Society

Thursday

Matt Ridley

E-cigarettes are making tobacco obsolete. So why ban them?

If somebody invented a pill that could cure a disease that kills five million people a year worldwide, 100,000 of them in this country, the medical powers that be would surely encourage it, pay for it, perhaps even make it compulsory. They certainly would not stand in its way. A relentless stream of data from around the world is showing that e-cigarettes are robbing tobacco companies of today’s customers — and cancer wards of their future patients. In Britain alone two million now use these devices regularly. In study after study, scientists are finding e-cigarettes to be effective at helping people quit, to show no signs of luring non-smokers into tobacco

Fleur Adcock

Mnemonic

Nothing I write will be as durable as the rhyme for remembering the genders of third declension nouns, stuck in my head ever since Miss Garai’s Latin class. Masculini generis I used to fancy I shared it with generations of English schoolboys, the colonial servant dispensing justice under a tree in the African bush, are the nouns that end in -nis the wakeful subaltern in the trenches before the Somme; but now I discover the rhyme was originally German, as was Miss Garai. The vision shifts: and mensis, sanguis, orbis, fons, the solar topeed official sits not in Nigeria, but in Kamerun; the soldier is on the other side of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Save the male! Britain’s crisis of masculinity

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_1_May_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Diane Abbott and Isabel Hardman discuss the crisis of the British male” startat=48] Listen [/audioplayer]Last week saw another victory in the battle for equal pay. Workers in Swansea are now looking forward to receiving around £750,000 in back pay after the university that employs them decided to close the gender pay gap. Vive la révolution! The only unusual thing about this case was that the workers in question were men, not women. The male cleaners, plumbers and carpenters at the University of Wales, Trinity St David, had discovered that they earned around £4,000 less than female colleagues. The idea of women having a rotten deal has become so

Mark Palmer

My mother’s passport to the Antibes good life

My mother always said she wanted to ‘die tidy’. But I never imagined she would file everything away quite so neatly as she did. One drawer in her desk was given over to travel. It included a little Hermès box containing a leather docket given to her by Hotel-Du-Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes after she and my father spent their honeymoon there in 1950. It was a passport to the hotel, allowing them to go as day guests whenever they wanted for the rest of their lives. Which is pretty much what they did. They would spend two weeks every year in a B&B in St Jean Cap Ferrat and enjoy

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

May Wine Club I

We’re thinking ahead with this offer, with summer firmly in our sights. Think of barbecues, picnics by the river, summer fêtes and lazy days on the beach. And think of red wine. Chilled. I’ve never understood our obsession for serving red wines at room temperature or even warmer. The habit started long before the days of central heating — what was room temperature then would be considered jolly parky now. Of course, big, butch, bold reds need a bit of coaxing to open out and shake off their tannin. But this can be taken to extremes. Only recently I was served an uncomfortably warm Aussie Shiraz that had been well

Roger Alton Roger Alton

What’s right with Saracens — and José Mourinho’s Chelsea

It’s hard to love Saracens rugby club — their centre is called Bosch, a word that also describes their bulldozing style of play — but you have to admire the demolition job they did on Clermont Auvergne in the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup. The flamboyant French side, free-runners to a man, had 68 per cent of possession, 64 per cent of territory and yet were tackled into impotence. Clermont limped off the Twickenham turf, stuffed 46–6. The English club play Toulon, the defending champions, in the final in Cardiff on 24 May and again I will be supporting the French team, not just  because this will be the last

Lucy Vickery

I’m a non-believer

In Competition No. 2845 you were invited to provide a hymn for atheists. This excellent, and topical, competition was suggested by John Whitworth, in response to the growth of organised atheism. Hymns do not feature at all at the Sunday Assembly, an atheist church founded last year in London. Instead the congregation sings along, in evangelical style, to pop songs by the likes of the Pointer Sisters, Stevie Wonder and Daft Punk. Perhaps they might feel inspired, by one of the entries below, to change their tune. Honourable mentions go to Sid Field, George Simmers, Barbara Smoker, Nick Grace, Richard Kelly and Samuel Johnson. The bonus fiver is Rob Stuart’s

Andrew Neil

Andrew Neil: Letter from Australia

No rest for the wicked. We touch down before dawn in Sydney after a 22-hour flight and by 7 a.m. I’m live on radio 2GB with Alan Jones. I’m aware talk radio is big in Australia — as you’d expect in a country full of refreshingly forthright people — and Mr Jones’s breakfast show is one of the biggest. Predictably, talk turns to the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Aussie commentators are a bit sheepish about it all. Only 15 years ago, supposedly informed opinion, on the left and the right, confidently predicted that Australia would be a 21st-century republic. They were confounded — disgusted, even — when

Matthew Bell

Guns, gays and the Queen – a former bishop reminisces

The bishopric of Bath and Wells comes with more bear-traps than most. For one thing, there’s the baby-eating. Ever since Blackadder told Baldrick he was being chased for a debt by the ‘baby–eating Bishop of Bath and Wells’, the image has stuck. When the last incumbent, Peter Price, made his first visit to the House of Lords, accompanied by his five-week-old granddaughter, the Bishop of Southwark remarked: ‘I see the bishop has brought his own lunch.’ The present incumbent, who was elected in March, and will be formally enthroned in June, has suffered a worse indignity. Peter Hancock is to become the first appointee not to live in the Bishop’s

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Beyoncé is a conservative icon

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_1_May_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson and Freddy Gray whether Beyoncé is a conservative icon” startat=1050] Listen [/audioplayer]When Time pictured an underwear-clad pop star on its cover, hailing her as one of the world’s most influential people, it looked like a crass sales ploy. But in Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, they had more of a point than they seemed to realise. Time had asked Sheryl Sandberg, the head of Facebook, to praise the singer for joining various do-gooding campaigns — but this is the least of her achievements. Beyoncé’s real potency lies in her status as a poster girl for a new conservative counter-revolution taking place among the young. It may seem, from a

Tom Leonard

How to shop for the apocalypse

 New York City An architect friend who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own power and water supplies, but — and there isn’t yet an architectural term for this — it would be post-apocalypse. The conventional house would be mirrored below ground with pretty much identical living quarters that would be completely secure and so self-contained that there would be facilities to hydroponically grow plants and vegetables without soil.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Dickin Medal is a morally dubious piece of nonsense

Apparently, mice think that women are useless. I don’t mean that they think women mice are useless — they’re keen enough on them, all right. I mean women women, like Rachel Reeves, the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, and the R&B singer Rihanna, and the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, Baroness Ashton. And so on. All women, everywhere. Some scientists in Canada carried out a study about what mice think of women, and this is what emerged. I don’t know how the study was carried out, whether it was multiple choice questionnaires or what have you — or indeed why it was carried out,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why the bankers’ bonus debate is not going away

A bouquet to Alison Kennedy, ‘governance and stewardship director’ at the Edinburgh-based pensions provider Standard Life, for leading the rebellion of Barclays shareholders against the bank’s decision to pay increased bonuses of £2.4 billion, far outstripping dividends to shareholders and despite a fall in profits. At last week’s AGM, 34 per cent of shareholders refused to endorse the board’s remuneration report after Kennedy declared herself ‘unconvinced’ that the bonus pot was ‘in the best interests of shareholders’ and warned of ‘negative repercussions on the bank’s reputation’. As if to prove the latter point, Barclays chairman Sir David Walker responded not by apologising but by expressing ‘irritation’ that Kennedy had spoken

Michael Paraskos

What would Raymond Chandler do?

If the inclusion of the erstwhile master of the genre, Raymond Chandler, as a fictonalised character in a pastiche 1930s detective novel is a bit of a gimmick, it is a nice gimmick. In The Kept Girl it keeps us guessing whether the author, Kim Cooper, believes Chandler’s greatest invention, Philip Marlowe, was a self-portrait, or based on someone he knew. The most likely candidate Cooper offers is Tom James, a Los Angeles detective inspector busted down to traffic cop for trying to expose police corruption. But equal billing might go to the fictional Chandler’s secretary, Muriel Fischer, a woman with more pluck than the average Chandler heroine. In this

Ian Thomson

Jorge Luis Borges and his ‘bitch’

When Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986, at the age of 87, he left behind 100-odd slender fictions and as many poems, but no novels. Compared with the blockbusting authors of our age, this was a small (if perfectly formed) output. Many of Borges’s glittering ficciones are mere ironic fragments, at best notebook jottings. To his detractors his work amounted to little more than a babble of sweet nothings. ‘Who is Jorge Luis Borges?’ Philip Larkin gruffly enquired. (Larkin had not seen Nic Roeg’s trippy film Perfomance, where Mick Jagger is shown reading the Argentine author in the bathtub.) Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Borges was acutely myopic as

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The secret life of the leader writer

The latest series of Andrew Rawnsley’s ‘Leader Conference’ on Radio 4 starts tonight…keenly awaited obviously. But having been on the programme a couple of times – though not, funnily, since I did a piece for this magazine about the difficulty a woman has in getting her oar in across the masculine timbre of Danny Finkelstein et al – perhaps I should disabuse you that this admirable series actually replicates what happens in a leader conference. It’s very good, as everything my old friend Andrew does, but just not quite the same as the thing itself. This, I may say, is something of a specialist subject of mine, on account of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Nigel Farage is just Russell Brand for old people

Yes, yes, yes, some young ‘uns support UKIP. Just as a few black people do too. But come on. We all know – because the polling tells us so – that UKIP supporters are likely to be older and whiter than the average voter and, most importantly, also more certain that the whole bleedin’ country is going to the dogs. The sodding dogs, I tell you. It isn’t. Of course there are problems. Of course there are great injustices that need correcting. Of course there are difficult, often intractable, policy debates that resist easy answers. There always have been and always will be. Change is always alarming and always unavoidable.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Did the pope say ‘inequality is the root of all social evil’?

The following blog from a Catholic commentator about the Pope’s controversial tweet suggesting that “inequality is the root of social evil” puts the row about it on Twitter into context. But the real question is the language in which Pope Francis first tweeted: Spanish or Latin? In Latin, as the author of this blog observes, the critical noun is “iniquitas”, which you might as well call “sin”; come to that “malus” doesn’t mean social evil so much as any sort of evil. And to say that sin is the root of evil is sort of tautologous, at least for Catholics. But if the pope’s thought was first expressed in Spanish,

Tuesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Ten handy phrases for bluffing on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’

How do you sound clever and au courant in 2014? Easy. You talk knowingly about Capital in the 21st Century, the seminal, magisterial, definitive, landmark, pick-your-coverblurb-adjective book by French academic Thomas Piketty. It’s all about the growing gap between rich and poor, you see, and inequality is all the rage. No wonder: it’s fun to get all hot under the collar about the ‘mega-rich’ — especially if you’re secretly cushioned by the knowledge that you’ve got a bit tucked away yourself. Piketty (who must himself be making a mint) even topped the Amazon.com bestseller list last week, not bad for a such a big book on such a heavy subject. But

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Max Clifford’s conviction vindicates the jury system

The conviction of Max Clifford for indecent assaults feels like a vindication of the jury system, as did the acquittal of the many other showbiz characters charged under Operation Yewtree. One reason I keep raising questions of justice about the current obsession with paedophilia is out of suspicion that those most zealous in their accusations are unhealthily interested in the subject. This was the case with Clifford himself and, of course, with the newspapers with which he did business. Celebrity culture is, in essence, a form of pornography which incites powerful people to exploit unpowerful people. It acquires an extra twist of perversion when it turns on those it has