Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Since when is it too much trouble to serve proper tomato juice?

‘I have a feeling,’ said my father, ‘that this evening is not going to go well.’ We were sitting in the bar of a local fish restaurant near my parents’ home having pre-dinner drinks, and I was throwing a wobbly because my tomato juice wasn’t right. I had arrived at the table after putting my order in as I went off to park the car, only to find a drink in a bottle called Big Tom sitting on the table. You know the drill, it’s the little things that get me. I immediately went into one because I cannot understand why asking a bartender to make a tomato juice from

Joan Collins

Joan Collins’s diary: Why I gave up on Ascot – and where I go instead

Can there be anything more perfect than early July in London, when the sun is shining, the sky a cloudless azure and the temperature hovers in the mid-seventies? Sorry, I still do Fahrenheit. It’s party time everywhere, with all the annual events happening, but I don’t do Ascot any more, too waggish, or Henley, too wet, or Wimbledon, too warm. The former has changed radically over the last 20 years, when I was fiercely censured for borrowing another woman’s Royal Enclosure badge, on a dare that no one would recognise me. Now these high jinks would be deemed innocent in comparison to the behaviour that goes on: people snogging, passing

Robin Oakley

Ralph Beckett’s winning way with the fillies

Fretful horses who waste their energies — and often their racing potential — ceaselessly pacing their stable dormitories are known as ‘box walkers’. Some trainers merit a similar description, dragging nervously on one racecourse cigarette too many. It isn’t sharing the washing-up but their teeth that have left their nails worn down to the quick. Their brows are furrowed as they saddle up their hopes. Instead of enjoying a joke with an owner’s wife their eyes flicker nervously to their four-legged charges skittering around the paddock for fear they are sweating up. Nervousness is easily transmitted between man and beast and I always feel more comfortable when the handler responsible

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 10 July 2014

The European Team Championships drew to a close last week and the most successful country overall was …England! The doughty Seniors took Gold, the Women took Silver and the Open Team took Bronze. I hardly went out in the ten days of the tournament, so glued was I to BBO and the fortunes of everyone I knew. Well done all who qualified for the Bermuda Bowl next year but especially well done to the three English teams who did us proud. Today’s hand is an example of how things can go wrong at the highest level — but you have to keep on playing. Amazingly, both rooms played the unlikely

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Dean Street Townhouse – at last! Somewhere I’d pay to eat

Occasionally a critic must review a restaurant in which they are prepared to spend their own money. So here is the Dean Street Townhouse. It is a terrible name, because all houses in Dean Street, a fusty artery of Soho, are town houses; they are not Wendy houses or country houses or dolls’ houses. But Dean Street House is worse, too close to Soho House, the private club and near neighbour where no one will meet your eye for wondering where the next useful tosser is. ‘Townhouse’ has a kudos, I suppose, these days. It is almost opposite the Groucho Club, which is Noel Edmonds’s Multi–Coloured Swap Shop for media

Toby Young Toby Young

If John Bercow were two-and-a-half inches taller, he’d never have been such a big success

Unlike 99 per cent of my colleagues, I was quite touched by John Bercow’s comment about how fed up he is with jokes about his height. ‘Whereas nobody these days would regard it as acceptable to criticise someone on grounds of race or creed or disability or sexual orientation, somehow it seems to be acceptable to comment on someone’s height, or lack of it,’ he said. OK, maybe taking the mickey out of someone for being short isn’t quite on the same level as, say, murdering them for being black or homosexual, but I think he has a point. I say this for two reasons. The first, obviously, is because

Dot Wordsworth

Just how old-fashioned is Labour’s ‘cost of living’ campaign?

Labour’s appeal to the cost of living has a rather old-fashioned feel to it: as if the whole nation still heated water with a geyser over the bath and darned (or got me to darn) its socks of an evening. ‘Till recent years the phrase “Cost of Living” was only used loosely by economists when the balance between movements of wages and prices was in question,’ the Encyclopædia Britannica remarked in 1922. ‘In popular parlance it has since become a recognised economic problem.’ That was when Sidney and Beatrice Webb were busy with their blue books and squared paper, before discovering a ‘New Civilisation’ in Soviet Russia. The next big

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Our holiday hosts swim naked

Q.  We have recently returned from Provence where we stayed the first night with distant relatives. We woke on a perfect morning to sounds of laughter in the pool, so we happily slipped on our swimsuits and went down.  Our host and hostess were in the water but minus swimsuits. My husband, who was clearly taken aback, briefly greeted them, dived in, did a couple of lengths and left. I followed suit, although my inclination was to shed my costume and join our hosts. I think that we were unnecessarily prudish and have told my husband so. He says we invaded their privacy. What should we have done, Mary? —

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 July 2014

Home Theresa May, the Home Secretary, ordered a review, taking perhaps ten weeks, by Peter Wanless, the head of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, of how her department, the police and prosecutors handled historical child sex-abuse allegations. There would also be a large-scale inquiry by the retired judge Lady Butler-Sloss. These came in response to a ferment of speculation into what the late Geoffrey Dickens had alleged in 1984 in a folder of information he gave to Leon Brittan, then Home Secretary. In 2013 the folder was found not to have been kept. Rolf Harris, the entertainer, aged 84, was jailed for five years and nine

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The real scandal is that government files are ‘lost’ all the time

Like almost everyone else, I have no idea whether the accusations about paedophilia in Parliament in the 1980s are true. One thing I do feel quite confident about, though, is the business of the lost ‘dossiers’. The suggestion is that the disappearance of the file containing Geoffrey Dickens’s accusations of about 30 years ago and of 114 other files proves a cover-up. It does not. Literally tens of thousands of government files are destroyed every year, without much inspection. I believe, for example, that the overwhelming majority of the files from the offices of Chief Whip, the Leader of the House and Lord President of the Council from the 1980s

Doc

2170: Hector’s Summer Nights

The unclued lights (one of three words and three of two), as three pairs and three individually, are of a kind. Ignore four accents and one apostrophe, in total.   Across   1    A few lines about criticism of Indian city pub (9) 6    Composer’s lost final catalogues (5) 9    Boy at old festival gets caught (4) 11    Mental lapse, having tiara borne in disarray (10) 13    Bishop loses note first (5) 16    Indirect effort made by government official accepting sponsorship, for a start (5) 17    Actress wearing nothing, apparently (5) 20    Adolescent appearing regularly at The Weeny Angler (7) 22   

Doc

to 2167: Groupies

The unclued lights are ‘nouns of assemblage’, all listed on page 6 of the Word Lover’s Miscellany section in Chambers 2011. Solvers had to shade to highlight COWARDICE (34A + 40A).   First prize John Fahy, Thaxted, Essex Runners-up Mike Atkin, Butterton, Staffs; Eddie Looby, Longbridge, Birmingham

Ed West Ed West

Who are Britain’s stupidest jihadis?

You have to laugh. Two men who’ve admitted to trying to go abroad to fight jihad had to buy copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies before their glorious mission. Shouldn’t the publishers cash in by publishing a Jihad for Dummies? It would sell like hotcakes. The young chaps, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, are off to jail for a while, but to paraphrase Bill Hicks, I don’t think we’ve lost any cancer curers here. But they are far from being Britain’s stupidest jihadis. This country, which is at the cutting edge of social trends in pioneering the Reverse Flynn Effect, seems to produce an enormous number

Steerpike Steerpike

Who is Robert Peston’s ‘senior government source’?

Earlier this year, a ‘government source’ floated the idea that Sebastian Coe could well be appointed the next chairman of the BBC Trust. It’s no secret that George Osborne and Seb Coe go back a long way –  they both used to work together in William Hague’s private office. And while Osborne has never officially stated that he would support the appointment of his friend, both he and Cameron are reportedly keen on the idea. That appointment is a ‘virtual shoo-in’, writes the BBC’s Robert Peston, who is currently in India with Osborne and Hague. According to a senior government source, ‘Lord Coe is widely and snootily under-rated “as that

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Lady Butler-Sloss should not lead the child abuse inquiry

Last week, Nick Cohen suggested that Lady Butler-Sloss was not the correct person to lead the child abuse enquiry. She has now resigned from her role.  The Guardian says today that Lady Butler-Sloss cannot be the right person to lead the inquiry into alleged child abuse. ‘Not only was her brother, Lord Havers, attorney general – and briefly lord chancellor – at the time of some of the allegations of cover-up. She is also of the same generation as those around whom rumours swirl. If she were still sitting as a judge, she would never contemplate being involved in a case that might touch, however remotely, on family or friends.’

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

World Cup diary – best tournament in years

Sorry – bit of an interregnum in the World Cup diary, caused principally by England’s pathetic capitulation. But still the tournament gives pleasure, perhaps to a greater degree than it has done in thirty years or more. Watching Brazil get stuffed on their own midden heap was an enormous pleasure. Their thuggery in the previous round, against Colombia, came back to haunt them; there is karma in football. That’s why Leeds Utd are still in the lower reaches of the Championship.  Germany were magnificent; Brazil gave in after the second goal — but truth be told, they were never terribly good. One thing bothers me, though — at the start

Douglas Murray

Now that we can’t even trust the church, who can we trust?

Who would trust MPs?  Until recently most of us thought they were just in it for the expenses. Now it turns out they’re in it to abuse kids too. We know because we’ve read it in the papers. Not that they’re any better, tapping Milly Dowler’s phone. Still, at least you can trust the BBC. Apart from their old stars, that is, or the higher-ups who covered for them or fingered the wrong paedos. Really, the police should have stepped in years ago. Except they were probably busy being racist. So who will speak up for the kids? Once it could have been a bishop or something. Though not after

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A very British witch hunt – wild, furious and three decades late

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Matthew Parris and Dr Liz Davies discuss the child abuse enquiry” startat=48] Listen [/audioplayer]I suppose we must accustom ourselves to the fact that some 30 years ago Britain was in the grip of a terrible paedo–geddon — even if, at the time, we did not quite know it. More shockingly still, it was not simply light entertainers who were fiddling about up and down the country, with their cunningly coded messages to children about having an ‘extra leg’ and sinister injunctions to restrain kangaroos. It was, it seems, everyone. The Home Office has announced an enormous inquiry into the whole business, covering a considerable number of major institutions

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

July Wine Club | 10 July 2014

We’ve a great selection of regional French wines this week from my old chum Jason Yapp. With carefree al fresco imbibing in mind, during what promises to be a blisteringly hot couple of weeks, I was keen to keep the wines under a tenner and relatively light in alcohol, and we almost succeeded. Only a gorgeous, peach-scented Viognier is more than 12.5 per cent alcohol by volume, and only a cheeky Vin de Savoie is over a tenner. Wines of similar quality from better-known (but certainly not better) regions would have cost a heck of a lot more. Sadly, our self-imposed strictures meant that we had to ditch a really