The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Blame the regulators, not the water companies

No competition Sir: Ross Clark’s compelling critique of the water companies comes to the wrong conclusion (‘Water isn’t working’, 13 August). He is right to say that water privatisation has been a failure, but this was inevitable given the nature of the industry – a monopoly providing an essential public service. Clark’s suggestion that there should be more competition is unworkable for the simple reason that there is too much fixed investment stretching back to the 19th century and we all have only one pipe into our homes. There are parallels with the rail industry, where a quarter of a century of trying to introduce competition has resulted in a handful of open access services and vastly higher costs.

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Portrait of the week: Inflation soars as Boris moves out of No. 10

Home The annual rate of inflation rose to 10.1 per cent, its highest since 1982. Average wages rose by 4.7 per cent between April and June, but inflation in that quarter left average workers 3 per cent less well-off than before. The supermarket Iceland was to offer customers interest-free loans of between £25 and £100, repayable at £10 a week, to help them buy food. Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, called for £29 billion to be spent on freezing energy prices for six months for all consumers, rich and poor, partly to be paid for by extending the windfall tax on oil and gas. Railway workers belonging to the RMT union went on strike for another two days.

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Somewhere XII – Solution

30 July is Independence Day in Vanuatu in MELANESIA (23D). Its capital city is PORT VILA (39/16), one of its volcanoes is LOPEVI (30), an indigenous reptile is the FLOWERPOT SNAKE (11/36) and its national anthem is YUMI YUMI YUMI (4/43A/43D). Its former name was THE NEW HEBRIDES (diagonally from 1) which must be shaded.

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Don’t blame Brexit for our lack of workers

It has become received wisdom that Brexit has condemned Britain to chronic labour shortages. Many of the migrant workers who used to staff our hotels and restaurants, install our bathrooms and look after our children, returned home during lockdown and never returned. Sometimes that is blamed on the end of free movement, other times more generally on Brexit Britain somehow having become less attractive in the global competition for people. It is a notion which is easily disproved, however, by a simple figure published this week by the Office for National Statistics which went woefully under-reported. There has been no drop in migrant workers in Britain. On the contrary, there were 6.3 million foreign-born workers at the last count – a record high.

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Do Brits take as many holidays as Boris?

Testing, testing When were A levels first sat? They can be traced back to the Oxford Local, an external examination for schools instigated by Oxford University in 1858. Out of 401 candidates only 150 passed, with the Educational Times complaining that the questions were more searching than those on Oxford’s BA exam two decades earlier. – The first standardised national exam designed to be taken at 18 was the Higher School Certificate introduced by the Board of Education in 1917. In order to pass, candidates had to satisfy the examiners in a minimum of five subjects. The certificate was replaced by A levels in 1951. Bone-dry Britain How unusual is the drought?

Thursday

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A-level results: has government reversed grade inflation?

As A-level results come out today, we will find out if the government has made any progress in stemming exam grade inflation. As always, some candidates will celebrate while others will be disappointed. This year, though, the latter group is expected to be more numerous because exam boards are supposed to be clamping down on the implausibly high grades awarded during the two years when school exams were suspended due to lockdowns. Anyone looking solely at exam grades without other information to hand might wonder: what was it about Covid that appeared to boost the educational attainment of so many 18-year-olds? In 2019, the last normal year, 76 per cent of A-level entries were awarded grades A* to C.

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Letters: The Tavistock is a national health scandal

The race isn’t run Sir: Bravo Fiona Unwin (‘Rooting for Rishi’, 6 August) for the best piece I have read on the grassroots take on the Conservative party’s leadership election. Having attended several such hustings both this time and over the years, this one does remind me of 2005: David Davis vs David Cameron. Lots of career-focused senior MPs backing an early front-runner, and then quiet reflection from the life-experienced sensible grassroots membership. Few predicted the 2005 winner until that electric party conference speech. This time, with dozens of events like the one the vice-president of West Suffolk describes, the typical Spectator reader rather than the Westminster hack will select the next prime minister. It’s all to play for.

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What are the rules around ex-presidents’ paperwork?

Tracing paper FBI agents raided Donald Trump’s estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, in search of papers he is accused of removing illegally from the White House. What are the rules? — The Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978 in the wake of Watergate, makes clear that documents relating to a president’s time in office are public property. They may not be destroyed or removed from the White House except with the written permission of the US archivist, which may be given if the records are no longer deemed to have historical or evidential value. — The public can obtain access to the records under freedom of information laws five years after a president has left office. However, in limited circumstances a former president can delay that for up to 12 years.

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Portrait of the week: Energy bills up, NHS waiting lists down and hosepipes off

Home Energy bills will be £4,266 for a typical household by January, according to the consultancy Cornwall Insight, which had put the sum at £3,616 only a week earlier. Ofgem had decided since then to shorten the period over which suppliers can recover their costs. Gordon Brown, prime minister 2007-10, declared that Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, competitors to succeed him, must hold an emergency Budget to deal with the ‘financial timebomb’ of energy prices. ‘If they do not,’ he said, ‘parliament should be recalled to force them to do so.

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2562: 3 X 2 – solution

The unclued lights are words (or one phrase) which contain three pairs (3 x 2, in the title) of double letters: 13 Tennessee, 15/14 Sweet tooth, 17/37 Successfully, 21/24/39 Whippoorwill, 31/2 Bookkeeper, 41 Committee, 42/6 Barrenness.

Thursday

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Can Liz Truss be trusted?

Liz Truss has taken the lead in the Tory leadership race with an agenda that seems radical and ambitious, whereas Rishi Sunak appears to offer only elegantly managed decline. Truss promises instant relief from the rising cost of government; Sunak offers to reverse barely half of his own tax rises – and over the course of the rest of the decade. To promise more, he says, is to sell ‘fairytales’. Truss says a better future is possible with enough vision, ideas and, perhaps most importantly, resolve. Ms Truss came up with a promising idea this week: regional pay boards, so that civil service salaries could be set relative to the local cost of living.

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Letters: How Rishi Sunak could beat the odds

Injured party Sir: Prue Leith’s short interlude as a Conservative party member and subsequent resignation underlines a feature of the current membership and the impact of resignations (Diary, 30 July). The Johnson era has seen the continuing decline in party membership brought about by the resignation of many members who were dissatisfied with the evidence of endemic dysfunctionality by the Prime Minister. The consequence is that the membership is likely to be dominated by Johnson diehards. Liz Truss is certainly focusing on them. Those who did not renew their membership but are still likely to be Conservative supporters in a general election are now disenfranchised. Sir Charles Walker is right to call for an overhaul of this electoral process.

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When did ‘best before’ dates begin?

An idea past its sell-by date Waitrose has announced the removal of ‘best before’ dates from many food products. – The idea of printing dates began with Marks & Spencer in the 1950s, but only for use in the stockroom. They first appeared in the company’s shops in 1970 and were named ‘sell-by’ dates from 1973, launched with an advertising campaign saying: ‘The sell-by date means that St Michael foods are fresh.’ There was also a TV advert which featured Twiggy. – The concept was quickly adopted by other supermarkets after evidence that shoppers liked the reassurance of a date.

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Portrait of the week: Hosepipe bans, England’s women win the Euros and a strike over dragons

Home BP reported quarterly profits of £6.9 billion, its biggest for 14 years, after oil and gas prices rose steeply. Typical domestic energy bills were forecast by the consultancy Cornwall Insight to go above £3,600 a year in the coming winter. Under the family scheme for visas, 31,300 Ukrainians had arrived in the United Kingdom, and 72,700 under the sponsorship scheme. British Airways suspended new ticket sales for short-haul flights from Heathrow until at least 15 August, to meet the airport’s limit on the number of passengers departing each day of 100,000. On 1 August, 696 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats; in July the total was 3,683, and more than 17,000 so far in 2022.

Thursday

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Germany’s energy crisis is a warning to Britain

During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy. A decade on and it is Berlin doing the begging. Europe has reluctantly agreed a 15 per cent cut in gas use this winter in the hope that German factories can stay open and German citizens can keep from freezing. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom threatened to reduce the gas flowing through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline yet again so that Germany would receive only a fifth of the amount it did before the Ukrainian invasion. While Berlin has said it plans to wean itself off Russian gas over the next few years, Vladimir Putin is taunting Europe by cutting supplies faster than Germany can cut its dependence.

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Letters: Let’s get fracking

Get fracking Sir: All credit to The Spectator for grabbing the cancelled Tory leadership debate slot (‘The final three’, 23 July) and for quizzing the contenders on the massive cost of net zero. Rishi Sunak’s response was particularly disappointing. Here is a man who has financial acumen and who has spent his entire cabinet career in the Treasury. Yet he would have us believe that the offshore wind industry, whose biggest costs are incurred in erecting huge structures of steel, iron, plastic/resin and concrete, has somehow contrived to cut those costs by nearly three-quarters over a decade.

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Portrait of the week: Sunak vs Truss, London dodges a blackout and 94st walrus capsizes boats

Home In a television debate between the two contenders for the leadership of the Conservative party (and hence the prime ministership), Rishi Sunak said it would be irresponsible to put the country in even more debt by cutting taxes and Liz Truss said that the tax rises he approved would put Britain into a recession. Mr Sunak was criticised for interrupting. A later proposal he made to cut VAT when the price cap on energy bills rose above £3,000 only brought accusations of a U-turn. He agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Neil on Channel 4, but Ms Truss didn’t. Opinion polls put Ms Truss well ahead among Conservative voters; Labour voters preferred Mr Sunak.

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Which country has hosted Eurovision the most?

The longest heatwave How did the recent heatwave compare with that of 1976? That year, the temperature peaked at 35.9˚C at Cheltenham on 3 July. This did not even break the UK temperature record at the time – 36.7˚C recorded in Northamptonshire on 9 August 1911. No recording from 1976 currently features on the list of Britain’s ten hottest recorded days. By contrast, in 2022 temperatures peaked at 40.3˚C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Spectators at Wimbledon protect themselves from the sun wearing newspaper hats and books on their heads, during the 1976 heatwave (Getty Images) – However, the 1976 heatwave was far more prolonged. Temperatures surpassed 90˚F (32.