Society

Rod Liddle

Thanks Mehdi, for making me understand ‘ROTFLMAO’

I had never really understood the acronym ROTFLMAO properly until I read about the wretched Mehdi Hasan and his hypocritical denunciation of the Daily Mail, after having applied with cringing desperation to the same paper for a job. (Dacre told him to get lost, which is to his credit). My colleague Nick Cohen has filed an excellent analysis of this business, to which you should be directed if you yourself haven’t also had the opportunity to ROTFLMAO. But at least Mehdi will be in no trouble with his religion. He is, of course, famous for quoting the Koran to the effect that unbelievers are regarded as “cattle”. And by the

Give us your views! Here is Fraser Nelson’s

Spectator readers are known for their views — fierce, funny, original. Now we want not only your opinions, but your visual views as well. This week’s magazine features Sam Leith’s lovely review of Simon Jenkins’ wonderful book, ‘England’s 100 Best Views’. What are your favourite views, from these shores and beyond? Send them to us. Also, don’t forget we’re canvassing your viewpoint with our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize — the £2,000 award for unconventional travel writing. Only three more weeks till that competition closes. To kick off our reader photo spree, we thought we’d give you some views of our own. The photo above shows editor Fraser Nelson’s favourite view,

Nick Cohen

Who is the greater hypocrite: Mehdi Hasan or the British left?

As displays of duplicity go, Mehdi Hasan’s performance on the BBC discussion show Question Time seemed hard to beat. Hasan delighted leftists by hounding the Daily Mail. Who really “hated Britain”? he asked. Not Ed Miliband’s father, as the Mail had claimed, but the “immigrant-bashing, women-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.” How the audience clapped and cheered. How they loved the sight of a principled left-wing journalist taking on the “Daily Hate” without fear of the consequences. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the Mail showed within a day that Hasan’s outrage was phoney: a piece of cynical crowd-pleasing by a manipulative hack. He had sent Paul Dacre a begging letter asking

Steerpike

Mehdi Hasan: Please, please, please can I work for the Daily Mail!

Observe (above) one Mehdi Hasan in full flow on last night’s Question Time. Then look at the tweets below from the Mail’s Tim Shipman. Try not to cackle; it’s rude. Mehdi Hasan, who so vociferously attacked the Daily Mail on Question Time, asked for a job in 2010 & praised the paper equally floridly — Tim Shipman (Mail) (@ShippersUnbound) October 4, 2013   @mehdirhasan to Paul Dacre, asking for a column: ‘The Mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate.’ — Tim Shipman (Mail) (@ShippersUnbound) October 4, 2013   Mehdi Hasan told Paul Dacre: ‘I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 4 October 2013

The latest adaptation of one of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh’s books is Filth  – a film so filthy that Deborah Ross had to ‘endure’ the film ‘from behind her hands’. But, somewhere amongst the ‘enduring’, she became ‘strangely hooked’, as Bruce Robertson (aka James McAvoy) led her through Edinburgh’s ‘dark underbelly of general horridness’. Filth may be ‘ghastly and unpleasant, but also kind of brilliant’, says Ross. Here’s the trailer: Breaking Bad started off with mixed reviews and an ‘uncertain future’, as it ‘dumbfounded viewers and critics alike’ – at least according to the economics professor Steffen Huck. But despite all of that, the series went on for 5 seasons,

Rod Liddle

Alastair Campbell, moral arbiter? Pull the other one.

Has there been a more emetic sight than Alastair Campbell touring the radio and TV studios lecturing the world on moral probity? I can’t think of one, offhand. The BBC, an institution he once tried to destroy, if you recall, is more than happy to shove him on air whensoever he feels like it. I assume that this is because, like Campbell, they are intent on turning the Daily Mail-Miliband farrago into a post-Leveson issue about the nature of journalism. As some of us said at the time of Leveson, the metro-liberal left does not really give a toss about intrusion into the lives of drug-addled slebs. It wishes instead

Isabel Hardman

The clever councils keeping localism in vogue

One of the problems with localism is that it sounds very grand and clever in opposition, and then turns out to be a nightmare to implement in reality. A minister recently remarked to me rather grumpily recently that ‘all the good people left local government because Labour starved them of responsibility’, and a lack of skills at the top does make it a little more risky to hand powers from Westminster to councils. But there are local authorities who are savvy and brimming with ideas who do want – and deserve – more control over policymaking, such as Manchester. Manchester has caught the eye of Chancellor George Osborne for being

Through glasses darkly

Grandmasters Pal Benko and Viktor Korchnoi have worn dark glasses to counter perceived hypnotic influence during games. In the recent Sinquefield tournament in St Louis, Hikaru Nakamura resorted to the same measure against Magnus Carlsen. In the past Naka has fared badly against Carlsen, but this time he held the draw. Maybe there is something in it… St Louis, by the way, is Carlsen’s last public preparation before his world title challenge to Anand next month.   Carlsen-Nakamura: Sinquefield Cup, St Louis 2013   Although Black has a slight material advantage, chances are balanced and neither side can make progress. 34 Qe7 Rxb7 35 cxb7 Rb8 36 Qd7 c5 37 Qc6

No. 286

White to play. This position is from Alekhine-Bogolyubov, World Championship (Game 4), Germany 1934. The black king has been driven out into the open. How can White conclude? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 8 October or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 Rxg5+ Last week’s winner Alastair Cridland, Huddersfield

Taki: Mayor Bloomberg has sold New York out to the highest bidder

 New York The trouble with driving into the city is nostalgia. Manhattan Island looms into view and it still has the same effect of wonderment as it did long ago. Once walking the streets, however, reality sets in with a bang. And it is a bang! Manhattan is one big building site, cement mixers and drills having replaced the soft tunes of Tin Pan Alley that I first heard when walking to Broadway and 47th Street. Back then it was the haunting voice of Jo Stafford singing ‘No other love can warm my heart’, or Buddy Clark’s mellow tenor voice letting it all hang out in ‘It’s a big wide

Jeremy Clarke: Morality in children depresses me

I went to a Tibetan yoga all-day workshop. Tibetan yoga is very simple. It would be hilariously so if it didn’t hurt as much. For the first hour we stood and very slowly raised our hands — as slowly as a satellite seen from the earth on a starry night, was the advice given — from down by our sides until they met above our heads. For the second hour we lowered them back down again to their starting point. After a frugal lunch we stood and swung our heads in a fast tempo from left to right and back, and for the final hour we nodded them up and

Melissa Kite — after nearly 40 years of riding, all I know is: horses are horses. They are not people

Natural horsemanship has a lot to answer for. After a cross country event the other day, I rode back to my trailer to find the two women parked next to me doing some very strange things as they loaded their horse. One woman led the pony up the ramp quite efficiently, flicking it with the rope to stop it hesitating and then shut it inside. Whereupon her friend shouted: ‘No! Get him back off, quickly!’ And she lowered the ramp, untied the pony and pushed him back down the ramp. ‘He’s got to choose to load,’ said the woman, who I now noticed was a little hair-brained looking. ‘He’s got

Good news from Alexander Chancellor’s menagerie

There is at last good news to report on the poultry front. In the past, when I have mentioned my chickens or my ducks, it has usually been after some grisly tragedy — a duck decapitated by a terrier, another disembowelled by a fox. I can no longer remember how many chickens I have lost to foxes, which usually leave only piles of feathers as evidence of their visits (though I once saw a fox brazenly killing a chicken in broad daylight just outside my front door). But since I am determined never to yield to terrorism, I always head off to the poultry centre in Towcester to replace whatever

Bridge | 3 October 2013

I defy anyone, even Tolstoy were he still alive and were he to abandon War and Peace for a bridge column, to avoid a shed load of clichés when describing the final of the Venice Cup in Bali, between the magnificent English Ladies and their American counterparts. Let me make do with heart-stopping. With seven boards to go, England led by two IMPs, rendering the previous 89 boards somewhat insignificant! And what sensational boards they were. One small slam, missed by the Americans, produced a big swing for England. America then claimed a game swing back. Two Grand Slams were missed at both tables and the Americans finally took Gold

Dear Mary: How can I make a surgeon give me my book back?

Q. Towards the end of last year, I began three months of treatment for a knee replacement. During one consultation the surgeon and I chatted about a mutual interest, the pleasure of cigar smoking. In fact I ceased smoking some time ago, but still had a quantity in my humidor and was pleased to make a gift to someone still enjoying a smoke. Among the items were a number of Monte Cristo Habanas, and to avoid any damage I packed them in a leather cigar case: I also handed over an inscribed book on the cigar industry, saying that I would like to have both the book and the case

Tanya Gold

The Wild Rabbit’s food may be organic – but nothing else there is

The Wild Rabbit is a pub in the Cotswolds, that small corner of Britain full of evil grinning cottages; if the Cotswolds were a small dog it would always be mounting interior decorators and ripping out their throats. It is owned by Carole, Lady Bamford, the wife of the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony ‘Digger’ Bamford, which of course poses the question — does she have a toy one at home? And when she proved she could look after that one she got a real one? In any case, the Wild Rabbit is a story because Lady Bamford is also the owner of Daylesford Organic, which obviously helps stock the kitchens

Dot Wordsworth’s week in words: Did William Empson have the first clue what ‘bare ruined choirs’ meant?

I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading at all. A paragraph of his in Seven Types of Ambiguity, concerning one line in Sonnet 73 by Shakespeare, is called a great example of literary criticism. In the London Review of Books, Jonathan Raban wrote recently about how Empson’s book made him ‘learn to read all over again’ in 1961. As for this paragraph, he had been ‘ravished by its intelligence and simplicity’. The line is ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’. ‘Of course!’ the young Raban exclaimed after reading Empson’s remarks. ‘After all, Shakespeare was

Aristotle on winning the centre ground

Party conferences always provide the most agreeable spectacle of politicians desperately trying to appeal to both the diehards among the party faithful and the soft underbelly of the general public. Aristotle (384-322 bc) lived at a time when democratic and oligarchic groupings within any polis (city-state) were regularly in conflict to impose their system of government, and was all too aware of the problem. In his Politics, Aristotle began by reflecting on the advantages that these two different systems of government offered to citizens within a polis. Democracy, he concluded, appeals to the many poor, because it gives them a say in the assembly, but oligarchy to the rich few,

Letters: David Aaronovitch defends Daniel Finkelstein, Godfrey Bloom defends himself

Oborne’s ideas of ethics Sir: Your edition of 28 September included a 1,500-word demand from the journalist Peter Oborne to the effect that the Times, the newspaper that I work for, should sack its columnist Danny Finkelstein. The reason given by Oborne for this view is that Finkelstein is too parti pris and close to people in power to be a ‘proper’ journalist. He is wrong in his argument and also, I believe, deficient in his journalism. Oborne deploys the veteran cliché about true journalists ‘speaking truth unto power’. Yet the history of British newspapers is full of ‘political’ journalists such as Finkelstein. At the Telegraph there were great figures