Society Archives

Thursday

6 Aug 2015

Oporto

‘When he’s away, the thing he misses about Porto is the tripe.’ I was talking to Eduarda Sandeman, wife of George Sandeman, chairman of the eponymous port firm. Despite his illustrious name, George Sandeman isn’t from Oporto (as the British call it). His family are from Jerez and he was educated in England. He speaks English and Spanish fluently but he told me that he is still teased by his wife for his imperfect Portuguese. It’s a hard language to pronounce — a bit like Spanish spoken by a Russian. George’s love of tripe, though, marks him out as a true son of Oporto. The inhabitants of the city are

Rod Liddle

Who’d have thought that about Ted? Well…

In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation should be used to punish teachers who hold ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality and perhaps divest themselves of these views to their pupils. I assume this could mean simply reading out bits of the Bible — that pungent little verse in Leviticus, perhaps, with its reference to ‘detestable acts’. Or maybe he would be OK reading out bits from Leviticus if he then made it clear that the Levite priests, and God Himself, were totally wrong on this issue and that homosexuality is absolutely lovely. But never mind the Levites. These ‘old-fashioned’ views would include

Jonathan Ray

August Wine Club | 6 August 2015

A really strong team of wines from The Wine Company this week, drawn from France, Italy and New Zealand and including two delicious oddities. And so proud of our final choice was The Wine Company’s Mark Cronshaw that he rashly agreed to some very decent discounts. I hope you enjoy the selection as much as I did. The 2014 Domaine du Cléray Chardonnay (1) is a charming curiosity, a Chardonnay from the Loire. As any fule kno the Loire Valley is Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre, Pouilly Fumé) and Chenin Blanc (Vouvray) country and Chardonnay has no business being there at all. But maverick winemaker Pierre-Jean Sauvion ignores tradition and has found

Roger Alton

Champions of absurdity

Jumping the shark isn’t yet an Olympic sport, but if it were the International Olympic Committee would be a shoo-in for gold. And silver and bronze too. Amid some low-key hoopla last week, the IOC awarded the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing. Yes, that’s the same Beijing that staged the 2008 Olympics and in a couple of weeks will put on the World Athletics Championships. The 2022 bidding boiled down to a two-horse race between Almaty, Kazakhstan, which at least has some snow; and Beijing, which doesn’t. The previous front-runner, Oslo, withdrew its bid last autumn after all the main political parties rejected the funding plans for the Games. It

Alex Clark

Man of many worlds

By the kind of uncanny coincidence that would tickle his psychogeographically minded friends Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock’s publishers have recently moved offices to the same corner of London occupied by his latest novel, The Whispering Swarm; and just as their rather swanky embankment premises are called Carmelite House, so does the religious order provide Moorcock with one of his key characters. It is a Carmelite monk who leads the book’s teenage protagonist, one ‘Michael Moorcock’, from an ABC teashop to a mysterious enclave just off post-Blitz Fleet Street. There, behind a ‘battered oaken gate’, the precocious journalist and budding science-fiction writer is introduced to ‘Alsacia’, a secret

The Spectator

One year on

From ‘The End of the First Year’, The Spectator, 7 August 1915: Terrible as have been the sufferings caused by the war—the agonies of the body for those who have fought and fallen wounded, and the agonies of the mind for those who have seen husbands, fathers, and sons go to their deaths or return maimed or ruined in health—the present writer cannot feel that sense of overmastering horror which the war seems to have inspired in certain minds. Some have been carried away so far by such thoughts that they tell us they wish their eyes had been closed for ever before the national tragedy began. The present writer can

J. Meirion

The GPs’ revenge

On 31 March, I walked out of the Royal Marsden Hospital in London for the last time, after 28 years as a consultant cancer surgeon. At the age of almost 69, I had given six months’ notice of my wish to resign my contract by Easter, but to remain on staff in order to complete a research project on malignant melanoma. That request was initially considered favourably, then withdrawn after I wrote a series of articles in The Spectator and the Daily Mail about what I thought was wrong with the NHS. One, in which I said that ‘GPs are part of the NHS’s problem, not the solution’, triggered a

Matthew Parris

If Corbyn wins, he could split the Tories too

‘Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?’ asked C.P. Cavafy in his poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. All through your and my life the Labour party have been at the gates of Downing Street, and often enough stormed them, only to be beaten back at a subsequent election. What might happen to the Conservative party if those barbarians disappear? We must not assume that Jeremy Corbyn will

Martin Vander Weyer

The Libor trader’s long stretch is a big message to the banking world

Fourteen years is a long stretch. The punishment imposed on former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes for his role as ‘the hub of the conspiracy’ to rig yen Libor rates is the same as the maximum sentence for burglary with intent to commit GBH. Even though no public attempt has been made to quantify his fraudulent profits or identify victims, Hayes’s punishment is twice that imposed on rogue trader Kweko Adeboli, who lost UBS $2.3 billion — both having pleaded ‘not guilty’. With remission, Hayes will serve about half the term: Adeboli, jailed in late 2012, came out this June. But even so, the socially awkward Hayes has forfeited

Mark Palmer

The ugly game

What a terrific summer of sport it’s been: a wonderful Wimbledon, a rollicking Royal Ascot, an absorbing Ashes series that still has the best part of two Tests to go. And now along comes football, barging its way on to the back pages, shoving the other sports aside, sniggering all the way to the bank. Every August, the ‘beautiful game’ reasserts itself as the playground bully. Football is the most popular sport in this country — and the nastiest. It has become a cesspit of greed, debauchery and racism, especially in Britain. It is crude and overbearing and has all the subtlety of a disco at Holy Communion. I feel

Lucy Vickery

Taking the Michael

In Competition No. 2909 you were invited to follow in the footsteps of Michael Gove, who has urged civil servants to take inspiration from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, and submit a memo generated by either the Department of Education or the Ministry of Justice as it might have been written by a writer you would like to see Whitehall bureaucrats model their correspondence on. It’s a squeeze this week, so I’ll hand straight over to the worthy winners below who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch takes £30. From: Under-Secretary Screwtape Re: Stratification of Educational Assessment Procedures Now that we have successfully imposed permanent

Wednesday

5 Aug 2015

Isabel Hardman

Kids Company closure: three questions for ministers

Yesterday, Miles Goslett revealed on Coffee House how the beleaguered charity Kids Company was dealing with the allegations against it. His cache of emails revealed that it was using the £3 million grant it had received from government to pay staff, a direct violation of the terms of the donation. This evening, the charity has shut its services. In a statement, Kids Company boss Camila Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s trustees said: ‘We have been forced to do so because collectively, despite the extraordinary efforts of Camila and her team, some truly enlightened philanthropists and the government, we have not been able to raise enough money to meet the ongoing costs

Charles Moore

Remembering Robert Conquest, 1917 – 2015

Last month, in Stanford, California, I had lunch with Robert Conquest, poet, historian, literary editor of this paper in the early 1960s, exposer of Soviet totalitarianism. After Conquest’s book The Great Terror (1968), it became impossible for all but the most crazed fanatic or fool to deny that Stalin had arranged the greatest system of mass murder in history (Hitler being at least his equal in iniquity, but a bit lower on the numbers). Bob turned 98 a week after I saw him. He was born just before the Bolsheviks he exposed came to power. His writing, and his advice to Margaret Thatcher, helped bring about the collapse of their

Rod Liddle

Who would have thought that about Ted Heath? Well…

In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation should be used to punish teachers who hold ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality and perhaps divest themselves of these views to their pupils. I assume this could mean simply reading out bits of the Bible — that pungent little verse in Leviticus, perhaps, with its reference to ‘detestable acts’. Or maybe he would be OK reading out bits from Leviticus if he then made it clear that the Levite priests, and God Himself, were totally wrong on this issue and that homosexuality is absolutely lovely. But never mind the Levites. These

Geoffrey Alderman

Trade unions should foot the bill for any economic damage they cause

As of 6.30pm this evening, Londoners will (once again) suffer miserably at the hands of the transport unions, which have called another 24-hour strike on the Underground system in support of a demand for higher payments for operating a night-time service on parts of the network. Many commuters – forced onto overcrowded buses – will arrive late for work, while many more will be unable to work at all. Shops and restaurants will lose custom. When the last such strike took place, on 15-16 July, the Federation of Small Businesses estimated the cost at around £300 million. With more tourists in the capital, the cost of this next strike is likely to

Jonathan Isaby

The Tube is an essential service and should be protected from strikes

Today, London feels on edge. For the second month in a row, militant transport unions will shut down the Underground system at 6:30pm, leaving Londoners to face seemingly endless queues for buses, inflated Uber prices and an army of occasional cyclists bearing down on them. The estimated cost of a 24-hour strike (this time, over the plans for a 24-hour Tube service) is some £50 million. It’s time for the government to step in. Currently, the fire service, among others, is regarded as an ‘essential service’, which means a minimum service has to be provided during periods of industrial action while full-scale walkouts are illegal. It is time for the Tube –

Melanie McDonagh

Since when did opposing gay marriage make you an extremist?

You know, when gay marriage legislation was going through parliament and Christian campaigners were warning about the possibility that those with a conscientious objection to gay marriage would find themselves at a disadvantage in public life – especially teachers – I honestly thought that it would take some time to happen. You might have some nutty secularist calling out a teacher who stubbornly refused to teach the parity of gay and straight marriage to children, but outside the Liberal Democrats, I couldn’t really see persecution ahead, other than for marriage registrars who would, unfortunately, just have to lump their conscientious difficulties with marrying same-sex couples. Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. For

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Should the Church say sorry?

From ‘Apology’, The Spectator, 7 August 1915: Does any public body ever apologize to the world? Such a concerted effort has never, we think, been made through any authorized mouthpiece. The effect of such an experiment might be colossal. Suppose, if the supposition be not too absurd, that a Pope should apologize in the name of the larger half of Christendom for all the more glaring lapses of the Roman Church—for all the great persecutions, for all the great mistakes. Such action is not unthinkable, No Church has ever claimed to be infallible except in dogma and theoretic morality. The present Pontiff in his recent refusal to condemn the atrocities

Tuesday

4 Aug 2015

Miles Goslett

Revealed: the emails which show how Kids Company is dealing with the allegations against it

The charity Kids Company is under so much pressure that some people are starting to worry about its outgoing chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh. Recent reports of financial mismanagement published in The Spectator and elsewhere have contributed to Batmanghelidjh being forced to quit her £90,000 post, which she has promised to vacate by October 31, but uncomfortable questions remain: last week, a sex abuse investigation into the charity was launched by police. In the small hours of yesterday morning I was sent, anonymously, a series of emails sent from Kids Company employee accounts over the last month. Some are written by Batmanghelidjh and provide an insight into how she is dealing

Martin Vander Weyer

The Libor trader’s long stretch is a big message to the banking world | 4 August 2015

Fourteen years is a long stretch. The punishment imposed on former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes for his role as ‘the hub of the conspiracy’ to rig yen Libor rates is the same as the maximum sentence for burglary with intent to commit GBH. Even though no public attempt has been made to quantify his fraudulent profits or identify victims, Hayes’s punishment is twice that imposed on rogue trader Kweko Adeboli, who lost UBS $2.3 billion — both having pleaded ‘not guilty’. With remission, Hayes will serve about half the term: Adeboli, jailed in late 2012, came out this June. But even so, the socially awkward Hayes has forfeited