionate about their innovative products and services, determined to make a positive contribution to society, financially resilient and capable of scaling up nationally and internationally.

Wednesday

The Spectator

The Boris distraction

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson should not be forgiven for his handling of lockdown. He needlessly criminalised everyday behaviour when voluntary guidelines would have sufficed. Nannies were prosecuted for delivering birthday cards to children; friends were apprehended for meeting up in the park. Meanwhile, the officials who had created these rules flouted them regularly. Johnson wrongly denied that his staff were having parties. But compared with everything else that went wrong during that period, his false denial is trivial. It is surprising, then, that the House of Commons seems obsessed by it, rather than by the collapse of the democratic apparatus during lockdown, or the fact that the government was allowed to deploy emergency powers long after the crisis had passed.

The Spectator

How healthy do we think we are?

From our UK edition

Beyond a joke Is it time to rewrite an old joke? A letter published in Time in 1963 suggested that heaven would consist of French chefs, British police, German engineers, Italian lovers and Swiss bankers, while hell would consist of English chefs, German police, French engineers, Swiss lovers and Italian bankers. British police, however, have sunk in the world’s estimation – a poll last year revealed that only 44% of people trust them, which puts us behind France and Germany. The most trusted police are in Denmark and the Netherlands, where they are trusted by 58%. The good news is that British chefs are no longer staffing hell’s kitchens. According to a YouGov survey of 24 countries in 2019, British food came mid-table, with Scandinavian countries filling the bottom places.

The Spectator

Letters: The dangers of certainty

From our UK edition

Uncertain times Sir: Kate Andrews’s article on the era of economic certainty (‘Crash test’, 18 March) is not the first article I have read – especially in the financial press – telling us that we live in uncertain times, as though at some stage in the past everyone knew exactly what was going to happen. I am unable to recall such a time. I would argue that what we really should worry about is certainty. When people start talking about the end of history, claiming that there is a certain fortune to be made in buying cryptocurrencies or when ‘everybody’ knows the most important thing is to achieve net zero, that is the time to be worried. ‘Why did we not see it coming?’ the late Queen is reported to have asked about the 2008 banking crisis.