Society

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Thinking of becoming a cartoonist in today’s Britain? Think again

The cartoonist Vicky (Victor Weisz, 1913–66) fled to London not long after the Reichstag fire, with the Gestapo at his heels. Had he not possessed a Hungarian passport he would never have got away, for as the boy wonder of Berlin political cartooning in the 12 Uhr Blatt, he had gone for Hitler as far back as 1928, and was a marked man. The cartoonist Vicky (Victor Weisz, 1913–66) fled to London not long after the Reichstag fire, with the Gestapo at his heels. Had he not possessed a Hungarian passport he would never have got away, for as the boy wonder of Berlin political cartooning in the 12 Uhr

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Your Friday Galloway

Reason’s Michael Moynihan reminds me that I’ve been remiss in not posting the video of George Galloway pretending to be a cat while appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. There’s no pressing need to post this, beyond reminding oneself just how vile Galloway is. And to think that this is a Member of Parliament… O tempora, o mores indeed:

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Come by! Come by!

Once more across the transatlantic divide, my friends… I’m not sure televised sheepdog trials would ever be likely to become a hit in the United States. This, then, is another difference between the old and new worlds. So it is sad to record the end of an era: Phil Drabble, the long-time presenter of One Man And His Dog has died. As always, we turn to The Daily Telegraph’s obituary to lament – and yet be entertained by – the passing of another (albeit minor) British institution: Phil Drabble, who died on Sunday aged 93, came to fame presenting BBC2’s sheepdog trials programme One Man and His Dog, a series

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Game, set, match to TNR? In a better world maybe…

If you’ve not tired of the “Baghdad Diarist” pseudo-controversy, The New Republic has published a statement defending and, to my mind, confirming the essential accuracy of their story. I doubt even this will be good enough for the hacks and harpies on the loony right, but it ought to satisfy reasonable observers. (Then again, being a pro-TNR type I would say that, wouldn’t I?) Meanwhile, comic relief is provided by the fact that one of the Weekly Standard‘s main sources in their effort to discredit Scott Beauchamp’s story allegedly turns out, according to Media Matters, to have been a former male escort who has appeared in a number of gay

Sarah Standing

Facing up to my new addiction

Today I joined a cult. In a weak moment this morning my 21 year old son “enabled” me to join Face Book. It was 5am and we “clashed”. I was waking up, he was returning from a club. We bonded. I took him out to breakfast at the Wolseley because he was hungry and I was jet-lagged. Result. However neither of my  daughters are talking to me and have effectively blackballed any of their friends from joining my world/network/friends/space. In fact they are barely talking to me. What do I care? I am hooked. After reading Amelia Torode’s feature in this weeks Spectator I worry that at 46 I am

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Forcing the issue

It is good news that the government has finally got round to making certain that forced marriages are illegal. (How on earth it took this long baffles me. It is hard to imagine a more clear cut case of denying someone their rights than forcing them to marry someone against their will). But as Sunny Hundal points out over at Comment is Free, the bill actually does far less than it should—social services can still turn a blind eye while victims can not sue for compensation.  How supposedly good feminists like Harriet Harman are content to sit by while the government is so weak on these issues never ceases to

The Spectator

Very possibly the worst idea from a presidential candidate ever

  Some dumb things are said during every presidential campaign but few statements in campaign history can be as reckless, irresponsible and downright idiotic as Republican Presidential contender Tom Tancredo’s proposal that the United States announce that in response to a nuclear terrorist attack it would nuke Mecca and Medina. Tancredo thinks that this would be an effective deterrent. But  it would actually play straight into the terrorist hands: not only would they have pulled off a spectacular on American soil, but the American response world then thrust the world into a full blown clash of civilisations. I know you can say that Tancredo is about as likely to win

Matthew Dancona

The worst form of NIMBY-ism

Societies often have trouble assimilating those who return from war. Half a century before Vietnam, Wilfred Owen wrote of the survivors of World War One: “A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,May creep back, silent, to still village wellsUp half-known roads.” But there is something distinctively modern and distinctively shameful about the story which has just reached a conclusion in Surrey over the Headley Court rehabilitation centre for servicemen near Epsom. Mole Valley District Council has finally rejected a petition from local residents to stop a house in nearby Ashtead being used by relatives of injured service personnel. Amazingly, 86 residents signed a petition objecting to the

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Waiting

What’s the point of waiting for General David Petraeus’s report from Iraq on how the newish US policy is faring? Most of the right will welcome whatever good news can be gleaned from it while most of the left will denounce any such news as propaganda and deny that anything good or even half-way positive could ever happen in Iraq. In other words, most people in Washington seem intelligent enough to draw their conclusions from the report before its even been written. So why bother releasing it? [So what would you do, eh? I haven’t a clue – which is one reason why I tend to avoid writing about Iraq.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Spice Surge

Fed up with Iraq? Want to knock some heads together to press for a political solution? Seeking leverage to do so? Here’s your chance… The reunited Spice Girls are letting “fans” vote to decide which unfortunate city should be added to their forthcoming world tour. In what is either an act of some bravura or an unfortunate oversight, you may vote for any city in the world: including Baghdad. Obviously this is the sort of thing the internet was made for.. If the prospect of a “Spice Invasion” doesn’t concentrate Iraqi minds it’s hard to know what can.  Alternatively, you may feel that Iraq has suffered so many agonies that

Alex Massie Alex Massie

And the trains even sort of run on time…

Brilliant. From the Sydney Morning Herald: After recent items on weird conditions for public transport there has been a flurry of mail, but we may have to close the correspondence after this, from Kim Meredith, of Ainslie, ACT: “My favourite ticketing system was in Mumbai, India,” Kim enthuses. “No one actually buys a ticket, but you can buy ‘ticket insurance’ from private entrepreneurs who work at the entrance of the station. The ‘ticket insurance’ is about half the price of a regular rail ticket. It gives you a guarantee that, in the extraordinary event that you are booked by a railways inspector for taking a free ride, your fine will

The Spectator

Obama out-hawks Bush and Clinton on Pakistan

Barak Obama just delivered the most important speech of the 2008 campaign so far. Having stepped to Hillary’s left on the issue of meeting with Castro, Ahamdinejad, Chavez et al, he is now going to her right by pledging himself to military strikes on al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan if Musharraf won’t deal with the problem himself. If, through positions such as this, Obama can establish himself as credible on national security he will have removed one of the major obstacles to him being elected president. Here’s the key passage of his speech: “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to

The Spectator

List your pet hates

Over at Comment Central, Daniel Finkelstein is asking folks what impolite behaviour really gets under their skin in an attempt to draw up a definitive list. He starts us off with David Aaronvitch’s ten suggestions in The Times this morning and adds in a few of his own: people who bellow on their mobiles, make speeches when called on to ask a question, put you on email lists without asking and joke about other people’s weight. I’ll definitely second Daniel on the motion of people who fail to obey the chair’s injunction to ask a question–not speechify–at meetings and add in my current bug bears: people who try and get

The Spectator

Spice up their lives

The Spice Girls have set up a website allowing fans to vote for one more city to be included on their world tour. But I fear they might be in for a surprise. You can enter any city you want and, oh so predictably, the internet campaign to send them to Baghdad is already under way, which seems a little unfair on the Iraqis. Where would Coffee Housers vote to send the Spice Girls? Personally, I’d favour Stockholm as retaliation for sending us Abba or the Cheeky Girls hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania. 

The Spectator

Just not cricket | 1 August 2007

Christopher Martin -Jenkins, The Times’s cricket correspondent and Test Match Special commentator, has an op-ed that is well worth reading on the excessively heated atmosphere during the Trent Bridge Test in this morning’s paper. The game was definitely not played within the spirit of the game. England’s scattering of jelly beans at the crease, apparently designed to distract the Indian batsmen, was pathetically juvenile. (It was a sweet irony that the pumped up victim of this prank, the Indian bowler Zaheer Khan, swung the game India’s way in England’s second innings.) While the beamer that Shantha Sreesanth bowled at Kevin Pietersen was downright dangerous. Let us hope that the last

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Diversity of the British Press

One of the other great glories of the British press is cartooning. Drawing (ha!) their inspiration from a tradition that stretches back to Hogarth and Gillray, today’s cartoonists take pride in their often savage, scabrous wit. They take a proper pride in their lack of reverence – which is presumably why the stuffy New York Times doesn’t even have a cartoonist. Why would you have fun on the editorial pages when you can publish Bob Herbert instead? Sometimes, however, the British cartoonists might be accused of groupthink. Clearly the combination of Ingmar Bergman’s death and Gordon Brown’s first meeting as PM with George Bush proved irresistible: The Independent:The Times: The

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Pour encourager les autres? Oui, monsieur…

Of course I agree with Megan that dog-fighting is a bad, even wicked thing. Still, I was struck by her (cutting) question: did Michael Vick and his pals think that by – allegedly! – executing and torturing dogs that had lost fights this would be a case of pour encourager les autres? Voltaire’s famous quip is one of my favourites. “In this country” he remarked, speaking of Britain, “it is thought good to kill an admiral from time to time, to give courage to the others”. When it’s trotted out these days it’s generally accompanied by an arched eyebrow as though the very idea of this was absurd. But Voltaire

Alex Massie Alex Massie

US to UK: You Think We Care?

Remember that book, He’s Just Not That into You: The No-Excuses Guide to Understanding Guys? There are times when I think Britons should remember this message when they consider the nature of the so-called “Special Relationship” between Britain and the United States. Today is one of those occasions when one is reminded again – as if it was really necessary – that the relationship is a just a little bit more important and rather more special to Britain than it is to the United States. Though the American newspapers covered Gordon Brown’s first visit to the United States as Prime Minister, they understandably didn’t attach the same importance to his

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Nobody defeats Rupert Murdoch…

It looks like the Dirty Digger has won his battle to take control of The Wall Street Journal. Unlike many people I don’t believe this means the sky will fall. I’ve written about Rupert Murdoch and the gruesome Bancrofts here and here. Shorter version: Rupe has no incentive to change the Journal’s newsroom structure and every reason to keep it the way it is. Does this guarantee he won’t fiddle with it? Certainly not, but there’s no such thing as total editorial independence from owners’ whims anyway so suck it up suckas and make the most of having a boss who loves (and understands) newspapers and is prepared to invest