Society

Thursday

Damian Mcbride

Damian McBride: Why I clutched at my trousers in front of Jeremy Paxman

They say nothing beats the feeling of seeing your book in print. But for me, the proudest moment was presenting the first copy to my Mum. She’s been ill recently and I read her most of the chapters in draft while she was convalescing, albeit leaving out the nasty bits. I sat with her that evening, reading her more of the book and feeling quite pleased with it. But the nervous feeling kicked in the next day when I saw the first extracts in the Daily Mail, and heard some of the reactions from the media and Labour folk. It strikes me as bizarre that people would reach conclusions and

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 26 September 2013

Home The General Medical Council said it was dropping cases against four doctors who worked at Stafford Hospital at the height of the scandal of neglect and abuse there. Bail until October was given to eight people, including five policemen, arrested during investigation of an incident last year in which Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, was accused of calling police ‘plebs’, which he denies. Two men were charged with the computer theft of £1.3 million from Barclays Bank in Swiss Cottage, north London. A photograph was published of the Queen in a cardigan entertaining the prime minister of New Zealand at Balmoral in a room with a tartan carpet,

Doc

2132: Ricochet

The unclued Across lights, when correctly paired with the unclued Down ones, are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer.   Across 4 Deer and setters disturbed fire-arm supports (11, hyphened) 11 Bits of lava surround unfortunate one (7) 13 Valentino edited modern work (9, hyphened) 14 Wader’s support (5) 19 African Moslems’ bad sinuses (7) 21 Isle’s black pick-up (4) 23 Young tree — one that’s alright round heather (7) 24 It’s almost flat panic, initially! (4) 30 Medley from a couple of little girls (7) 32 In full – on the run? (7, two words) 34 Bulrush from gutless turcophile (4) 35 Sideways request one City rejected (7) 37

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to 2129: DUMPYNOSE

The unclued lights (1A, 1D/36, 4/31D, 5/27, 15/16A, 16D, 25A/40, 42 are each the PSEUDONYM (anagram of ‘Dumpynose’) of a famous celebrity. See Brewer 17th edition revised, page 1112 et seq.   First prize Mike Underwood, Auvillar, France Runners-up Anthony H. Harker, Oxford; Gillian Ollerenshaw, Bowdon, Altrincham

Edward Timpson

Adoption can be a wonderful gift – that’s why we’re making the process better

As someone with two adopted brothers, I know how important it is to get the adoption system right. Since coming to office, the Government has sought to ensure more children are given the love and support of an adoptive family more quickly. We’ve simplified the adoption process for those looking to adopt and made it easier for them to access clearer, more comprehensive information. We are giving adopters a more active role in identifying children for whom they might be a good match. We’re making extra funding available to attract more adopters, with £150 million going to local authorities and £16 million to support voluntary adoption agencies. For too long,

Steerpike Steerpike

Anti-Murray mania in Essex

Andy Murray may have crashed out of the US Open; but last time I checked he was still a hero in this land after 12 months of triumph. All of which makes the recent travails of Conservative MP David Amess rather odd. A complaint to the PPC shows that his local paper, The Southend Echo, made an erroneous claim about him wanting Murray to be knighted, after he was subjected to public abuse. The paper has since grovelled and apologised; but at least it exposed its patch as being the most anti-Murray part of the country.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Caroline Flint gives Lord Mandelson the smackdown over energy bills

Peter Mandelson’s criticisms of Ed Miliband’s energy policy are probably quite useful for the Labour leadership. They certainly seem to think so. Caroline Flint was dispatched this morning to remind anyone watching BBC News that Labour are the only party standing up for the consumer, while the Tories and naughty Labourites like Mandelson are busy sticking by their evil energy boss chums. She said: ‘I know Lord Mandelson has financial interests in energy companies. I don’t know if he’s just speaking to them, but I’m speaking up for consumers and businesses, who are going to be helped by Labour’s policies.’ listen to ‘Caroline Flint: ‘Lord Mandelson is just plainly wrong’’

Simon Hoggart

September Mini-Bar

It’s a curious fact that the recession has increased sales of the more expensive wines. Merchants put this down to people being unwilling to pay for restaurant meals — and for restaurant wines, which can be three or four times the retail price. So they cook at home, and make the meal special with a good bottle. Most restaurants believe that the mark-up on wine is the only thing that keeps them going, but I rather admire those who charge, say, a flat £10 or £12 above retail, so that while a house white at £17 might seem pricey, for £25 you can get a really good wine. That said,

Aidan Hartley

How we survived terror at Nairobi’s Westgate mall

 Nairobi Kenya is one of those places where everybody knows everybody — and each one of us seems to have friends or relatives caught up in the Westgate shopping mall terrorist attack. My friends Simon and Amanda Belcher were on their way to lunch at the mall before catching a film at the cinema. They had parked their car on the top floor and walked past a marquee where a children’s ‘super chef’ cookery competition was about to start when gunfire erupted inside. Simon at first thought ‘firecrackers’. Then they heard shots from the ramp up to the car park. Walking towards them were two slim young men carrying AK-47s

Matilda Bathurst

Notes on…The house museums of Paris

It doesn’t matter how many times they expand the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’s past is so colossally rich that it could never be squeezed into its great public buildings. The city has instead developed its own breed of ‘house museum’ — ready-made monuments to its distinguished inhabitants. It’s not just regular tourist stops like the Maison de Victor Hugo, either. In Montparnasse, the studios of artists Ossip Zadkine and Antoine Bourdelle display sublime sculpted figures in shaded gardens, and across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower you will find Balzac’s former village home, cramped among the Belle Époque curves and 1970s luxury towers of the 16ème. Up by

Toby Young Toby Young

Unite the right! Email Toby Young at conukip@gmail.com

The most common objection to a Tory-Ukip pact is that neither David Cameron nor Nigel Farage will touch it. So why waste time discussing it? But a pact doesn’t need to be endorsed by the leaders of either party to work. What I have in mind is something bottom-up rather than top-down. A unite-the-right website set up by members of both parties that tells people who they should vote for in their constituency to keep out Labour and the Lib Dems. Take Eastleigh, for instance, a seat currently held by the Lib Dems. Ukip came second at the by-election last year, so the advice would be to vote for Diane

Bruce Anderson

Life — and death — of a Tokay

I was praying for a miracle, but it seemed unlikely. There had been one already: the bottle’s very survival. A second would qualify it for sainthood. It was an extraordinary story, almost on the scale of The Hare with Amber Eyes. Towards the end of the Napoleonic wars, a barrel of Imperial Tokay was dispatched from Trieste to St James’s St, where it was bottled by Berry Bros, in 1811. From there, a bottle went to St Petersburg, where it rested for more than a century in a well-appointed cellar. In 1917, it ought to have been delicious. Imperial Tokay is an immensely long-lived wine, well capable of making a

Michael Ware

Electric cars – the ultimate subsidy for the rich

This morning, Nick Clegg promised to take £500 million from taxpayers, and use it to subsidise electric cars. Last year, the Spectator’s annual Matt Ridley Prize was won by an essay exposing the idiocy of the scheme – and the menacing social implications of subsidingof the rich.  My wife’s friend Charlotte earns £17,000 a year working as a teaching assistant, lives in a housing association flat and is having sleepless nights about paying her recent £124.78 electricity bill. My friend Toby earns £425,000 a year as a media lawyer, lives in a big house in Putney and every day the no doubt well-meaning but somewhat misguided people of Westminster City

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind: I spy complete indifference towards being spied

Oh, but life’s easier if you’re American. Each and every last way the state meddles with your life is an outrage. Whether it’s forcing you to have health care, or denying you the right to own the gun that Al Pacino has in Scarface, or making you wear a seat belt, or taxing you, or threatening to silence your long-held and proudly defended right to put a pillowcase on your head and be a racist, Big Government is a villain. There are people, the American thinks, and then there is power, and the latter shafts the little guy every chance he gets. It’s not like that in Britain. And, if

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Nobody takes a flight from London to Manchester. So why would we take HS2?

From Edinburgh airport there are more than 45 flights a day to London. And, I imagine, the same number back. You can fly from Edinburgh to London Heathrow, -London Gatwick, London Luton, -London Stansted and London City — even to the optimistically named -London Southend. Glasgow offers a similar choice. I have often used these flights. I live about 25 minutes’ drive from Gatwick, so when I go to Edinburgh my -favourite plan is to take a morning train up and then fly or take the sleeper back. Since Manchester is bigger than Edinburgh, I had naively assumed that I would be able to do something similar for an upcoming

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

This isn’t a property bubble – it’s a reason to improve London’s transport

Everyone —including me, if I’m honest — has been talking about a new property bubble. But is it for real? London house prices are rising at an annual rate of almost 10 per cent, and shares in the capital’s bellwether back-from-the-dead estate agency Foxtons soared on their stock market debut last week. Yet according to the Office for National Statistics, the national rise is just 3.3 per cent, the average price of a home having only recently regained its pre–credit-crunch peak. -Outside the South-East, and hotspots such as oil-rich Aberdeen, the pattern is largely flat or even falling. Although real incomes (adjusted for inflation) have fallen over the past five years,

Lucy Vickery

Let’s twist

In Competition 2816 you were invited to submit a short story with an ingenious twist at the end. I was inspired to set this challenge after coming across O. Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’ and then rereading Maupassant’s quietly devastating ‘The Necklace’. The moral of Bill Greenwell’s tale — dishonesty pays — struck me as a neat counterpoint to Maupassant. The winners earn £25 each. G.M. Davis takes the bonus fiver.   I answered the knock and was struck dumb. It was 20 years since we’d lived together. I’d undergone sea changes, but she was no different: the pleated pink minidress, the rhinestone gladiator sandals, glamour slap à la

Wednesday

Ed West Ed West

The insanity of ‘votes for children’: who cares what adolescents think about politics?

Should people who comment under YouTube videos be deciding the fate of our country? That’s the frightening scenario proposed by Ed Miliband, who wants to give 16-year-olds the vote because, as he put it, it will make them ‘part of our democracy’. Or, in other words, the electorate’s opinion is no more important than a child’s. There is nothing progressive about allowing children to vote, any more than it is progressive to allow kids to sit on juries or take out mortgages. These things all involve the ability to make judgments, which is not sufficiently developed in adolescence. Voting isn’t just a right that makes you feel ‘part of democracy’;