Society

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Hilary Mantel’s misinterpreted Royal Bodies lecture was still unpleasant

People are quite often pilloried for saying the opposite of what they actually said. I have read Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books lecture, and she is quite clearly not attacking the Duchess of Cambridge, but criticising what it is that people try to turn royal women into. When she speaks of the Duchess as ‘a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung’, or ‘the spindles of her limbs’ being ‘hand-turned and gloss-varnished’, she is talking about what the media and public opinion want of her. She discusses appearance, and offers no opinion about the young woman’s reality. She is sympathising with a female predicament, and she does the same about

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — the battle for Eastleigh and free riding the NHS

The Tories and Lib Dems are locking horns in Eastleigh but what is Labour’s strategy? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth debates with the Fabian Society’s Marcus Roberts on how Labour is working to regain long-lost voters in the South East, as well as their aims for this by-election. We also examine this week’s Spectator cover on what Eastleigh says about the health of the coalition. Mary Wakefield joins to discuss the next big NHS scandal — the abuse of access to treatment. Does anyone track access to NHS services? Do doctors care about who patients are and can anything be done about it? Freddy Gray also explains why we

Simon Hoggart

February Mini-bar | 21 February 2013

The annual offer of Château Musar is here, and The Wine Company of  Colchester has again given us some very generous discounts. I never recommend wine as an investment, partly because I believe it is for drinking rather than money-making, and also because I don’t want to be blamed for you losing your life savings. But I would point out that some of the older vintages of Musar are now going for ridiculous sums, such as almost £1,500 per bottle for the 1956, and £145 even for the 1978. This is a wine that just goes on improving. The days when you could pick it up for, say, £5 a

Roger Alton Roger Alton

All hail the headmaster

Two down, three to go. The Six Nations reaches the halfway point this weekend and only one team can aim for the Grand Slam and Triple Crown. The championship is still to play for and Lions places are there to be won, but only England can take the lot. Which is not bad going for a team that was on trial only 12 months ago. There was an awful lot to put right after a World Cup campaign that had gone horribly wrong on and off the paddock. England didn’t just need a new coach, they needed a headmaster… and in Stuart Lancaster that is just what they got. He

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 21 February 2013

Rift Valley I am training for a half-marathon on the slopes of Mount Kenya in June and I must prepare myself for failure. I may not even make it to the starting gun because at 47 I can look back on a life littered with unfinished book projects, smashed resolutions and missed deadlines. Since I last ran cross-country at school I’ve drunk around 10,000 bottles of wine and at least 1,000 litres of vodka.For about 15 years, I smoked a pack of fags a day, so that’s 110,000 cigarettes. After school I rarely took exercise unless it involved chasing women, shooting birds, or running away from people shooting at me.

Rachel Ward

Pining for the Brecon Beacons

Pommies, in Australia, are famous for what the Aussies call ‘whinging’. Whether this is born of character or homesickness is debatable but, in the past, I have gone out of my way to resist the affliction. Returning to England this winter, however, my resolve was undone and I’ve been ‘whinging’ for Britain ever since. My stepfather advised, ‘Never marry out of your class, it will lead to great unhappiness’, but, at the age of 24 and ornery, I promptly married both out of my class and country. Thirty years later I can confirm that he was wrong. Marrying outside my social class (I was upstairs, he was downstairs) has not

Bruce Anderson

Laws, laws everywhere and not a drop of common sense

It might sound like an Ealing comedy. But it is not funny. It illustrates the fact that law-making in Britain has lost all contact with common sense. The town of Deal in Kent has a heraldic crest. Some local vigilante has pointed out that since the grant of arms was made, the local government boundaries have altered, so it is no longer technically legal for the town to use its current arms. But a replacement would cost the ratepayers tens of thousands of pounds. Deal football club would also be stuck with a five-figure bill. From the outset, this government has preached two sermons. First, that as the country is

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Forget Eastleigh, Tatchell vs. Hughes was a real by-election

I got a text message the other day, inviting me to a party. This is a nice thing to happen, and not an everyday event. I have become used to all modern forms of communication bringing nothing but trouble; the more modern they are, the more unpleasant will be the message. If it arrives via Twitter, it will usually be a condensed ball of noisome vomit, perhaps containing within it the vestige of a threat. In a sense, we are all Mary Beard these days. The nastiness rains down upon all of our heads, the nastiness from other people. Never mind. But this was different; not merely an invitation to

J. Meirion

Free riding foreigners: the next NHS scandal

A fundamental and enduring principle of the NHS is that it is ‘free at the point of use’. All major political parties subscribe to this mantra and none dare challenge it. Herein lies the problem. The consequence of such altruism — all at the UK taxpayer’s expense — is health tourism and abuse of the NHS by ineligible patients. The general public seem unaware of this deception despite being rightly exercised about other examples of similar abuse, such as benefit fraud. How is this any different? The rules and regulations laid down by the Department of Health governing eligibility for free NHS care are so porous, ineffective and difficult to

Lucy Vickery

Love rules

In Competition No. 2785 you were invited to submit poetic advice on how to woo a member of either sex. What better instructor can there be than Ovid, whose Ars amatoria gives guidance on the art of romantic conquest that knocks modern seduction manuals such as The Rules into a cocked hat. Two sections are addressed to men on how to get your girl and how to keep her, and one to women on how to hook your man. There are tips on personal hygiene (Don’t let those long hairs sprout/ In your nostrils. . .’) as well as on the bestowal of compliments and much else. You didn’t quite

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Privatisation is the only solution for Royal Mail

We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet — and neither has last week’s Spectator, although a large envelope posted to me from Old Queen Street on Wednesday did arrive on Thursday, but without its contents. Have aliens seized the sorting offices, or have Royal Mail managers been distracted by a ‘secret 62 per cent increase’ in their bonuses, revealed this

Ian Cowie

Investment: Will bonds crash as shares rise?

Tim Price: In a normal market, maybe. But not in this one UK base rate squats at 0.5 per cent, its lowest level in history — or since the formation of the Bank of England in 1694, which is much the same thing. With sporadic signs of inflation and patchy evidence of recovery, plus a new broom at the Bank of England who is expected to be boldly interventionist, the financial chatterati are transfixed by the prospect of the ‘Great Rotation’. This much-anticipated shift out of UK government gilts, and bonds more generally, back into equities reflects expectations that bond prices are due for a fall because interest rates must inevitably

Tessa Codrington

Travel: Notes from a boom town

Why hasn’t Morocco had an Arab Spring? On the one hand, history; on the other, the vision of the present king, Mohammed VI. Throughout the colonial era, when France and Spain each had a slice of the country, Morocco retained its identity, its cities, its culture and its monarchy — which stretches back for centuries, unlike the artificial monarchies created in the Middle East by the Europeans. It was never officially a colony of either France or Spain, but a protectorate. France did exile Mohammed V, the present king’s grandfather; but in 1956 the people successfully demanded his restoration, and full independence followed in 1957. So Morocco is the only

Victoria Lane

‘Morocco is a diabetic’s nightmare’

Fleeing streets of slush, we touch down in a north African spring, where we are driven through the desert scrub outside Marrakech, passing dusty ochre expanses filled with old plastic containers and half-built hotels and the odd donkey before turning down a track which runs alongside a walled garden. Tantalising green fronds poke above the wall. The gates open (someone is posted to look through a gap in the wall to time it right) and reveal a lush complex of grass, palms, roses, figs and orange trees around a T-shaped pool. This hotel is one of a handful to have popped up a short way away from the clamour of

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Vicky Pryce jury discharged, retrial starts Monday

The jury in the trial of Vicky Pryce has been discharged having failed to reach a verdict. The decision comes after the jury informed the judge that they were highly unlikely to come to even a majority verdict. The retrial is scheduled to start on Monday. There are, obviously, limits to what can be said for legal reasons. We can, though, report that the jury asked the judge ten specific questions during their deliberations. It would be a surprise if the court decided to sentence Chris Huhne before a verdict had been reached in this case. This means that it is unlikely that Huhne will be sentenced before the Eastleigh

Jonathan Jones

Good news on employment, but don’t expect it to keep coming

Today’s jobs figures are pretty unambiguously good news. The number of people in work rose by 154,000 in the last three months of 2012 to a new record high of 29.73 million — surpassing pre-recession peak by 158,000. And unlike other recent rounds of employment growth, this wasn’t driven by a rise in part-time workers (their number actually fell by 43,000). But there are still a couple of reasons cause to greet this good news with caution. Rising employment at a time of economic stagnation has come at the expense of earnings. Adjusted for CPI inflation, average weekly earnings have fallen by 7 per cent in the last five years,

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

A model of diversity

There’s nothing quite like diversity. Take Manchester. It has a large Muslim population and a lot of gays. What could possibly go wrong? Last week Manchester University’s Student Union played host to the ‘Global Aspirations of Women Society’. This appears to be a front group of the extremists of Hizb ut-Tahrir and therefore by no means does what it says on the tin. Anyhow – as the university’s student newspaper puts it: ‘A speaker at a Students’ Union affiliated society workshop said that homosexuals would be executed in an ideal Islamic state, describing the practice of two men kissing as an “atrocity.” 1st year Middle Eastern studies student Colin Cortbus

Steerpike Steerpike

No, Prime Minister | 19 February 2013

Twice Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel was trying to give the media a warning about their treatment of the Duchess of Cambridge, yet her blunt choice of ‘machine made’ and ‘plastic’ has upset the easily upset this morning. She has also revealed an insight into the tastes and mindset of our dear leader. Mantel’s words, in context, appeared in the London Review of Books, but the distorted version was splashed across the front-page of middle-England’s favourite news source. Weighing into the issue from India, the PM decried the ‘hurtful’ comments he had clearly only seen in the Daily Mail. In a further sign of dumbing down, he even referred to

Andrew Montford

Nursing prejudice: how climate change activists are prisoners of their own politics

Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel laureate and President of the Royal Society, has been hitting out at global warming sceptics. In a speech to the University of Melbourne recently, he attacked dissenters from the climate change orthodoxy, declaring that their objections were in reality political rather than scientific: ‘A feature of [the global warming] controversy is that those that deny there is a problem often seem to have political or ideological views that lead them to be unhappy with the actions that would be necessary should global warming be due to human activity. I think that’s a crucial point. Because these actions that are likely to include measures which include

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Myth of the Immigrant Benefit-Moocher, Part Two

I am afraid, dear reader, that I have misled you. Yesterday’s post on immigrants and benefit-claimants contained an inaccuracy. I repeated a claim I’d seen in the Telegraph that there are almost 14,000 Polish-born people claiming unemployment benefit in Britain. This is not the case. The true picture of Polish benefit-dependency is very different. There are, in fact, fewer than 7,000 Poles claiming the Job Seekers’ Allowance. Indeed, there are fewer than 13,000 JSA claimants from the “Accession Eight” countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia). Whatever else these eastern europeans have been doing in Britain, they’ve not been mooching off the benefits system. And it