Society

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

The rumble of the Thunderer

Steerpike is back in this week’s Spectator, and here’s a little taster from Wapping: James Harding, the ousted Times editor, left with a £1.3 million payoff in his pocket and the praise of Fleet Street ringing in his ears. But why did he go? A chap who polishes the executives’ shoes at News International tells me that just before the hacking scandal blew up, Rupert Murdoch was planning major changes at the Times. He’d decided to pull the newspaper out of the Press Complaints Commission, just as Richard Desmond had done with the Express. Then he’d pull it out of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which he felt didn’t reflect

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The accidental exit

If Britain leaves the European Union, historians will say that 30 June 2012 was when the great exit began. That day, David Cameron was due to write an article for the Sunday Telegraph and his advisers were frantic. It was a last-minute idea, to balance out some loose talk from the Prime Minister at a Brussels press conference. The piece was being drafted by committee and on the hoof. Aides stood at railway stations and in airport lounges emailing a line here and a tweak there. The result was Cameron’s gnomic pledge that ‘for me the two words “Europe” and “referendum” can go together’. What did it mean? Those who

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Just not cricket

Sad times for The Times, and for the game of cricket, with the passing within days of each other of William Rees-Mogg and Christopher Martin-Jenkins. Both men represented, besides the potency of the double-barrelled surname, a specific and wholly admirable strand of Englishness. They had unfailing good manners, and though very posh were never snobbish. They would talk to anyone and enjoy it (most of the time anyway). They never looked as if they were trying too hard, though of course both did work very hard throughout their lives. And by golly they knew their stuff — whether it was Rees-Mogg and his antiquarian books (and Somerset cricket, of course)

Daniel Kalder

A hit man at 13

After a long wait in the visiting room of the maximum security wing of the ‘Gib Lewis Unit’, Rosalio Reta finally arrived for our interview. He was only five feet tall, but even so projected an air of menace. The demonic face tattoos helped. That face was the last thing many people saw before they died, I thought. When he started talking, his voice was soft and mellifluous. Until his arrest in 2006 Reta was a sicario, a hit man responsible for at least 30 murders in the USA and Mexico. He started at the age of 13, when he executed a man as an audition to join the Zetas.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Gnomes of Zurich will fall like skittles before US investigators finish with them

So farewell, Wegelin & Co, the oldest bank in Switzerland and the one with the simplest strategy for growth — which was to offer secret accounts to American tax-evaders who could no longer obtain that valuable service from bigger Swiss banks such as UBS. Founded by a linen merchant in 1741, which makes it half a century younger than Coutts and Barclays, Wegelin last week pleaded guilty to helping US citizens evade tax on $1.2 billion, agreed to pay $58 million in fines and restitution, and announced that it is closing down. The explosive growth of Wegelin’s funds under management during the last decade — despite being headquartered in a

Michael Tanner

Trojan triumph

Opera has naturally made no start at all in 2013 in the UK, the month surrounding Christmas being a culture-free zone. By contrast the New York Met has entered the new year with a thrilling production, revived from 2003, of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, a resounding success in all major respects except one. Lovers of this great masterpiece usually have a chance to see it about once a decade, but only a few months ago it was staged by the Royal Opera in a production that had a muted response.  Les Troyens is one of those works which either shakes you to the core or leaves you mildly, or even very

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How did Mary Seacole come to be revered as a black icon?

Isn’t it time, just out of perversity, that we all signed the petition on the Operation Black Vote website to restore the part-time nurse Mary Seacole to the national curriculum? I am beginning to think that our children should learn all about this entertaining woman; she’s given me a good laugh for the last dozen or so years, ever since she was dredged up as an icon by the deluded and hysterical liberal-left. After all, if Mary is not restored to the curriculum, kids will be pestering us to know why so many buildings in this country are named after her. The University of Salford, the University of Birmingham and

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The ineffable sadness of Franco’s ruins

The end of an old year cast me into a portentous frame of mind as I descended a couple of thousand feet down an ancient path through forest, brush and briar to the Pantà de Susqueda: an immense, deep lake created by a dam, 400 feet high, across the gorge of the River Ter in -Catalonia. You will spot the long, winding, inundated gorge on any map of north-east Spain. Seeing the teeming Costa Brava into which this valley spills through the Ter’s last gorge, you may wonder at how empty is the country behind the portals of that gorge. The map shows no roads or settlements. At night, flying

Julie Bindel

Wedding hells

In the good old days of the gay liberation movement, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the excitement of challenging the orthodoxy attracted even the shy and apolitical to its cause. To those of us around at the time, it felt like a cultural insurgency: a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and the lifestyle that accompanied it. But now battle, such as it is, has changed utterly. It seems to involve people like David Cameron inviting gay people to conform to what he rightly calls the profoundly conservative institution of -marriage. These new, well-spoken and self-appointed leaders of the gay rights movement want to rebel by conforming. To them, homosexuality is

Lucy Vickery

Answering back

In Competition No. 2779 you were invited to submit Maud’s reply to Tennyson. It was Joyce Grenfell’s magnificently ball-breaking riposte to the invitation to ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ that inspired the challenge, and in general your responses referenced this section of the poem. You were on equally feisty form, having little truck with the narrator’s lurking in the bushes and talking to flowers. Honourable mentions go to unlucky losers Crispian Cartwright, Graham King, Douglas G. Brown, Frank Kershaw and Roger Theobald. The winners earn £25; W.J. Webster takes £30.   Alfred, dear, you are very sweet To wait at the gate all night, But I have danced quite off

Mark Mason

How not to steal a million

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ crackled the voice over the Buckinghamshire police radio in the pre-dawn light of Thursday 8 August 1963. ‘They’ve stolen a train.’ Fifty years on, we can’t believe it either. And to the extent that we do, our fascination with the Great Train Robbery shows no sign of fading. It’s Britain’s real-life Wizard of Oz — no matter how familiar the tale, we can never resist savouring it just one more time. By this new book’s own admission, the ‘definitive’ of its subtitle cannot mean ‘statement of fact’, a single, unarguable version of the the truth. Too many years have passed, too few of the

Wednesday

Nadhim Zahawi

The press needs a regulator that outlives the memory of the last scandal

Ahead of a major Spectator debate on the implications of the Leveson report, Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi explains why he supports a statute-backed system of press regulation. Yesterday’s mid-term review included the statement ‘We will continue to work on a cross-party basis towards the implementation of the Leveson Report on press regulation’. A welcome reminder that the question of what to do about press regulation has not been forgotten over the Christmas break. But what we should do is still very much up for debate. We now have two Bills, Labour’s ‘Press Freedom and Trust Bill’ and Hacked Off’s ‘Leveson Bill’, and of course the Government will be coming forward

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs blows underline importance of Tory NHS rehabilitation mission

While Ed Miliband wasn’t exactly Mr Pugnacious today at PMQs, one of his better blows was when he read out the promise in the Coalition Agreement to ‘stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS’ and asked whether that would be on a list of broken promises in the audit of government achievements. Labour always sees the NHS as an easy way to score points now that the government’s hard-won credibility has been scuppered by the Health and Social Care Act, and naturally Miliband roused some cheers from his MPs. James argued back in December that it is now impossible to have a mature conversation about the NHS. Indeed, the Tories

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Barack Obama & Chuck Hagel: The Era of Big Foreign Policy is Over

Republicans objecting to Chuck Hagel’s nomination to serve as the new US Defense Secretary have only themselves to blame. Having run Susan Rice out of the running to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, there’s no way President Obama could stomach losing a second high-profile nomination before he’s even formally accepted his second term. That’s a trivial detail. More importantly, the objections to Hagel’s nomination are a useful reminder why, at least in terms of foreign policy, this present bunch of Democrats is preferable to their Republican opponents. According to the feverish GOP reaction against Hagel, the Nebraskan is an anti-semite whose views lie outside the Washington “mainstream”. The

Tuesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Piers Morgan: the best interviewer in the world

If you haven’t seen it yet, this video of Piers Morgan interviewing a lunatic is good value for a few minutes: He is the butt of many jokes, Morgan, and I suspect the Americans like his rather bumptious public school schtick more than we do. He is, however, a very good interviewer indeed, both in print and on screen; genuinely one of the best, much as it grieves me to say so. He didn’t have to do much here, mind, apart from keep a straight face. The gun lobby must curse Alex Jones every time he appears on screen to support their cause. I wonder, beyond the screeched debate about

Martin Bright

The Big Society and the problem of faith-based policy making

The real problem with the Big Society (and I speak as someone who has written in favour of the idea) is that it was a vaguely-defined description that was turned into a vaguely-defined aspiration. As with so much of the Conservative Party’s agenda it turned out the project was infused with a nostalgic right-wing utopianism. Yesterday’s letter to The Times from Sir Stephen Budd, the CEO of the Association of Chief Executives of Charitable Organisations (Acevo) was an important intervention from the third sector, which feels justifiably angry that it was marched up to the top of the hill by Iain Duncan Smith and then marched all the way back

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Briefing: What does the Mid-Term Review say the Government is going to do?

The coalition has worked very hard, taken tough decisions, worked in the long-term interest of the country for short-term political gain. That, if you can’t summon the energy to read all 46 pages of the Mid-Term Review, is its surprising verdict on the Coalition so far. But the document also sets out plans for the rest of this Parliament, although many have already been announced in previous speeches and launches. Here’s the bluffer’s guide to what the Government has got in store up to 2015: Deficit – The Government will stick to its deficit reduction plan ‘while protecting vulnerable groups and key long-term investments’. Business, enterprise and growth – Sector-specific

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Gay bishops and women bishops are not the same issue

This being the Ephiphany, churchgoing Anglicans will be on the receiving end of any variety of sermons on the visit by the three kings to the infant Christ. There won’t, by and large, then, be much attention given to the whole issue of gay bishops. No attention at all, probably. You’d never think it, though, judging from the broadcast and press reaction to the news. On the Radio 4 Today programme yesterday, the presenter said sternly to one conservative Anglican, Norman Russell, the Archdeacon of Oxford, that the fuss over the issue of gay bishops just goes to show why people are turned off by the church: it can only

Sebastian Payne

The truth about dead bats and wind farms

Are wind turbines really good for the environment? The economics, as we know, is often deeply dubious. But in this week’s Spectator, Oxford biological lecturer Clive Hambler reveals another drawback: the slaughter inflicted on birds and bats caught in the blades. Hambler argues that despite death tolls from numerous sources in various countries, many environmentalists are not being thorough with their questioning of renewable energy. In Britain, this argument isn’t made much — but overseas, as Hambler says, they’re realising the damage inflicted on nature: ‘Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lance Armstrong, the Greatest Cheat in the History of Sport, Prepares to Admit His Sins – Spectator Blogs

The news, reported by the New York Times, that Lance Armstrong is preparing to confess his sins reminds me of this passage from the Book of Daniel: Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Remember, however, that golden-sunned afternoon in Paris in the summer of 2005. On the Champs-Elysees Lance Armstrong, the undisputed titan of his era, stands