Society Archives

Thursday

19 May 2016

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

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

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

18 May 2016

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

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

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

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 18 May 2016

It’s an oft-used phrase but the popularity of ‘the Bank of Mum and Dad’ shows no sign of waning. New research shows that one third of parents have been under financial pressure as a result of bailing their children out financially. According to the information services company Experian, over half of parents surveyed said that adult children had drawn from the Bank of Mum and Dad an average of four times and to the value of £6,000 since becoming financially independent. Meanwhile, results from a survey by YouGov, commissioned by Royal London, reveal almost five million renters in the UK have no plans in place to cover their rent if they

Ed West

What we learnt from Piers Morgan’s interview with Donald Trump

Is Donald Trump the Leicester City of US politics, the 5,000/1 outsider who took everyone by surprise? That was Piers Morgan’s opening question to the likely Republican presidential candidate on ITV last night. The obvious response might be that the Donald is more like Chelsea – loads of money, everyone sorts of hates them, some dubious right-of-centre supporters. The Morgan interview was presumably part of a plan for softening his image, now that he’s won the GOP base and needs to get more of the centre. There was lots of personal stuff – I’m a nice person, he kept on saying, I’m a people person, I love people – but

Tuesday

17 May 2016

Sally Carson

As a midwife, I’m horrified by my union leader’s support for unlimited abortion

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the UK’s largest abortion provider, and a group of other organisations recently launched a campaign for the repeal of all legal limitations on abortion in the UK. As a midwife, I was shocked to discover that one of those signatories was the Royal College of Midwives (RCM). If what the BPAS campaign is calling for were ever implemented – the total removal of abortion from criminal law – it would mean that there would be no restriction on abortion whatsoever. This would put the UK in a small international club that includes China and Vietnam – where abortion is available, for any reason, up to

Steerpike

Did The Times get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

Oh dear. While Mr S is not himself immune to the pitfalls of journalism in the digital age, today’s Times Red Box email really does take the biscuit. Although today’s morning briefing promised an exclusive poll proving that Corbyn is going nowhere, a lot of subscribers received something quite different: Fear not, however. If you fell victim to today’s technical glitch there is still time to try an alternative by signing up to The Spectator‘s Lunchtime Espresso and Evening Blend emails.

Monday

16 May 2016

James Forsyth

Which polls are you going to believe?

Today’s ICM phone and online polls are a reminder that the polls aren’t going to offer much certainty about the result of the EU referendum. ICM’s traditional phone poll has IN ahead 47 to 39, and with the don’t knows excluded up 55% to 45%. This would suggest that IN is on course for a fairly comfortable victory. But its online poll has Out up 47 to 43, and with the don’t knows excluded ahead 52% to 48%. Phone polls are generally regarded as slightly superior to online ones, they are certainly more expensive. So, I suspect that most people in Westminster will take these polls as a sign that

Camilla Swift

How Jeremy Corbyn kept down the bids at this year’s big Tory fundraiser

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. The Conservative party’s Black and White Ball is a lavish, billionaire-laden affair. Tickets can cost up to £1,500, with guests who shell out the full £15,000 for a group of ten rewarded with the presence of a cabinet minister on their table. But even if that sounds a bit steep, selling tickets isn’t the main objective. What really makes money is the post-dinner auction, at which Russian oligarchs bid tens or hundreds of thousands

Rebecca O'Connor

Pets v children: financially speaking, it’s no contest

There’s a whole swathe of wannabe parents buying pets to ‘practise on’, according to recent research. More than two million British dog owners bought their dogs to limber up for a baby, the Direct Line survey found. Meanwhile, a third of dog owners without children feel like parents and one in 20 childless dog owners believe owning a dog is more work than having a baby. It’s hard to know whether to feel more sorry for the dogs or the children. Babying a dog is a sure-fire way to psychologically destroy it and if you reckon that pampering a pooch is anything like the mind and body annihilation that comes

Helen Nugent

Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 16 May 2016

There’s some good news for homeowners this morning: asking prices for houses jumped to a new record high of £308,151 on average in May, according to property website Rightmove, Thisismoney reports that some towns have seen ‘eye-watering’ increases while across England and Wales, the average price tag on a property coming to market has risen by £1,118 on last month. The price increase comes despite a three percentage point stamp duty hike for buy-to-let investors, imposed from April 1, which it was thought would take some heat out of the market. But the rush from homebuyers in March to beat the extra stamp duty on buy-to-let properties and second homes has led

Julie Burchill

Comedians who think they’re soldiers are the biggest joke of all

I must admit to snigger-spitting my Sugar Smacks recently as I read an interview with Eddie Izzard in the Times. (Odd, because he’s never made me laugh before.) He spoke thus: ‘I would have been a soldier if I’d knew which war I’d have to fight. I was ready to apply but when you join the armed forces you fight where you’re sent. I parked the idea.’ Later on in the interview he opines – and Izzard is a proper Opiner, whereas most of us just say things – ‘Fears are there to be conquered. I’ve gone from playing the streets of London to the Hollywood Bowl. But the biggest thing