Society

Thursday

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Spectator Wine Vaults

A really tasty selection from The Wine Company this week at very generously discounted prices. There is a theme of sorts: I wonder if you can spot it. Made exclusively for The Wine -Company (Moa Ridge and The Wine Company share an owner in Suffolk-based Johnny Wheeler), the 2011 Moa Ridge Chardonnay (1) from Marlborough, New Zealand, is spiffing value at just £12 a bottle (down from £14.99). Hand-picked and oak-aged for 15 months, it’s full of citrus and spice and succulent stone fruit. It’s subtle too and gratifyingly complex, more Burgundian in style than New World, and perfect with a dozen or so of the last R-in-the-month oysters. The

Roger Alton Roger Alton

In defence of the Boat Race

It’s Boat Race time again and as soon as the BBC starts its broadcast on Sunday there will be those who invade Twitter and such places, having a moan faster than the Bullingdon Club can trash an Oxford curry house. Why’s it always the same two teams in the final? The more strident will demand why licence fee payers’ money is being spent on a private race that’s of no interest to anyone who wasn’t educated under one set of dreaming spires or the other. It’s amazing how many people went to Oxbridge, in that case. Why do more than seven million viewers tune in each year, and why has

Bruce Anderson

Secrets of Sicily

Western Sicily has been a crucible of aspiration and grandeur: the human condition at its most exalted: unsurpassable art and architecture. It started in the Greek era. Sicilian agriculture produced abundance. Trade with north Africa turned Demeter’s bounty into gold. With this wealth, Greek colonists built the temple cities of Selinunte and Agrigento, plus other glories such as the temple at Segesta. The modern traveller, seeing only harmony, might assume that the ancient inhabitants must have been uniquely blessed. In earlier generations, the best preserved temple in Agrigento was known as the Temple of Concord. This was an error. That was not its name and there never was much concord.

Liam Halligan

Michael Lewis vs Wall Street’s new predators

‘The US stock market is rigged.’ That’s the j’accuse headline that screams out from Flash Boys, the new book by Michael Lewis. It’s a very big claim, made by America’s foremost financial writer. It’s also a claim that, after years of accumulating evidence, warrants extremely close and sustained official scrutiny. Lewis produced Liar’s Poker, his first bestseller, in 1989 — after a four-year stint as a fresh-from-the-Ivy-League bond dealer at the now defunct firm Salomon Brothers. The book, an insider’s account, brilliantly lampooned the macho, aggressive behaviour of the ‘big swinging dicks’ who paced the carpet-tiled trading floors. Liar’s Poker defined popular understanding of Wall Street in the go-go, testosterone-fuelled 1980s. Another

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The EU is worse than you thought

For me, by far the most surprising revelation in Martin Durkin’s documentary Nigel Farage: Who Are You? (Channel 4, Monday) was just how astonishingly vast, unwieldy, authoritarian, interfering, undemocratic, sclerotic, and sinister the European Union actually is. As a Eurosceptic, I suppose I ought to have known this already. But the secret of the European Union, as one of Durkin’s talking heads noted, is the way it uses boredom as a weapon. Even those of us predisposed towards thinking ill of the EU are unwilling to apprise ourselves of the full, tedious details because our brains would explode at the sheer, grinding dullness of it all. So it was a

Clarissa Tan

The Visit

Clarissa Tan, who wrote articles and TV reviews for The Spectator, has died of cancer aged 42. She came to London from Singapore after winning this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing and over the next seven years wrote about a great many things: Asia, race and the East; also smartphones, Sienna and socks. Clarissa paid attention to prose and all her pieces were beautiful and funny but, perhaps most unusually, they rang true. She was much loved by all at The Spectator and we miss her. Here is her prize-winning piece.    I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I’ve found the perfect compromise on breastfeeding

What attitude should we take towards women who wish to breastfeed their babies in public? Older, more conservative readers may feel a little squeamish about this sort of thing and would prefer mothers to do their breastfeeding in private; it is as much the hideous slurping noise as the sight of a female breast which offends, I think. At the other extreme, the modernist view is that they should be allowed to breastfeed when and where they want, without argument or hindrance, and that’s an end to it. As ever, I stalk what we might call the middle ground, the area where some sort of compromise can be found between

Aidan Hartley

Before you talk about ‘Lessons from Rwanda’, read this

In Rwanda I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant — this time 20 years ago I had no idea of the scale of what I could see on the ground. Trekking with a column of rebels from the Ugandan frontier south towards Kigali, we came upon the early massacres of Tutsis, hysterical survivors, flames leaping above huts, mortars roaring down misty valleys. But we had seen a lot of this across Africa in the 1990s. We visited a Catholic pastor in his rectory and I suppose at that point I and my Tutsi guides still respected the priesthood and could not imagine their complicity in

Douglas Murray

We’ve got gay rights, now let’s have gay responsibility

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Julie Bindel discuss monogamy in gay marriages” startat=665] Listen [/audioplayer]As inexorably as night follows day and push comes to shove, so the words ‘Tory’ and ‘scandal’ seem destined to conjoin with ‘Brazilian’ and ‘rent-boy’. Yet the main response to the allegations about Mark Menzies MP last weekend was neither laughter or condemnation, but pity. The tone was similar to that recently adopted by Jeremy Paxman when interviewing the disgraced former Co-op chairman Paul Flowers. How sad, it seemed to sigh, in this day and age. Is there anything we can do? Well yes, in fact: it has just been done — and among other things it

Lucy Vickery

Vice verse

In Competition 2841 you were invited to paint an amusing portrait in verse of the vice and folly of humankind. It was William Congreve who wrote that it is the business of a comic poet to paint the vice and follies of humankind, and I thought I would give you the opportunity to do just that. Gail White expresses doubt that ‘the vices of our flesh and minds’ can ‘be contained in sixteen lines’. But John O’Byrne boils it all down into a haiku: ‘My new credit card/ Means I can buy happiness./ Where did I go wrong?’ The extra fiver is Sylvia Fairley’s. Her fellow winners take £30. Oh,

Philip Ziegler

The Thucydides of court gossip? Steady on…

Sir Brian Unwin leads off with some decidedly questionable assertions. He wonders why the first of his two subjects, the Comtesse de Boigne, should have been ‘ignored or un-noticed by most historians’ — curious words to apply to a woman whose words are quoted in virtually every biography or history of her period. As to his second subject, Fanny Burney, he describes her as a ‘great novelist’. Evelina, Cecilia and Camilla make pleasant reading and were vastly successful in their time, but ‘great’ is surely pushing it a bit? In the vast gulf that separates Barbara Cartland from Virginia Woolf, Burney is nearer the latter than the former but a

Wednesday

Will Gore

How I learned to love T20

Cricket snobs will tell you that Twenty20, with its dancing girls, booming pop music and illuminated bails, is nothing but a glorified piss up for people with short attention spans. The accepted wisdom goes that a Test match is the ultimate form of the game, and it’s a view I’ve readily subscribed to throughout my cricket-loving life. Since the first T20 ball was bowled back in 2003, I’ve avoided watching much of what I thought to be the bastard son of ‘proper cricket’, yet to my great surprise, the current World Cup has won me over. I will never be reconciled to the idea that the best way of celebrating

Steerpike Steerpike

Does Andrew Davies prefer Kevin Spacey’s version of ‘House of Cards’ to his own?

It sounds like the screenwriter of the original House of Cards prefers the US version, although, of course, he couldn’t possibly comment. Andrew Davies, who adapted the BBC version from the book by Michael Dobbs, said he got ‘completely hooked’ on the Netflix series starring Kevin Spacey, and ‘more or less binged on three or four episodes at a time’. When Mr S asked him how the two series compared, the writer said: ‘[The US series] is fascinating. I think that because it’s going to be so long they had more space to develop the characters in such a lot of detail. I particularly liked Spacey’s performance- so different from

Ed West Ed West

Farewell, then, Nuts magazine

It looks like Nuts may be about to close, ten years after the lad’s mag was launched with great fanfare. Although it came to epitomise in some people’s minds the objectification of women, Nuts aimed at first to be a magazine that young men wouldn’t feel embarrassed to have around the house. No nipples were allowed, and the aim was to celebrate women, not denigrate them – or at least that was the official line. It was repeated so often it had to be true. Then after about six weeks or so, with disappointing sales, a marketing expert was called in to ask focus groups for input. His conclusion, which presumably he was paid

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

Lutfur Rahman and Tower Hamlets — an example of why elected mayors don’t work?

Is Eric Pickles about to send government troops into Tower Hamlets? Last night’s Panorama examined Lutfur Rahman, the borough’s independent directly elected mayor, who is accused (amongst other things) of mismanaging public funds to purchase influence within certain communities. The programme outlined how Rahman has allegedly ignored the advice of his own officials on distributing money and more than doubling funds to projects in Tower Hamlets’ Bengali community— of which more than two thirds were responsible for electing him in 2010. Rahman has denied all of the allegations against him, calling the BBC Islamophobic, a charge the BBC has in turn refuted in vigorous terms. Part of Panorama’s aim was

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Why not fine those who waste the NHS’s resources?

What do I want from the budget, I was asked. So I had a think. One plea was for no more pasty taxes, which I argued distracted from the more serious changes that would actually affect most people. So Osborne decided to cut the Bingo Tax, and we ended up with #bingogate. Someone obviously hadn’t been paying attention at the back. But among what I like to think of as the more serious requests to the Chancellor, I suggested the implementation of a charge of, say, £10, each time a person missed an NHS appointment. The Chancellor didn’t listen to me then, either. (Well, to be fair, why should he?)

David Aaronovitch

Index on Censorship is thriving and defending free speech around the world

Index on Censorship defends free speech and debate for all – so we defend Nick Cohen’s right to write a blog highly critical of Index. The problem is, however, that what he wrote was wrong, both in broad outline and finer detail. As a consequence Nick threatens to undermine the very cause that he claims to hold most dear. Index is not ‘falling apart’ nor is it even ‘in crisis’. In common with many other organisations in the charity sector it found itself, last year, facing a shortfall in funding. There are complex reasons for this but one of them, ironically, may be due to the very opposite problem to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

People’s front against HS2 to unite

Watch out for an increase in hostilities from anti-HS2 campaigners in the next few weeks. One of the more concerted backbench campaigners against the new route is planning to strengthen the cause by bringing together all the groups that are against HS2 under one umbrella. Andrew Bridgen, the Conservative MP who has a track record of causing serious problems for the government on issues such as Syria, tells me that he and Cheryl Gillan are setting up the group in May ‘so we can speak as one voice’. Bridgen hopes the campaign will include organisations who have set their faces against high speed rail such as the Campaign for the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Michael Gove is right — the Conservatives are the party of social justice

Yesterday, George Osborne dedicated himself the mission of ‘full employment’. Today, Michael Gove has given a speech declaring that the Conservatives are the ‘party of social justice’. This is not positioning – it’s simply stating the obvious. Thanks to Gove, the best hope a council estate kid has of dodging the local sink school is for a new school to open nearby. The Gove reforms don’t help the rich – the education system works fine for them. The best state schools are filled with the state pupils from the richest backgrounds. Ed Balls was sent private, as his dad (who used to teach at Eton) had wisely saved money and

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

New NHS boss warns that health service is facing its biggest challenge

Simon Stevens is giving us the first glimpse of what he wants to do as the new chief executive of the NHS today. In a speech in Newcastle, he will warn that the service is facing its biggest challenge, and that a radical transformation of care is needed. Stevens will say: ‘I know that for the NHS the stakes have never been higher. Service pressures are intensifying and longstanding problems are not going to disappear overnight.’ So what are the radical changes that Stevens wants to set about working on? In this week’s Spectator, former Labour adviser John McTernan profiles the new NHS boss, and explains what this radical reformer