2096: new world symphony
The unclued lights are six US composers, at 4 and 24, and the pairs at 9/11, 21A/32, 25/16 and 35/3. First prize Jed Brignal, Nottingham Runners-up Alan Hook, York; Lewis Corner, South Fremantle, Western Australia
Society
Thursday
Being squeamish about the NHS won’t stop another Stafford Hospital
Should heads roll over the Mid Staffordshire Hospitals Trust scandal? I ask only because as I listened to Mark Carney giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee for several hours this morning, I found myself browsing through a number of articles on this site and others about the Libor scandal. Back in those heady days of George Osborne accusing Ed Balls of having questions to answer, and Bob Diamond resigning from Barclays ahead of his appearance before the same select committee, people were very keen for heads to roll, and not just those sitting on bankers’ necks. They were also keen that those who performed badly when questioned about their
Whisper it, but the British economy may in better shape than you think… – Spectator Blogs
Doom and gloom is all around. This is another winter, if not of discontent, then certainly of persistent grumbling. Optimism is as rare as a Scottish victory at Twickenham and, frankly, just as fanciful a thought. That, at any rate, is today’s conventional wisdom. Fleet Street looks to a Triple Dip recession and ponders what side dishes will best complement the Chancellor’s broiled reputation. And yet, and yet, I wonder – hesitantly, I grant you – if all this is quite accurate. Fleet Street, like Westminster, is often fighting the last war. Worse still, it tends to presume that what has happened will continue to happen and that present trends
Reducing the ‘pull factor’ for Romanian and Bulgarian migrants
Whisper it but the government have a fighting chance of reaching their immigration target. The main risk now is an inflow from Romania and Bulgaria when our labour market is fully opened to them next January. That is why the issue of child benefit is important; if we continue to pay it to children left at home it could greatly encourage such migration. Opposition to the government’s immigration policy is now starting to dissipate. Much of it has come from special interest groups who stand to gain from unlimited immigration. Unfortunately for them, their raucous campaigns are colliding with the facts. It is hard to argue that business is suffering when there is
Sickness in the health service
A former editor of this magazine, Nigel Lawson, once described the NHS as ‘the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood’. He meant to imply that blind faith tends to take over from observation. But there are other likenesses: bickering cardinals, grandiose PFI cathedrals that suck money from the pockets of believers — and now, finally exposed after being covered up for years, a shocking scandal of abuse. Hospital managers like to commission paintings of the premises to hang in their corridors. In the case of Mid Staffordshire Hospitals Trust, William Hogarth would have been a suitable choice
Short story | 7 February 2013
In Competition No. 2783 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’. The title — shared by an unadmired, Phil Spector-produced album by Leonard Cohen and an as-yet-unproduced screenplay by the literary and erudite rocker Nick Cave — connects two of pop music’s masters of melancholy. Rock music didn’t feature in the entry but ladies lavatories loomed large. You also drew inspiration from history — Henry VIII, Lord Byron — and from the natural world. Sid Field, Lynn Haken, Juliet Walker, Alan Millard and John MacRitchie earn honourable mentions. The prizewinners, printed below, take £25 each except Frank McDonald, who has £30. He was
A classic weekend at the Six Nations
Has there ever been a more wondrous start to a tournament than the first weekend of this term’s Six Nations? In any sport for that matter. England playing like the All Blacks, with Owen Farrell in stupendous form and Billy Twelvetrees, the face of a choirboy and the frame of Hercules, blasting all before him; a reborn Ireland on the way to crushing Wales in Cardiff before beating off a thrilling fightback; and then the best of all, on a sunny afternoon in front of a roaring Roman crowd. When you saw Italy’s warrior prop, Leicester’s Martin Castrogiovanni, hirsute and terrifying, belting out the last words of his country’s anthem
Old school joy
Let’s not beat about the bush: Howard Goodall’s Story of Music (BBC2, Saturday) is landmark television, a documentary series that deserves to rank with such unimpeachable classics as Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and which, if you haven’t seen it yet, you absolutely must for it will answer so many of the questions that have been bugging you all your life. Questions like: ‘Bach — was he really as good as I think he was?’ ‘So what did music sound like in Roman times?’ and ‘Where did Lurpak butter get its name?’ Of course that last one is a fake question. I’d hazard a fortune you’ve never once asked it — but
Steerpike
Stanley Johnson, replete with energy and charming as ever, is touring the country looking for a safe Tory berth to ease himself into at the next election.No takers so far, I’m told, but the wily old bird has devised a brilliant ruse to boost his chances. He’s been dropping hints that his occupancy would last only until May 2016, when Boris’s second mayoral term ends. Johnson Snr would then fall gracefully on his sword, leaving the seat vacant for the blond bombshell to launch his bid for the Tory leadership and Downing Street. The so-called ‘baby lotion strategy’ (Johnson & Johnson) is proving hard for constituency chairmen to resist. One snag is that sister
Remember the lesson of Shaun of the Dead: some zombies eventually come back to life
Funny how little phrases go viral. Suddenly everyone’s talking about ‘fasting diets’, ‘zombie companies’ and ‘leadership plots’. As to the first, the idea of the ‘5:2 intermittent fasting diet’, I gather, is to eat as little as you can for two days a week. It’s all over the media, and any moment now someone will call George Osborne’s fiscal strategy ‘the 0:7 fasting diet that’s starving us of protein for growth’, or some such. There you are, Mr Balls: yours on a plate, as it were. But ‘zombie companies’ are not so easy to explain. Financially speaking, these are businesses that are surviving but unable to invest in new capacity,
Dubai Notebook | 7 February 2013
François Hollande rolled into town for the World Future Energy Summit here recently, but hardly anyone noticed. There is little enthusiasm for his thoughts on clean energy deployment. In any case, in Dubai we prefer D-list celebs to A-list politicians. Just over a year ago, Kim Kardashian brought Dubai to a virtual standstill for two days when she opened a shop called Millions of Milkshakes, and bagged £125,000 for her troubles. But that doesn’t mean politicians can’t make money here. Local media reports that Gordon Brown earned £75,000 for a speech in the UAE last year, disclosed in the Register of MPs’ Interests. Not as good as Kim’s rate, but not bad. I get a call from
A snapshot moment in Old Havana
The Parque Mátires ’71 is pleasant, nothing special, hardly distinguishable from dozens of other little parks in Old Havana. Fairly safe, reasonably clean, shabby, some tatty greenery and a few trees, a bird-limed bronze statue to a forgotten hero, and rickety park benches around a stone-paved terrace. I was perched on the more stable slats of one of these in the late afternoon sunshine, and reading Romola. This was not as incongruous as it sounds, for the massive novel is George Eliot’s attempt to recreate a world far from her native English Midlands: the smells and colours, the jostle and noise of the street in 16th-century Florence. Old Havana is
Atheists vs Dawkins
Sometimes a perfectly good argument can be stretched too far. I heard the resulting snapping noise last week in Cambridge during a debate with Richard Dawkins. We were meant to be on the same side at the Union. But over some months the motion hardened and eventually became ‘This House believes religion should have no place in the 21st century.’ While an atheist myself, it seems to me that claiming that religion should disappear is not just an overstatement but a seismic mistake. So I joined Rowan Williams and my close enemy Tariq Ramadan in trying to explain to Dawkins and co where they might have gone wrong. The Union
“The twins I saw will spend their lives staring at ceilings”: Bulgaria’s abandoned children
It was something about the twins that got to me; after seeing so many baby institutions and children’s homes, I had almost grown used to abandoned children in ranks of cots, staring at the ceiling. The twins — a boy and a girl of six — were set apart; pale, twisted, both with cerebral palsy. Their mother left them in the institution on the day their father had kicked her out for ‘only being able to have crippled children’. I reached into the girl’s cot to hold her hand, and her steady gaze held mine. I bent over to hold her brother’s foot, and felt like a lightning rod between
What makes me feel sorry for Chris Huhne
If Chris Huhne hadn’t copped off with that woman who looks remarkably like the late comedian Jack Douglas, I suppose we would have been deprived of all the tumultuous glee which has attended both his utter collapse, as a man, and his likely incarceration. We would never have known about that small crime, committed years before he had become an MP. It was not the act of asking his wife to take those speeding penalty points which did for him, it was swanning off with his assistant, Carina -Trimingham. Wives sacrifice themselves for their husbands in all manner of ways; it is part of the deal of marriage, I suppose.
Wednesday
Rooms with a view
I do like a Shard story. My recent revelations about the prevalence of hanky panky at the top of the tower graced every national paper. Now I hear that the tower has become a giant pawn in a bitter property battle. The word is that one of the many members of the Qatari royal family, who are currently buying up most of London, is locked in a bidding war with the Duke of Westminster for one of the tower’s larger apartments. The Shard is the perfect vantage point from which to survey one’s vast estates in central London. I understand that the duke is not enjoying the new competition.
Borgen and Scotland: A Love Affair Founded on Self-Congratulation
Borgen – the title refers to the Danish equivalent of Holyrood or Westminster – has been terrifically popular amongst those people interested in sub-titled political dramas from Denmark. I fancy that viewers in England have simply enjoyed the programme for what it is: a well-made but impossibly smug piece of “progressive” political propaganda. In Scotland, however, it has been seen as something different: a glimpse of the future. Or, at any rate, one future. In one sense this is reasonable. Even if it is only a TV show, one can see why Scots – and nationalists especially – should be thrilled by a drama showing how the ineffably right-on leader
Michael Gove: My debt to Jade Goody and the future of school reform
In shaping education policy I have been influenced by many people… But two particular individuals have influenced me more than any others. The Italian Marxist thinker – and father of Euro-Communism – Antonio Gramsci. And the reality television star Jade Goody. Let me explain my admiration for Jade first. When she first appeared on our screens in Big Brother Jade was regarded as paragon of invincible ignorance. She was derided and mocked because she thought that Cambridge was in London. On being told that Cambridge is in East Anglia, she assumed that to be abroad, and referred to it as ‘East Angular’. Her other misconceptions included the belief that Rio
What shall we do with the racist lap-top?
Important work from Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University into the inherent racism of internet search engines. She carried out a study which demonstrated a clear difference between the sort of ads that appear on the page if you’re searching for either a “black” name or a “white” name. She used a bunch of names which had previously been identified as being associated with one race or another. For “black” names she used DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine; for “white”, stuff like James, Emily and The Rt Hon Nicholas Soames or something. When the white names were tapped in, up came adverts for nice sofas and dating agencies and holidays in agreeable
Francis report: Cameron needs to talk about the structure of NHS care as well as the culture
The Francis Report into Mid Staffordshire hospital trust will be published at 11.30am today. David Cameron will make a Commons statement this afternoon on the matter. Yesterday I explained why Cameron should be bold today and go beyond the usual ‘lessons must be learned, procedures should be tightened’ platitudes. One of the greatest risks is that the government ends up introducing more targets and more bureaucracy with simply replace or even add to burden created by Labour which the Report will criticise today. But as Iain Martin points out, the Mid-Staffs failure took place following huge increases in NHS spending. This isn’t a death-by-cuts story. Targets and a lack of