Society

Thursday

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 19 May 2016

A ‘digital revolution’ was at the heart of the Queen’s Speech yesterday, including a new legal right to fast broadband under plans to bring rural areas and unconnected households into the 21st century. That’s according to this morning’s front page of The Times. The paper reports that a law enshrining the right to broadband will mean that up to a million people in rural areas, who have long suffered terrible coverage, can demand a better service. It brings internet connectivity into line with the right to get electricity, telephone and postal services. Other measures in the speech included the capping of exit fees for savers who want to access their cash under new

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Hillary’s America

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. What should we expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency? The Democrat frontrunner is now the firm favourite to win the White House, assuming that she can defeat her Republican rival Donald Trump. But what would her victory mean for America? In his Spectator cover piece this week, Christopher Buckley says one of Hillary’s prevailing characteristics is her ability to bore. He also argues that Clinton’s politic shapeshifting over the years may have enabled her to stand the test of time, but it’s also

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Obama’s last great battle is in the bathroom

Who’d have thought that one of Obama’s last great battles would be over toilets? Last week he issued a strict warning to schools saying that transgender pupils must be allowed to use whichever loo they choose. Girls or boys who feel they’re trapped in the wrong body have, in some states, been required to widdle according to their biological sex. No more, said the President. No child left behind in the wrong restroom. This was an arrow aimed straight at the heart of the conservative South. Back in March, North Carolina passed a law requiring people in schools and government buildings to use the loo matching the sex recorded on

Gary Bell Qc

A QC’s guide to cocaine

As a defence silk, I come across some surprisingly intelligent drug dealers. Many of them are highly entrepreneurial and driven, and I’m often left wondering what they might have achieved if only they’d chosen a different career. Sharp operators are drawn to the narcotics trade because vast profits can be made in very little time. But then the consequences of failure, especially at the heavyweight end of the market, are rather worse than a tumbling share price. And we all make mistakes. I was recently involved in a case where a criminal mastermind had been jailed for 15 years for heroin importation, but had kept on running his empire from

The Spectator

Bus battles

From ‘The softening of street manners’, The Spectator, 20 May 1916: Generally the public opinion of the ’bus entirely upholds the conductor. The influence of the tyrant is too strong to allow of protest, but now and then cases of rebellion occur, and bold females who consider themselves slighted vow that they will write to the company. But an ordinary ’bus-load contains no such heroines…. Sometimes, however, the will of the passengers prevails by reason of unanimity. A few nights ago a drunken soldier got, late at night, into a West End ’bus. The conductor civilly asked him to get out. The man began to argue, and a number of elderly

Christopher Buckley

The age of Hillary

Predicting what might happen in a Donald Trump presidency is easy. Day 1: A fabulous, really great inaugural, the best ever, with amazing entertainment by fabulous, top people. Day 2: War with Iran. Day 3: War with North Korea. Day 4: Mexico builds a wall to keep out Americans. But let’s not go there. (Please.) Let us instead conjure what four years of a Hillary Clinton administration might bring. After all, she is, despite the media-led panic about Trump’s improving polls, still strong favourite to become the 45th President of the United States. So what would Hillary’s America look like? Well, we could start with some predictions about the legislative fate

James Delingpole James Delingpole

What’s making Remain campaigners so tetchy?

Like a lot of keen games-players I’m a stickler for the rules. This is not because I’m an especially honourable person; merely a recognition that without a rigorous structure and a sense of fair play, a game can be no fun and winning can afford no satisfaction. I feel much the same way about politics. Take Hilary Benn’s recent contribution to the Brexit debate, wherein he professed to have taken grievous offence at Boris Johnson’s use of the word ‘Hitler’ in an article about Europe. As was perfectly clear from the context, the reference was dropped in lightly and unhysterically in the service of an unexceptionable point. So the game

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

How your brain buys a sofa

Almost every popular commercial product owes its success to two different qualities. First, it does the job it is ostensibly designed to do pretty well. Secondly, it has some quality that you might call ‘limbic appeal’. It delights or soothes our unconscious mind in ways which defy objective measurement. Much as it delusionally believes that it runs the show, the power granted to conscious reasoning within the brain is that given to a slightly colour-blind, utilitarian man when he buys a sofa with his wife. The man may have his own preferences, but he has a minimal role in the selection, involving as it does many complex factors that defy

Bruce Anderson

Nicholas the miraculous

Miracles are not ceased. A few years ago, a kindly educational therapist took pity on John Prescott and set out to devise a way to reconcile the Mouth of the Humber and his native tongue. He came up with Twitter. That explains the restriction to 140 characters, barely room for Lord Prescott to commit more than three brutal assaults on the English language. A hundred and forty was too much. Twitter did not cure John Prescott. But it did gain pace among the young — and, the miracle, with Nicholas Soames. Nick is one of the funniest men of this age. With Falstaff, he could say (he could say a

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 19 May 2016

   Nairobi The gangsters hadn’t heard of Brexit. ‘What is this “Breaks it”?’ they asked my friend hours after kidnapping him at gunpoint. At dusk my mate had been driving in Nairobi, with the Wings song ‘Band on the Run’ playing. He pulled over to answer his mobile when a man appeared at his side with a pistol. After letting him and two others get in, my friend was directed to an insalubrious Nairobi postcode, frogmarched up five floors and then beaten on the arms and knees with a golf putter. Big Gangster emptied his pockets and went carefully through his iPhone emails, messages and contacts list. ‘They got to

Lucy Vickery

Wild thing

In Competition No. 2948 you were invited to step into the skin of a species of your choice and provide an account of the experience. In his fascinating, funny book Being a Beast Charles Foster attempted ‘to learn what it is like to shuffle or swoop through a landscape that is mainly olfactory and auditory rather than visual’. As a badger he took up residence in a hole and ate earthworms (they taste of ‘slime and the land’). And as an urban fox he ‘lay in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans living

Ben Schott

Jeeves and the Cap that Fits

The Secret Service said it would investigate Donald J. Trump’s longtime butler over Facebook posts laced with vulgarities and epithets calling for President Obama to be killed. — New York Times, 12 May 2016 I had only just risen from a deep slumber, when in shimmied Jeeves with the cup that cheers. ‘Does the day look fruity, Jeeves?’ I yawned. ‘Indeed, sir,’ he assented, opening the curtains to an expanse of cloudless sky, ‘decidedly clement.’ ‘Perfect conditions for a perusal of the racing form in the long grass, would you say?’ ‘I would, sir. However your aunt has asked me to inform you that she desires you to entertain a

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Private fears

I should have known the London prep school scene was a racket from the way parents talk about it. They sound mad. ‘You’re too late!’ I was told by one mother, when my Little Face (not his real name) was nine months old, as if we had, by a whisker, missed the lifeboats at the Titanic. ‘What schools are you considering?’ asked a stranger in the playground. I muttered some names and she, a drab suburban Maleficent, cursed me. ‘You’ll be lucky,’ she smiled, as I dreamed of laying a peculiarly north London curse of my own: ‘May your child fail its A-levels.’ Even so, I put Little Face on

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Will Labour convict me of thought crime?

I got an email this week, from a chap called Harry, which began as follows: ‘I am writing to inform you that I will be carrying out the investigation on behalf of the Labour party into the circumstances that resulted in your suspension from the party.’ Harry went on to say that he will be ‘conducting interviews with witnesses’ and added: ‘I will also need a time when you are available for an interview.’ This last presumably as an afterthought: I suppose we need to hear from him. Anyway, at this interview (to be conducted in London, natch) I am allowed to bring along a ‘silent witness’ —someone who is not

A.N. Wilson

Dante’s egomania

Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even when supposedly writing on politics or arranging love poems to his dream-women. The core of this new book about him can be found in a sentence following Dante’s banishment from Florence, and his setting out as a poverty-stricken exile, deprived of all power, separated from his wife and family and stripped of his wealth. Marco Santagata writes: One of the typical features of Dante’s personality, which qualifies him as an ‘intellectual’ in the modern sense of the word, is his endless reflection on what he is doing, both as an

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A deal has been reached in the junior doctors dispute

A deal has been reached between the government and the BMA on the new junior doctors contract. The deal now needs to be approved by a BMA ballot. Details of the deal are still emerging, but I understand that rather than junior doctors working the 11 Saturdays a year that the government wanted them to, they will now work 6 weekends a year. The marginal cost for a hospital of employing a junior doctor will fall by roughly a third if this deal goes through. The government has given some ground elsewhere. Doctors returning from maternity leave will be entitled to catch up on the skills training that they have

Laura Whitcombe

Revealed: the magic formula for a prosperous retirement

This piece is from the new issue of Spectator Money, out on Thursday 19 May. The magazine will come free with your next copy of The Spectator, and will also be available to read online at www.spectator.co.uk/money. We’re all getting older. We’ve just celebrated the Queen’s 90th as a very special occasion, yet by 2027 there will be a million of us in the UK aged 90 or above, according to the Inter-national Longevity Centre (ILC). Ten years beyond that, 65-and-overs will account for nearly a quarter of the population. Longevity is a luxury if it’s accompanied by good health. It also comes with many challenges, not least the need to

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Donald Trump’s media fanboys are as bad as his haters

Vicious, arrogant, obnoxious and possibly evil. These were the words Donald Trump used to describe Piers Morgan, when he won the first series of Celebrity Apprentice. That’s right: even the man they say is Hitler’s second coming is wary of Britain’s most insipid TV export. The combination made last night’s exclusive ITV interview, between Morgan and The Donald himself, a recipe for outrage. Twitterers compared it to Alien vs Predator. Or Jeremy Kyle meets Frost/Nixon. Alan Sugar told Morgan to climb out of Trump’s arse. And 140-character bilge did fly. But the chummy, half-hour chat, filmed in Trump Tower, wasn’t anything to write home about. Touching on Princess Diana, terrorism

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Sir Michael Wilshaw, where are these illegal schools run by the ‘Jewish community’?

Apparently, there are secret Jewish schools in Britain where children are taught nothing but the Jewish faith, where they are exposed to homophobic literature, where all music and the arts are banned and where they are indoctrinated by extremists. How do we know? Because Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw has told us. Admittedly he didn’t quite say so in those terms but that is what he ended up implying on Radio 4’s PM programme earlier this week. Interviewed by Eddie Mair about the 100 or so illegal schools reported to be operating behind the backs of education inspectors, Sir Michael described the problem. Parents abuse the law providing the right for home education

Helen Nugent

In case of emergency…hike up the price

My phone rings. ‘Hi, it’s your editor here. We need an article in a hurry, it’s a bit of an emergency. Can you do it quickly?’. I reply: ‘Yes, but I’ll have to raise my rate by 500 per cent.’ My career at The Spectator would be pretty short-lived if I tried that on. But it’s exactly what plumbers do – and they get away with it. A new study from Direct Line Home Insurance has revealed the so-called ‘plumber premium’ if you need a tradesperson to fix a leak in an emergency. While the average increase in a plumber’s hourly rate for this kind of work is an imposing 117 per