Society

Thursday

Miles Goslett

The trouble with Kids Company

In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should be helped rather than demonised. He was reaching towards what he hoped would be a new, ‘compassionate’ conservatism inspired in part by the charismatic social activist Camila Batmanghelidjh. She was the perfect lodestar for the young Tory leader. She began her drop-in centre — the Kids Company — in 1996 and within a few years, was helping thousands of disadvantaged inner-city children. She’s colourful, powerful but also a former Sherborne girl with whom Cameron and other members of the establishment

Andrew Brown

Paganism is alive and well – but you won’t find it at a Goddess Temple

The first pagan temple to be built in Iceland for a thousand years has just been granted planning permission, a wonderful bureaucratic detail that shows up just how much this revival is polite make-believe. Ragnar Hairybreeks or Harald Bluetooth would not seek planning permission before building a place of sacrifice. At Gamla Uppsala, the Viking temple site in Sweden, horses were hanged to please the gods in groups of nine from trees, along with cattle, sheep, and human beings. In Reykjavik today’s pagans still eat sacred horsemeat at their feasts, but they buy it in from caterers. Respectable modern paganism is not only made up, as its leading ideologues cheerfully

Barnaby Rogerson

A walk through Fez is the closest thing to visiting ancient Rome

Fez is one of the seven medieval wonders of the world. An intact Islamic city defined by its circuit of battlemented walls, it is riven by alleyways. You pass doorways that look into a 10th-century mosque, then a workshop courtyard, before coming through a teeming covered market and twisting past the high walls of a reclusive garden palace. The aesthetic highlight of any visit will be the teaching colleges built in the 14th century by the Merenid Sultans, and nothing can quite prepare you for the colours and odours of the open-air tanneries or the drama of listening to the dusk call to prayer from the ruins of the Merenid

Lucy Vickery

Hair brained | 12 February 2015

In Competition No. 2884 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of beards. The beard has been rehabilitated since the dark days of Mr Twit, Jimmy Hill and The Joy of Sex. It will, as Ekow Eshun points out in his insightful essay ‘Welcome to Beardland-ia’, one day stand as ‘the definitive visual shorthand for the early 21st century, as the moustache is for the Seventies and a pair of mutton chops for Regency England’. A large entry was evenly split between pogonophiles and pogonophobes. Susan de Sola, Debora Garber and Jonathan Taylor stood out. The winners, printed below, net £25. Basil Ransome-Davies takes £30.  

The Spectator

From the archives | 12 February 2015

From ‘Prohibition in Scotland during the War’, The Spectator, 13 February 1915: At present the economic waste caused by drunkenness in Scotland is enormous. We are not going to attempt to calculate how many hours in the working year are lost through the inefficiency caused by alcohol, but unquestionably in the aggregate the total is huge… even if when the war is over Scotland gives up prohibition and once more flings open the doors of the public-house, she will have done herself a great deal of good by the temporary prohibition. Thousands of men and women throughout the length and breadth of the land will have realised how perfectly easy

Tom Hollander

My moment of mortification with Saint Joan Collins

I did a film with Dame Joan Collins once. No no, not The Stud. It wasn’t as good as that. It was called The Clandestine Marriage. And although it wasn’t that fun to watch, it was really fun to make. We filmed it one autumn in someone’s stately home. I had a lovely fling with a woman in the art department, who, in order to hide the fling from friends of her faraway boyfriend, came up with the brilliant ruse of pretending to have a fling with the third assistant director to confuse everyone. At least that’s what she told me she was doing. I was definitely confused, but I

Ian Cowie

Five questions to help you take control of your pension

If you want something done properly, it often pays to do it yourself. So it must be good news that as of 6 April, when George Osborne’s pension reforms take effect, it will be easier than ever to run your own pension fund, because you won’t be forced to retire as an investor when you cease to work for a living. Instead, everyone — not just the rich — will be allowed to retain ownership of their life savings and try to live off them by means of what is known in the jargon as ‘income drawdown’. But is a DIY pension right for you? Institutional funds are buying government

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The Master of the Universe who taught me that life is about much more than money

God it’s nauseating when an exact university contemporary of yours turns out to have become a hugely successful investor with a fund worth many millions. The bit during our meeting where I most wanted to throw up my ravioli was when this fellow — Guy Spier his name is; read PPE at Brasenose with my old mucker Dave Cameron at the same time I was at Christ Church — told me how he’d once paid nearly £250,000 in a charity auction just for the privilege of having lunch with Warren Buffett. A quarter of a million quid. Imagine all the things you could do with that. I could make a thousand and

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The pen is only powerful when we defend it unconditionally

It looks like this year’s Simon Hughes prize (awarded each year to the non-Muslim who does the weirdest impression of holding Islamic principle) must go to Lord Woolf. In a speech yesterday at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies the former Lord Chief Justice chose to explain why Muslim sensitivities should be especially respected.  He also used this pulpit to warn people in Britain not to exercise their rights as free citizens.  Here is an excerpt: ‘By now it must surely be appreciated that depicting the prophet in a derogatory way will cause grave offence among many Muslims and can lead to an explosive reaction with dreadful consequences. ‘The power of

Steerpike Steerpike

Wolf Hall upsets horticulturists with its ‘historical plant inaccuracies’

First, Wolf Hall upset a number of members of the Catholic faith with its depiction of St Thomas More. The Bishop of Shrewsbury went so far as to claim that it inaccurately depicted More as a villain. Now, the show has managed to anger ardent gardeners too. In today’s letters page in The Telegraph, a reader writes in to point out a discrepancy in one of the plants used on set. ‘Those worrying about historical inaccuracies in Wolf Hall need to get out more: there’s plenty to entertain them outside. The best example was in last week’s episode, when Anne Boleyn went gliding past a mature specimen of Wisteria sinensis, a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why I may bail out the Guardian

Here’s a preview of Rod Liddle’s column from this week’s Spectator, on the financial plight of The Guardian… One of the highlights of my week comes on a Saturday morning, when I make myself a cup of fair-trade coffee and settle down to read the letters page of the Guardian. My wife usually joins me — it’s a sort of date thing, romantic in its own way — and we sit there cackling, our cares and woes forgotten for a while. Sometimes it is the smug little commendations of some earnest article that has uncovered the suffering of an hitherto -unreported minority of the population — that stuff is quite

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rude jokes about Stephen Hawking are exactly what the Baftas need

Odd though it may seem, I think I’m with Stephen Fry on the issue of the Baftas. The grand old poof – I mean that in an affectionate, rather than a disparaging or a prejudiced sense – has been criticised for his performance as compere at this fatuous awards ceremony. Too many expletives. Off colour jokes at the expense of the likes of Stephen Hawking. He even said ‘Tom Fucking Cruise’, instead of ‘Tom Cruise’. Good for him; the Baftas are a ghastly parade of mewing luvvies and deserve to be undermined by calculated unprofessionalism. I think all awards ceremonies are likewise vile, to be honest; smug and self-congratulatory and hugely

Mary Dejevsky

Want to understand the conflict in Ukraine? Compare it to Ireland

What seemed this time last year to be a little local difficulty in Ukraine has metastasised to the point where a peace plan drafted in Paris and Berlin may be all that stands in the way of war between the West and Russia. Over the months, many of those watching, appalled, from the safety of the side-lines, have combed history for precedents and parallels that might aid understanding or offer clues as to what might be done. Last spring, after Russia snatched Crimea and appeared ready to grab a chunk of eastern Ukraine too, the favoured comparisons were with Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation of Sudetenland. It was a parallel that

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Needling pain

From ‘Compulsory Inoculation’, The Spectator, 13 February 1915: IT is a little difficult to keep one’s patience with the Government’s attitude towards compulsory inoculation. It is a capital example of “Letting ‘I dare not’ wait up ‘I would,’ like the poor cat i’ the adage.” “The cat would eat fish, and would not wet her feet.” The Government would like to knock enteric out altogether from the list of serious Army diseases. They know that they can do so and ought to do so, but they have not done so as yet because they do not want to wet their feet politically—i.e., antagonize the faddists of their party. In reality the

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The pope is right – smacking your kids is sometimes OK

One good thing has come out of the fuss over the pope’s comments about it being ok to smack your children (so long as their dignity is maintained); it has flushed out the former Irish president, Mary McAleese, as tiresomely conventional in much the same way as her predecessor, Mary Robinson – the very incarnation of PC. Shame, because I’d been a fan until I read her letter to the Irish Times on Saturday criticising the pope for his remarks, on the basis that they’re at odds with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which, apparently, has zero tolerance when it comes to corporal punishment. Actually, make that two benefits to

Monday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

If we want to tackle anti-Semitism we must challenge hate speech, not censor it

One month on from the Charlie Hebdo massacre, free speech is still under attack. The outpouring of public revulsion at the bloody silencing of ‘blasphemous’ cartoonists after the attack was inspiring. It was a visceral display of support for the right to speak one’s mind – as crudely, offensively and blasphemously as one chooses – that has been absent for some time. But deep-rooted ambivalences have remained – and now these look to be exploited by policymakers looking to institute blasphemy laws of their own. When it comes to cracking down on aberrant ideas, Europe has long been leading the way. Restrictions on hate speech are in place across Europe.

Ed West Ed West

Fancy a job in academia or the media? Best brush up on the new political correctness

Why has political correctness proved so enduring? This is the subject of cover pieces in The Spectator by Brendan O’Neill and Damian Thompson, which follow an article by American liberal columnist Jonathan Chait on the subject. We tend to think of political correctness as something from the late 1980s and early 1990s but in the internet age it has become more powerful than ever. Chait’s point is that – as Gerry Adams might put it – it hasn’t gone away you know. This is puzzling because much of the ideology is quite extreme, hysterical or absurd (microaggressions?) and extreme movements tend to burn themselves out or become ridiculed out of

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: A dreadful froth of dead

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 13 February 1915: FROM the eastern theatre of war there have been received daring the week details of the gigantic dimensions of Field-Marshal von Hindenburg’s grand attack upon the Russian centre—i.e., upon the force on the Bzura which bars the German advance on Warsaw. On a very narrow front, not more, it is said, than seven miles, the Germans concentrated some hundred and fifty thousand of their best troops and burled them in close formation, five deep, upon the Russian trenches. This mighty mass of battalions, brigades, and divisions was supported by the fire of no fewer than a hundred batteries, or six

Saturday

Molly Guinness

The moral argument for three-person babies

If all goes according to plan, the first baby with the DNA of three people will be British, and could be born next year. Mitochondrial transfer could end years of misery for some couples and prevent appalling conditions being passed on to the next generation. Some scientists have raised concerns that it’s such uncharted territory that the babies could be born with disabilities or genetic defects, but the majority are happy that the research has been through necessary reviews. Melanie McDonagh and Isabel Hardman have drawn attention to the breakneck speed with which MPs voted to legalise the procedure. Parliament should act as a national conscience, and we don’t want