Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 14 May 2015

Plagued by stigma The World Health Organisation told doctors to stop naming diseases after people, places and animals so as not to stigmatise them. But are diseases even really associated with things that gave them their name? — Spanish flu. First identified in an army hospital in Kansas in March 1918. It gained its name because Spain was a neutral country, and uncensored newspaper reports made it appear uniquely affected. Subsequent theories have had it originating in China or at an army camp in France. — Legionnaires’ disease. First identified after an outbreak at a convention of the American Legion at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, Philadelphia, in July 1976. — Ebola.

Taki

High life | 14 May 2015

OK. Magnanimity in victory is a sine qua non among civilised men and women, so let me not be the first to rub it in. Last week I wrote that I feared the worst and felt sorry for Britain. I was convinced throughout the campaign that a certain testicular fortitude was missing on the part of the voters, and that David Cameron would be vacating No. 10. But, not for the first time, I was proved wrong. The only testicular fortitude missing was when Ed Balls lost his seat. So now we’ll have five more years of furious lefty hacks passing more wind than usual. There is nothing that angers

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 May 2015

I’ve been on two cruises before: one was fun, the other misery. The misery one was a late August cruise from Dover to Iceland via Shetland, Orkney and Faroe. The weather was unseasonably chilly, the North Sea rough. The ship pitched and rolled through fog for days on end. At Shetland we went ashore and looked at rails of knitwear in shops. Ditto Iceland. At Faroe we went ashore and watched two women knitting in a hut. At Orkney we visited a prehistoric circle of standing stones that were remarkably jagged as standing stones go. The average age of the passengers was 79 and the restaurants smelt faintly of a

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 May 2015

The ‘I’m Voting For Chuka’ posters in my rich neighbours’ front windows pushed me over the edge. There is nothing so likely to galvanise one’s inner Tory than the sight of the biggest, poshest houses in the neighbourhood displaying left-wing conceitedness. ‘Of course they’re voting Labour, they’re the only ones who can afford to,’ said the builder (boy)friend, who had popped round to my house for supper. I know, I know. It’s confusing. But we are always going to be on-off, so everyone is going to just have to deal with it. And he is a beacon of common sense at election time, I can tell you. Just the sort

Robin Oakley

Ones to watch

Back on political duty with CNN in election week, I came across a dead rat in Downing Street. It had to be an omen, but had the rodent been leaving or arriving when he met his fate, presumably in the jaws of the lean-looking fox who loped across the No. 10 doorstep shortly afterwards? Perhaps my furry ex-friend, too, had been misled by the polls but then we all have to make do with the best information we have available, as I did with our list of winter jumpers. After that heady summer of 2014, when our Twelve produced a profit of £171, I feared a setback and so there

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 14 May 2015

The best EBU tournament of the year is, IMHO, the Schapiro Spring Foursomes, held at the beginning of May in lovely Stratford-upon-Avon. The format is double knockout with one team emerging undefeated on Monday afternoon. For the second year running that team has been Frances Hinden’s squad of four (almost all the other teams field six), which is a serious achievement in itself. Last year they were ousted in the semi-finals but this year they beat everyone, including the number one seed Allfrey (with most of the England Open team on it), to win the coveted trophy. It was an outstanding performance — many congratulations. Frances played with her regular

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 14 May 2015

On election day I was in Puglia in the ‘heel’ of Italy, where interest in British politics could hardly be lower. One local news website that I consulted appeared to give higher priority to the fact that Italian penis-enlargement operations had increased by 20 per cent during the past year than to the electoral bombshell in Britain. I was staying with friends in their beautifully restored house — a former olive-oil press — close to the sea and below the remarkable hilltop town of Ostuni, between Bari and Brindisi, known as ‘la città bianca’ for its white medieval walls and palaces. At dusk it seemed to glow as in a

Toby Young Toby Young

Why I still have a deep attachment to the BBC

After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself. I very nearly didn’t come back. The first kibbutz I went to was on the Israeli-Lebanese border and about a week after I arrived it was targeted by a group of Palestinian rebels. Katyusha rockets rained down from all sides and the other guest workers and I were ushered into a special air-raid shelter reserved

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 14 May 2015

Q. I have a friend who can be shy and inhibited. Recently, he was invited to stay on a Caribbean island by a generous and rich host, so wanted to take the host and his wife and the other members of the house party out to dinner. The host suggested a beach restaurant which, despite its informal appearance, then produced a bill for £700, with no facility for credit cards. My friend had £600 in cash but had to borrow £100 from the host. Unfortunately, this resulted in the other members of the party thinking that the host had paid for dinner. How could my friend, without appearing vulgar, have

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 May 2015

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, soon got used to the surprise of the Conservatives being returned in the general election with a majority of 12. He retained George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer and made him First Secretary of State too. Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Michael Fallon and Iain Duncan Smith also stayed put, but Chris Grayling replaced William Hague, who had left the Commons, as Leader of the House, to be replaced as justice secretary by Michael Gove, who was replaced as chief whip by Mark Harper. Amber Rudd became Energy Secretary. John Whittingdale became Culture Secretary in place of Sajid Javid, who became Business Secretary. Boris

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Goulash and whiplash

Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety–plankety-plank: goodbye to our most recent terrible leader — and who will be the next? I, meanwhile, am in the Gay Hussar, choking on my own grief, hearing ‘Crying in the Rain’, weirdly, in my head, trying to forget the images that flicker mercilessly across my eyes, disrupting my view of a book that says, in capital letters, for emphasis — tony blair (now that’s a leader, eh!) — Clegg, dry-eyed with realisation at the breadth of his failure, Ed Balls hauled down like an -Easter Island statue, Samantha Cameron’s victory

Dot Wordsworth

Progressive

I was interested by the widespread annoyance at the use of progressive by the lefty parties before the election. Irritation is not the essence of a love of language (philology), but it is a symptom. The suspicion here was that socialism is so pejorative that a euphemism was being sought. It is true that when Milton wrote of ‘Their wandring course… Progressive, retrograde, or standing still,’ he wasn’t referring to the left, the right and the Lib Dems. He was taking about the apparent motion of the planets relative to the sun and other stars, a science more familiar to learned people of his day and before than today. A

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 14 May 2015

David Cameron is taking a bit of trouble to unite his parliamentary party. Having built a coalition outside it last time, he knows he must now build one within. The best way to do this lies to hand. It is to return to the pre-Blair custom of having Prime Minister’s Questions twice a week. Advisers always tell prime ministers not to do this, on the grounds that it is a waste of time and can only expose them to added risk. But in fact it has two good effects. It makes MPs feel much happier, and so discourages plotting. It also makes the Prime Minister the master of every area

Dumpynose

2211: Toddler hero

Clockwise round the grid from 37 runs a quotation plus its source (3,3,5,8,8,5,2,3,6,2,3,4) suggesting the outcome of 2. Remaining unclued lights, combined and subjected to 2, identify the author (three words). Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across 8    Garden cheers New World mammals (8) 10    Green and half-green bacteria (5, two words) 12    Lag Ivy Leaguer had rebuffed (5) 13    Flyer’s navigation manual (page missing) (7) 14    Plucky giant cycling (4) 15    Painter of meadow weeping (7) 17    Outdated trials in anterooms lacking force (5) 19    Detective meets senior prisoner (8) 25    Secretary goes round with bearlike creature (5) 26    I am feeding docked bullocks in compound (5) 27    Day

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Full employment, Prime Minister? What exactly do you mean by that?

‘Two million jobs have been created since 2010 — but there will not be a moment of rest until we have reached our goal,’ said David Cameron in a Telegraph article a fortnight before the election: ‘Two million more jobs; or full employment in Britain.’ It was a bold statement. Indeed you might think, given unemployment at 1.84 million in the winter quarter, that the target for new jobs was actually an error on the part of who-ever drafts the Prime Minister’s prose. Either way, it drew little attention amid the smoke of battle. But now the air has cleared it merits revisiting, because it connects all the key themes

Dumpynose

To 2208: MORT

The fictional SCHOLAR (28) was Billy Bunter, described by his creator, Frank Richards, as a ‘FAT GREEDY OWL (22A/31/26)’ (in ODQ). SILLY (13) and PUFFING (18) are associated with ‘Billy’ and KEUPER (4) and MUSCHELKALK (16D) (in Chambers individually and under ‘Triassic’) with ‘Bunter’. Title: ‘bunter’ is a low woman or mort.   First prize R.R. Alford, Oundle, Peterborough Runners-up B. Taylor, Little Lever, Bolton; Frank Maslen, London W1

Ross Clark Ross Clark

People are avoiding retirement because of low interest rates. Who can blame them?

‘Bank of England says that migrants are holding down wages’ the headlines screamed this morning. Yet Mark Carney, when interviewed on the Today programme this morning, spun a slightly different story. Migrants bear some responsibility for downwards pressure on wages, he said, but not so much as another group of people: British workers in the 50s and 60s who are returning from retirement, or who never retired in the first place. Over the past two years, net migration is up by 50,000, but that number is dwarfed by 300,000 people whom the Bank of England would normally have expected to have retired by now, but who have carried on in

Ed West Ed West

Nigel Farage isn’t the biggest threat to the Eurosceptic cause. Vladimir Putin is

I keep on reading that the ‘Outers’ are going to lose the upcoming EU referendum because Euroscepticism has become associated with Ukip, and Nigel Farage is too divisive. It has been talked about for some time but I’ve seen it far more since the party won 13 per cent of the vote last week. The paradox is that, as Ukip’s support has risen since 2011, conversely British support for EU membership has actually increased. It’s possible, of course, that the public has come to associate Euroscepticism with Ukip whereas it once associated it with the Tory Right, although how much less toxic that brand is must be open to debate. It’s

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

A radical guide to boosting your baby’s ‘brand individuality’

A Telegraph journalist, Lucy Denyer, has written about how rubbish it is that people are calling their children stupid, made-up names. (Spoiler alert: I’m anti stupid made-up names.) Trouble is, while she hasn’t exactly gone the Fifi Trixibelle/Peaches route herself, she has called her son Atticus. And no, it’s not the friend of Cicero she had in mind; it’s the bloke from To Kill a Mockingbird. Difficult one, Atticus. Classical names like Titus, Marcus or Octavia do dangerously expose your child’s class background, increasing their chances of getting beaten up. On the other hand, I’m all in favour of Cornelius, which is obviously from the Acts of the Apostles, and was formerly a