The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Harry’s confessions, house prices fall and Cornish space launch fails

Home Government ministers held short meetings with trade union representatives as strikes continued by ambulance drivers, teachers, bus drivers and driving test examiners. A bill was introduced to require some workers to provide a minimum level of service during strikes in the NHS, education, fire and rescue, border security, nuclear decommissioning and public transport. Evri, the courier formerly known as Hermes, said ‘Our service has not been as good as we would have liked’ as parcels were reported delayed or undelivered. James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, and Maros Sefcovic, a vice-president of the European Commission, held ‘cordial and constructive’ talks on Northern Ireland trade.

The Spectator

2585: Happy anniversary – solution

Puzzle 2585 appeared on 10 December 2022, an anniversary of HUMAN RIGHTS DAY (at 1 Across) whose letters can be used to make the ten symmetrically placed unclued entries. The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10-12-48.

The Spectator

Who was the monarchy’s original wicked stepmother?

Wicked stepmothers Prince Harry said that he was worried Camilla would become his ‘wicked stepmother’. But she would have to be rotten indeed to match the English monarchy’s original wicked stepmother, Aelfthryth, who married King Edgar in 965. Upon Edgar’s death the succession should have passed to his elder son, Edward, but Aelfthryth had other ideas, wanting her own son, Aethelred – King Edgar’s younger son – to take the throne. She invited Edward to meet at Corfe Castle, Dorset, where, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, she sent out her servants to stab the boy – then aged about 16 – to death. As a result, it was Aethelred who became king, with Aelfthryth becoming regent until he reached adulthood. Crime time Why are people in prison?

The Spectator

Letters: What Benedict XVI did for Catholicism

Oxford’s Big Brother Sir: Your Oxfordshire council correspondent (Letters, 7 January), who refers to himself as the corporate director of environment and place, refutes Rod Liddle’s description of councillors as ‘dictators’ and his criticism of the way Oxford will be divided into zones to reduce traffic. Bill Cotton’s letter put me in mind of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The sectors, the checkpoints, the control of access, the difficulties in just trying to go about your business, the paperwork. Ah, the paperwork! Cotton’s letter mentions residents’ applications for permits – at cost – to drive through the ‘filters’ for 100 days or 25 times a year for county visitors. How will people keep track of these?

Thursday

The Spectator

Wanted: a research producer

The Spectator is the world’s oldest magazine. More people than ever are reading us, online and in print, and they’re listening and watching our broadcast output too. Our podcasts now get downloaded more than two million times each month, and Spectator TV often gets more than a million views a month. We are looking to hire a research producer, working in our broadcast team. Our team of four set up Spectator TV and produce podcasts on everything from politics to books and food, and we have big ambitions for the future. We need someone to provide research, deliver briefings, write entertaining questions and scripts, and support the team with editing it all. You must understand what The Spectator, in print, online and in broadcast, is all about.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Harry’s losing game

Four months into his reign, King Charles has seen his fair share of drama: two prime ministers and a wave of public attacks from his second son. ‘I would like to get my father back,’ says the Duke of Sussex, in part of a television interview to promote Spare, his book, which is released next week. The book is, of course, not exactly a sincere appeal for familial unity. It is yet another broadside against Harry’s family, the House of Windsor. The main revelation is a story about how an argument with his brother once escalated into a fight: one in which he says his necklace was ripped. The public are by now familiar with Prince Harry’s story: the royal family’s ‘never complain, never explain’ motto is a deception, he says, as he explains his complaints.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A&E crisis, Alps snow shortage and walrus cancels fireworks

Home The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said some A&E departments were in a ‘complete state of crisis’. Railway workers belonging to the RMT union and Aslef began five days of strikes. Rail fares will rise by 5.9 per cent from March after the government decided to cap them; usually they go up a percentage point more than the July inflation figure, which in 2022 was 12.3 per cent. More than a million households with prepayment meters did not redeem their monthly energy support vouchers during the cold spell in December; postal strikes and difficulty of contacting suppliers were blamed. In December, the Bank of England had raised UK interest rates to their highest level for 14 years, to 3.5 per cent from 3 per cent.

The Spectator

2584: Song XI – solution

‘MANY A TEAR HAS TO FALL’ (10/30) is the first line of It’s All in the Game whose tune, originally called ‘MELODY IN A MAJOR’ (1D), was composed by Charles G. Dawes, a future NOBEL LAUREATE (40D/2) and was often played by FRITZ KREISLER (30/6). TALLEST (34): It’s ALL in the game (TEST). DAWES (diagonally from row 4) was to be shaded.

The Spectator

How often do you see a walrus in Britain?

Tusk force A new year firework display in Scarborough was cancelled for fear of disturbing a walrus which was resting on the seafront. How unusual is it to see a walrus in Britain? – There have been 27 recorded sightings in UK waters in the past 130 years, the most recent in Seahouses Harbour, Northumberland, in November 2021. – In the same year a walrus continued even further south, visiting northern Spain before returning to the Arctic. – There have been 11 sightings in Irish waters over the past century. A 125-stone walrus was responsible for sinking several anchored boats in Irish harbours in 2021. Top of the crops A Radio 4 programme, Rethink, repeated claims that crop yields could fall by 30 per cent by 2050 as a result of climate change.

The Spectator

Letters: The vileness of Richard Harris

Three kings Sir: In his analysis of British politics over the past 12 months (‘A year is a long time in politics’, 17 December), James Forsyth named 2022 as ‘the year of the three British prime ministers’. Some interesting comparisons were drawn with Prussia’s year of the three emperors in 1888. Two alternative choices slightly closer to home could have been illustrated through the dramatic consequences of the two years when England saw three kings. In both 1066 and 1483 the monarchy changed three times, ushering in profound political upheaval with lengthy repercussions. Perhaps in the long view, and contrary to Whig interpretations of history, 2022 was not so exceptional after all.

Julian Stannard

Piazza Della Lepre

There’s a black door in Piazza Della Lepre with neoclassical figures. The stairs lead up to a knocking shop, at the very top. The best in the city, oh what ceilings! There’s no lift. You must walk up the slate stairs.  The stairs are steep. Not everyone can: heart seizure, ennui, brain softening and some who do never put their nose in the piazza again,  extinguished – it would seem – by rapture. Number 9, Piazza Della Lepre. Books have been written and songs have been sung. Any man of that age would have taken their pleasure there back in the day. They were young. They didn’t walk up the stairs. They – more or less – ran.

Sunday

The Spectator

Christmas after our darkest hour (1940)

Below is The Spectator’s leading article from Christmas 1940, which you can find on our fully-digitised archive. We have reached the second Christmas of the war, and we are keeping it with what heart we may. No confidence in the rightness of our cause is lacking, nor has doubt emerged about the ultimate issue of the struggle. What penetrates men’s souls today is not concern for their personal fate, or even for their country’s, but a sense, borne in on them with sombre force as this festival comes round, of the tragedy of the conflict in which millions of human beings are still locked on the day when the message of peace and good will to all mankind should be sounding from every pulpit and rung out by the bells of every steeple.

Monday

Julian Stannard

The CLA

Sectioned, I was sent to the Cicada Lunatic Asylum. Doctor Coppola signed the papers. His patients, he explained, were beleaguered by obsessions. Hence the cicadas which colonised the trees in the great courtyard. We were encouraged to adore them. This was Doctor Coppola’s radical way of defying insanity, he was known across Europe. It wasn’t easy at first. Sbagliando si impara. Practice makes perfect. Imagine locked wards of relatively decent people flapping their tongues. Even the cicadas thought we were cicadas. Saturdays Doctor Coppola conducted his monomaniacal troupe from the gazebo. People came from Spoleto: wooden benches, jugs of wine, hand-rolled cigarettes. Bravissimo! Bravissimo!

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: Russia invades Ukraine, the Queen dies and Britain gets through three prime ministers

January Civilians participate in a Kyiv Territorial Defence unit training session as Russia amasses troops on its border, 29 January 2022 (Getty Images) The first day of the year reached 16.3°C in St James’s Park, London. In France, 874 cars were set alight for the new year. Southern Railway suspended services because of staff absence through Covid. The legal obligation to wear face coverings in England ended. Sue Gray delivered her report into Downing Street parties. Together Energy became the 28th energy supplier to go bust as wholesale gas prices rose. Inflation reached 5.4 per cent. Some 1,339 migrants crossed the Channel in small craft. Around 100,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukraine border.

The Spectator

A Christmas hope for Ukraine – and the world

This year, for the first time, millions of Ukrainians will celebrate Christmas on 25 December. The Orthodox Church had used the Julian calendar and marked the nativity on 7 January – but parishes are moving to a new ecclesiastical hierarchy, dropping ties with Moscow. The invasion has accelerated the forging of a distinct Ukrainian identity: a people united by spending winter without power or running water due to the Russian strategy of firing missiles at power stations and using the cold as a weapon against the general population. Moscow’s aim is to erode morale – and the will to fight. Like much of Vladimir Putin’s strategy, though, this isn’t working. Ukraine has spent months preparing for this winter and the ordeal has, if anything, stiffened public resolve.

The Spectator

Letters: The politics of easy-peelers

Divided we stand Sir: I was pleased to see that Jenny McCartney picked up on the recent poll from the Irish Times which took a lot of air out of the Irish Unity hot air balloon (‘A bridge too far’, 10 December). British citizens in Northern Ireland have been told for years that a united Ireland is inevitable and indeed is just around the corner. I am now 52 years old and all throughout my childhood (which coincided with the euphemistically titled ‘Troubles’) sympathetic commentators and republican politicians said we should all prepare for such a time. By 2016 we would be in an all-Ireland state to coincide with the centenary of the violent Easter Rising. That didn’t happen. Now we are told by Irish republican lobby groups that it is coming in a decade. It’s not.

The Spectator

What did psychics say would happen in 2022?

Bank on it One event in 2023 which the government and Bank of England will not want to draw attention to is the 100th anniversary of the peak of the Weimar inflation. – The value of the German mark had already been plummeting in the early 1920s as the German government printed money to pay reparations to the victors of the Great War. But inflation was given a further boost in early 1923 as yet more money was printed in order to pay striking workers in the occupied Ruhr region. Between the beginning of 1923 and November of that year, prices rose a billionfold. Stabilisation was only achieved after the Weimar government issued new banknotes backed by mortgage securities, which in turn were backed by the price of gold. Inflation, strikes, demands for reparations.

The Spectator

2022 Christmas quiz – the answers

Verbals 1. Boris Johnson, on resigning as leader of the Conservative party 2. Liz Truss, on being elected leader of the Conservative party 3. King Charles, greeting Liz Truss for her first audience as prime minister with him 4. Sue Gray in her report on ‘Alleged gatherings on government premises during Covid restrictions’ 5. President Joe Biden of the United States, of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, in a speech in Warsaw 6. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister 7. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, in Parliament 8. Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia party, who became prime minister of Italy 9. Liz Truss, as foreign secretary, on being asked whether Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, was ‘friend or foe’ 10.

Friday

The Spectator

A Spectator Christmas poll: What gives you hope?

Volodymyr Zelensky   Volodymyr Zelensky makes a surprise visit to the liberated city Kherson, 14 November 2022 (Getty Images) I am inspired by the Ukrainian people – a courageous, creative and strong people who united in one moment against the brutal and unjust Russian aggression. All Ukrainians today are warriors – those on the front line, volunteers, journalists, IT specialists, doctors, teachers, absolutely everyone. These are strong and courageous people who are fighting for their homeland, their country and their lives. And nothing can break them. Not bombs, not rocket strikes, not the lack of electricity, water and heat in their homes, nor other types of Russian terror. This nation delights and inspires me and gives me confidence in the victory of Ukraine.