White truffles and 50 bottles of bubbly: life as a modern-day chalet girl

Is there any point in boycotting Afghan cricket?

The English and Australian cricket boards have announced that they will not schedule bilateral series against Afghanistan, says Jonathan Liew in The Guardian. The decision is a stand against the “deterioration of basic human rights for women” in the Taliban-led country, where women are banned from speaking in public or being seen through windows. Yet for some reason, both nations are still happy to play Afghanistan in global tournaments – as though the dignity of 20 million Afghan women is “acceptable collateral damage” against the wider backdrop of, say, a World Cup. What a cop-out. Taliban officials post photos with the national team, call senior players to congratulate them on wins, and screen games to a “grateful male-only audience” in public parks. If countries like Australia and England really want to confront the “iron age misogyny” of the Taliban, they’ll need to try harder.

The reality is that an all-out boycott would do “nothing for women”, says Chris Bayliss in The Critic. Cricket boycotts helped white South Africans understand how the rest of the world felt about Apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s because they had, ultimately, a “common understanding” of morality. But the Western view on gender equality is never going to align with that of the Taliban. They are imposing laws based on deeply entrenched “traditional Pashtun societal norms” which have lasted a thousand years. And they’ve learned that any meddling foreigners will eventually lose patience and “leave them alone”. The notion that their leaders will suddenly start implementing progressive reforms over the odd game of cricket is mad.

How I miss being fashionably late

My mother was once stopped for soliciting, says Candida Crewe in The Oldie, as she sat in her car, “all dressed up”, waiting to go to a party. She’d accidentally arrived on time, she explained, so she was sitting there until she could turn up fashionably late. That was the 1960s, but arriving anywhere on time was still unimaginable in the 1980s, when I was a young woman about town. If a dinner invitation said “8 for 8.30”, everyone knew it would be “insufferably bourgeois” to turn up before 9, even if it meant “the hostess’s soufflé had transitioned to a pancake”. In 1957, the British writer Cyril Northcote Parkinson proposed that the optimum arrival time is “exactly” three quarters of an hour late – allowing a sufficient crowd to witness your entrance, with no risk of getting there after the important people have gone on (“as they always do”) to another party.

I am now 60, and “can’t be bothered to be cool anymore”. These days I arrive a mere 10 minutes after the starting pistol. And I can tell you: something has changed. Everywhere I went during the Christmas season, I arrived to find proceedings in full swing. I recently turned up at a book launch at ten past six to find 100 people there. I had a lovely time, but I was only there for an hour and found myself one of the last to leave. I remember when the last stragglers at an early-evening event would leave at 10.30pm, before supper in Chinatown and on to the Groucho or the Chelsea Arts Club, ending up in bed around dawn. “Those were the nights.”

“Never work with children, animals or The Spectator”

I got to know the Tory prime ministers pretty well during my 15 years as Spectator editor, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. Boris Johnson always took the criticism we gave him with good grace, so whenever I received “furious WhatsApp messages” from his number – usually over something trivial, like jokes about his yapping dog – I assumed they had been written by his “ubersensitive” wife Carrie. Liz Truss was “the minister for fun” – as foreign secretary she’d always get the karaoke machine out at Chevening, “like a teenager whose parents were abroad”. Theresa May was much less fun, once declaring: “Never work with children, animals or The Spectator.” We adopted it as an advertising slogan.

Rishi Sunak had a “first-class financial mind”, but embodied how such skills rarely translate in government. When, as chancellor, he asked for a basic cost-benefit analysis of lockdown – whether it would result in more cancer deaths, for example – he was accused of disloyalty. In business, failing to ask such questions would be a “sackable offence”. As for Kemi Badenoch, I know her from her time as The Spectator’s digital chief, and she’s exactly the same in private as she is in public: “instinctive and irrepressible, enjoying combat perhaps a bit too much”. I always thought she was someone who could transform her party and country, or self-destruct. “I’d say it’s still 50/50.”