Society

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Real Life | 17 January 2009

Another night without sleep because of the upstairs neighbours’ remarkable capacity for impromptu nocturnal romance. What I don’t understand is, why do these people always end up living in the flat above mine? Everywhere we read about the declining libido of the human species, the fact that fertility is down, that people are too tired to perform, that couples are struggling to find time for romance. Not in the flat above mine they are not. Oh, no, they are bucking the national trend quite nicely, thank you. In my little corner of Balham you would think they had just invented it. The problem is made worse by the fact that

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 17 January 2009

I’m in the barber’s chair, getting a trim, studying the reflections of the waiting customers in the mirror. One man, about 60 years old, his head in the Daily Mail, looks vaguely familiar. We’ve met somewhere before, I think. Then I remember. It was at one of our lurcher, terrier and ferret club summer shows. (Our club was disbanded shortly after the chairman died, so it must have been ten years ago at least.) I was stewarding the ferret show. We’d erected a gazebo to keep the sun off the show cages, and we’d strewn straw bales around for the exhibitors to sit on. The appointed judge was an old-school

Taki

High Life | 17 January 2009

Gstaad So what’s a few hundred dead Palestinian children when Tzipi and Ehud have gained eight to ten points in the polls? They were terrorist babies, anyway. So what if the Egyptians and Saudis are ignoring them while spending millions on hookers, palaces and yachts? The Gazans don’t deserve such goodies, certainly not palaces on the Riviera. My favourite is Yigal Palmor, an Israeli spokesman, who took umbrage when Cardinal Renato Martino, a high-ranking Vatican official, compared Gaza to a concentration camp. The Israeli whined that second world war imagery was below the belt. I suppose the Cardinal should have called it a beach resort. Oy veh, one can’t trust

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 17 January 2009

One of my favourite spectator sports is sitting, glass in hand, watching Mrs Oakley in the kitchen. There will be a stock reducing here, a pan with a few chopped leeks and onions there. A pinch of this, a sprinkle of that. A handful of coriander and a scrinch of lemon, a shlurp of rather better wine than should really be devoted to culinary purposes — and then probably another shlurp. It is all done with the confidence of a surgeon taking the first slice into a patient, the dexterity of a master cooper. There is no sign of the hesitation that seizes Mrs O when she is asked to

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 17 January 2009

When my husband can’t put his chair-side whisky glass on the old familiar mat, he gets quite agitated. It seems like Asperger’s disorder. My own irritation is more rationally provoked, I hope. A recent irritant was the foolish philology that I came across in the Daily Mail: ‘Politicians and the Catholic Church have warned that singing The Hokey Cokey could land you in prison.’ The objection is to Rangers supporters offending Catholics by chanting to the tune at football matches. What annoyed me was the baseless claim that the song ‘originated from Puritans in this country before being taken to America by 18th-century religious refugees’, as the Mail said. ‘The

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 17 January 2009

How a reality show gave me back my title as least popular person in America When I was asked if I wanted to appear as a judge on Top Chef, an American reality programme, I said ‘yes’ without giving it much thought. The producers assured me it was ‘the highest-rated food reality show on cable’, but that sounded a bit like describing Nuns On the Run as the best cross-dressing comedy about nuns made in the Eighties. Aren’t reality shows ten-a-penny on American television? No doubt my involvement in the programme would go completely unnoticed, just as my appearance on countless British food reality shows has done. (Did anyone see

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 January 2009

Q. I know someone who is a theatre producer, an extremely generous man who never says no to anyone, whose secretary is besieged with calls from friends of his wanting (often free) tickets for Oliver! How can she deal with this without offending them? How can he continue coming off like a saint? It is doing the poor secretary’s head in. Name and address withheld A. So that the applicants can avoid feeling like members of a salon de refusés or that other friends have been given priority, the secretary must say that the producer had allocated his block of special tickets to a charity. ‘We are hoping that some

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How patient will the public be?

As Pete noted earlier we can expect the government to announce a new string of measures to try and get the banking system moving again next week. The key political question is whether action from the Prime Minister revives his poll rating or whether the public conclude that this means that the government’s first effort failed and that it doesn’t know what it’s doing. I’ve spent most of today at the Fabian Society conference and sitting on a panel with Peter Mandelson I was particularly struck by this comment from him: “No one responsibly would say that this is all that needs to be done to put right what’s gone

Peter Hoskin

Brace yourselves for the “mother of all bank insurance schemes”

Given his, ahem, prescience on these matters, it’s worth flagging up Robert Peston’s latest blog post.  He suggests that the Government’s next set of measures to prop up the ailing banking industry, expected Monday, won’t involve the establishment of a state-run “bad bank,” as had been mooted. Instead we can expect the “mother of all bank insurance schemes”: “I don’t know why the Government hasn’t knocked on the head the idea that it’s working on the creation of a bad or toxic bank that would buy our biggest banks’ dodgy loans and investments. What I expect it to announce on Monday (although the timetable could slip a day or so)

Peter Hoskin

Why did Harman’s Big Idea see the light of day?

Harriet Harman’s idea of imposing a legal obligation on public bodies to narrow the gap between rich and poor has the potential to be a dangerously regressive measure.  With that in mind, we should welcome the suggestion in Andrew Grice’s Independent article this morning that it doesn’t have the backing of the Government: “The second ‘class war’ accusation came when the social mobility paper was published. This time it was more justified. Harriet Harman, the Equalities minister, wants a new law to put ‘the persistent inequality of social class’ on the same footing as discrimination on grounds of race, gender, sexuality or disability. Contrary to some reports, she did not

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should heed Milburn’s warnings

There’s been a lot of garbage spoken about social mobility in the past few days – almost all of it from the government.  But if Tories need reminding that Alan Milburn – the new social mobility czar – gets it, then they should read his interview with Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester in today’s Times.  Here’s one particularly striking paragraph: “Labour’s arch-moderniser is not, however, going to limit himself to considering the number of internships at law firms. In his view, the key to social mobility is education, and he has radical plans for reforming the entire schools system. He backs the Tory proposal to allow companies, charities and parent

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 17 January 2009

Last month saw the usual spate of newspaper articles ridiculing the circular letters sent with Christmas cards. A series of books by Simon Hoggart now documents the worst of these. Funny as his examples are, he’ll be hard put to beat the instance sent in by a reader of the Daily Telegraph: ‘I suppose the high spot of our year was John’s Nobel Prize.’ Even so, am I alone in being slightly uncomfortable with all this opprobrium? If you care enough to spend 50p sending someone a Christmas card, shouldn’t you expect them to spend a minute or so hearing what’s happened to you in the past year? Is it

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 17 January 2009

In Competition No. 2578 you were invited to imagine the speech that Shakespeare, as a boy, might have delivered as he was slaughtering a calf. This challenge was inspired by John Aubrey’s portrait of the young bard in Brief Lives: ‘His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech.’ You plundered the works of the adult Shakespeare with inventiveness and to great effect. Michael Brereton’s slaughterhouse oration was accompanied by scholarly analysis. Part of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

If fat people can’t adopt, who’s to say that drinkers or blacks won’t be next?

Should blacks be allowed to adopt healthy children? Or should they be kept as an emergency reservoir of care for the damaged or ill children nobody else wants? It is time we got a little more rigorous about who we allow to adopt the kiddies, don’t you think? Black people are slightly less likely, on average, to abuse their children sexually than are white people — however, that’s pretty much their only plus point. They are slightly less likely to stay together as parents and disproportionately more likely to have been involved in some form of crime. Black fathers will be less well-educated, on average, than their white counterparts and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

You think Abraham Lincoln had it tough?

James Forsyth says that Barack Obama will need all his remarkable talents to confront an extraordinary set of challenges — not only the economy, but global security Short of wearing a stove-pipe hat, Obama could not make his desire to be compared to Abraham Lincoln any more obvious. He plans to travel to his inauguration via the same route that Lincoln did, be sworn in on the Lincoln Bible and eat lunch off replicas of the Lincolns’ White House china. Michelle and the girls must have wondered if he was going to change their name when he took them to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday night. Obama has set a

Con Coughlin

Don’t misunderestimate Bush’s record

Oh, the fun we’ve had. Not since the Reverend William Spooner dumbfounded Oxford undergraduates have we been so entertained by the garbled syntax and grammatical infelicities that have been one of the more diverting features of the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. ‘Tell me, was it you or your brother that was killed in the war?’, a question Spooner asked a former student after the first world war, could just have easily been posed by Dubya to an American soldier fresh back from fighting on one of the many front lines in the war on terror. The debate over the achievements and failings of the eight-year presidency of George

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 17 January 2009

My wife tells me, and so it must be right, that now that we are retired we must beware of the involution of our habits and interests. It is all too easy for old people to live the petty round, in which a visit to the grocer seems an expedition of some magnitude, and not to change their clothes for weeks on end. And yet there is something deeply reassuring about the scale of the quotidian, that seems suddenly upon retirement to be so much more important than it seemed before: besides, one cannot always be considering the deepest questions of existence, and not being a cosmologist or an astronomer,

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was… | 16 January 2009

Here are some of the posts made over the past week on Spectator.co.uk: Matthew d’Ancona recommends Frost/Nixon and offers CoffeeHousers a chance to see it for free. Fraser Nelson says that Heathrow should be improved before it’s expanded, and applauds the Tories for making debt a human issue. James Forsyth finds no wealth of talent in the Cabinet, and outlines the Ken Clarke conundrum. Peter Hoskin asks whether Mandy’s latest scheme will kickstart the car industry, and laments the Government’s equality overdrive. Melanie Phillips observes the astounding shallowness of Britain’s Foreign Secretary. Clive Davis asks: was Bush right after all? Trading Floor writes on what not to do about climate change.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tory task on foreign policy

There has been a conspicuous silence from the Tories about David Miliband’s deeply mistaken piece in The Guardian yesterday. While there are not many votes in foreign policy for an opposition, it is vital that a party that wants to be a success in government uses its time out of office to work out its world view. So far, there’s insufficient evidence that the Tories have done this. David Cameron has developed impressive relationships with foreign leaders but the intellectual framework for Tory foreign policy, especially when it comes to the broader Middle East, is lacking. Part of the problem is that there is no ideas infrastructure on the right

Mike Penning

More Brownies from Bradshaw

This week, my colleague Andrew Lansley quite rightly corrected Ben Bradshaw’s misleading assessment of Conservative plans for NHS spending. Bradshaw has a tendency to be over-zealous in his role as the Department of Health’s attack dog, and this wasn’t the first time in the last year that the Minister has been somewhat economical with the truth. During July 2008, the Government published a strategy for Primary Care with the intention of giving patients more choice over their GP. Obviously worried that it wouldn’t get much coverage, Ben Bradshaw duly went on the offensive against family doctors. The Minister, who, it would be reasonable to assume, held an extensive collection of data,