Society

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

Chasing Pulitzers has ruined American journalists. That’s why they’re edited by Brits

I was interested to read a story by Michael Wolff in USA Today saying that Graydon Carter may be about to step down as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Carter has been at the helm for 22 years and was my boss during the three years I spent there between 1995 and 1998. According to Wolff, himself a columnist at the magazine, the runners and riders to take over are nearly all British. Wolff thinks this is mainly because power within Condé Nast, the publishing company that owns Vanity Fair, has shifted from New York and towards London, home of Condé Nast International, a subsidiary that is now more profitable than

The Spectator

The slow death of Nato

The Cold War was won by 26 words contained within article five of the Treaty of Washington, which founded Nato in 1949: ‘The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.’ There was no wriggling and no qualification. The message to Stalin was perfectly clear: you nibble at one inch of Western Europe and you won’t just get an ad hoc response from war-weary Europeans; you will have to face a nuclear-armed Uncle Sam. The last time Britain held a Nato summit, in 1990, the organisation was triumphant. Little wonder that the newly

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 22 May 2014

Home Demand for housing posed ‘the biggest risk to financial stability’ according to Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. House prices rose by 8 per cent in the year to the end of March, according to the Office for National Statistics, and in London the increase was 17 per cent. The annual rate of inflation rose to 1.8 per cent in April from 1.6 per cent in March, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index; it remained at 2.5 per cent as measured by the Retail Prices Index. The underlying annual profits of Marks & Spencer fell by 3.9 per cent to £623 million, putting them behind

Dumpynose

2163: Muscle

Six unclued lights (one hyphened) suggest words each differently formed from the same 13 22, which appears as a clued light and must be shaded.#   Across   1    Common choir dressed in black and white (11) 11    Thing every elder has about yellow waistcoat (6) 15    Message in letter about this month in Paris? (5) 16    Bard’s encounter in narrow passage (5) 17    Trumpet introduces king and queen – I lie in wait (6) 18    Posh man in warship (5, hyphened) 20    Pothead strong individual curbed (6) 21    Morose and without doubt lacking in energy (5) 27    African ruler hid a misguided prophet (7) 29    Tons o’ bananas beasts

Dumpynose

to 2160: 18 down

The unclued lights are all CHARACTERS (18D) in Plato’s dialogues, all but SOCRATES (1A) appearing in titles. In six cells, clashing letters could be combined to form letters of the Greek alphabet (e.g. LAMB + DA = LAMBDA) — these six characters spell out the name PLATO in Greek (Πλάτων, using lower case letters, was also acceptable).   First prize Sandra Speak, Dursley, Glos Runners-up S.J.J. Tiffin, Cockermouth, Cumbria; M. Puttick, Montpezat, France

Steerpike Steerpike

Why should the licence fee payer fund the BBC’s cultural imperialism?

Picture the scene. BBC executives convene in a glass think pod in Salford to consider the latest expensive external report commissioned by Director of News James Harding. The report states that Auntie, despite its vast budget and massive staff, is ‘punching well below its weight in the digital world.’ That was what Sir Howard Stringer’s report, published today, found. The fact that Buzzfeed gets 10 million more pageviews than the Beeb every month seems to be a particularly sore point: ‘Given Buzzfeed, for example, was only founded in 2006, this raises the question of why the BBC’s global digital reach is not more significant. It is impossible to escape the

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: Ukip’s triumph, predictions for this week’s elections and the return of the cad

Has Ukip been a good thing for British politics? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, political commentators Peter Oborne and Matthew Parris debate the topic of this week’s Spectator cover feature. Has Nigel Farage reinvigorated democracy in this country? Can Ukip still be described as a ‘Tory sickness’, a ‘protest party’ or something entirely different? Can the rise of Farage be attributed to the other parties not discussing issues like immigration? And do Peter and Matthew both intend to vote Conservative today? Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth also discuss what will happen in today’s local and European elections. Will Ukip’s momentum of the last few weeks push them into

Allison Mcvety

Landings

On our anniversary, you drag the sofa-bed   into the old conservatory. The January moon     swells to cliché and under a ten-tog duvet   we shiver. Frost plays havoc with the view. Years slip, sheets cool, the roof weeps and timber withers   in its frame. We are unhinged, the window slides,     the stars keep their distance, and we, still lovers  of the moon, cling to landings, wipe the rime. A mist of words mixes up the messages   between us. You step outside to clear the glass,     your uncertain face fills the pane and I see   man and marriage eclipse and pass. I know how Lovell must have felt on Odyssey:         the moon

Alan Judd

Goodwood Festival of Speed

You smelt them, it was said of the Mongol hordes, before you heard them, and by the time you heard them it was too late. At the Goodwood Festival of Speed it’s the other way round: you hear the intoxicating yowl of high-revving engines before you’re close enough to smell the heady mixture of high-octane, burnt oil and hot rubber.  But by then it’s too late — next year you’ll be back for more. Goodwood is motoring’s Glyndebourne, glamorous, smart and bucolic with the South Downs as backdrop and its origins in aristocratic hedonism. On Revival days you wear period costumes to go with your car, assuming you can find

Bruce Anderson

Some consumer advice: do not sell your daughter for a bottle of 90-year-old port

Port, or Hermitage? This does not refer to personal consumption. I was trying to remember Meredith’s Egoist, in which one of the principal characters seeks to coerce his daughter into marriage, in order to have unlimited access to his putative son-in-law’s ancient wines. That could give rise to an interesting moral speculation. I raised the question in a club, one of the few surviving places in Britain where free speech is possible. There was a desire for further and better particulars: which wine were we talking about, and what about the daughter? Was she an easy-on-the-eye, generally obedient creature, a pleasure to have about the place, or…. Someone quoted Lord

Aidan Hartley

The books that have kept me alive

In bed Safety measures — I’ve never been good at them, so inevitably I inhaled and got soaked by the toxic agricultural chemical I was out spraying on a windy day in Kenya. At 49, I’m not worried about triggering distant future tumours — or infertility — and I’m still waiting to pay back on the mortgage of my misspent youth. I expected that being poisoned would be rather invigorating — similar to a whiff of tear gas in a riot, which I like as much as bee stings, or dragging my hand through nettles. I spent the next few days wondering if I might drown in my own lungs

Digby Warde-Aldam

Happy birthday, spam! Do you mind if we don’t celebrate?

The other day, I got an email advertising ‘miracle’ weight loss. You know the sort: English as defined by Boggle and no way on earth that anyone would ever buy the product in question. I opened it without thinking, and was redirected to a blank page. Within minutes, my Hotmail, Twitter and WordPress accounts had gone haywire; I stared at my computer screen as the original message replicated itself and fired off to every single one of my contacts. My groan lasted about 20 minutes: why, I asked myself, would anyone bother doing this to me? It turned out I’d been hacked on a convenient anniversary. In April 1994, two

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I’d rather have a German next door too — and I have the figures to show why

Should we be worried about the vast numbers of German-born people living covertly in the United Kingdom? The Office for National Statistics estimates that in 2011 some 297,000 Germans were resident here, the fifth largest non-British-born contingent (after Indians, Poles, Pakistanis and the Irish respectively). What the hell are they all up to? Sitting in smartly furnished homes, biding their time, and waiting, waiting. That’s what I suspect. A report in the Guardian a while back suggested that our German community tended to ‘stay under the radar’, an ability which mercifully eluded them 70 years ago. The paper also reported that while there were a few areas with significant German

Evan Davis

Has Thomas Piketty met his match?

I feel a certain disappointment with myself at the moment. On the big question of the day, ‘How worried should we be about inequality?’, I find myself miserably unable to give a simple answer. In the last few months, I’ve had a chance to speak to two notable economists on the topic, representing opposite extremes of the argument — both arguing their case so well that I can’t disagree with either. On one side of the debate, I got to interview the man of the moment, Thomas Piketty, author of the much talked-about Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In fairness, it was not much an interview: it was something of

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In praise of cyberchondria

There’s something perversely satisfying in discovering that your children have inherited your vices. That’s why I was so quietly pleased the other evening when Boy came to see me petrified that the huge fat spider with the sinister body-markings on the wall above his bed was in fact a deadly false widow with a bite — so the internet tells us — whose symptoms can range from ‘feelings of numbness, severe swelling and discomfort to various levels of burning or chest pains’. Though I’m not personally scared of spiders, I could most certainly claim proud authorship of the catastrophist tendencies Boy was displaying here. Also — being a fellow cyberchondriac

Lucy Vickery

Scottish question

In Competition No. 2848 you were invited to submit a poem commenting on Scottish independence in the style of William Topaz McGonagall. McGonagallesque long lines leave me space only to congratulate you on a vast and skilful entry before handing over to the man himself, hailed by the TLS as ‘the only truly memorable bad poet in our language’. Ralph Rochester takes the extra fiver; the rest nab £35. Bounteous Heavens, let us all rejoice! For the People of Scotland have been given a     Choice And there is to be a National Referendum For which we must thank the Scottish     Nationalists and London. But how many will vote No and

Merryn Somerset-Webb

They made me sit an exam on giving financial advice. And I’m glad

There was a time, not that long ago, when financial advisers as we know them today didn’t really exist. Pension and tax advice came from accountants. If you bought shares you bought them via a stockbroker (who gave you advice along the way). Unit trusts came directly — you responded to advertisements or perhaps got your accountant to do it for you. Occasionally you used an insurance broker. And that was that. It wasn’t particularly complicated and as a result no one (your accountant aside) was officially qualified to do anything. Brokers and dealers didn’t take exams to prove their proficiency and no one really thought they should. In the

Robert Cole

What is an investment trust?

A strange language is spoken on Planet Finance. It often seems designed to baffle the average investor, and save the richest pickings for the professionals. Take, for example, ‘investment trusts’ — they’re investments, certainly, but they are not trusts. And since blind faith is the last thing to invest in any money-making exercise, the two terms make an odd pairing. The most important decision an average investor has to make is to trust their money with a good manager in a promising sector. And this is the main attraction of Investment Trusts. If you fancied a bet on Japan, for example, your first thought may be a straightforward fund, like

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How to win the World Cup (in the betting shop)

Summer is a difficult time for serious investments — it’s hard to be rational when hot — so why not try betting on the football world cup instead? Thanks to technology, sports gambling can feel a lot like investing these days. Internet betting exchanges are not bookmakers, but trading platforms. Any adult can buy or sell a bet — or position, if you prefer — and ‘trade out’ at a profit or loss before the match, race, or tournament even begins. Which means you are gambling less against sporting chance, more against the human whims of the market. Let me give you an example. If you had taken the advice of,