Alcohol

London’s party-hungry Russians suffer Putin problem

Word reaches Mr S of the plight of Mr Alexander Sucenko, organiser of next Saturday’s annual Russian Summer Ball. The ball is said to be in jeopardy because nobody wants to come. It seems that many regular attendees of this staple of the Russian expat social calendar have cried off this year because of the actions of a certain Russian President. It all strikes Mr S as a little ironic, bearing in mind that the Summer Ball is geared towards the exiled Czarist side of Russian culture. Her Highness Princess Olga of Russia and His Highness Prince Rostislav are set to be the guests of honour. Hasn’t the Russian royal family

The death of student activism

Oxford students heard this morning that, after a three-day referendum, our student union, OUSU, will be disaffiliating from the National Union of Students. I voted to break with the NUS, and I felt confident doing so: Oxford’s membership currently costs us over £25,000 a year, and, aside from the dubious satisfaction of knowing that Nick Clegg will never be short of misspelt placards to stare at, no one has a clue what we get in return. The most notable thing about the referendum was how little people cared. The turnout was just 15 per cent, despite voting taking place online. And this wasn’t an isolated example of lack of engagement

Drinkaware in Chelsea

Kensington and Chelsea Council can do nothing to counter its reputation as the most affluent borough in London. In fact, it revels in the notoriety. Take a look at the council’s new alcohol awareness campaign. The prostrate gentleman appears to be in white tie and drinking a half-bottle of champagne, while the lady, bedecked with pearls, swirls around with a martini glass in hand. Marvellous.    

Staggers Drawn at Fortnum & Mason Awards

As the two leading British political weeklies, the Spectator and the New Statesman, have for many years enjoyed a relationship of jocular antagonism. This amiable sort of rivalry can been maintained as their differences are over relatively trivial matters such as how the country should be run and the world ordered. But now they have come head to head over something deadly serious, drink. The shortlist for the  Fortnum and Mason drinks writer of the year has been announced and it’s a two way race between Nina Caplan of the Staggers and Henry Jeffreys of this parish. Expect thundering editorials, snide remarks and spiked drinks from both sides in the run-up to the announcement of the

A tipple and a scribble with Gerald Scarfe

Mr Steerpike longs for the day that he has a bar named after him, so he went to doff his cap to Gerald Scarfe at Scarfe’s Bar last night. Cartoonist Scarfe has spent the last four months decorating the bar at the Rosewood Hotel in Holborn. Politicos or royal junkies will love it: Farage, Brown, Cameron, Clegg and the first cartoon of wee baby George are all in evidence. ‘If the Prince of Wales can have a pub named after him, why shouldn’t I have a bar?’ says Scarfe, who treated me to a whistle-stop tour of his work. ‘There won’t be enough time to paint Maria Miller [before she

Please stop trying to raise my awareness

I wish people would stop trying to raise my awareness. I can’t so much as surf the web or stroll a high street these days without being accosted by one of the aware, who is always hellbent on making me as aware as he is, usually about some disease or, if you’re really lucky, the rifeness of child abuse. The army of the aware are everywhere, covered from head to toe in awareness ribbons, their arms weighted down by awareness bracelets, their aware brains bulging with scary stats about Aids, rape, breast cancer or boozing that they are desperate to impart to us, the blissfully unaware. These awareness-raisers seem to

Rod Liddle: Neknominations – this is what the internet is for

Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Take the case of Torz Reynolds. You are almost certainly not called Torz and I would guess, too, that you count few people within your circle of friends who abide under that name. I don’t know where it comes from, Torz. A shortening of Victoria, I would guess, although it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was actually christened Torz, much as people these days are christened Jayden. Anyway, that’s not the point. Torz, who is 26 and lives in London, decided that she

Rod Liddle

What shall we do about Neknominate?

I wonder if we should start our own Spectator Blog NekNominations? Open to bloggers and readers. I nominate Daniel Maris to drink a small glass of Pinot Noir while watching the early evening news. And Alex Massie to drink a flagon of Teachers while standing on the up line somewhere between Edinburgh and Alnmouth. Maybe on that big bridge over the Tweed. No need to post any photos or film. I’ve written about this latest internet craze for the mag this week: it is the usual carefully and copiously researched investigation, devoid of bigotry and offensiveness. At least five people have died so far taking part in Neknominations and there

When trolling pressure groups cause real harm

My grandmother, Nanny Nancy, is 99 and going strong. But it can’t be denied that while she’s all there mentally, physically she’s not the lithe young thing she was in her 1920s adolescence. I mean no disrespect to my beloved grandmother, but if we’re honest, when Michael Bay is casting his next blockbuster and it’s a choice between her and Megan Fox for the female lead, well… . It’s not just me who has noticed this: the kids have even more so. When they were younger, especially, and I asked them to kiss their great-grandmother they’d react — as so many children do when confronting their older relatives’ decrepitude — as

Toby Young: Why I’m giving up drinking. And chocolate. And ice cream…

I’ve gone completely overboard with New Year’s Resolutions this year. I’ve sworn off three illicit substances — alcohol, chocolate and ice cream — and vowed to eat an apple every day. I’ve given up alcohol before. The first time was when I was living in New York in the 1990s, though the episode that prompted it happened in Switzerland. I got spectacularly drunk at a nightclub in Verbier and woke up the following morning without my signet ring. This was a family heirloom given to me by my mother so I was understandably distressed. It turned out I’d given it to a young Swedish woman who I’d proposed to the

Ed West

My January diet and detox – anything to stay in the middle class

Like many of you folks out there, I’m currently engaged in the thinly-disguised admission of alcoholism that is ‘Dry January’. I’m also on a diet, and this week have eaten what looked like two shrivelled gonads for lunch, (they were boiled potatoes, I think) and yesterday a ‘salad’. The goal is to be down to Class I Obese by the summer. The diet means no white bread, no pasta (white pasta but I don’t recognise brown pasta as such) and most of all no sugar, which is now thought to account for a large number of deaths from heart disease. The Telegraph’s Tom Chivers makes the perfectly sensible, if thoughtcrimey,

Champagne sales point to stable recovery at Gold Cup

Green shoots were visible in Newbury on Saturday for the 57th Hennessy Gold Cup. While brandy cocktails warmed the punters in the Fred Winter Suite, Rob Brydon and Martin Clunes chatted up Joan Collins, who, despite being the most famous person in the room, was wearing a name badge. Myleene Klass displayed a lack of class when posing for a photograph with Princess Anne. And Tinie Tempah might want to have a word with his tailor: the rapper’s trousers were cut off half way up his shin and he must have been freezing without any socks on. Mr Steerpike feared that he might have had one too many nips of

The most important gardening book of the year

I’ll own up at once. Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson, the author and photographer of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln, £40, Spectator Bookshop, £30), are friends of mine — no very unusual circumstance in the small world of garden writing. Moreover, I wrote this book’s forerunner, The English Garden, also in collaboration with Andrew Lawson. However, my reputation would falter if I sold you an expensive pup so, if I tell you that The New English Garden is one of the more important and interesting gardening books published this year, you may believe me. The book looks at 25 innovative gardens or public spaces that have either been made,

Letters: Nurses reply to Mary Dejevsky, and Iggy Pop’s sherry habit

Nursing standards Sir: I share Mary Dejevsky’s concern regarding the impact of tired, overworked nurses on the quality of patient care (‘Short shrift for long shifts’, 6 October). However, it is unwarranted to blame nurses for detrimental work cultures when the contributing factors are complex. Nurses generally do not have a choice about the length of shifts they work. Shift lengths must be determined by patient needs and safety, and 12-hour shifts can be an essential part of their job, but hours of unpaid overtime where they cannot deliver care effectively and safely leave nurses burnt out and demoralised. The Royal College of Nursing’s research showed that nurses are dealing

In defence of binge drinking

Such an ugly word, ‘binge’. Why can’t we talk about ‘spree drinking’ or ‘frolic drinking’ or ‘extravaganza drinking’? But no, it has to be ‘binge drinking’, a term loaded (pre-loaded?) with connotations. Well you can stick your connotations: it’s binge drinking for me every time. Or rather not every time. That’s the whole point: you don’t binge as a matter of habit, otherwise it’s not a binge. But the other thing you don’t do as a habit — and this is really what I’m getting at — is sit at home with a nicely acceptable Chilean merlot every night, tooting most of the bottle and patting yourself on the Boden-clad

The week in books – Tudors, thinkers, dreamers and boozers

The book reviews in this week’s issue of the Spectator is worth the cover price. Here is a selection of quotes from some of them. The historian Anne Somerset enjoys Leanda de Lisle’s ‘different perspective’ on the Tudor dynasty. She reminds us that these self-invented parvenus had ‘vile and barbarous’ origins. ‘When Henry VII’s surviving son inherited the throne as Henry VIII, he continued his father’s policy of judicially murdering anyone close enough to the throne to imperil the claims of his immediate family. Yet the dynasty’s future remained precarious, for Henry’s six marriages produced only a single male heir. Having disinherited his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Henry only reinstated

PMQs sketch: Cigarettes and alcohol and Lynton Crosby

Cigs and booze. These issues dominated PMQs today. Ed Miliband tried to portray the PM as a puppet of ‘Big Tobacco’ whose decision not to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes was influenced by his electoral guru, Lynton Crosby. Had the PM ever ‘had a conversation’ with Crosby about fag packets? Shifty Cameron dodged sideways and declared that Crosby never ‘lobbied me about anything’. ‘Weasel words,’ said Miliband, looking triumphant. He quoted a Tory GP, Sarah Wollaston, who labelled the decision ‘a day of shame’ for the government. Up popped the lady herself from the backbenches. Dr Wollaston begged the PM to re-think his decision against ‘minimum unit pricing’, which she

Fathers, sons and the beauty of a “borrowed” book

I spent the weekend in Dublin; consequently, I am suffering from what Apthorpe would have called ‘Bechuana tummy’. For the uninitiated, Apthorpe is the premier fool in Men at Arms, the first book in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. I was reading it in bed last night and was wryly amused by this joke, which hangs over two chapters: ‘The two lame men climbed into the car and returned to Kut-al-Amara in alcoholic gloom.  Chapter 7 Next day Apthorpe had a touch of Bechuana tummy, but he rose none the less.’ I return to Men at Arms often, but never without reason. I did so this time because Father’s Day fell

Vice is vanishing from Britain

In this week’s issue of the Spectator, Leo McKinstry argues that Britain is dropping all its most harmful habits. Here is an excerpt: ‘According to the pessimistic narrative of national decline, Britain is now drowning in the effluence of moral collapse. We inhabit a country supposedly awash with vice and decadence. If we aren’t playing poker or bingo on our computer screens, then we are watching pornography. Our streets are said to be dominated by betting shops and lap-dancing clubs, by drug addicts and binge-drinkers. Yet for all its hold on the popular imagination, the idea of worsening degeneracy in modern Britain is not backed up by the evidence. Our society is