The Spectator
25 May 2019 Aus
ScoMoses
Australia
We picked it
The Coalition’s election victory may have come as a shock to many, but certainly not to readers of The Spectator…
Election notes
At the Anglican boarding school I attended in England as a scholarship boy from the age of ten it often…
London notes
A Right shambles One of the glories of London is its vast Hyde Park and adjoining Kensington Gardens. On a…
Australian Features
ScoMoses
Scott Morrison, having parted Labor’s red sea and led his astonished people to the promised land, must seize his Moses…
If the ABC is so trustworthy, why isn’t anybody watching it?
Here’s a question. Who said this recently, about the ABC: ‘The ABC is one of Australia’s most important institutions. Now,…
Business/Robbery etc
Bob Hawke and Sir Peter Abeles; Bill Shorten and Anthony Pratt. What is it that attracts such close friendships between…
The sloppiest suicide note
‘No-one saw it coming,’ the shocked commentariat claimed. Goodness. Where are the ABC’s fact checkers when you need them? In…
The immigration iceberg
In the Middle Ages the periodic return of plague from the Middle East to communities throughout Europe killed off possibly…
It was The Speccie wot won it
‘No body saw it coming,’ the mainstream media repeated endlessly when results emerged on Saturday evening 18 May, contrary to…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US election the day she called Donald Trump’s supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’. After that,…
Australian notes
Eleven random thoughts Let me start with a bow to those who thought it best to vote for Malcolm Turnbull…
Captain James Cook. Wedgwood and Bentley, c.1779
Three speakers: one is Director of The Royal Collection comprising over a million objects in 13 royal residences across the…
Features
Corbyn isn’t working – and Labour is being picked apart by its new enemies
Protestors on the anti-Brexit marches have sensed an eerie absence. ‘What is it?’ I thought back in March as I…
Keeping up with Farage: What’s next for the Brexit party?
‘Labour are in so much trouble here you can’t even believe it,’ says Nigel Farage as we sit in a…
Shelf conscious: I had no idea I was such a show-off
I’ve just had new bookshelves put up in the hall, a whole wall-full of them, and for the first time…
Iran alone: Tehran’s perspective on escalating hostilities
On 20 May, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, predicted that Donald Trump would fail to subdue Iran just as…
The day Turkish democracy died
‘It’s official. Turkey is a banana republic!’ My friend Mustapha, a serial entrepreneur, sends me a flurry of doom-laden WhatsApp…
Parent trap: WhatsApp groups are feeding our fears
The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was…
The magic of the Chelsea Flower Show
Chelsea, the most famous flower show in the world, pulled in its devotees once more this week, with its accustomed…
The Week
The end of May: Theresa must go so the Tories can heal
This week’s European election was always going to be pointless, at least from a British perspective. It is possible that…
Portrait of the week: European elections, milkshake attacks and British Steel buckles
Home The country went to the polls to elect Members of the European Parliament and express its loathing for the…
A presidential pardon for my ‘miraculously shrinking crime’
I owe my return to these pages to the pardon I have received from the President of the United States.…
Roman entertainment was far more exploitative than Jeremy Kyle
The Romans were as aware as Jeremy Kyle was of the pleasure that people could get from situations in which…
What punishment can you expect for throwing a milkshake at a politician?
Milkshakes and other missiles What can the man who threw a milkshake over Nigel Farage in Newcastle expect as a…
Letters: Nato’s broken promise
Nigel’s nakedness Sir: Rod Liddle is right to be wary of the hubris that Nigel Farage, the Brexit party leader,…
Columnists
If you’re going to leave Notre Dame in ruins, why not set fire to Oxford University?
Almost everyone agrees it is a pity that so few pupils from ‘disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds’ get into Oxford. But no…
The grave mistake that has killed Theresa May’s Brexit deal
The European elections were a gift for Britain’s two new political parties, Change UK and the Brexit party. But only…
On milkshakes
Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from…
Only Boris can bury Brexit
Sit down, my swivel-eyed Brexiter friend, and pour yourself a stiff whisky. I’ve something to tell you that’s going to…
Adversity is the new diversity – and it disadvantages everyone
To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this…
Why the British Steel crisis is not about Brexit
There’s a strong sense of déjà vu in this week’s steel crisis. The whole Brexit saga seems to have been…
Books
Towards a technological utopia
The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will…
Passing bells for old Tokyo
In Edo (now Tokyo), before the Meiji restoration, bells marked the beginning of each hour. The hours were named after…
Oddballs of English philosophy
Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the…
Bach helped me survive Bergen-Belsen
One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the…
Last lines on Brexit from Geoffrey Hill
In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition.…
Brutish Brits: You Will Be Safe Here, by Damian Barr, reviewed
Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This…
Arts
The new treasures of Pompeii
One afternoon in AD 79 an unusual cloud appeared above Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples. ‘It was raised high…
Sunday night on the Beeb was an orgy of virtue-signalling and third-rate sport
After its new costume drama You Go, Girl! (Sundays) about how amazing, empowered and better-than-men women are, especially if they…
Forget the The Reith Lectures. To understand the world listen to George the Poet
At last a podcast that takes the medium to its limit, created by someone who loves listening, understands how it…
A very odd two hours: Sting and Shaggy reviewed
Many is the pop star who has craved gravitas. Only Sting, however, has pursued it by covering John Dowland on…
This Boris play only gets it half-right
The opening of Jonathan Maitland’s new play about Boris purports to be based on real events. Just before the referendum,…
A mesmerising retrospective: Victoria Crowe at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, reviewed
This mesmerising retrospective takes up three floors of the City Art Centre, moving in distinct stages from the reedy flanks…
The forgotten masterpieces of Amy Beach
At the Wigmore Hall last Friday, the Takacs String Quartet and Garrick Ohlsson played a piano quintet that was once…
If opera survives, it’ll be thanks to artists and curators, not opera houses
It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all…
Rocketman is cheesy and clichéd – and all the better for it
There have been claims that Rocketman, the biopic of Elton John, is ‘cheesy’ and ‘clichéd’, but, in truth, you do…
Life
My feud with Conrad Black
Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and…
Banana leaf, wood-effect on knitted? Choosing my mother’s coffin
The mental fruit of yet another sleepless night was that my mother was determined to arrange her funeral as quickly…
My little lodger has been stolen from me
‘Farewell then, little lodger. I wish you would stay for ever but I understand that girls in their early twenties…
In praise of older horses – and their trainers
Newbury is as fair a test for a racehorse as you can get with its galloping track and a wide-open…
Goring the gambit
One of the most irritating defences to meet when playing 1 d4 as White is the Benko Gambit (1 d4…
no. 555
White to play. This position is from Dubov-Giri, Moscow 2019. How did White conclude with a fine blow that forced…
Animal magic
In Competition No. 3099 you were invited to dream up an imaginary animal that is a hybrid of two existing…
2409: Crosswords
The unclued lights are of a kind, including one hyphened, all confirmed in Chambers except for 8 across, which is…
to 2406: Heptad
The group is ‘Les Nabis’ (anagram of ALBINESS (18)). Its members were VALLOTTON, DENIS, ROUSSEL, RANSON, SÉRUSIER, BONNARD and VUILLARD.…
How paranoia has infected our politics
The politics professor Matthew Goodwin made an interesting observation on Twitter this week. He pointed out that many of the…
Could my slogan have swayed the Brexit vote?
People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’.…
Dear Mary: What should I do when my host won’t serve the champagne I brought?
Q. Was I right to feel aggrieved when, having contributed a bottle of fine champagne to a small supper party,…
Debunking the Greek wine myth
A book, a bottle, a bower set in an ancient garden: you think that if you walked round the right…
Why is a book like a sarcophagus?
‘Is it like a packet of fags?’ asked my husband, less annoyingly than usual, but still in some confusion. I…
Cartoons
