Society

Tuesday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The segregation of women and the appeasement of bigotry

For over a week now, astonished reaction has been building to the decision of Universities UK to recommend the segregation of men and women on campuses. The astonishment has been all the greater because, in a characteristic display of 21st century hypocrisy, the representatives of 132 universities and colleges clothed reactionary policies in the language of liberalism. It could be a denial of the rights of a woman hater – or ‘representative of an ultra-orthodox religious group’, as our finest institutes of higher learning put it – to allow men and women to sit where they please. The Muslim or Orthodox Jew could refuse to speak in such intolerable circumstances.

Chris Skidmore

PISA rankings are a shot in the arm for education reformers

Like measuring water by the handful, calculating the success of the education system at a time of rampant grade inflation is an impossible task. If exam results go up every year how can we know if are our children are actually getting a better education or if exams are just getting easier? Part of the answer is international comparisons – which is why the OECD PISA rankings published today do actually matter. The last time they were published, in 2009, they showed that as a country we slipped to 25th in reading, 28th in maths and 16th in science. Yet at the same time domestic UK exam results were getting better. If

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Caroline Flint and Ed Davey clash over who cares most about consumers

One of the Conservatives’ great victories in government has been to portray the party as on the side of consumers against behemoth and sometimes inefficient producers. Take education, where Michael Gove has set to tackling the ‘Blob’ of the education establishment on behalf of parents who want real choice over their children’s education. Or the NHS, where Jeremy Hunt has styled himself as the patients’ champion, standing up to a resistant NHS establishment on standards of care. But this isn’t the case on every front. Today’s Commons statement on energy bills by Ed Davey underlined the struggle the Coalition faces in presenting a convincing case for being a consumer champion

Steerpike Steerpike

Champagne sales point to stable recovery at Gold Cup

Green shoots were visible in Newbury on Saturday for the 57th Hennessy Gold Cup. While brandy cocktails warmed the punters in the Fred Winter Suite, Rob Brydon and Martin Clunes chatted up Joan Collins, who, despite being the most famous person in the room, was wearing a name badge. Myleene Klass displayed a lack of class when posing for a photograph with Princess Anne. And Tinie Tempah might want to have a word with his tailor: the rapper’s trousers were cut off half way up his shin and he must have been freezing without any socks on. Mr Steerpike feared that he might have had one too many nips of

Ed West Ed West

Someone rid us of the awful slogan: ‘hardworking families’

This is a message to any politician out there thinking of using the phrase ‘hardworking families’ or ‘hardworking people’ – I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. A day does not go by without a Tory politician using this highly irritating slogan, especially in the regular spam emails I get from the party. The latest occurrence happened today with the energy minister telling WATO that ‘We are determined to protect hard-working families from fuel bill rises’. I must be out of touch with public opinion, as usual, and this idea must resonate with people in general, because otherwise the media-obsessed Tories wouldn’t repeat

Alex Massie Alex Massie

When oh when will we ever be able to talk about immigration (sensibly)?

I do wish we were never allowed to speak about immigration. That seems the only way to prevent folk from spouting – and writing – rubbish on the subject. But of course there is no conspiracy intent on stifling discussion on immigration. Not even a liberal, metropolitan or elitist conspiracy. Sorry. You can say all the things you think you can’t say. And we know this because many, even most, of them are said all the time. So often, in fact, that they lack novelty. And we also know that no-one really wants to have a conversation about immigration. Conversation would require some back and forth. It might even allow the possibility someone might

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Horror in the corridors of the Observer

Absolutely fascinating double page spread in The Observer yesterday which suggests that the UK is ‘sleepwalking’ towards an exit from the European Union. My only quibble with the piece is that the source of this narcolepsy was not explained: is it drug induced, or have we perhaps become zombified? Either way, we don’t know what we are doing, according to The Observer. This is the usual recourse of the left when the rest of the country makes the grotesque mistake of thinking differently to what the bien pensants want. The feature was based upon a poll which suggested that only 14 per cent of Brits consider themselves ‘European’, which is

Olivia Cole

Editor’s letter

The late Anthony Minghella described our cover star, Ralph Fiennes, as a ‘held, slightly unknowable person’. Though I’ve long admired his work, I got to know him a little bit better when we met to talk about The Invisible Woman, his unforgettable account of Dickens’s secret life with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Fiennes both stars and directs, which he terms a ‘brilliant, scary’ feeling.   It’s a strategy that has produced some great American films (last year’s Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, or Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, or Robert Redford’s Quiz Show), but it’s a particular pleasure to celebrate a Rada-trained, homegrown talent taking on Hollywood on his own exacting

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator’s 2013 carol concert: an open invitation

It’s December, advent calendars are on the wall and being prematurely raided (in my house, anyway). And it’s just ten days until the event of month: the Spectator’s carol concert with the amazing choir of St Bride’s. It’s a stunning church but quite a small one: we only have 200 tickets and most have been sold. But there are still a few left, which you can buy online. It’s in aid of Cancer Research UK and a warm invitation is extended to any Coffee Housers who’d like to come and join us. The evening is our own (condensed) lessons and carols – the lessons being read by our own saints:

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Naked politicians and the Emperor’s New Clothes: Labour’s Autumn Statement challenge

The Autumn Statement isn’t until Thursday, but already it’s clear what the attack lines will be from both sides. As James explained earlier, the Tories and Lib Dems will want to focus on the ‘responsible recovery’, which means fewer giveaways than a Chancellor might be tempted to make at this stage in a parliament and which feeds into the Conservative narrative that voters should let them finish the job by re-electing them in 2015. From Labour’s part, it’s that this Autumn Statement was written by Ed Miliband at his party’s conference in Brighton. Labour MPs are now very keen to talk about Coalition politicians dancing to Labour’s tune. Meanwhile, Ed

Carola Binney Carola Binney

Science versus Arts – which degree is harder?

People get competitive about the difficulty of their degrees. The accepted line at Oxford is that Science is harder than Arts, and everything is harder than PPE – three years of sleeping until 1pm and waffling about Mill’s Utilitarianism, and you still get to tell employers that you have a degree in economics. It’s probably true about the PPEists, but the Arts vs. Science stuff is a myth. Scientists’ claim to the tougher time is based on the fact that they have more contact hours. More contact hours, we are often told, make a more serious degree: it was reported as a scandal in May when Bahram Bekhradnia, director of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne wants to talk about ‘the responsible recovery’ but energy bills are still Topic A

In the minds of government strategists, the autumn statement is the moment when the coalition gets to turn the conversation back to the broader economy and away from Ed Miliband’s focus on the cost of living. But the first five minutes of George Osborne’s pre-statement interview with Andrew Marr were dominated by the action the government is taking in response to Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy bills. The problem for the coalition on energy bills is that the £50 it is taking off bills now might well not be enough to stop bills rising next year. If household bills go up again in 2014, Miliband’s price freeze is going to

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A joke at Russell Brand’s expense

I see that Russell Brand has morphed into Mehdi Hassan. Mehdi, if you remember, excoriated The Daily Mail and then the paper published the cringe-worthy paean of praise Hassan had written to the paper’s editor in chief, Paul Dacre, when he was after a job. Brand, meanwhile, has bravely stuck it to The Sun newspaper and of course the most evil man in the entire history of mankind, Rupert Murdoch. The paper apparently ran a story that Brand had cheated on his girlfriend. Yes, yes, I know – big story. Anyway, in his usual tortured prose Brand kicked the hell out of The Sun. And then The Sun revealed that

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

No 10: the government has not asked for a price freeze

If today’s energy bills confusion is an example of how the government plants stories, it really is a poor gardener of news. Number 10 this morning denied that ministers had asked the energy companies for a price freeze, with the Prime Minister’s spokesman saying: ‘The government has not asked for a price freeze’ and added that ‘people should wait for the Autumn Statement when we will spell out our plans to roll back the impact of levies on people’s energy bills’. The spokesman explained that the government will be focusing on the need for more competition through the annual competition review and rolling back the levies and charges on energy

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

BBC vs newspapers – who wields the power?

David Yelland, a former Sun editor turned a PR director, is today giving a lecture to Hacked Off’s parent group lamenting what he sees as the absence of proper press regulation. He was invited on the Today programme to talk about it, and they kindly invited me on afterwards. Here’s the audio: listen to ‘David Yelland: Journalism in the UK is ‘lions led by donkeys’’ on Audioboo

Thursday

Taki

Taki: The joke that made me like Mike Tyson

New York   Nature is at her best right now, the leaves still holding, Central Park awash in golden browns and reds. I go there every morning, half a block away from home, and under a giant elm I put the creaky body through its paces. Twenty push-ups, 30 deep knee-bends, 25 kicks over a knee-high bar with each leg, and finish with 25 punches against a leaf for speed and accuracy. Then a quiet walk and back to the flat for breakfast and the papers. At six in the evening I walk to the dojo and mix it up rather hard with karate sensei Richard Amos and other black

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: I’m a fake. The cannabis tells me so

Can it be that the one single agreeable thing about getting old is that one loses one’s pot paranoia? No. I thought I was going to get away with it, but here it came again like a creeping fog: the terrible introspection, the loss of identity, the psychic disintegration, the paranoid delusions. And here already, I noted, was the paralysing delusion that I am rooted to the spot and somehow tied to the company by a bond of loyalty, to the extent that even to uncross my legs and leave the beer-garden table would feel like a terrible betrayal. It’s horrible. I hate it. My immediate task was to try

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite: My journey to despair with Lambeth’s bin men

Everything is a journey now, especially if it involves failure. The X Factor rejects, people having disasters as they build their own homes on Grand Designs, they’re all on a journey. ‘It’s been an incredible journey,’ they say, watery-eyed as they reflect on what is, in truth, a shameful mess of their own making. Very much in this vein, a new communication from Lambeth Council has come through my door explaining ‘the recycling journey’. Bear with me, because I want you to come on this journey in order to fully grasp the beautiful symmetry of what Lambeth has achieved. Imagine a flow chart made up of eight photographs. The first

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: A slice of Italy in Milton Keynes

Back home from a week in Italy, I almost feel that I haven’t left. For I go almost at once to Milton Keynes to see Donizetti’s quintessentially Italian opera, L’elisir d’amore. It is a superb, joyous production by the Glyndebourne Tour company, one of which any great international opera house would have been proud. And here it is being performed in Milton Keynes, not a town generally associated with cultural sophistication. But then ‘Das Land ohne Musik’, as England was once cruelly called by a German music scholar, is now awash with opera. It has been spread across the land by country opera festivals, springing up everywhere in imitation of

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 28 November 2013

‘Yikes! I’ve been Grosvenored!’ This is a wail you will hear from time to time when a Declarer has been ‘had’ by the dreaded Grosvenor Gambit. It is explained in The Official Encyclopaedia of Bridge as follows: ‘A humorous psychological ploy described by Frederick Turner of Los Angeles in The Bridge World 1973. A defender deliberately makes an error, giving the Declarer an opportunity he refuses because he expects a rational defence. The hope is that the declaring side will be demoralised on later deals.’ In last weekend’s Tollemache Cup qualifier, the inter-county championships for teams of eight, Victor Silverstone, playing for Middlesex, gave us a perfect example of a