Society

Thursday

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

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 14 February 2013

Q.  My husband, aged 56, mutters constantly that he is not well.  He has a variety of symptoms and I suspect hypochondria, yet he will not put his mind (or mine) at rest by making an appointment with a doctor.  How can I make this happen? — A.O.T., London SW11 A. The way to make men go to the doctor is with a white lie, told for their own good. Tell them the surgery has rung, asking them to make an appointment for a check-up. This jolts them into action. By the time they have arrived in the consulting room, they are less concerned with whether their wife has tricked

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 14 February 2013

Home Findus frozen beef lasagne was found to be 100 per cent horsemeat, and Tesco frozen ‘Everyday Value’ spaghetti bolognese 60 per cent horse. French suppliers blamed a Romanian abattoir. Waitrose withdrew frozen beef meatballs in which pork was thought to be present. Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, told the food industry to publish soon the results of their own testing of meat products. He then flew to Brussels for talks. Police raided a slaughterhouse in West Yorkshire that the Food Standards Agency believed had supplied horse carcasses to a meat company at Aberystwyth. Dr Mark Woolfe, formerly a scientist with the Food Standards Agency, said that the import of

Dot Wordsworth

Electrification of the ring fence

At the age of 55, Gervase Markham set off to walk from London to Berwick without using any bridge or boat, and without swimming, but relying only on a staff to help him leap. That was in 1622. When he returned, with a certificate from the mayor of Berwick, many of his friends — 39 of them — refused to pay up on the wagers they had laid. I mention Markham because he is the first person known to have used the term ring fence. Last week George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, aged 41, said he was going to electrify the ring fence. He has not yet made

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 14 February 2013

I feel that we in the bridge community (is there one? Am I in it?) haven’t made enough of a song-and-dance about Andrew Robson being awarded an OBE in the Queen’s new year’s honours list. It’s been nearly 20 years since a bridge player was honoured in this way (the last was Nicola Smith in 1995), and it’s richly deserved: Andrew has done more than anyone in this country to promote the game. In fact, his club in Parson’s Green is the only place I feel completely confident in sending people who want to learn. Bridge players can be a pretty rude and intimidating lot, but Andrew has instilled a

Columba

2100: Mask

Each of eighteen clues contains one misprinted letter in the definition part. Corrections of misprints spell a four-word phrase which alludes to the unclued lights, indicating the position of one of them in relation to the others. One unclued light is  hyphened; elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across 1 Neat section, last of four in colour (6) 7 Hypersensitive airman carrying hat (6) 13 Money returned one hour before denial (5) 15 Offhand treatment of urban movie lacking love (9, two words) 16 Sties left covered with rubbish (6) 22 Rudiment in article with new angle (6) 24 See star prepared by right to be champion (8) 28 Moth down

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2012 H2

The Spectator’s sales figures are out today, and I thought Coffee Housers may be interested to know how things are going here in 22 Old Queen Street. It’s a tough time for print. Newsweek has now gone off to a digital afterlife and even The New Yorker is down 17 per cent on newsstand. As more readers change their habits – on Kindle and iPad – the Spectator has been changing too. The below chart shows how we’re getting on: The bit in blueshows the print sales, taken from our ABC certificates over the years. It does not include copies given away free, which I’ve never quite seen the point of.

Columba

2097: spaced

1D, 2 40, 12 and 15 36 are PERSONAE (43) that have been adopted by DAVID BOWIE.  Unchecked letters of unclued lights are supplied by the thematically allusive astronaut writer, piano guy spelt by extra letters in clues. First prize Simon Harris, London SE21 Runners-up Trevor Evans, Drulingen, France; Kevin Ward, Quorn, Leicestershire

Dan Byles

The UK needs a serious debate on shale gas

Arguments over the potential development of UK shale gas resources are too often characterised by rhetoric and hyperbole on both sides. Some of the wilder claims need to be challenged and we need to separate the facts from the ill-informed speculation. That is why I am one of a cross-party group of MPs and Peers who have come together to set up the new APPG. Members include MPs who are in favour of developing a domestic shale gas industry, MPs who are opposed, and MPs who simply want to better understand the truth. The intention is to cut through the rhetoric and get to the facts. Much of the excitement

Douglas Murray

An interview with Lars Hedegaard

A couple of days ago I managed to interview Lars Hedegaard – the Danish journalist currently at an undisclosed location under police protection after an assassination attempt at his home in Copenhagen. The results are in this week’s magazine. Lars was his usual calm, eloquent and forthright self. If anybody thought they could silence him, they’ve got another thing coming.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

More nonsense in the newspapers

There’s another one of those fatuous “studies” in the papers today, based upon that favourite newspaper device, the false correlation. This time it’s about marriage; if you want to make your marriage work, move to Dorset, because part of it has the highest number of married couples in the country and they are more likely to stay married. The implication is that there must be something magical about Dorset, and that if you moved to, say, Wimborne, or Curry Rivel, any marital problems you might have had would immediately evaporate. Of course the reason more people are married in Dorset is that the average age of the population there is

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 – Ex-Benedict, Mexican Horsemeat and goodbye to Sindy

What does Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation mean for the future of the Catholic church? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Daily Telegraph’s Damian Thompson and Freddy Gray discuss our in-depth cover feature on the papal resignation. What will be Benedict be remembered for? Will his sweeping reforms be left in place? How does his legacy compare to John Paul II? Was there more to the resignation than just his health? And what challenges lie ahead for his successor? And just who might that be? James Forsyth also joins to discuss his political column in this week’s Spectator, revealing the huge scale of the horsemeat imports from Mexico. Listen

Bruce Anderson

Horse and bourbon

At a club table, a group of us were discussing horse–eating, marvelling at the confusion and sentimentality of our fellow countrymen while telling hippophagic anecdotes. I mentioned a typically Provençal street market in Apt. There had been a group of horses. They were not looking happy. More intelligent than Boxer on his way to the knacker’s, they clearly sensed that the good days were over and were summoning reserves of stoicism to help them through the (brief) final phase. ‘What’s going to happen to those horses?’ inquired an English female member of the party. ‘Well, er, it is either the Sunday Joint Derby or the Hamburger Cup.’ ‘Oh no, I

Stephen Glover

Farewell, Independent on Sunday

On Tuesday the Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced to a breathless world the latest development in the Leveson saga. The government wants a royal charter to oversee a new press watchdog. I say ‘the government’, but the Liberal Democrats are only half on board. Like Labour, they seem still to hanker after some sort of statute to set Leveson in stone. As for Hacked Off, the celebrity-backed pressure group that has campaigned for greater press regulation, it will settle for nothing less than a statute, and wants every recommendation made by Lord Justice Leveson to be implemented without delay. On the day Mrs Miller did her little turn in the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Chris Huhne and the £500,000 speed camera

I don’t want to defend Chris Huhne, I really don’t. Apart from anything else, I have always thought the country would be better off if all Oxford PPE graduates were simply imprisoned immediately, instead of the present inefficient system where we wait for them to commit a crime first. This would save us from being ruled by people who wanted to be politicians at the age of 17. But no newspaper has yet pointed out that the speed camera which caught Chris Huhne was not just any old speed camera. From what I have found online it seems to have been the long-notorious ‘Site 050’ camera at the M11 at