The Spectator
13 July 2019 Aus
Morality managers
Australia
Naidoc’s ‘themes’
It’s Naidoc Week, which is, quote, ‘a time for all Australians to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of all…
Australian Columnists
Simon Collins
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ is the opening line of The Go-Between, L. P.…
Brown study
As you know, here at The United Nations Cultural Reform Unit we have embarked on a major project to remake…
Diary
The gloss of a new political year doesn’t take long to wear off. The shiny enthusiasm that accompanies the pomp…
Dis-con notes
Watching and hoping, Mr Morrison With our post-election parliament finally operative, what can we now expect from the new…
Australian Features
Indigenous voice?
It’s Naidoc Week in Australia, and this year’s theme is: ‘Voice. Treaty. Truth. Let’s work together.’ As the locals are…
Morality managers
Financially rewarded beyond the wildest dreams of rank-and-file Australians, some of the nation’s managerial elites are labouring under a delusion.…
Ghostbusters
Last week the miserable ghost of Malcolm Turnbull put in an apparition at the Friends of Wolper Jewish Hospital. Presumably…
Lefty lawyers, Part 2
Last week I noted that the lawyers of today, as a class, are a lot more left-leaning and politically correct…
Abolish the arts degree (and start again)
In addition to my full-time job as a commercial journalist, I sometimes teach English to high school students, usually in…
Features
Can Boris Johnson make Anglo-American relations great again?
It seems a fitting end to an ill-fated premiership. As Theresa May prepares to leave No. 10, a major quarrel erupts…
The European fighters who battled Isis – and were abandoned by their governments
Foreign fighters are returning from the battlefield — not Islamists but the Americans, Europeans and South Americans who fought to…
Anglo-Saxons deserve reparations for the Norman Conquest
Restorative justice for the victims of colonialism is an idea whose time has come. A few years ago, the Indian…
‘Panto pays better than being an MEP’: Ann Widdecombe interviewed
We could all forget about Ann Widdecombe for the past nine years while she was doing Strictly Come Dancing and…
Would no-deal Brexit be a disaster? Probably not – and here’s why
How bad would a no-deal Brexit really be? This is now perhaps the most important question in politics, and the…
Run, Boris, run: why middle-aged MPs have turned into fitness freaks
Forget the cigar, the homburg and the V-for-victory sign. If Winston Churchill were around today, he’d be pounding the streets…
The motorway that contains 2.5 million Mills & Boon novels
The first one was too straight. In the absence of a speed limit, early motorists on the M1 used the…
The Week
The Tories can profit from Labour panic
In some alternative universe the Labour party, as under Tony Blair in the mid 1990s, is busily preparing for government,…
Portrait of the week: A resignation in Washington, Labour departures and a plague of toxic caterpillars
Home Sir Kim Darroch resigned as British ambassador to Washington after the Mail on Sunday published disobliging emails he had…
Petronella Wyatt: I’ve been turned into a curiosity – and Boris is to blame
I am beginning to feel like a sort of fairground curiosity: one of those pickled things in jars that Victorians…
An absurd craze
From ‘Keeping fat’ by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 7 October 1978: The running craze is a symptom of our deplorable age, in…
Is women’s football really that popular?
Ode to all sorts Brexit party MPs were likened to Nazis for turning their backs on a recital of ‘Ode to…
Politics, Pandora and the tender leaves of hope
With parliament irretrievably deadlocked over Brexit and the EU intransigent, there remains little belief that either of the prime ministerial…
Australian Letters
Turnbull and the Prez Sir: Peta Credlin (‘Turnbull, the G-G, Porter and Dutton’, July 6) writes an incisive article on…
Columnists
Sir Kim Darroch failed to recognise Trump’s communicative genius
When I last talked to Sir Kim Darroch, he was a slim young private secretary, so it was a long…
The most important decision that Boris has to make
After being backed by a majority of Tory MPs, Boris Johnson now looks set to win over party members by…
End this hate speech against my community
I am a football fan. Each fortnight I go to watch my club and, like the overwhelming majority of the…
My daughter’s gone to Magaluf, and it’s hard not to worry
At the Leavers’ Ball held to mark our daughter’s last day at boarding school, there were only two topics of…
Deutsche Bank is a parable for our mad modern era
Among the numbers attached to the restructuring of Deutsche Bank announced by Chief Executive Christian Sewing this week, the 18,000…
Books
The tragic story of Witold Pilecki, whose reports from Auschwitz fell on deaf ears
On 14 October 1942, the 23 Swiss members of the International Committee of the Red Cross met in Geneva to…
Reshuffling ministers annually is no way to govern
‘Annual reshuffles are crazy,’ remarked one of the prime minister’s most trusted advisers in July 1999 as I hovered outside…
Jerusalem’s libraries contain priceless treasures — but almost no one gets to see them
The bearded figure clad in white robes and wandering barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem is not, in fact, the…
Washed up in Istanbul: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
Elif Shafak once described Istanbul as a set of matryoshka dolls: a place where anything was possible. As with much…
Star-crossed lovers: Sweet Sorrow, by David Nicholls, reviewed
The 16-year-old hero of David Nicholls’s fifth novel is ostensibly Everyboy. It is June 1997, the last day at dreary…
At long last love: Live a Little, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed
Towards the end of Live a Little, one of its two main characters says: ‘I’m past the age of waiting…
The magnificence of Elizabethan portraiture
Roy Strong first encountered the portraiture of Elizabeth I and her court while a schoolboy in post-war Edmonton. In the…
Vengeful pygmies
It says almost everything that needs to be said about Niki Savva’s latest book that its original title was Highway…
Arts
‘It could be a disaster’: Jim Broadbent talks to Stuart Jeffries about his latest role
‘I live completely anonymously,’ whispers Jim Broadbent down the phone from Lincolnshire. Nonsense, I counter. You’re one of the most…
Full of wonders: Takis at Tate Modern reviewed
Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter…
A cartoonish look at migration: Europe at the Donmar reviewed
Europe. Big word. Big theme. It was used by David Greig as the title of his 1994 play about frontiers…
Steve Bannon will be thrilled by The Brink
The Brink is Alison Klayman’s documentary portrait of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist (he shaped the ‘America First’…
Deft, elegant and genuinely chilling: Garsington’s Turn of the Screw reviewed
Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like,…
You leave awe-struck but also a bit frazzled: Holland Festival’s Aus Licht reviewed
In Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI hands become fists, arms and elbows clubs, shoving, pounding and ker-pow-ing the keyboard to near oblivion.…
An important story but not for the faint-hearted: Deadliest Day podcast reviewed
One of the advantages that podcasts have over the scheduled array of programmes is the space that can be given…
Reminds you how uncomplicatedly thrilling the first moon landing was: BBC2’s 8 Days reviewed
As the title suggests, 8 Days: To the Moon and Back (BBC2, Wednesday) comprehensively disproved the always questionable idea put…
Shakespeare in Love
For centuries plays have been derived from novels, myths and legends but only recently have we become used to plays…
Life
Coco Gauff won fair and square, but she played terrible tennis
Martina Navratilova has never been shy about telling it like it is. She came out when other athletes were hiding…
Tuscany’s killer climate
The hotel manager had arranged for me to borrow an Alfa Romeo Spider Duetto two-seater convertible (1982) for the afternoon.…
Not going to the osteopath cured me
Not going to the osteopath worked a treat. Walking out of that surgery after hearing the crunching coming from inside…
Howard Staunton
Staunton was the most successful British player of all time, winning three matches against European masters in the 1840s which…
no. 562
White to play. This is from Wassin-Grigorchuk, Izola 2019. Although the game is only just out of the opening, White…
Twister
In Competition No. 3106 you were invited to submit a poem with an ingenious twist at the end. This challenge,…
2416: Silence
The unclued lights share a common feature at least once, different in each case. Across 7 Liechtenstein test about…
to 2413: Sign here please
The unclued lights are EPISCOPAL SIGNATURES First prize Jason James, CambridgeRunners-up K.M. Robb, Borrowstounness, West Lothian; McNeill, Belfast
I love Boris for not firing me when I wrote a play about his sex life
Fourteen years ago, almost to the day, Lloyd Evans and I received a note from Boris. It was the press…
What the new generation of tennis players could learn from Rocket Rod Laver
A chum was in Waitrose a year or two back, and was bending down with some difficulty to look at…
Dear Mary: How do I stop men sending me articles from the Guardian?
Q. It is difficult to know what to do when homeless people ask you for cash as you are leaving…
The devil eats Prada: Patisserie Marchesi 1824 reviewed
The Prada Café is both a cake shop and a historical inevitability. It sits on Mount Street, almost opposite the…
The Lib Dems are wrong – it’s ‘ballocks’ to Brexit
I agree with James Joyce on the spelling ballocks. The Liberal Democrats made their MEPs wear T-shirts printed with ‘Bollocks…
