Society

In recent months I’ve read at least ten articles about French malaise — all of it apparently due to some mysterious Gallic trait that makes the world’s luckiest people unable to make the best of things. Granted, unemployment is over 10 per cent, the Germans are again running Europe, and François Hollande’s ‘socialist’ government is coming apart at its hypocritical seams. But I don’t buy the thesis that the French are generally ‘miserable’, as Paris School of Economics professor Claudia Senik argued last month in the Financial Times. Indeed, I felt almost defiant as my wife and I boarded the Eurostar in London two weeks ago and headed off to

Travel around Britain, and the paradox of our labour market quickly becomes apparent. There are far too many young people out of work, yet employers complain that they can’t get the people they want. That is because, for too long, young people have been denied the experience that employers want. This is what’s known as the ‘skills crisis’ and is one of the greatest problems facing Britain today. It is a problem this government wants to solve. Yes, employment has risen to a record high under the coalition but we’re painfully aware that this is not an end in itself. We want British dole queues to shorten. Look around the

The government’s ‘nudge unit’ has always been regarded as radical – or a bit wacky, depending on your outlook – and now this Cabinet Office division, officially known as the Behavioural Insights Team, is getting a bit more radical. It’s going into the private sector. A source close to Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude says the government is looking for a commercial partner for a joint venture in which the unit would become a profit-making enterprise: ‘As a mutual they will combine the benefits of private-sector experience and investment with the innovation and commitment from staff leadership. This accelerates our drive to make public assets pay their way.’ The nudge

If we had a time machine and could take a stroll down our local high street twenty years ago, we’d discover a place alive with activity. As well as shoppers hunting through famous outfits such as Woolworths, JJB Sports and Comet, we might see queues snaking at the local bank branch, someone waiting their turn outside the telephone box and couples scouring the travel agents’ window for a last minute, cut-price deal. Today, it’s a different story. We can browse the entire planet’s products on our phones, make an Amazon purchase with the swipe of a finger and track our order online with precision. We can drive to out-of-town shopping

Continuing the domestic bliss/ tv theme, one programme I have not watched so far is The Wright Way. This is a situation comedy about somebody called Wright, as you might have imagined. It is written by the 1980s comedian Ben Elton. The show has already received a slagging from a couple of critics, largely for not being funny. I have yet to read a good review. It is on BBC One – and this, I think, is the point. Who else, other than the BBC, would commission a show from Ben Elton? Just as who would put Jeremy Hardy and Sandi Toksvig on air? Nobody, I suspect. I don’t dislike

Perched at number 3 in The Times’ ‘30 Richest under 30’ list this week were Fawn and India Rose James, aged just 27 and 21 respectively and with an estimated fortune of £329 million. Who are they, and how did they get on the list? Their grandfather, Paul Raymond, was dubbed the ‘King of Soho’ for buying up swathes of the area, and was infamous for his Raymond Revue Bar strip club and his adult magazine empire. The Look of Love is his biopic and, says Deborah Ross in this week’s film review, is ‘visually fantastic, with more retro kitsch than you can shake a stick at’. The trailer’s below,

Trust the French to have cuisine in mind when coining their phrase for April Fool. On the front page of the Daily Telegraph of 3 April, I spotted a statistical prediction by my old rival for the British chess championship, Bill Hartston, that Seabass (a horse, not a marine delicacy) would win the Grand National. Bill’s theory, which seemed a sure thing at the time, was that according to past results, stretching back 174 years, winners would have a name of one word consisting of between seven and 11 letters and beginning with S, R, M or C. The winning horse would also be aged nine or ten. Believing in