The Spectator

Special Offa A regulation passed by the Welsh government to prevent people travelling from Covid hotspots in England has brought comparisons to Offa’s Dyke. — There is no firm evidence that the dyke, which takes its name from the king of Mercia between ad 727 and 796, even stretched along the entire English-Welsh border. Moreover, some of the sections which do survive have been dated as early as ad 430, 300 years before Offa’s reign. But whoever built it, its design seems to confirm that it was designed to keep the Welsh out of England rather than the other way round: the ditch is on the west, Welsh side and the dyke takes such a path as to ensure that there are uninterrupted distant views into Wales.

State of the Union Sir: Writing in a week that an opinion poll shows 58 per cent support for independence in Scotland, it seems bizarre for Professor Tombs to claim that commentators are ignoring ‘the death throes of separatism’ (‘Out together’, 17 October). He argues that nationalist supporters rely on the Brexit and Covid-19 crises to advance their cause, and that they will be in retreat once things return to normal. Then, once doubts begin to bubble up about the financial and economic uncertainties of independence, Scottish voters will return to the unionist cause. These arguments may give him some comfort, but here in Scotland they seem unreal.

Wind worries Sir: You are right to side with the 2013 version of Boris Johnson, when he claimed that wind power could not pull the skin off a rice pudding (‘Boris’s second wind’, 10 October). However, it was wrong to claim that offshore wind at £40 per megawatt hour makes Hinkley Point C, at over twice that price, look like a bad deal. The nuclear plant will be able to provide reliable, constant baseload power for up to 50 years. A wind plant will provide power only when the wind is blowing (and not blowing too hard). To provide reliable baseload requires fossil-fuelled backup. Second, the £40 per megawatt hour is the current strike price offered by the winners of projects to build new capacity.

When the Black Lives Matter protests struck London in the same week that Public Health England published a report into the higher death rate from Covid among the black and ethnic minority population, the Prime Minister did not quite know how to react. He did what modern Prime Ministers so often do when presented with a little difficulty: he kicked the matter into touch by appointing a commission — on ‘race and ethnic disparities’. At least the person charged with overseeing the commission, Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch, was brave enough to challenge those who were lazily trying to make out Britain is a racist hellhole. Britain is, she asserted in the Commons, ‘one of the best countries in the world to be a black person’.

The unclued lights form pairs of famous soloists and the instruments they play; 1A/19, 5/34, 23/8, 31/39, 43/16A.