Society

Thursday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

My son and the back-crackers of Harley Street

All along Harley Street, charlatans and medical experts have set up side by side with no obvious way to tell them apart. The same wide steps lead up to the same glossy front doors, all with prestigious brass knobs. Each separate house is itself a layered stack of quacks and docs: radiology one floor above absence healing, flower therapy down the corridor from paediatric ENT. The magnificent Harley Street address confers a blessing on every dubious therapy. Perhaps it has a placebo effect all of its own. I know the street quacks well, or used to. My mother had a horror of antibiotics and would pack us off to Harley

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In my other life, I’m a water engineer

Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with our spring-fed water supply. Hearing their car, I slithered out to greet them, covered in slime like a monster from the deep. It would be natural to say this took them by surprise. It did not. They know me. Since infancy I’ve loved playing with water. Every river I could dam, every channel I could dig, every pond I could drain or fill, every stream I could divert, every castle wall I could build against the encroaching tide, seemed to point to a promising career as a water engineer. Sadly

Peter Jones

Frater, ave atque vale

As his obituaries pointed out, my brother David made a name for himself with his unrideable bicycle; his ‘perpetual motion’ machine — a bicycle wheel still rotating in a frame on our mantelpiece (it attracted 1.1 million hits on a German website); and his theory that the arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair and fingernails was down to his wallpaper. The papers naturally got all this wrong (‘Napoleon killed by wallpaper’ they intoned, as did Andrew Roberts), and the image of the potty prof emerged. In fact, his purpose was serious. He was equally serious about our children — after a failed marriage, he had none of his own, to his

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The hormone that makes you a liberal halfwit

People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn. More specifically, they are deficient in oxytocin, a neuropeptide hormone sometimes known as the ‘cuddle drug’ because of its ability to turn normal human beings into simpering halfwits. Psychologists ran a series of studies in which Germans were asked how much money they would like to give to, say, Tariq and Mohammed, who have just arrived here from Syria. ‘Nothing at all, unless they intend to spend it on a ticket home’ is of course the correct response, and indeed many Germans initially concurred with this. However, after they were

Lucy Vickery

Bowing and scraping

In Competition No. 3011 you were invited to submit a disgustingly flattering poem in heroic couplets in praise of a contemporary person of power. You were at your bootlicking best this week: Donald Trump, Anthony Scaramucci, Xi Jinping, Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin were all on the receiving end of some serious sucking-up. Bill Greenwell’s tribute to Justin Trudeau caught my eye: ‘When all around you, everyone’s a pseudo,/ How gracefully you rise, dear Justin Trudeau…’. As did David Silverman’s love letter to Kim Jong-un: ‘How do you solve a problem like Korea?/ Ask Kim Jong-un, he’s sure to make it clear.’ Closer to home, Alan Millard and John Whitworth

Wednesday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

What have commuters done to deserve this price hike on their rail fares?

With the Retail Price Index figures released yesterday, commuters are up in arms at the news that rail prices are set to rise by up to 3.6% as of January. It’s not all fares that will be affected; only those that are regulated by the government – and the price increase won’t happen until the government agrees to it being implemented. But around 45% of fares in England, Scotland and Wales are regulated, including certain off-peak and standard return tickets, and most season tickets in the South East and London regions. A 3.6% increase might not sound huge if you only get the train once or twice a month. But

Tuesday

Trevor Barnes

The Garden Bridge was the definition of a folly

Dry your eyes, Joanna Lumley, and try to move on. For the Garden Bridge was doomed from the start. Sure, it had all the hallmarks of an absolutely fabulous idea dreamt up by Patsy and friends in the early hours of Sunday morning after a humdinger of an evening on cocktails and Bolly. But by mid afternoon its shortcomings should have been uncomfortably apparent and the whole fuzzy-headed wheeze quietly forgotten. The mystery is that it’s taken so long – although even now, with the death-knell sounded, the bridge’s giddy supporters are petulant when confronted by unbelievers daring to suggest that, as a purely practical proposition, the idea stinks. Let

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Trump’s presidency will stain America for years to come

It is amazing what a crowd – or a basket – of deplorables can do. Sometimes they can even strip away cant and reveal the truth. Such has been the case since a few hundred neo-Nazis and assorted other white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the weekend. They were protesting the planned removal of a statue honouring General Robert E. Lee, a statue typical of the American south’s longstanding emotional sympathy for the Confederacy. The Confederates might have been wrong, but they were romantic and, besides, they were our kind of wrong. Of course they should still be honoured by statues that serve as consolation prizes or participation trophies.

Monday

Tony Diver

The NUS’s latest stunt is leaving students worse off

The National Union of Students isn’t good for much beyond the occasional discount voucher which it sends to its members. But its latest campaign still proved a big hit. The NUS called on its members to boycott the National Student Survey, suggesting that it could be used to justify higher fees if universities scored highly. Students need little encouragement not to do something; unsurprisingly, the plan worked. Last week, it emerged that a dozen universities didn’t get enough responses for their surveys to be deemed valid. Top universities – including Cambridge, Oxford, UCL and Bristol – were among those affected. The NUS is busy claiming success. Yet this characteristically petty

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

How one London junction is raking in fines of £200,000 per day

Driving in central London is a minefield at the best of times. What with the confusion of the congestion charge zone, one-way streets at every turn, cyclists all over the place and it being nigh-on impossible to park, it’s a wonder that anyone even tries to drive in London. Perhaps this is all a tactic by the Mayor to put off drivers from coming in to the capital. It does seem like a pretty good tactic, to be fair. The latest gripe is about one particular junction in Bank, from which cars are banned, and only buses and bikes are allowed to drive through. However, the rules were only changed

Sunday

Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford: How I write

I have a beautifully quiet workroom at home, but somehow the expectant hush in there raises the stakes intolerably, and I only use it in an emergency. Instead I put my laptop in my bag and make my way to a café which meets my needs for a steady background murmur of other people’s conversation, and decent coffee. Also, for tolerance of a gurning, teeth-picking, hair-twiddling, head-scratching man in the corner who sits for hours at a time, only buying Americanos. If anything, my present café is a little bit too white and bright and hipster-aspirational. There used to be one nearby that almost perfectly embodied my ideal of shabbiness

The Spectator

Jeremy Corbyn still cannot bear to condemn his fallen idols in Venezuela

Jeremy Corbyn finally broke his silence on Venezuela this week, but in the manner of a man who has his head buried in a very large bucket of sand. He condemned violence ‘on both sides’, painting the country’s problems as a battle between factions rather than a case of a repressive government snuffing out popular protests. No one would know from the Labour leader’s words that President Maduro’s regime is engaged in what the UN Human Rights Office described this week as a ‘widespread and systematic use of excessive force’. More revealing still was Corbyn’s reply when prodded on the economic and social conditions which led to the protests. The

James Delingpole James Delingpole

David Cameron’s kept his head down, so let him chillax

David Cameron was in the news again this week after being paid £1 million a minute to give a speech explaining why Brexit was a terrible mistake at the annual Gay Stranglers’ Guild gala dinner at a brutal dictatorship in central Asia, before spending a week cruising the Baltic on the yacht of Putin’s second-favourite oligarch with the prettiest members of the Russian men’s lacrosse team. No, wait. My bad. Had he done that, as we know from similar cases, he would have got off scot-free. Instead, the ex-PM did something far, far worse in the eyes of our ever watchful media: he was photographed enjoying himself at a Cotswolds

Saturday

Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh: How I write

If you are a writer of my disposition you tend to grasp any opportunity for self–sabotage and distraction. So here’s my shabby, rapidly declining two bob’s worth. The process to me is generally an ideal I am working towards or aspiring to, like drinking less or going to the gym more. Whenever I pompously declare ‘I’m at my desk every morning by 7 a.m.’ a cynical voice in my head screams ‘You wish!’ But the good news is that it’s easier to stop a teenager from masturbating than a real writer from writing. The ideal I aspire to is rising at 6 a.m., having a light breakfast, being at my desk till

Andrew J. Bacevich

Trump hasn’t drained the swamp – he’s put the military in charge of it

Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn Americans in 1961 of the ‘military industrial complex’, but perhaps it is now the only thing that stands between the US and chaos. The new White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, is the third general Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet. Kelly is already getting a good press for introducing military discipline and order to the Trump White House. His first move was to fire the attention-grabbing billionaire Anthony Scaramucci as head of communications, and he’s said to have told even members of Trump’s family that they must book ‘face time’ with the President through him. Is this another sign

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Even in the cesspit of elite football, the Neymar deal has a pungent whiff to it

In a quiet season for business news, the giant cesspit that is the world of elite football can be relied upon to provide a money story with a pungent whiff to it. I refer to the transfer of the 25-year-old Brazilian known only as Neymar from Barcelona to Paris St Germain for a world-record fee close to £200 million. When Neymar was bought by Barcelona from Santos of Brazil in 2013, a £200 million break clause was inserted in his contract in the belief that no club in the world could possibly afford to buy him out. But PSG has done so even though Spanish football authorities refused to facilitate

Friday

Matt Purple

Trump is treating Kim Jong-un like a rival New York real estate developer

When I first heard Donald Trump threaten North Korea with “fire and fury,” I immediately despaired—because I’m sick and tired of hackneyed Game of Thrones references. Amongst American pundits, mentioning the hit show has become a desperate way of showing off one’s knowledge of popular culture. To that end, Steve Bannon isn’t Rasputin or Jean-Paul Marat; he’s Qyburn, of course, and Sean Spicer is Hodor. Now this lazy form of posturing has infiltrated even the highest levels of the United States government. What have we come to? Despite its fantasy undertones, however, Trump’s “fire and fury” remark didn’t originate on HBO; it was improvised by the president during an event addressing the American

Rory Geoghegan

Paid police informants are a necessary evil

Police paying a convicted child rapist to be a covert informant will always turn stomachs. But the real stomach-churner is that the grooming and exploitation of vulnerable women and girls is continuing. Even so, the £10,000 payment made to a sex offender who helped bring the Newcastle grooming gang to justice has sparked a backlash. The chief constable of Northumbria, who authorised the payment, has conceded that his decision is widely seen as ‘morally repugnant’. Yet the criticism aimed at the police should not mask the importance of paid informants. It’s clear to me that information and intelligence is the lifeblood of any investigation. This is particularly true in cases involving child sexual exploitation, where offenders operate in

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The method behind Donald Trump’s fire-and-fury madness

Donald Trump’s latest eruption – saying that his threat of fire and fury didn’t go far enough – will have delighted Kim Jong-un. His demented regime is based on the idea of being on the brink of war with the United States: this conceit has been used to build a nuclear weapons arsenal that has cost billions of dollars and millions of lives. He ran 24 missile tests and two nuclear tests last year and still didn’t get a rise out of Barack Obama. Then along comes Donald Tump and: bingo. Kim has finally found someone with whom to play nuclear poker. To many in Washington – and the world