Society

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ecstasy vs Peanuts

Here’s a question for you: Imagine you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest? So asks the New Scientist in its latest editorial. I think you know the answer, don’t you? You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA. Now it’s true that some research suggests there may be some ill-effects* associated with ecstasy use; but

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 21 February 2009

A damned fine spell A few of us had a small dinner the other day to thank Angus Fraser for his distinguished stint as the Independent’s cricket correspondent. Not quite reeling off 45 overs from the Nursery End, but a damned fine spell anyway. The evening was, as such occasions should be, wine-fuelled, good-humoured and jam-packed with cracking stories, most of them unrepeatable. Gus was one of those remarkable players who just stepped over the boundary ropes when they finished their career in the first-class game and then, seemingly effortlessly, took up a career as a first-class journalist (think Mike Atherton of the Times, the Telegraph’s Derek Pringle, or the

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 21 February 2009

In Competition No. 2583 you were invited to provide an extract from one of the following chapters which appear in a real work of modern literary criticism: ‘Noddy: Discursive Threads and Intertextuality’; ‘Sexism or Subversion: Querying Gender relations in The Famous Five and Malory Towers’. I was pulled up by one regular competitor (obviously not a member of the Noddy Club) for setting two challenges, within a relatively short space of time, requiring knowledge of Enid Blyton’s oeuvre. While often panned by adults, Blyton’s books are enormously popular with children. These mock-worthy chapter headings come from an academic volume entitled Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature, by David

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 21 February 2009

Lloyds becomes one more catastrophe for which Brown will never apologise How Lloyds Banking Group chairman Sir Victor Blank must regret not having had a prior engagement on Monday 15 September last year, the night he bumped into Gordon Brown at a City reception and got bounced into the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB. Dubbed ‘the bank that did dull’ by Neil Collins, Lloyds was a safe bet to survive this crisis unscathed — until Brown started mumbling through his canapé about sweeping competition issues aside, safeguarding Scottish jobs and saving the world. With its debt downgraded by Moody’s this week, Lloyds will be crippled for years by HBOS’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

If we are going to ban nasty foreigners, can we at least be consistent about it?

Rod Liddle parodies the nonsense that is the government’s approach to foreign visitors with unpleasant messages. It makes no sense to ban a critic of Islam but let in every homophobe with a passport Perhaps we should not let anyone into our lovely country, for fear of the mischief they might cause. Almost all foreigners I have met have been devious and malevolent, eaten up with jealousy about what it is to be British, none too bright and with filthy table manners. You would not leave them alone with your wife for ten minutes. Nor, indeed, with your children. A complete ban on these vile people would spare us a

Quentin Willson

I have felt the unlikely zeal of the football convert

Quentin Willson goes to his first ever football match expecting to end up in A&E — and leaves a misty-eyed evangelist for a sport he now feels is grotesquely misrepresented There’s no easy way to confess this. You are the first people I’ve told. Until very recently I’d never, ever, been to a football match. For an alpha male this is a fairly damning admission I know, but I just never fancied all that shouting, that atavistic male tribalism. For me, football’s worst advertisement, like Christianity’s, was always its devotees. Fans like a horde of Mongol storm-troopers on a three-day pass, TV commentators spouting flannel in lengthy widths, barely articulate

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 21 February 2009

Last week I lost it. I flipped out. Actually if I’m being totally truthful I didn’t just flip: I f***ing flipped. Like Boris Johnson, I had a Vaz-attack of epic, expletive-laden telephone rage. Having recently received the Transport for London form to renew and pre-pay my annual (discounted) congestion charge, I’d managed to get my application in with two weeks to spare before the old one expired. I’d duly ferreted out and enclosed a recent household utility bill. I’d filled in my mobile, work and home contact numbers and given my credit card details. I’d posted it off and as far as I was concerned the job was done, dusted

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 21 February 2009

36,000 feet When I was a teenager on a flight to Nairobi I sat next to a pretty Kenyan girl the same age as me. We got talking. Out of the blue at 36,000 feet she slipped me a scrap of paper on which was scrawled, ‘I LOVE YOU.’ ‘That’s nice,’ I said. I did nothing about it. On another flight back to school in England we got delayed in Zurich, where an attractive older female passenger bummed a cigarette off me. When we reached London she took me back to her posh London flat. ‘Aha,’ I thought. She quite literally showed me her engravings, things got steamy and yet

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Looking ahead to the 81st Academy Awards

Hm. Besides the odd gem, it’s an uninspiring selection of films competing for the main awards at Sunday’s Oscars ceremony.  Even so, just for the record, here’s my should-win / will-win list for the major categories.  Do jot down your own predictions and hopes in the comments section. Best Picture Should win: Frost/Nixon  Will win: Slumdog Millionaire Best Director Should win: Gus Van Sant (Milk)  Will win: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) Best Actor Should win: Sean Penn (Milk)   Will win: Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) Best Actress Should win: Angelina Jolie (Changeling)  Will win: Kate Winslet (The Reader) Best Supporting Actor Should win: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)   Will win: Heath

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should clarify Brown’s “pro-cyclical” admission

Looking back on Brown’s Wednesday press conference, his admission that the UK regulatory system was “probably too pro-cyclical” seems particularly significant. To my ears, it’s the closest he’s got to saying they his tripartite system just didn’t work, and the closest he’s come to admitting a specific error. Yet the opposition parties haven’t made much of it since, which got me a-wondering why. My guess is that Brown’s language has dissuaded them from launching an attack. One of the PM’s great skills is to hide bad news behind financial jargon and lingo that don’t make sense to the average person. In this case, if the Tories were to major on

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Andrew Motion is a typical Devout Sceptic

Andrew Motion has confirmed his image as the ultimate middlebrow, wet liberal. He is passionately keen that students should read the Bible, so that they can progress on to the true faith of Eng-Lit. ‘I am not for a moment suggesting that everybody be made to go to church during their childhood’ he told the Guardian, but he wishes everyone would have a taste of the ritual, the beautiful mystery, like he did. Yuk. ‘If people want to get down on their knees and believe it line by line, good luck to them. I often wish I could, but as it happens I can’t. But it doesn’t destroy my pleasure

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Doctor is Out

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog raises a good point: whatever happened to Howard Dean? That is, why does the former chairman of the DNC receive so little credit for the party’s resurrection? And why is he not being considered to be Secretary for Health and Human Services, given that, as governor of Vermont, he did assemble a track record on healthcare reform? Dean’s eclipse is partly a matter of personality clashes: he has feuded with both Rahm Emanuel and David Plouffe. Certainly Dean has an abrasive, even arrogant, side to his character that hasn’t helped him; nor has he ever really been trusted by the party’s establishment. And yet

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shumble and Corker in Spain

Mind you, it’s not just the Irish police who are confused by foreign languages. A reader emails this piece of Fleet Street entertainment: That reminds me of XXX’s story chasing a British felon somewhere on the Spanish Costas. He got an interview with a doctor who slagged off the guy on the run but the chap refused to give his name. The Sun newsdesk insisted they have a name, so our intrepid hack went back to the guy’s office and took down the name on the door… Imagine the surprise and embarrassment the next day when Spanish speakers phoned The Sun to ask why they were quoting a doctor called

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Get ready for the return of shadow cabinet elections

One of the fun things about Labour’s return to opposition will be the return of shadow cabinet elections. Tony Blair never managed to change the fact that the Parliamentary Labour Party elects the shadow cabinet. This is going to cause some mighty ruckuses and put some rather odd people in Labour’s top team. Just imagine if David Cameron’s choice of shadow cabinet members was dictated by the Parliamentary Party. The rules are that Labour MPs get to vote for 19 members of the shadow cabinet, at least four of their votes have to be for female candidates. The results are then published with the candidates ranked in order of popularity,

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s PFI dilemma

Good work by the Times, who are tracking the Government’s continuing problems on the PFI front.  If you remember, numerous PFI projects are in danger of collapsing as the banks withdraw funding, and word was that Brown ‘n’ Darling would have to stump up £4 billion of taxpayers’ cash to fill the breach.  I’d assumed that would mean the Government hawking more gilts and adding to our national debt, which has all sorts of implications for the off balance-sheet nature of these schemes.  Turns out the Treasury may have something different in mind: “Billions of pounds could be taken from council staff pension schemes to bail out the Government’s PFI

Peter Hoskin

Debt Britannia

The front cover of today’s Mail should be stuck on the wall of every MPs’ office in Westminster.  It spells out the scale of the national debt burden in the starkest possible terms: £2,000,000,000,000 in big red numerals, with a post-script translating that to £33,000 for every “man, woman and child” in the UK. Thing is, the Mail’s figures – based on the ONS’s release yesterday – are probably a bare minimum.  We don’t yet know full extent of the nationalised banks’ liabilities; there’s likely to be more debt-heavy government action over the next year or so; and Brown’s off-balance sheet ruses will add to the burden faced by taxpayers,

Peter Hoskin

Does Brown hate Cameron and Osborne so much that he’d give up his job to defeat them?

Like Steve Richards in today’s Independent, I think it’s highly unlikely that Brown won’t remain Labour leader until the next election.  But Richards does spell out an alternative scenario which is news to me: “It is still possible that Brown might go of his own accord before an election, without a new job offer. When things were going badly last time around, he told an ally that he felt guilty about what was happening to Labour under his watch. If he felt a Tory victory could be prevented by his departure he would consider going. I suspect that Brown would do anything to stop Cameron and Osborne securing power, including

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lessons from a great Antiguan Drama

Test match cricket is something else, isn’t it? Patrick Kidd has a splendid line making the point that test cricket is terrific because it is “a game in which it is much more exciting when something almost happens than when it happens all the time.” Granted, cricket’s detractors might cite this as evidence to support their prejudices, but who cares about them? Kidd is right. This was a great test match, conjured from the most unlikely circumstances. Full credit to the groundstaff at the ARG and, of course, to both teams who produced a match that vindicated the idea and reality of test cricket even as one of its greatest

Martin Bright

The Adrian Mole Generation Should Step up to the Plate

It’s perhaps a step too far to mix a reference from a popular work of 1980s satirical fiction with a phrase borrowed from baseball in the headline of this piece, but somehow it seemed to capture the situation. With increased speculation about Harriet Harman’s leadership ambitions the time has come for the younger generation of Labour politicians (most of whom are a simillar age to Sue Townsend’s hero) to start sticking their heads aboove the parapet. A name that seems to be emerging as a possible runner is Treasury minister Yvette Cooper. I have often wondered whether we would ever see a husband and wife team in No. 10 and No.