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Society

Why the Huhne/Pryce case makes singleness all the more attractive

Watching the shipwreck of the Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce court case has made me feel guiltily relieved that, at the age of 42, I haven’t yet married. The operatic scale of the disaster makes it appear emblematic of all the other couples who make each other unhappy all the time in smaller, less dramatic ways. That two people can bind themselves together for life, raise five children together and yet remain so emotionally unintelligent about each other and the world in which they live says several things to me. It makes me think that they may have got married for the wrong reasons, most likely because they were young

Forget 50p — scrap the 60p tax rate

Imagine if a Chancellor stood up and announced that those earning up to £100,000 would pay a 40p tax rate, those earning £100,000 to £112,950 will pay a 60p rate, and those earning above £112,950 will pay the 40p rate, and then the top earners will pay a 50p rate. That’d be crazy, right? But that’s exactly what Alistair Darling announced in his 2009 Budget. So how did he get away with it? By delivering his announcement in code. Instead of talking about marginal tax rates, he described the move as withdrawing the personal allowance for those with incomes over £100,000. The language may be different — and may sound

Apprenticeships should be the ‘new norm’ in parliament. Get your MP to hire one

As sound bites go, it’s not one of his best, but David Cameron is right to suggest that apprenticeships should be the ‘new norm’ for young people who want to go to university. But we should use National Apprenticeship Week to recognise that we have a long way to go before the apprenticeship system as a whole is up to the task. As the Richard Review of Apprenticeships found, there is a lot of work to be done. The entrepreneur and former “dragon” was polite when he pointed out that apprenticeships should be targeted at people new to a role and in need of training and that recognised industry standards

A great honour in memory of a remarkable man

I am delighted to say that my latest book, Bloody Sunday: truths, lies and the Saville Inquiry, has been jointly awarded the Christopher Ewart-Biggs memorial prize at a ceremony in Dublin. My co-winner is Julieann Campbell, author of Setting the Truth Free: the inside story of the Bloody Sunday justice campaign. The literary prize is named after the former British Ambassador to Ireland. Christopher Ewart-Biggs was educated at Wellington and Oxford and served with the Royal Kent Regiment during World War II. He lost his right eye at the Battle of el-Alamein. After Foreign Office postings to numerous countries, including Algeria, he arrived in Dublin in July 1976. Twelve days

International Women’s Day is a bit silly

The British do not do seven day mourning the way many Venezuelans are for Hugo Chavez, neither – as a rule – do we flock to the roads to see the bodies of our politicians being driven through the streets. With the exception of Jeremy Bentham we do not – mercifully – put our departed on display.  We tend to leave that to communists. Just as Chavez’s death reminds us that we like to keep our grief low-key, it is fair to say that we are incredibly bad at most public events, with people grumbling, criticising, and proudly declaring that they are going away on holiday just to avoid the

Drones save lives

‘Drones save lives’ is the title of my piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. President Obama is currently receiving criticism from left and right for his policy of targeted assassination by unmanned drones. I think among a range of bad options drones are the least bad option for dealing with the threat, and explain this further in the piece which is available here. Along the same lines readers might be interested in a debate I did last week on the same subject for Google and Intelligence Squared. The motion was ‘America’s drone campaign is both moral and effective’. I was lucky in having David Aaronovitch on my side. The

Rod Liddle

Tweeting can seriously damage your health

Members of the World’s Most Rational and Peaceable Religion © have been going berserk in the lovely Bangladeshi town of Cox’s Bazar. Some bloke put a photo of a burned Koran on his Facebook page and the Muslims have been rioting, taking out their infantile fury on the minority Buddhist population. Setting them on fire and stuff. Usually Buddhists don’t need any help setting themselves on fire, but that’s another story. As social networking sites establish themselves in third world countries full of furious mentals, this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it? The end of the world will come not with a bang

Diary – 7 March 2013

My friend and colleague Roy Brown has just sent me the draft of a statement he will submit to the UN Human Rights Council this spring, on behalf of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. This is a group to which we both belong, which campaigns on freedom of thought and expression, women’s and children’s rights, education and much besides. Roy’s draft concerns discrimination against people who do not have a religious faith. It is extraordinary how many countries discriminate by law against nonbelievers, in violation of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects freedom of conscience. Most of the offenders are Muslim-majority countries, in some

Priests and pagans

The Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy (Latin caelebs, ‘unmarried’), by which Cardinal O’Brien was bound, is not a dogma, but a discipline. In other words, it can be altered at the rotation of an encyclical. Like much else in the Catholic tradition, it has its roots in the pagan world. Asceticism derives from the Greek askêsis, ‘training, practice’. Pagans had long believed that humans could be transformed through mental and physical discipline. Pythagoras, for example, thought that the element of the divine in us could be brought out by fasting and contemplation. Diogenes in his clay wine jar rejected the whole concept of ‘society’; the millionaire Seneca, committed to the idea

Peter Archer — Notes from an Inland Sea

Peter Archer used to paint landscapes on the Cornish side of the Tamar river. Their most notable features were lovingly observed trees and the tall chimneys of abandoned tin mines. One might have expected that when he moved to a coalmining valley in South Wales, his landscapes would have become blacker and its main features hills and slag-heaps. Instead, he has gone to sea, not literally nor even as an observer from some visited shore, but in his imagination. The Welsh coal-mines may have had something to do with it, since these are predominantly grey paintings in which, like Conrad’s Thames Estuary, ‘the air was dark above Gravesend, and farther

Letters | 7 March 2013

Gove’s history lessons Sir: ‘The idea that there is a canonical body of knowledge that must be mastered,’ says Professor Jackie Eales, ‘but not questioned, is inconsistent with high standards of education in any age.’ This is not true. Primary education is, or should be, all about just such a body of knowledge. This gives children a foundation of fact, preferably facts learnt by heart. Without it, they cannot begin to reason, and develop valid ideas, in the secondary stage. It may be a tight squeeze to get them through English history up to 1700 by the age of 11, but it is better than not covering the ground at

The woman on the airport bus

By jogging from the railway station to the grim concrete underpass outside the arrivals terminal, I caught the last courtesy bus from bus stop K to the budget hotel with seconds to spare. Cheapskate that I am, I was glad to be spared the humiliation of being charged £20 by a cynical cab driver to be taken the long way round the one-way system to a destination less than a mile away. Which is what normally happens to me at Gatwick. I was tired after a long journey and the issue had assumed an importance in my mind that was perhaps disproportionate. So my euphoria at seeing hotel bus number

A stable full of Germans

After a lot of false starts, I am now the proud occupant of a small weekend rental in the country. It is very exciting. No more commuting from Balham to Cobham to ride the horses. I wake up on Saturdays in a converted barn down a farm track and drive two minutes to the stable yard to see Tara, Grace and Darcy. The three mares have now moved from their expensive livery yard to what we horse-owners rather disingenuously call a DIY yard. I say disingenuous because it’s not really DIY. A nice lady called Sue looks after them on weekdays and I ‘do them myself’ at weekends. Somehow, it

Edinburgh Zoo and the great panda racket

If you have nothing to do, are suffering from stress, and wish to be rendered comatose, I recommend that you get interested in the efforts being made by Edinburgh Zoo to mate its two giant pandas. The zoo has thoughtfully installed video cameras in the pandas’ enclosure so that we can constantly watch them online and marvel at their sloth. I had my laptop tuned to the ‘Panda Cam’ throughout the weekend and checked it from time to time to see what the pandas were up to. The answer was never anything at all except for sleeping or eating. Often there was no panda in camera shot; but when there

Bridge | 7 March 2013

Terry Hewett’s annual charity bonanza, Night of the Stars, has become THE charity event of the year and has made Terry the true star. This year she auctioned off 43 bridge stars, raising well over £40,000 for four charities, and gave us all a fabulous evening to boot! This year’s tournament was won by Jeremy Dhondy playing with the outgoing Chairman of the EBU, Sally Bugden. Look at the formidable Jeremy in action here: Maybe Sally overbid with 3♦ (I would have done the same) but if she hadn’t there wouldn’t be a story to tell. West led the ♠10 and declarer had a lot to do. It’s usually right

Witschcraft | 7 March 2013

There are two new books about Aron Nimzowitsch, chess strategist and author of My System. Aron Nimzowitsch on the Road to Chess Mastery 1886-1924 by Per Skjoldager and Jorn Erik Nielsen is published by McFarland, while Aron Nimzowitsch 1928-1935 by Rudolf Reinhardt (on which the notes to today’s game are based) is shortly to be published. This week, a game and puzzle by the crown prince of chess, as he was sometimes known. Nimzowitsch-Asztalos: Bled 1931; English Opening 1 c4 Nf6 2 Nc3 c5 3 g3 Nc6 4 Bg2 e6 5 Nh3 Nimzowitsch tries something unusual instead of the normal 5 Nf3. 5 … Be7 6 d3 d6 7 0-0

no. 256

White to play. This position is from Nimzowitsch-Alapin, Vilnius 1912. How did White swiftly conclude his sacrificial attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 12 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 … Rxg2 Last week’s winner Peter J. Skelly, Bedford

If David Cameron wants to save the NHS, he should sack David Nicholson

Twenty-five years ago, when he had left the Communist party and taken over as chief executive at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, Sir David Nicholson made a point of promising his staff a ‘job for life’. He has certainly stuck to his ideology. This week he admitted his part in the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal, in which up to 1,200 patients died from poor care and neglect. He confessed that as chief executive of the Shropshire and Staffordshire Strategic Health Authority — the body which was supposed to oversee Stafford Hospital — he had failed to notice its high death rates. And yet still he appears to believe that he has the

Portrait of the week | 7 March 2013

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer failed to dissuade EU finance minsters in Brussels from endorsing a plan to cap bankers’ pay bonuses. City banks contemplated taking the EU to court over it. HSBC’s annual profits fell by 6 per cent to £14 billion, including a loss of £700 million made in Britain. The Royal Bank of Scotland, 81 per cent of which is owned by the government, made its fifth annual loss in a row, of £5.17 billion. Sir Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, suggested it should be split up and sold. Lloyds Banking Group, 40 per cent of which is owned by