The Ivy may be known for its famous clientèle and terrible food, but are they taking this celebrity thing a bit too far? The club has invited Mark Pinchin, Public Affairs Director of the Church of Scientology, to speak at the end of the month. Scientology boasts more celebrity supporters than Hacked Off, and are always on the look out for new members. Stars and groupies, you have been warned.
It was only a matter of time before the silence of Uncle Gary would be broken. Last seen splashed across the pages of the News of the World snorting cocaine at his Ibiza villa La Maison De Bang Bang, the black sheep of the Middleton family has given an interview to Hello! magazine. The magazine are famed for high spending for their exclusive scoops, and refuse to deny paying Gary Goldsmith for the interview. Kate and Wills will no doubt be delighted with the details about how Uncle Gary taught them to DJ, and then hosted Kate at the villa after William had dumped her in 2007. On the subject of his tabloid sting
You know this levy on Cyprus bank deposits? It’s not a levy. A levy is a kind of tax, and what is happening to the people with bank deposits in Cyprus is no kind of tax, although today the European Commission spokesmen have been insisting it is. How can it be a tax when the depositors are going to be ‘compensated’ with shares in the bank? I mean, when you pay your income tax, George Osborne doesn’t compensate you with shares in RBS. No, what’s happening in Cyprus — assuming that the Cypriot parliament is just as gutless as the new Cypriot president, Nicos Anastasiades, in capitulating to eurozone demands
Scottish people are more generous than English people, contrary to the widely held belief that the Jocks are comically tight-fisted. A new study suggests that they are more likely to give money to charity than English people. I suppose it would only cause unnecessary offence if I suggested that the money they’re so happy to give to charity is, actually, ours. Anyway, this survey was published to mark Red Nose Day, when every BBC light entertainer not yet arrested by Operation Yewtree was deputed to personally groom you to hand over your dosh in a series of, I daresay, hilarious and wacky stunts. As a mark of the relentless vaulting
The party leaders should finish their discussions on Leveson – by phone – in the next hour or so. We’ll then get a statement in the Commons on the outcome of those talks, and it’s highly likely that all three leaders will speak as part of that statement. But the big debate now is whether what they have signed up to already constitutes the statutory underpinning that David Cameron was so very keen to avoid. There are two amendments to two different pieces of legislation relevant to press regulation: one on the Crime and Courts Bill on exemplary damages, and one to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill which prevents
The Adam Afriyie leadership speculation has now got to the point where he’s been interviewed by Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics. His first big broadcast interview as a potential leadership candidate was always going to be a big test for Afriyie and he failed to impress today. Afriyie, who looked like he’d been heavily coached for the encounter, failed to properly answer the questions put to him or to make a case for any alternative vision. He was even unprepared to say whether or not he supported means-testing pensioner benefits. On the whole question of his own ambitions, Afriyie was hugely unconvincing. Moments after declaring ‘I have no ambition
Jeremy Hunt used his address to the Conservative Spring Forum this afternoon as the next step in his quest to make the Conservatives the party of the NHS, not Labour. His speech was in some ways quite formulaic: it started with good news about health care in this country, then praise for the ‘extraordinary’ staff working in the NHS. But then it moved on to his duty ‘to be honest about the failures’ of the health service too. He said: ‘If you care about something you don’t try to sweep problems under the carpet – you expose them, sort them out and make things better. And by criticising us when
The ‘clash of generations’, depicted above by Anton Emdin, was the bestselling issue of The Spectator last year. It’s a new and potent force in British politics: the idea that the young will end up having to foot the NHS and care bills for the old: the working-age will have to support the pension-age as they sit in their hugely valuable houses and run up NHS bills. There is talk about ‘intergenerational fairness’, one of the more sinister ideas to emerge of late, and one worth rebutting. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today, which has drawn a response from the author of that cover story, The
For many people, Budgets are when you find out if your pint of beer or bottle of wine is going up in price. It’s the day you fill up your car just in case fuel goes up again. It’s the day you hope to see a tax cut that puts some more cash in your pocket or helps your business grow. Generally it’s a day the average person lives in hope and prepares to be disappointed. That’s the nature of Budget day. This year is different. They say that this Budget will be highly political. If so, as soon as the doors open, the Commons’ corridors will be buzzing with
Sir David must stand down Sir: Reading the reports of Sir David Nicholson’s evidence before the House of Commons Health Committee on 5 March 2013 (Leading article, 9 March), it seems to me inconceivable that he could remain in his post. We are informed by the Prime Minister that in the current circumstances the NHS is unable to do without him. But nobody is indispensable and in any case, to judge by Sir David’s recent performance, he is incompetent, a hopeless leader, has a very poor memory and is more interested in saving his skin than in the wellbeing of NHS patients. While he remains in his post, the anger
The week starts with a bang — literally — when my 1986 Land-Rover explodes, mid-gear change: CLANK and the exhaust pipe burps blue smoke. The old girl rolls to a halt. All we lack is the tinkle of a dislodged hubcap. I feel like Peter Cook’s Maj Digby Dawlish in the 1969 film Monte Carlo or Bust after coming a cropper. Daughter Honor, ten, will be late for school so I palm her off on a passing car. Its driver seems friendly. I suppose Social Services would want me to have had her CRB-checked. The AA tows me to our mechanic in Ledbury. Lewis has a poke under the bonnet.
Q. My mother has had a minor physical setback which means it is currently too difficult for her to go out and see people. People consequently come to her, which is wonderful, but because she is so popular, they come in their hordes. It is not so much the provision of food and drinks which is the problem for her as a host, but the need to be ‘good value’ conversationally — sometimes up to four times a day for an hour at a time. What do you suggest, Mary? — Name and address withheld A. Chemotherapy patients often report that they much prefer it when two people come to
It felt like a stiletto jab in my liver, a pain so sharp it will take half a century to forget. Jessica Raine — aka Nurse Jenny in Call the Midwife — has shacked up with a married man, an actor and a redhead to boot. It is as if I had heard that my mother had run off with an Albanian gigolo, or Russell Brand. Nurse Jenny is the kind of girl one takes home to mother. Just as Natalia Vodianova is the type one takes to Marcel Proust’s salon. (That’s the frog writer, not a hairdresser.) My fiancée Lindsay Lohan one takes to a motel. Sure, love to
On the wall at home is a framed photograph of T.E. Lawrence taken in his chunky forties. The photo, a postcard advertising an exhibition of historical artefacts, is a close-up of his face. Knowing what we do about his pathological aversion to most human contact, the camera’s nearness is startling. And the thing is, in spite of all those biographies telling us what a sensitive aesthete Lawrence was, the face confronting the onlooker is that of a thug. The Desperate Dan-sized chin, the eyes too close together, the cruel mouth: it’s the kind of face one saw frequently in the away ends of football grounds in the 1970s, especially among
‘Have you been flossing?’ The four most terrifying words in the English language. The dental hygienist peers down at me through her scary goggles and speaks in a strange, muffled voice through her mouth mask. Despite all the face furniture I can see that she is arching her eyebrows. ‘Have you been flossing?’ I’m more inclined to lie in answer to that question than in response to any other situation, no matter how intimidating. The time the banker boyfriend had me cornered in his swanky mews house and was throwing a wobbly about my phone ringing late at night was a doddle in comparison. I’d rather account to an irate
It is usually a mistake to return to places one has known as a child. I have only once been back to the large, white-stuccoed, early-Victorian manor house in Hertfordshire where I was born and brought up, and it was a dispiriting experience. Although the house was near to the town of Ware, less than an hour’s drive from central London, it was set in unspoiled country alongside a village in which the names of some of the inhabitants had been there in the Domesday Book. Apart from a small row of bleak pre-war council houses on the edge of the village, there was nothing there to offend the eye
The first time I met the jockey Andrew Thornton, at a hotel dinner, he had a pair of ladies tights sticking out of his pocket. No, he hadn’t just been interrupted in an amorous encounter in the car park. Nor does he have an eyebrow-raising secret taste in underwear. The tights were part of the equipment he had brought along to demonstrate to the audience we were both addressing that night just what a jockey’s life involves. Tough as the saddle gladiators look, those all-enveloping lightweight garments are essential under their breeches to help keep out the cold as they coax and coerce half a ton of horseflesh for two
The world championship qualifier, known as the Candidates’ tournament, should now be underway in London. (For details see the website worldchess.com/candidates.) The favourite is Magnus Carlsen, who has identified Lev Aronian of Armenia as his most dangerous rival according to an interview in the Guardian with Stephen Moss. If Magnus fails to rise to the occasion, I favour Vladimir Kramnik, who usually plays well in London, where he was crowned world champion in 2000 when he defeated Kasparov. One of Carlsen’s great strengths is his ability to adopt seemingly harmless openings and then manoeuvre endlessly until the opponent cracks. A case in point was his victory with the antediluvian
White to play. This position is from Fischer-Benko, US Championship 1963. One of Fischer’s classic attacking finishes. What is the winning move? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 19 March 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 Qd8+ Last week’s winner Richard England, London W3
Every ancient Greek juror would have warmed to their descendant Vicky Pryce, when she admitted in court that she wanted revenge on her faithless husband. Revenge, in other words, did not just happen in Greek myth. It was a splendid reason for going to law. In Plato’s Republic, ‘justice’ was defined as ‘rendering to every man what he was owed’, taken to mean ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies’. This was a principle of conduct said to have been ‘laid down’ and ‘prescribed’ by one orator, and so common that Xenophon could say that true manliness was to ‘excel friends in benefaction and enemies in harm’.