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Diary

Justin Webb

Wednesday, 24th September 2008

Justin Webb on living in America

I am deeply depressed about my children’s capacity to connect with the Old Country should we ever come back to England. My effort to begin the process of toughening them up for the rigours of the British education system (uniforms, etc) met with disregard bordering on insolence. ‘You might have to take exams,’ I ventured. ‘What’s an exam?’ they chorused without lifting their heads from the telly. Oh dear. At their Washington school they mainly learn how wonderful they are; the headmaster begins each day by shaking hands enthusiastically with every pupil. My children are much admired for the faintly British way they speak but the youngest thinks apple sauce rhymes with criss-cross. This I find sweet, but I am deeply aware that in polite British society it is acceptable to be prejudiced against such a view. If we did ever come back, I should like to have a room in the house in which only American is spoken. Y’all can suck it up if you don’t like it.

On a gorgeous late summer Washington evening I find myself face to face, as it were, with Rudolf Nureyev’s penis. It is preternaturally large and dominates the photograph of its owner. The exhibition is, aptly, on the theme of power. Richard Avedon photographed the Washington elite (and random celebrities) for a generation and here they all are staring balefully out from the walls of the Corcoran Gallery. Most, thankfully, are clothed. Here, for instance, is Donald Rumsfeld in his Nixon incarnation, black hair slicked back, in a textured suit, and a tie that screams out, ‘Nylon, the fabric of the future.’ I ask our ambo Sir Nigel Sheinwald (the current generation of power players is at this preview, surveying the old) to give me his candid assessment of whose politicians are uglier, British or American. Nigel smoothly declines to venture an opinion. Nor does he have one on Nureyev, but others are less coy: as we leave I overhear a Powerful Washington Lady remarking, with gin-fuelled vigour, ‘God, he’s well hung!’ The Corcoran is currently being rescued and restored to its rightful place as one of the world’s leading galleries by a Briton, Paul Greenhalgh, and he has ensured repeat business with this evening.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

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Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.