Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is Lord Adonis the right man to lead Labour’s Growth Review?

One of the things we know about Labour’s policies is that the Adonis Growth Review is meant to produce a fair few of them. Launched by Ed Miliband last month, the former head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unit’s review is meant to publicly report in spring 2014. When Miliband announced this review, he praised Adonis’s work in reforming public services in the last government. But this positive view of Adonis’ work does not seem to be shared by all the shadow cabinet. In his Guardian interview on Saturday, Andy Burnham said ‘I wasn’t cheerleading for academies.’ Academies were, of course, an Adonis initiative. One other consequence of Adonis heading this

Steerpike Steerpike

Katie Hopkins gets her comeuppance

Former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins, who has become a ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’-style rent-a-quote in middle age, was never going to applaud the appearance of names like Riley, Isla and Mia in the top ten popular baby names of last year. In high dudgeon, she interrupted elevenses to hit the airwaves: ‘These are the sort of names you can hear parents screaming across the playground, screaming because they have not done their home learning, they are the sort of people that choose names like this.’ Hopkins, a professional snob, reiterated that she uses names as ‘a shortcut, a very efficient shortcut to deciding who my children play with.’ Apparently she

Ruth Porter

Social housing needs to be more social

With the recent anniversary of the Beveridge report, TV channels have been packed with an array of documentaries on our welfare system. Most of these have been fairly hopeless, trying to make their points with extreme cases. Channel 4’s ‘How to get a council house’ was a notable exception. With devastating clarity it showed how our social housing system is nothing of the kind. My grandfather, an electrician, spent most of the Second World War on Malta with the RAF. His house in East London was destroyed by bombing during the war. With no home of his own he stayed with relatives when on leave and happily fell in love with my

Sunday

David Blackburn

Jeremy Hunt’s tough talk on the NHS doesn’t address the toughest question of all: what is the purpose of modern medicine?

Jeremy Hunt’s quiet demeanour is deceptive. The Health Secretary has a bit of what my late grandfather called ‘iron in the soul’ – a measure of self-confidence, calculation and the determination not to let the bastards get you down. ‘Iron in the soul’ came in handy during the Burma campaign in the Second World War. And I imagine that it’s vital if one is to prosper as Secretary of State for Health. Hunt was sent to the Department of Health last year in order to clean up the political mess left by Andrew Lansley. Hunt’s tenure has been beset by scandals beyond his or his predecessor’s control – from Mid

Lucy Vickery

Spectator literary competition No. 2812: Bookish

The CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos has said ‘the physical book and bookstores are dead’. This week competitors are invited to celebrate this endangered species and submit a poem (of up to 16 lines) in praise of bookshops. Please email entries  to lucy @ spectator.co.uk by midday on 21 August and mark them Competition 2812. Here are the results of this week’s challenge, in which competitors were asked to submit a letter liberally sprinkled with evidence of an imperfect grasp of foreign languages. There has been already a welcome influx of newcomers, which is great to see. Keep ’em coming.

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Stone the soothsayer

When the history books tell the story of peace in the Middle East, the name of Lord Stone of Blackheath, managing director of Marks & Spencer and a Labour peer, will be up there in lights. For he is a soothsayer with unique insights on the region. At least, that is the impression given by his ‘out of office’ email message: ‘I am in Israel for August back Sept 3rd. I said there’d be talks by then! Peace in 9 months!’ You read it here first.

The Spectator

Being uncharitable

William Shawcross’s comments earlier in the week, following the disclosure that the number of staff at foreign aid charities earning salaries greater than £100,000 a year has grown from 19 to 30 since 2010, caused consternation. The leading article in this week’s Spectator makes two points on the subject. 1). The expansion of the DfID budget has coincided with the growth of executive pay at charities, just as the expansion of the health budget under Blair and Brown coincided with the growth of staff pay in the NHS. Criticism of salaries should never be motivated by envy, but neither the charitable sector nor the NHS has provided adequate results to justify such salaries. HIV and malaria are yet

Ben Mason

The SPD has no credible answer to Germany’s Iron Lady as polling day nears

As symbolism goes, it borders on cliché. Running out of time to gain any serious traction, Germany’s Social Democrats last week unveiled their new campaign posters, and they promptly disintegrated on first contact with rain. The seven images neatly chronicle – or will do once they’re replaced – the profound failure of the main challengers to Angela Merkel’s re-election to provide any serious challenge at all. The first four have pictures of determinedly normal people standing alongside a totemic policy pledge: more childcare provision, lower rents, higher pensions, introduction of a minimum wage (Germany still doesn’t have one, though it has been a perennially topical debate). This is where the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Scotland’s disgraceful educational apartheid

Scottish teenagers received their exam results this week and, for the seventh consecutive year, the pass-rate for Highers increased. So did the pass-rates for all other exams: the Advanced Highers success rate marched past 82 per cent while a scarcely credible 98.9 per cent of all Standard Grade exams were passed. Cue the annual debate over grade inflation and dumbing down. Actually, the best academic evidence (compiled by Durham University researchers) suggests grade inflation, while real, is less of an issue in Scotland than it is in the rest of the United Kingdom. It also distracts attention from the real issue. Which remains that far too many children in far too many

Thursday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

‘Like a concentration camp run by KFC’: Tanya Gold visits Shake Shack

Shake Shack is a hamburger restaurant in Covent Garden market. It came from New York and it is as needy and angry and angry-needy as America itself; it is, I suspect, quite capable of inventing a bogus reason to invade Burger King while posing as a victim of Burger King’s evil machinations. ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ it says in its promotional material online. ‘See you in the queue!’ (That, if you are English and a man and have never had psychotherapy, is called passive aggression.) Covent Garden market is full of August tourists; that is, wanderers with no destination, staring blindly at the metal Apples and Chanel.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Football’s still the big boy in the playground – even when the big boys aren’t playing

It’s been a long, hot, soccerless holiday. There has been football about — the women’s European Championship, for example, and various age-group tournaments, all of which England departed with undue haste — but not the proper stuff. There hasn’t been a tournament where players can ‘put themselves in the shop window’ or prove that they have what it takes ‘at the highest level’ for any club with a fat chequebook and a friendly press. Youth football, even women’s, is all very well but it doesn’t pay the bills. Men’s professional football is, sadly, the big kid in the playground of sport. When it’s not there we miss it and make

Toby Young Toby Young

The myths of the English countryside

One of the great things about spending the summer holidays in England is that it gives you an opportunity to experience life in the country. All year, Caroline and I dream about moving out of London and spend hours scouring property websites to see what we could buy if we sold our house in Acton. But after a few days in Yorkshire or Suffolk, all our bucolic illusions are shattered. Suddenly, London doesn’t seem so bad after all. We’re currently in Norfolk staying with a friend near Burnham Market — known locally as ‘Burnham Mark-up’ because everything is so overpriced. We went to a farmers’ market that charged twice as

Alexander Chancellor

Alexander Chancellor: I found the key to holiday happiness in a car park

While sitting beside a pool under a blistering Tuscan sun, I’ve been reading an article in Corriere della Sera about how to make the most of a summer holiday. The paper says that it isn’t enough to do what I have been doing — sweat, swim, sweat again, swim again, and then eat and drink too much — because this leaves you feeling gloomy when the holiday is over. Strongest in your memory, it claims, will be the last few days of the holiday, which are the most depressing ones because you are starting to dread the resumption of the usual drudgery at home. The answer, it says, is for

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite meets the Greek dog lady on Tooting Common and has words

My spaniel has been pronounced ‘too thin’ by a lady who rescues dogs from Greece. I had stopped to chat with her in the park, as I often do, because I like the lady who rescues dogs from Greece. I’m not one of those people who say, ‘Well, how disgraceful. Fancy spending all that money rescuing dogs when the people are starving.’ No. I say that if a soft south Londoner wants to spend thousands of pounds importing waifs and strays from the collapsing Eurozone, rename them Bunty, feed them up until they are fit to pop and take them for a waddle around Tooting Common, good on her. There

Taki

Taki: I’m on Hemingway’s boat — but there’s no bringing back the old Riviera

 Porto Heli I am standing on the deck of a 100ft schooner that was built in Normandy in 1931 by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the golden American couple who invented the south of France as a summer playground and who were in the forefront of artistic and literary Parisian life of the time. More important, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald trod on the exact spot where I’m standing, relaxing rather, surrounded by children and grandchildren, but feeling a bit of a midget compared with the types that once sailed on the Weatherbird. I’ve chartered her for the month of August and the dreaded upcoming birthday but, far more important, in

Wynn Wheldon

Country Boy, by Richard Hillyer – review

Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects: the Venerable Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Durham cathedral, where he was a canon. He died in 1980. Country Boy was originally published in 1966. It is a memoir of the author’s childhood, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of its salient events. However, using a pseudonym, and changing the name of the Buckinghamshire village in which he grew up from Hardwick to Byfield (even giving us the proper pronunciation — ‘Biffield’) and presumably the names of the people characterised so brilliantly, perhaps accounts for the book’s coherence and

Anne Somerset

Tudor, by Leanda de Lisle – review

As parvenus, the Tudors were unsurpassed. In the early 15th century no one would have predicted that within a couple of generations these minor Welsh land-owners would mount the English throne and rule the kingdom for more than 100 years. Notwithstanding their ‘vile and barbarous’ origins, their name would become synonymous with historical glamour and the ruthless exercise of regal power. The family started their precipitous ascent when young Owen Tudor was taken to England by his father and secured himself a position as a chamber servant to Henry V’s widow, Catherine de Valois. Having opportunely tripped and fallen into her lap while dancing, he secretly married her and had

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Whisper it, but the big banks are finally getting their houses in order

By and large it was a good week for the big banks — underpinned by encouraging news from the wider economy, in which every little uptick brings a few more zombie borrowers back to the land of the living. Lloyds returned to profit, promised to start paying decent dividends again and declared itself oven-ready for return to the private sector, with the market anticipating an immediate sale to institutions of a first tranche of the taxpayers’ 39 per cent stake. HSBC reported varied performance around the world but still clocked up a fat result for the half-year — and asked the Vatican to close its account as part of a

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Gay civil partners should resist pressure to ‘upgrade’ to marriage

Apparently I’ve proposed to my civil partner. He claims that on BBC Radio 2, on the Jeremy Vine show (he thinks it was the JV show) I expressed myself in terms which presumed his prior acceptance. I can’t remember a thing about it — on live radio one does tend to throw these thoughts out heedlessly — but my partner swears I said, ‘Oh yes, well I suppose we’ll have to get an upgrade.’ He found this a graceless way of popping the question, and has forbidden me from using the term ‘upgrade’ again. Ah well. But in that case, if not ‘upgrade’, what shall we call it? ‘Conversion’ appears

Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton’s diary: Finding Scrutopia in the Czech Republic

Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I don’t know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere.