The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

What are the best pandemic board games?

From our UK edition

Dangerous games Sage scientists advised against playing board games at Christmas. Some games to consider if you are feeling subversive:Pandemic Co-operative board game inspired by 2003 Sars outbreak in which players pool their talents to defeat a deadly disease. Was stocked by the unlikely gift shop at the US Centers for Disease Control.Corona Battle Against Covid-19 German game where players battle to defend their businesses against the pandemic.Plague Inc. Players compete as diseases to infect the greatest number of people.Viral Players compete to try to infect a human body, braving its immune system.Infected One person plays plague doctor, while the others are villagers competing to try to stop him infecting the village.

The Spectator

2483: In my soup – solution

From our UK edition

Unclued lights are anagrams of animals: PRAENOMINA (1A: Pomeranian), MARTIAN (18: tamarin), LARBOARD (21: Labrador), SHORE (28: horse), PROTEIN (42: pointer), MACLE (6: camel), MENTALISM (24: Simmental), LATER (25: ratel), CREMATE (31: meercat) and MAGYAR (34: margay). The title suggests the song ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’. First prize A.R. Wightman, Harpenden, HertsRunners-up Roderick Rhodes, Goldsborough, N. Yorks; G.H.

Tuesday

The Spectator

Full list: the Tory tier rebels

From our UK edition

This evening, the House of Commons voted to enact the new tiered system, which will come into force when the national lockdown ends this week. Boris Johnson did not emerge unscathed though, with 78 MPs voting against his proposals, including 55 MPs from his own party. Labour leader Keir Starmer instructed his MPs to abstain on the vote, but 15 decided to vote against the government's plans.

Thursday

The Spectator

The Conservatives are losing the fiscal high ground

From our UK edition

Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures that Rishi Sunak laid out in his spending review this week boggle the mind. He has been Chancellor barely ten months, yet has already borrowed more than Gordon Brown did in ten years. The upshot of his Commons statement this week is that Sunak will carry on spending money as fast as the Bank of England can print it. But as he knows, debt bubbles have a habit of bursting. The response to this crisis may sow the seeds of the next one. It’s a point which Sunak has a hard time making in Downing Street, let alone with his party. The Prime Minister likes to use the language of low taxes, economic dynamism and fast recoveries.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Christmas is on, Trump is off and Piglet stars on a 50p piece

From our UK edition

Home The AstraZeneca vaccine developed by the University of Oxford was found to be 70 per cent effective — 90 per cent among those given a half-sized first dose and a full-sized second dose. It does not require supercooling. The United Kingdom had ordered 100 million doses. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 22 November, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 54,626 including 2,860 in the past week, compared with 2,878 the week before. The proportion of secondary school pupils absent for reasons connected to Covid-19 rose to 22 per cent. Travellers from abroad would from 15 December be allowed to pay for a coronavirus test after five days’ quarantine and be let out if it proved negative.

The Spectator

Letters: Solidarity is the best thing for Scotland

From our UK edition

SNP sophistry Sir: Andrew Wilson (‘Scot free’, 21 November) poses the question: ‘What if the case for independence was a highly sophisticated position?’ If only. For the SNP position is one of sophistry rather than sophistication. Wilson states that Scottish voters want Scotland to return to Europe. He also states that an independent Scotland would retain sterling, but does not mention the two policies are incompatible. It would be impossible for an independent Scotland to join the EU using sterling.

The Spectator

Which countries are most sceptical about vaccines?

From our UK edition

Gloss over Should we be worried that the head of research into respiratory drugs at AstraZeneca is called Dr Pangalos, given that his near namesake, Dr Pangloss, is a byword for foolish optimism? Dr Pangloss was tutor to Candide in Voltaire’s satire on Gottfried Leibniz’s work on theodicy: the attempt to reconcile why a benevolent and all-powerful God should allow evil, tragedy — or a pandemic — to exist. Dr Pangloss’s favourite phrase, ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, encapsulates Leibniz’s belief that the Earth, for all its apparent faults, was the best that God could possibly have created.

The Spectator

2482: Perm all five – solution

From our UK edition

The unclued lights each contain all five vowels once only, but in different orders. First prize Dr Stephen Clarkson, Hadleigh, Suffolk Runners-up Roslyn Shapland, Ilkeston, Derbyshire; P. and D.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Cummings goes, Corbyn returns and pigeon sells for £1.4m

From our UK edition

Home Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, left Downing Street after a week in which the public learnt that Lee Cain was the director of communications at No. 10, and that he had resigned after his appointment as chief of staff was withdrawn. The imbroglio directed focus on the performance of the Prime Minister and gave an opportunity for politicians to air their grievances. Mr Johnson then went into 14 days of quarantine, having been contacted by the national Test and Trace system after breakfasting with Covid-ridden Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield. Mr Johnson’s own Covid test proved negative. He had intended to set out his ‘personal ambition’ for the country (such as making it carbon neutral by 2050).

The Spectator

What does it mean to be ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’?

From our UK edition

Boris and the butcher’s dog Who first coined the phrase ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’? It has been traced to Lancashire. It is not the only quality attached to butcher’s dogs, however — such animals were perhaps widely observed as a result of customers having to entertain themselves somehow while the butcher prepared their cuts, and a dog gave them something to watch. A variant has someone as ‘happy as a butcher’s dog’. John Ray, in his collection of English proverbs from 1670, describes the expression ‘as surly as a butcher’s dog’.

The Spectator

Letters: The limitations of a Covid vaccine

From our UK edition

Still distant Sir: In James Forsyth’s analysis (‘Boris’s booster shot’, 14 November) he infers that a vaccine, if provided to the majority of the UK population, would deliver herd immunity from Covid-19, noting that ‘it seems increasingly probable that by the second half of next year, we will be emerging from this Covid nightmare’. I pray that he is right, though fear he may not be. In a recent Lancet editorial the view expressed was the exact opposite, as it notes that any vaccines are ‘unlikely’ to prevent transmission, though will reduce the severity of symptoms and likelihood of death.

The Spectator

Denial is not a strategy, Prime Minister

From our UK edition

The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and even family visits. A million jobs have gone since the first lockdown, with at least a million more to follow when the furlough money runs out. Children’s education was so badly set back by school closures that there are calls to cancel summer exams because pupils won’t be ready. Millions are facing financial ruin. A country looks to its Prime Minister for leadership. Yet the big announcement, made on the eve of the Brexit deal Boris Johnson was elected to deliver, is that he will ban the sale of new petrol cars by the end of the decade and hybrids five years later.

The Spectator

2481: Octet solution

From our UK edition

The octet associated with CHERRY STONES (19) is: tinker (1A), tailor (40), soldier (20), sailor (15), rich man (6A), poor man (23), beggar man (1D), thief (32). First prize Anthony Briggs, Brinkworth, WiltsRunners-up Donald Bain, Edinburgh; G.R.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Vaccine hopes up, Zoom shares down and Biden calls Boris

From our UK edition

Home Pfizer and BioNTech announced a vaccine against Covid-19 of 90 per cent efficacy from two injections three weeks apart. It was not known if it prevented transmission of the virus. The vaccine has to be stored at an ultra-low temperature of minus 80˚C. In July, the British government had bought 40 million doses, enough for a third of the population, with ten million available by the end of the year (along with access to five other vaccine candidates, totalling 340 million doses in all). The army and police planned vaccination centres. Shares in air transport went up; shares in Zoom went down. Asked whether we could say with confidence that life should be returning to normal by spring, Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, said: ‘Yes, yes, yes.

The Spectator

Open and shut case: how did lockdown affect shops?

From our UK edition

Shot in the arm Global stock markets reached a new high after pharmaceutical firm Pfizer announced a vaccine it is developing has been found to be 90 per cent effective. What have been the best- and worst-performing FTSE 100 shares over the past 12 months? BEST Scot. Mortgage Investment Trust | +109% Ocado | +94% Fresnillo (gold production) | +86% Flutter Entertainment | +75% Polymetal | +51% WORST Rolls-Royce | -74% Int. Consolidated Airlines | -71% BP | -61% Shell (B shares) | -58% Lloyds Bank | -52% Pharma’s life Who was Mr Pfizer? Charles Pfizer set up a factory with his cousin Charles Erhart in Brooklyn in 1849, initially to produce the drug santonin, used to purge the intestinal tract of parasitic worms.

The Spectator

Letters: Why lockdown II was necessary

From our UK edition

Cancelled procedures Sir: Your leader (‘A lockdown too far’, 7 November) suggests that the Prime Minister should have shown ‘leadership’ and ignored Sage’s call for a second national lockdown. Sam Carlisle (‘No respite’, 7 November) illustrates why this would have been a mistake. Sam reminds us that ‘half of community paediatricians were deployed to acute services’ during the pandemic’s first wave. Many other specialists were similarly redeployed. That the NHS was not overwhelmed in the first wave was precisely because most routine work stopped and staff were redeployed en masse to treat Covid-19 patients. Leaving projections aside, there were in fact 13,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital on Sunday 8 November.

The Spectator

Boris won’t be forgiven if his No. 10 chaos makes him cave on Brexit

From our UK edition

Mayhem has once again engulfed 10 Downing Street with the dramatic resignation of Lee Cain, Boris Johnson's communications chief. He was with the Prime Minister on the Vote Leave campaign — as had Dominic Cummings, Oliver Lewis and others who have formed a band of brothers in No. 10. Cain's departure put a question mark over the future of the others, which comes at an odd time because the Brexit they all campaigned for is weeks away from a conclusion. There are huge issues facing the government: a second lockdown, due to end on 2 December. The procurement and rollout of a potential vaccine. But another deadline, just weeks away, is Brexit. This is the mission Johnson was elected to accomplish, this is the drama that has defined British politics for the past five years.

The Spectator

Books of the Year II — chosen by our regular reviewers

From our UK edition

David Crane If nothing else, this has been a good time for catch-up. Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (translated by Walter Wallich, Persephone Books, £13) was a treat. But the real discovery of the year was an author I had never heard of, Wallace Breem. He seems to have spent his life as a librarian in the Inner Temple but found time to write three historical novels, one of which, The Leopard and the Cliff (Faber Finds, £13), set during the Third Afghan War of 1919, is up there with the very best novels of military life: vivid, tense and deeply moving, with a central character who has a touch of Guy Crouchback about him.