Society

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Which female media star wrote the right-wing Revolt? It says a lot that we can’t think of many candidates

I am still trying to get some sort of closure. For almost three weeks now I have been tormented by memories of Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark dancing to the song ‘Thriller’ at the close of her programme, something presumably intended as a light-hearted Halloween treat for the eight or nine remaining viewers. It was not a light-hearted treat for me. I have always harboured the suspicion that Ms Wark is indeed a zombie, an innocent cadaver disinterred by shadowy persons within the left-wing Scottish establishment — the Baron McSamedis — and subjected to some awful supernatural process before being released into the world to do their vile bidding. Watching Kirsty lumber

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer: The Reverend is just a funny sideshow — here’s who to blame for the Co-op mess

The naughty Reverend Flowers will be a comic footnote in the history of the financial crisis — but no more than that. In terms of making ministry relevant to modern congregations, you’ve got to take your hat off to a man of the cloth who knows his ‘Charlie’ from his ‘ket’ (for the uninitiated that’s a horse tranquilliser) and likes to unwind after a tough select committee hearing with a ‘two-day, drug-fuelled gay orgy’. But it must be obvious that neither the FSA nor his own colleagues thought him anything other than a figurehead when he emerged through the Co-operative hierarchy to become a director of the Co-op Bank in

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Would you trust this man?

In Geneva, America and her allies are limbering up for another round of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear project. In a sign of the thaw Barack Obama and our own Prime Minister seem desperate to declare, David Cameron has spoken directly with President Rouhani for the first time. According to a Downing Street spokesman, the two men ‘agreed to continue efforts to improve the relationship’. Meantime, ahead of the Geneva talks, the man with the power in Iran, the Supreme Leader, has just given a speech to 50,000 Baseejis (government militia).  Here is some of what he said: ‘Is the Islamic regime after war with others? This is the statement that

Sebastian Payne

British households are still overwhelmed by debt

Despite ‘the age of austerity’, Britain still has a debt problem. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Centre for Social Justice. It suggests that personal debt in the UK has reached a record high of £1.4 trillion, or 90 per cent of the UK’s economic output last year. That’s not happened overnight; but the debt level has increased steadily over the last decade: Breaking this down, the CSJ says that the average household debt is now £54,000 (nearly double what it was a decade ago). Thanks to the increase in borrowing, 5,000 people were made homeless last year due to mortgage and rent arrears. Christian Guy, director

Tuesday

Ed West Ed West

The CofE doomed? Only because it’s surrendered to phony soullessness

The Church of England is doomed, Lord Carey has said, warning that Anglicanism is just ‘one generation away from extinction’. To be fair people have been saying this for a long time; in the mid-19th century the Church decided to make a survey of churchgoing, and were stunned to find out that only a quarter of people in England attended Anglican services and a similar number to non-Conformist services. Half the population wasn’t going at all. Now you’d be lucky to get that many at Christmas. The Church faces the same problem as all churches, namely that religious belief continues to decline across Europe, and that those religions that do

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Here’s a thought about child care: what about giving parents some choice?

George Bernard Shaw made no bones about the merits of schooling: it was, he felt, a way for parents to offload the care of their children onto other people, and he was right. The rich do this systematically, of course, in delegating their children to boarding schools, but for the rest of us, Ed Miliband’s plan to extend childcare provision by obliging primary schools to take in our children from eight in the morning to six in the evening will have a good deal of appeal. At least for parents it will; if I were a teacher, I’d take a dim view of having babysitting added to my other duties. But

Matthew Plummer

Has local government in London left cycling in the wrong lane?

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. Surprisingly, its new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space. The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube

David Blackburn

After Mid-Staffs, the NHS needs whistleblowers – and whistleblowers need protection from the public

It is impossible, I would have thought, to have heard Debbie Hazledine’s account on the Today programme of her late mother’s mistreatment at Mid Staffs Hospital and not to have thought ill of the hospital in question. An institution in which such callousness thrived for so long must have few friends left, you might imagine. And yet the strangest thing about the Mid Staffs scandal is the defensive feeling it has inspired. The ‘Save Mid Staffs’ campaign has been vocal at points, while Julie Bailey, the Mid Staffs whistleblower, appears to have been persecuted. In front of this backdrop, a debate about what should happen to wards in failing hospitals has morphed into a full-on slanging

Monday

Ben Goldsmith

Why Britain needs Prince Charles

This week’s issue of Country Life magazine has been guest-edited by the Prince of Wales. As long term perspectives disappear from national debate, we should all be grateful for his presence in public life, says Ben Goldsmith. It is hard to name an area of modern life which has not been overcome by short-term considerations. Companies sacrifice long-term growth for their quarterly financial reports, politicians are blind beyond the next election, and the attention span of rolling news channels is shorter than ever. In cricket, the deep satisfaction of a five-day Test Match is threatened by one day or even shorter match formats. Long termism speaks with a quiet voice; a voice that has been all but obliterated. The Prince of

Steerpike Steerpike

Mysterious movements at the Daily Mail

When Mr S revealed a few weeks ago that long-time Mail columnist Richard Kay had been booted ‘up’ to a roaming writer role (to make way for Sebastian Shakespeare), there was plenty of speculation that Kay must have fallen out with his boss Paul Dacre. Perhaps the chattering was unfounded. The two were spotted being very chummy at the weekend, drinking wine in the Twickenham car park after the England v New Zealand match. Either Kay is extremely forgiving or there’s more to this than meets the eye. Shakespeare is very close to Dacre’s sparring partner Geordie Greig. The Mail on Sunday editor is said to have the ear of higher

David Blackburn

Denis MacShane pleads guilty to expenses fraud

The expenses continues to cast a long shadow. Denis MacShane entered a guilty plea at the Old Bailey this morning. As the Press Association reports: ‘The ex-MP admitted false accounting by putting in fake receipts for £12,900 of “research and translation” services. He used the money to fund trips to Europe, including to judge a literary competition in Paris.’ MacShane will be sentenced on 19 December, and he has been granted unconditional bail. All sentencing options remain open to the court. MacShane says that he did not profit personally from the claims; but concedes that he made a ‘grotesque mistake’.

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

‘A Radical Imagination’ – Doris Lessing in the Spectator

Doris Lessing’s obituaries, as much as her writings, bear witness  to the great turbulences of the twentieth century. How many of us spent our childhood in two countries which have both since changed their names? But ‘exotic’ was the last word Lessing would have used to describe herself: ‘I am 85, an Englishwoman (with Scottish and Irish tinctures) living in London‘, she insisted in one tart correspondence in our letters page. Though happy to pose as a mere correspondent several times over the course of forty years (oh, to crack her username at CoffeeHouse comments!), the Nobel winner was also a regular Spectator contributor. Exploring her archive left me queasy

David Blackburn

David Cameron’s crackdown on child porn is not over yet

Parliament returns from a three day break today, but the headlines this morning are dominated by the international crackdown on online images of child abuse on the ‘dark internet’. Technology companies have made significant progress since July, when David Cameron urged them to do more to eradicate these ‘depraved and disgusting’ images. For example, 200 employees of Google have been targeting 100,000 search terms in order to locate pictures of child pornography. YouTube engineers have found a way to identify videos created by and for paedophiles, and Google and Microsoft have been collaborating to identify pictures of child pornography. This announcement has come before a meeting in Downing Street about joint

Sunday

Philip Hensher

The genius of Doris Lessing 1919-2013

Doris Lessing died this morning, aged 94. The below is from the Spectator’s archives. Doris Lessing’s Nobel win came as a surprise to everyone, the author apparently included. Despite her enormous, decades-long international reputation, she was less fancied than dozens of patently smaller writers. That could only have been ascribed to a cynical estimate of the way the Swedish academy works. On literary merit, no one would have questioned her right to it. She is one of the greatest of novelists in English. Her career is a matter of savage breakthroughs into quite new territory, as if her searching, sceptical intelligence could never be satisfied with stasis for long. It

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

There’s no point in just outsourcing our CO2 emissions

The global warming question is back on the political agenda with David Cameron likening cutting greenhouse gas emissions to house insurance. His argument is that if there’s a risk that they may be harmful, you want to guard against it. But given that ‘global warming’ is no respected of national boundaries, one thing that isn’t sensible is to simply send energy intensive industries and their jobs and profits overseas. But this is just what the EU is doing, according to Bjørn Lomborg. He reports that: ‘From 1990 to 2008, the EU cut its emissions by about 270 million metric tons of CO2. But it turns out that the increase in

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: compose some wintry nonsense

Our competition this week invites you to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme. The line between sense and nonsense is a blurred one. In his Spectator review of Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber anthology of nonsense verse, Anthony Burgess encapsulated this nicely, noting that Mr Grigson ‘wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He knows that we will only know what nonsense is when we know the nature of sense. Nonsense is something we think we can recognise, just as we think we can recognise poetry, but there has to be an overlap with what we think we can recognise as sense.’ A good way to get yourself in

David Blackburn

Sachin Tendulkar is among the very greatest sportsmen, but heroes are made to be surpassed

It was the sort of summer’s day that makes you glad to be alive; but we were watching the telly. We would not normally do this. If the weather was fine, we would play games of catch on the lawn: my 4-year-old self hurling any object that came to hand at my 78-year-old grandfather. The old man would leap about for my amusement, often careering into my parents’ sacred flower beds. He would pooh-pooh my father’s concerns about the wisdom of these exertions, and ignore my grandmother’s distress over the ruin of ‘yet another pair of trousers’. My delight would urge him to even greater theatrics when their backs were

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Let us eat horse

Could creating a UK market for horsemeat be the solution to the increasing number of equine welfare cases? This was the question posed by Princess Anne yesterday at World Horse Welfare’s annual conference. The former Olympic eventer argued that creating a horsemeat market, and thereby adding a financial value to many horses, would most likely improve the level of care that they currently receive. Unsurprisingly, Princess Anne’s comments have upset certain groups such as the RSPCA and Peta, with the RSPCA saying in a statement that ‘the killing of horses for meat is an emotive subject, as many see them as companion animals rather than a food source, a sentiment