Society

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Tatler canine bloodbath

Tragedy has struck Vogue House this morning as the sad news emerges that Tatler’s famous in house dachshund, Alan TBH Plumptre, is dead. Details are sketchy at the  moment and Condé Nast are refusing to comment beyond saying that there was an ‘accident’, but Mr Steerpike can reveal London’s most glamorous puppy was killed by the revolving doors. Alan’s owner, editor’s assistant Jennifer George, has broken the corporate silence: ‘he was so awesome and so very loved’. The little dog’s loyal social media following is distraught: pictures of Alan looking cute in the office were never ending. Thankfully no one was sick enough to capture his last moments, because, if rumours going

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hostilities deepen in Whitehall Wars

‘The relationship between my civil servants and me is summed up by trust and understanding. I don’t trust them and they don’t understand me,’ one Secretary of State likes to joke. The quip sums up the current, tense mood in Whitehall. Today’s Times has done a superb job chronicling just how bad things have got. Many ministers and special advisers feel that they are being made to do huge amounts of work to compensate for the failings og the civil service and being made to carry the can when the permanent bureaucracy messes something up. But before this is dismissed as just griping from ministers who are struggling with mid-term, it

Steerpike Steerpike

Claws out for Caitlin Moran

The ladies of the London chatterati are at each other’s throats. Left-wing identity politics has been eating itself since the New Year, when the leading feminists of Fleet Street went into battle over who is the better feminist. The  great titan-esses are actually secret subversives determined to surrender their cause to subconscious patriarchy. Well, that’s what you would think if you believe some of the words that have been thrown at the likes of the Times’ Caitlin Moran or the Observer’s Julie Burchill and Suzanne Moore in recent weeks. The barbs are getting sharper. The promotional materials for Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies, the latest offering from Hadley

Rachael Jolley

Why the armed forces make young people proud

The popularity of the armed forces as an icon of British pride among young people shows the value of seeing members of the military out and about in our regular lives. In a poll for British Future, 16-24 year olds picked the military as the institution that makes them proudest to be British. They rated it at 43 per cent, ahead of Team GB at 39 per cent and the NHS at 37 per cent. Only a couple of years ago the wider population never saw soldiers and sailors in uniform as they walked to the supermarket or boarded a bus. But the rules  changed and this is a generation which

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ministers hope pension reforms will calm concerns about stay-at-home mothers

Today’s pensions announcement contains an attempt by strategists to reassure those who worry that the government is abandoning the family. One of the gripes from the Tory backbenches about the mid-term review was that it provided precious little confidence that the tax break for married couples that they hope for will be forthcoming, with simply a promise that the Lib Dems could abstain in a vote on the matter. It was all very well announcing new childcare measures, MPs such as Tim Loughton complained, but what about those women who wanted to stay at home with their children? But the briefings ahead of today’s announcement have carefully sought to underline

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Home Office won’t produce estimate of number of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants

Eric Pickles says he’s waiting for figures on how many Romanians and Bulgarians are expected to come to the UK when transitional controls on their freedom of movement expire on 31 December 2013. The problem is that the Home Office isn’t producing those figures, arguing that such an estimate would be impossible. I’ve spoken to a Home Office source, who told me: ‘There are no Home Office figures in terms of a projection of the numbers because there’s not really very much point in guess work about this because it really is just guess work. Instead, our view is that we should be focusing on the factors that are bringing

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Mary Fitzpatrick made the BBC less ‘hideously white’

Anyone remember Mary Fitzpatrick? She was the BBC’s ‘Diversity Czar’ back in the middle of the last decade, paid £90,000 p.a by the licence payer to spout egregious pc bollocks. From a quick Google she now appears to be coining it for doing precisely the same job for the UK Film Council. Nice work, etc. Her most infamous pronouncement, when she was at the Beeb, was that the BBC had too many white foreign correspondents. People reporting from Muslim countries should be Muslim, from Chinese countries Chinese and so on. The audience, this berserk woman suggested, needed ‘valid and culturally accurate’ reportage, which meant far fewer honkeys. Everybody, at the

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Did Jimmy Savile nonce the entire country?

A very good article indeed by Charles Moore in today’s Torygraph, regarding Operation Yewtree and the astonishing news that Jimmy Savile nonced the entire country. You can read it here. There is a middle way, surely, between not believing anyone who says that they were sexually abused 40 years ago by Savile and believing, utterly, everyone who makes such an allegation. As Charles points out, the Savile report contains very little — if anything – in the way of evidence. But anyone who makes the sort of point Charles is making here will be howled down with the accusation ‘abuse DENIER!’ by the absolutist liberal left.

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Honda job losses should be put in perspective

News of 800 job losses at Honda’s Swindon factory are making the headlines — factory closures always do. They can leave scars that never quite heal, and for those affected it will be no comfort at all to know that there are today more people working in the UK economy than ever before. But it’s true. As the below graph shows, the British economy is not actually shedding jobs at a particularly high rate. Even during the boom years, there were about 1,500 redundancies every day. What mattered was that the number of jobs created was greater. But there is an in-built new bias, because the jobs created tend to

Dot Wordsworth

The history of the coffee house

In the series of radio programmes on culture, a guest of Melvyn Bragg’s declared that the distinction between high and low culture was never strict, as a Wagner opera was first performed in a music hall. This is to suggest that music halls always offered acrobats and performing dogs. But the Liverpool Music Hall, for example, advertised in 1814: ‘Beethoven, The Mount of Olives (“A New Sacred Oratorio”)’. The fortunes of the name music hall are paralleled by coffee house. We hear, from George Sandys’s visit to Constantinople in 1610, of ‘Coffa-houses’ where they sit ‘chatting most of the day, and sippe of a drinke called Coffa’. Pepys went to a coffee house

Thursday

Raymond Keene

London Classic | 10 January 2013

The fourth London Classic at Olympia, organised by the indefatigable Malcolm Pein, was the strongest of the series including, as it did, the reigning world champion, a former world champion and the current world ranked no. 1. In addition, the contest was graced by the strongest ever female player, Judith Polgar. Final scores, based on three points for a win, one for a draw and nothing for a loss, were as follows: Carlsen 18, Kramnik 16, Nakamura and Adams 13, Anand 9, Aronian 8, Polgar 6, McShane 5 and Jones 3. Carlsen’s success was rewarded by his breaking of Kasparov’s all-time rating record of 2851. The new top ten in the

Raymond Keene

No. 248

White to play. This position is a variation from Kramnik-McShane, London Chess Classic 2012. How can Kramnik finish off the badly exposed black king? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 15 January 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 Bd5 Last week’s winner Dr David Lubel, Pinner, Middlesex

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold reviews Hawksmoor

How many restaurants make a chain? If the number is four, then Hawksmoor, the superb chop-house named for the Baroque architect Nicholas Hawskmoor, has collapsed on a pile of cheques, the dirty girl, and is now officially a chain, embracing the inevitable suck of cash. It has added to its venues at Guildhall, Spitalfields and Seven Dials a vast restaurant on the oddly named Air Street, right on the great curve of Regent Street, in what used to be an Asian fusion tapas bar. (In restaurant terms, this makes it haunted by shrimp and loss.) It is as large as a bingo hall in Streatham, or an ice rink; it

Dot Wordsworth

Coffee house

In the series of radio programmes on culture, a guest of Melvyn Bragg’s declared that the distinction between high and low culture was never strict, as a Wagner opera was first performed in a music hall. This is to suggest that music halls always offered acrobats and performing dogs. But the Liverpool Music Hall, for example, advertised in 1814: ‘Beethoven, The Mount of Olives (“A New Sacred Oratorio”)’. The fortunes of the name music hall are paralleled by coffee house. We hear, from George Sandys’s visit to Constantinople in 1610, of ‘Coffa-houses’ where they sit ‘chatting most of the day, and sippe of a drinke called Coffa’. Pepys went to

Taki

High Life | 10 January 2013

Friends who were among the last to leave Palataki at New Year tell me there were stragglers waiting to be admitted, and this was as the sun was coming up on the first day of the year. My chalet, in other words, has become the last refuge of the desperate, or among those with twice as much serotonin in their blood who never give up. All I can remember is being on the top floor, and at my advanced age not using glasses, but drinking straight out of the vodka bottle. There is a portrait of my father by Dalì up there, and when in my cups I seem to

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 10 January 2013

Waiting at a country bus stop in a downpour. Not sure if I’ve just missed one. No raincoat. No phone signal. Two o’clock in the afternoon and already too dark to write a will. No wonder everyone that can do leaves the country at this time of the year. There isn’t a bus shelter so I insinuate myself backwards into the hedge. A passing car sends a spray of rainwater up my legs. A motionless row of Devons, fetlock-deep in mud beside the five-bar gate opposite, contemplate me miserably. I try to remember what sunshine is like. I close my eyes and try to imagine hot sun on my face.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 10 January 2013

The Bupa Blooper. In years to come, that is how I shall refer to what happened when I inadvertently cancelled my health insurance policy, with what certain people seemed to think were hilarious consequences. It all began when my policy came up for renewal and I tried to change my direct debit mandate so that the monthly payments were taken from a different account. I know, that way madness lies. Never, ever change your direct debit for anything unless you are prepared to send the whole thing to hell in a handcart. But they gave me the impression that changing my bank details would be perfectly straightforward. They sent me

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 10 January 2013

William Rees-Mogg, who has died, the Oxford-educated member of an old Somerset family, was widely seen as the archetypal ‘gentleman journalist’, but he aspired to be rather grander than that. Even before he became editor of the Times in 1967 he had upstaged his landowning forebears by buying himself an enormous 18th-century country house, Ston Easton Park near Bath, complete with fancy plasterwork, which he set about restoring and embellishing. He even asked the Times’s then Rome correspondent, the late Peter Nichols, to see about getting a replica made of Bernini’s boat-shaped fountain in the Piazza di Spagna — the famous Fontana della Barcaccia — for placing on the gravel

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 10 January 2013

Here is my eagerly awaited New Year’s List of the most infuriating things partner can do: 1. Bid ridiculously to game, get doubled, go for a telephone number and say: ‘Sorry, partner, I could have made that.’ 2. Double the opps into game, and when it makes, as it ALWAYS does, say ‘Sorry, partner, I could have beaten it.’ 3. Balance in pass-out seat when the opps have stopped in a part score, get doubled and go for 500. Or 800. Or 1,100. These things happen so regularly that they have become a standing joke, not to mention the butt of my most withering sarcasm. But for once my team

The Spectator

Letters | 10 January 2013

The aid argument Sir: ‘The great aid mystery’ (5 January) presents the development sceptics’ case — which in five years in opposition (2005-2010) the Conservative party set out to address head on. Although the huge changes in British development policy over the last two and half years appear to have eluded Messrs Foreman and Shaw, they are real and fundamental and genuinely provide grounds upon which most people on either side of the debate can camp. I learned in two-and-a-half years as Britain’s Development Secretary that both the extremes in this debate have deaf ears. The coalition government has reduced the number of aid recipient countries supported by Britain from