Society

Wednesday

16 Apr 2014

The day I discovered what worry was

Before I had children I don’t think I appreciated what anxiety was. I’d been anxious at various points in my life up until that point — when taking exams, for instance — but those occasions paled into insignificance when I experienced the full monty. The occasion was the birth of my son Ludo in 2004. The delivery was fine, but it just so happened that he was born in a five-day window between Caroline being infected with chickenpox and presenting the first symptoms. That meant Ludo was exposed to a full load of the Varicella zoster virus before Caroline had had a chance to develop any of the antibodies and pass them

Tanya Gold

Marcus Wareing drops a name

In the ‘Chefs’ Last Supper’ in the National Portrait Gallery, Marcus Wareing is throwing a brie at Gordon Ramsay, who plays Jesus. They both have restaurants in the celebrity-chef triangle in Knightsbridge near Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner, which led Ramsay to fantasise about chefs’ fisticuffs at 4 a.m. in the street, as he does; but what was Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, which sounds very like a restaurant with in-built directions for the confused, has been rebranded to be less ‘formal’ and more ‘relaxed’. It is now just ‘Marcus at the Berkeley’. It’s gone the way of gay icons with a solitary name in lights: Judy. Barbra. Liza. Marcus. The Berkeley is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can we pin down our neighbours’ rogue apostrophes?

Q. We have just moved into a charming little hamlet in Warwickshire and were delighted to find a bottle of wine and a friendly card to welcome us from the neighbours. I was a little bit dismayed to see that they had introduced themselves in their card as from the ‘Paddock’s’ (sic). Our problem is that the place is hard to find and we have agreed with these delightful neighbours that we should erect a sign listing the three dwellings in question at the end of the driveway that leads to our house and theirs and, without thinking, left it to them to organise the sign. How can we politely

Charles Moore

The Pope’s brilliant PR

‘Show, don’t tell’ is the mantra of PR advisers when telling public figures how to communicate. Pope Francis’s technique does both at once. By confessing his sins to what the media call ‘an ordinary priest’ in St Peter’s basilica without entering the confessional box, he seemed almost to be boasting that he is, like everyone, a sinner. I hope he does not take it into his head to make public the content as well as the fact of his confession. That would be what the Twitter generation calls TMI. But the gesture of openness worked. It helped to remind people that confession, far from being — as suggested by John Cornwell’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 April 2014

Home Nigel Evans, who had resigned as deputy speaker before being cleared of a bundle of rape and sexual assault charges against men, questioned the right of the Crown Prosecution Service to pursue cases that were ‘decades’ old and said that people should not have to spend their life savings defending themselves. Sajid Javid was appointed Culture Secretary, with additional responsibility for equalities, while Nicky Morgan was made women’s minister, with the right to sit in the cabinet when she is sent for. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrat party, said that a higher council-tax band on houses worth more than £2 million, proposed by Danny

The Spectator

Vladimir Putin knows what he stands for. Do we?

Possibly because his oratory is no match for his much-displayed pectoral muscles, the speeches of Vladimir Putin are seldom reported at length in the West. But as a means of understanding the manoeuvres in eastern Ukraine this week, there is no better starting point than the speech he made to the Duma when the Russian parliament annexed Crimea. Lest anyone thinks his words have been enriched by an over-imaginative reporter, the translation is provided by the Kremlin itself. Speaking of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, he asserted, ‘Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered… Millions of people went to bed in one country

The Spectator

Runaway runners and other other sporting refugees

Done a runner Mami Konneh Lahun, a 24-year-old athlete from Sierra Leone, went missing after finishing as the 20th-placed woman in the London Marathon. She is not the first athlete to have done a runner. — In the 2002 Commonwealth Games, 20 of her compatriots failed to return home. — After the London Olympics, 21 athletes went missing, including seven from Cameroon and three from Sudan. — The entire Eritrean football team failed to go home after a fixture in Kenya in 2009. — But the gold medal for asylum-seeking goes to 40 Nigerians who went missing after travelling to Britain in a stated attempt to qualify for the Open

Doc

2158: Late bloomers

The unclued lights (33 with I) are of a kind, all verifiable in Chambers under the appropriate headword. Across 1 Chief director takes one look at the league (13, two words) 8 Very best note on new piano (7) 10 1 and 10 down. Confused? I’m off! (7) 15 Orchestra giving half the chorus (5) 19 Mournful servant leaves travel agencies in trouble (7) 20 Throw back of heartless seaman in sea (7) 22 Awfully terrified, I’d leave and pine (7, two words) 23 Wader at small hut (5) 24 Scrutinises jail on board (5) 30 Sickly article

The Spectator

Books and arts – 16 April 2014

Doc

2155: Poor Billy’s left out | 16 April 2014

The unclued lights are SIBYLS (the title was an anagram of BILLY’S with L omitted). First prize Judith Bevis, Newport, South Wales Runners-up Dr Stephen Clarkson, Ipswich, Suffolk; Geoffrey Telfer, Baildon, West Yorkshire

Jonathan Portes

Why Fraser Nelson is wrong about a jobs ‘miracle’

In his blog earlier today, Fraser Nelson argues: ‘The UK jobs miracle is happening mainly due to radical welfare reform – the type Labour ducked in office..Under Labour, record numbers of people in work were celebrate as an end in itself – but most of the increase was accounted for by immigration. So more jobs did not mean less poverty – not if a quarter of Glasgow and Liverpool were still languishing on the dole at the peak of a boom. This time, it’s different. The welfare reforms are restoring the see saw link between jobs and dole queues.’ I suppose I should by now get over the fact that

Lara Prendergast

Sexism is ‘in your face’ in Britain because it’s up for discussion

Sexism is more ‘in your face’ in Britain than in other countries, a United Nations investigator has claimed. I can see why the UN’s Rashida Manjoo might think this – for better or worse, sexism is a topic that features frequently in British publications. I imagine the Pakistani, Egyptian and Sudanese press don’t give it quite as much coverage. I’m going to assume this was the official’s logic: we write about it a lot, ergo it must be prevalent. Her research would have been easy. All those tweets about #EverydaySexism. A cabinet with fewer women than men. Page Three! We’ve got a problem. Send help. Except that we really don’t.

Fraser Nelson

It’s official: smaller state and welfare reform leads to jobs record

The British jobs miracle continues, with unemployment now down below 7 per cent and employment at an all-time high of 30.4 million. This is the level that Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said he’d consider raising interest rates – a milestone chosen because, only recently, it seemed as if we’d take years to reach this point. Now we’re past it. It’s a reminder: economics is a very blunt art, and economists are often no better than the Met Office. They can be surprised when the economy goes right, as well as it goes wrong. It was the failed, Keynesian, stimlus-worshiping economic model that led Ed Balls to declare accuse

Christopher Booker

The mathematical revolution behind ‘the greatest picture in the world’

It seems odd to enter a room dominated by what Aldous Huxley famously called ‘the greatest picture in the world’ to find not another soul there. Looking down from an end wall of the mediaeval civic hall in the quiet little Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’ is an image of astonishing power, showing a stern-faced risen Christ stepping out of his tomb in the dawn light of the first Easter morning like an unstoppable force of nature, exuding supernatural authority as he turns the leaves on the trees behind him from wintry death to the new life of spring. This is a painting like no

Hugo Rifkind

If Ed Miliband can’t be our first Jewish prime minister, he can still be our first atheist Jewish prime minister from Primrose Hill

Last weekend, in a small New Jersey suburb, I found myself in a liquor store. Never been anywhere like it. The walls were lined with single malts of rare and impressive varieties, and the clientele both knew their whisky and spoke of little else. Yet they were all, also, to a man (and they were all men) ultra-orthodox Jews. Properly ultra, as well. There’s a website you might have come across called ‘Amish or Hipster’ and it shows pictures of young folks in beards and hats and braces, and asks you to vote on which particular cult you reckon you are looking at. This lot were like that. The beards

Theo Hobson

The return of God: atheism’s crisis of faith

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Freddy Gray discuss the return of God” startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]Like any movement or religion, atheism has ambitions. Over the years it has grown and developed until it has become about far more than just not believing in God: today atheism aspires to a moral system too. It comes with an idea of how to behave that’s really very close to traditional secular humanism, and offers a sense of community and values. Atheism has crept so close to religion these days that it’s de rigueur for political atheists like Ed Miliband to boast about a dual identity: a secular allegiance to a religions tradition, in his

Douglas Murray

Would human life be sacred in an atheist world?

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Freddy Gray discuss the return of God” startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]What was your reaction recently when it emerged that thousands of unborn foetuses had been burnt by NHS trusts? And that some had been put into ‘waste-to-energy’ incinerators and so used to heat hospitals? Revulsion, I would imagine. But why? I would hazard that it is either because you are religious or because your customs and beliefs are still downstream from faith, even if you reject it. Because if you grant that an unborn foetus is not a life and that once aborted it could have no further use, there is at least an argument that

Paul Mason

Where it’s all kicking off in Athens nightlife

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Paul Mason on why Athens is the place to go” startat=1192] Listen [/audioplayer]Where in the developed world can you ride a moped, minus helmet, at 2 a.m. under the noses of weary riot cops, when your night out has only just begun? Athens of course. Greece is in its sixth year of recession and crisis but this is still one of Europe’s great cities for culture, food, drink and entertainment. First stop: Bouzoukia. Forget all your troubles as you spend the small hours listening to live Greek pop music of a kind that makes The X Factor look underproduced. Despite the austerity, young Greeks say they will never

Roger Alton

A sporting chance from the brotherhood of cricket

The brotherhood of cricket, as we know, transcends race, creed, class and nationality. It can also be a big help when it comes to dealing with the law, as this East–er parable demonstrates. My distinguished Times colleague Phil Webster, besides being a doyen of political writers, is also a ferocious cricketer and a man once described as the meanest captain who had ever pulled on a pair of whites. Phil at this time — about 20 years ago — led a press team loosely affiliated to a long–defunct magazine. As is the way with these things, the team had acquired an opening bowler, a large and imposing figure from Jamaica

Rod Liddle

The Nigel Evans case proves that juries are smarter than our liberal elite

You may remember this little gem of a story from a month or so back. Justifiably worried at the ramping up of rhetoric by western politicians over the crisis in Ukraine, Blackpool ‘beauty technician’ Gemma Worrall took to a social media site to ask the — presumably rhetorical — question: ‘Why is our President Barraco Barner getting involved with Russia, scary.’ Why indeed, Gemma? The scorn and hilarity was of course immediately forthcoming at this fantastic level of pig ignorance, and lots of people, including me, wrote spiteful things about Gemma’s IQ level. Gemma was indignant at being publicly reviled as the most stupid woman who has ever walked the