Society

Monday

Douglas Murray

The BBC’s great public service: Cancelling the Today programme

Is it true that the Today programme did not go out this morning?  If so the strikers have done a great public service. Giving the country a day off the Today programme is one of the kindest things anybody could do, in any economic climate.  I hope the generosity continues. I stopped listening years ago after I acknowledged that the programme only succeeded in getting every day off to the worst possible start.  Since I stopped listening my life has improved immeasurably It is not just the inevitable left-wing bias of the programme or the left establishment view of what is or is not news.  It is the fact that

Matthew Sinclair

Why no conservative should support a mansion tax

The Government is expected to raise around £550 billion in tax revenue this financial year. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates that a mansion tax (of £20,000 on properties of £2 million), would raise at most £1 billion, less than 0.2 per cent of revenue. The tax is, however, likely to weaken the market and reduce prices – reducing receipts from other taxes; so even the CPS’s static analysis is probably optimistic. This proposed tax would be a huge burden on those forced to pay. The rate is not 1 per cent of the property’s value. The standard lifetime of a lease on a new build is 125 years, over

Sunday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Horsemeat scandal: four key questions

The ongoing horsemeat scandal has opened up a hugely complicated web stretching across the EU, highlighting the difficulty of tracing the origins of the meat on sale in this country. Even now, almost a month after it was announced that horse could be in beef products, no one is entirely sure of how the horses entered the food chain. There are other big questions, too: here are four that need answers: •       The matter of dodgy horse passports – which I wrote about last month – is something that still hasn’t been fully investigated. It has now emerged that up to 7,000 unauthorised passports have been in circulation in the UK

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

Charles ‘most popular Prince of Wales ever’

I wonder what Prince Charles makes of the fashion for abdication? Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and the Pope are both vacating the seat of power before shuffling off this mortal coil. Perhaps the old Lupin-whisperer imagines his destiny is close. Royal chatter reaches Mr Steerpike that someone at Clarence House recently commissioned a private poll on the public’s perception of senior royals. I hear that they were delighted with one pearl amongst the grit: Prince Charles is the most popular Prince of Wales ever. Funnily enough, the living population had little recollection of how previous heirs apparent conducted their public duties; smiled as they opened leisure centres; worked the room; or treated

Charles Moore Charles Moore

There will soon be a popular revolt over NHS standards

Can anyone think of a bigger scandal in any British public service than that revealed at Stafford Hospital? It is worse than Aberfan, or Bloody Sunday, or the King’s Cross fire, or Jimmy Savile, or even the abolition of grammar schools. Up to 1,200 people died unnecessarily, not because of one error, or a particular set of errors, but because of the way an entire hospital was run for several years. There is plenty of evidence now emerging that comparable disasters have taken place at other hospitals, for similar reasons. Yet I searched last Saturday’s Guardian in vain for a single mention. Politicians are desperately closing the subject down. They have persuaded

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Reagan, Keynes, Question Time and tax cuts

I was on the panel of BBC Question Time this evening, in Leicester. Ed Balls’ tricksy 10p tax proposal was raised, and I raised my reservation: it does very little for the low-paid. Balls says £2 a week, but Policy Exchange showed earlier how benefit withdrawal makes this a derisory 67p a week. And  this is the best the Labour Party could do to help the low paid? There should, I suggested, be a significant tax cut for the low-paid. That is to say: the equivalent of one extra month’s salary a year. So how, David Dimbleby asked, would this be funded? Any which way, I replied: it could be by

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 14 February 2013

Militant humanists Sir: Thank God for Douglas Murray (‘Call off the faith wars’, 9 February). It is possible that I have been counting myself an atheist for longer than Richard Dawkins — if only because I am almost a decade older than he is. It is only fairly recently, though, that I began subscribing to the Humanist Association, of which Professor Dawkins has long been vice-president. I confess that I joined largely in the hope that membership might one day reduce the likelihood of some well-intentioned priest spouting mumbo-jumbo over my coffin. Having signed up, I was faintly shocked by the ferocity of the humanist movement. I recognise, for example, that

Peter Jones

The Stoic stiff upper lip

Last week, Stoics applauded the idea that the doctor might in certain situations give the patient a book, not a pill, on the grounds that thinking rationally solved all personal problems. So why was Stoicism associated with the stiff upper lip? What was rational about that? Since Stoics believed that divinity/reason permeated the universe ‘like honey through a honeycomb’, they concluded that the will of the divinity ruled our lives inescapably: providence, or fate, must have its way. But this worried Stoics, because they also believed in free will. Square that circle! They did so by arguing that fate did not necessarily come in single statements. It could be conditional:

Taki

Tuesday lunches are an exercise in nostalgia

Hanky-panky is American slang for doing what comes naturally. In this Valentine’s Day week, I offer you Swoon, a book about great seducers and why women love them — one I knocked off in an afternoon. Written by Betsy Prioleau, it is her second to deal with hanky-panky. (Her first, Seductress, examined history’s most powerful sirens.) Betsy Prioleau is the wife of probably the nicest doctor I’ve ever had, a New York gentleman whose only bad habit is having his practice in the city. What the author tells us is that rather than being cold ladykillers, Romeos love women. In fact, they’re fools for love. I completely agree. The first

Jeremy Clarke

My encounter with a Bond girl

It’s my birthday. Four in the morning and I’m in the back of a cab coming back from a night out in town with Trev. He’s in the front, telling the driver about this 18-year-old he’s been seeing. You’d think an 18-year-old would be a sort of Holy Grail to a 51-year-old, but no. Far from it. She’s a nice-looking maid, he says, but talks a load of crap. Drives him nuts. The taxi driver nods sympathetically, the tart. He can well believe it, he says, youngsters being what they are these days. I worked on a men’s long-stay ward of a mental hospital in the early Eighties. Chronic schizophrenics

Melissa Kite

Discovering a takeaway-ordering rabbit

My ability to almost play the opening bars of Chopin’s Revolutionary Study may seem like a futile skill to have. But I never lost faith that it was going to come in useful one day. I can only play the first bit because I was halfway through learning the piece as a teenager when my piano teacher informed me — compelled, I presume, by some music teacher’s Hippocratic oath — that I would never make a concert pianist, and so I hadn’t the heart to put myself through two hours practice a day any more. I went on playing, but without worrying too much about the precise coordinates of my

Alexander Chancellor

Excited by finding fairy eggs

One ‘bridge too far’ should have been enough, but it looks to me as if Michael Gove has already embarked on a second one with his new plan to tackle obesity in schools. Despite having been forced to drop his cherished proposal for an ‘English baccalaureate’, the Education Secretary is reported to be preparing to tell young schoolchildren what they are allowed to eat and what they aren’t, and to compel them to take lessons in cookery. The resistance, I predict, will be at least as formidable as that of the teachers and civil servants who sank the baccalaureate project. For without resorting to totalitarian measures, it is almost impossible

Robin Oakley

Profit and loss | 14 February 2013

In his days as Foreign Secretary Robin Cook once told me that every politician should have a spell as a racing tipster to teach him humility — he tried it for the Glasgow Herald. I am not sure it worked the full miracle in his case, but racing is a true leveller with triumph and disaster as closely interlocked as the English and Irish scrums through their 80 minutes of mud-wrestling last weekend. On Monday last week, the most exciting hurdler in training, J.P. McManus’s Darlan, trained by Nicky Henderson, came to the final obstacle at Doncaster full of running. One mis-step and the ante-post favourite for the Champion Hurdle

The Spectator

Barometer | 14 February 2013

Takes all sports The government is to introduce a new strategy for sport in schools. To what educational ends can sport be used? — ‘Using Sport to Tackle Youth Crime’ US qualification for the over-14s — ‘Maths Through Sport — boost your pupils’ maths levels through physical activity and sport’. Active Learning Programme — ‘Using sport for drug-use prevention’ Paper by United Nations’ Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention — ‘Women Win spotlights the harmful traditional practice of female genital mutilation (cutting) and how the strategy of using sport can play a powerful role in shifting cultural practices’. — ‘Harnessing the popularity of sport to run HIV prevention programmes’ Washington-based Grassroot

Raymond Keene

Francophilia

Any book by the erudite Steve Giddins is an event and he has now produced a valuable guide to the popular Winawer Variation of the French Defence, championed by the eponymous Simon Winawer, as well as  Nimzowitsch, Botvinnik, Petrosian and Korchnoi. The Winawer gives up the bishop pair early on in most lines, seeking to exploit the doubled white c-file pawns which frequently arise. It is a line for those who prefer the counter attack rather than equalising defence. Interestingly, the computer has proved a great friend to the Winawer, since Black’s strategy often hangs by a complex tactical thread, which computer analysis can justify. This theme comes across strongly

Raymond Keene

No. 253

White to play. This position is from  Hartston-Portisch, Nice  1974. Can you spot White’s most accurate continuation of the  attack? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 19 February 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 Nxe5 (planning 1 … dxe5 2 Qe2) Last week’s winner Catherine Ellis, Durham

William Dalrymple

Diary – 14 February 2013

The Jaipur Literature Festival, which I help to direct, has in just six years grown like some monster from an Indian epic. Each year it doubles in size and we struggle to keep up with the vast crowds who come to hear our authors speak. We’ve also inspired nearly 40 daughter-festivals across South Asia. The great Bombay poet Javed Akhtar aired a theory about why the region has suddenly taken to literature like this: ‘We abandoned language and arts in the last 40 years,’ he said. ‘We wanted cars and fridges. Now today’s generation takes them for granted. They want something else. They want arts and literature.’ ‘Everywhere sales of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 14 February 2013

Pope Benedict is stepping down for conscientious reasons about which he will have thought deeply. But I still fear that his decision is a mistake. First, its manner was unfortunate. An institution like the Catholic Church should avoid unnecessary shocks. It seems that the main people involved were told only on Sunday, and presented with a fait accompli. The news was announced the following day. Obviously, secrecy was important, but in a monarchical system, such a change is momentous and its consequences need to be thought through by the closest counsellors. The orthodoxy has grown up that the long physical decline of Pope John Paul II was a disaster which

Toby Young Toby Young

The indiscreet charm of Julie Burchill

One of the downsides of getting older is witnessing your friends and acquaintances being honoured in various ways. I don’t just mean knighthoods and peerages, I also mind the little things — an entry in Who’s Who, for instance, or an honorary degree from a red-brick university. It’s reached such a point that I daresay I’ll feel a pang of envy when I see their obituaries in the Times. ‘That should be me taking up all those column inches, not them,’ I’ll think, before realising what I’m wishing for. So you can imagine how I felt when I heard that Julie Burchill was going to be on Desert Island Discs.

The Spectator

Bonfire of the Establishment

In September 1955 The Spectator’s political commentator, Henry Fairlie, coined a term to describe the way in which Britain works which has been used ever since. The ‘Establishment’, he said, was the real mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. The elites of the business, political and media worlds wielded power via a ‘matrix of official and social relations’, which varied from the banks to the director-general of the BBC to ‘divinities’ such as Violet Bonham Carter (Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury). The social and economic upheavals of the following decades only caused this Establishment to regenerate. But it has never faced an existential threat — until now. The Establishment