Society

Friday

The Spectator

Barometer | 28 December 2012

Counting the years 2013 might look an uninteresting number for a year but it is in fact a mathematical rarity: a year whose digits, when rearranged, can form a simple arithmetic progression: i.e. 0,1,2,3. — The last such year was 1432. The next will be 2031, after which we will have to wait until 2103 for the next one. — The good news, for those who believe in ominous dates, is that nothing terribly bad happened in 1432. Florence defeated Siena at the Battle of San Romano, there was a civil war in Lithuania and a small revolt against the Ottoman Empire in Albania. Faith, hope and quinoa 2013 will be

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 December 2012

Home Banks should erect a protective ring-fence round their high-street operations, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards recommended, and moreover it should be ‘electrified’. The metaphor meant that regulators should have the power to break up banks that misbehaved. The ten members of the commission included the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Revd Justin Welby, and ‘Nigella’s Dad’, as one paper put it, Lord Lawson of Blaby. Mark Carney, the next governor of the Bank of England, suggested that economic growth should be a target, rather than inflation. The government had to borrow £17.5 billion in November, £1.2 billion more than a year earlier, although some economists had predicted borrowing would

The Spectator

Unholy war

To attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve in parts of Nigeria is to take your life in your hands. For the last three years, Islamist militants have been attacking churches but last week, when gunmen moved on a church in Potiskum, they found the military waiting. On their retreat, they came across a smaller unprotected church in the nearby village of Peri and opened fire, killing the pastor and five parishioners. A separate attack on the First Baptist Church in the village of Maiduguri took Nigeria’s Christmas death toll to a dozen, and the overall casualties of its new sectarian war to 1,400. There was no condemnation from London. The

Doc

2093: Leading lights

The unclued lights (all verified in Brewer 18th and 19th editions) are of a kind. Elsewhere, ignore three accents.   Across 1 Overcome old film broadcast (8) 6 Tawdry item – small company holds a pile (6) 12 Ivy, out east, is after fish which have four faces (10) 13 Farewells losing one of two (5, two words) 15 Kite for flying over archaeological work housing a bit of loot in wood (10) 16 Years in France by border of city (7) 20 Leaving old flame with sex appeal (4) 22 Make a coat? No ideas circulating (7) 23 Official diploma that’s guaranteed (4) 24 A loveless pair with helpers

Doc

2091: plain and simple

The unclued Down lights are PLAIN Janes and the unclued Across lights are SIMPLE Simons. First prize Di Arbuthnot, Hungerford, Berkshire Runners-up Nigel Woolliscroft, Newcastle-under-Lyme; Barry Butler, Birmingham

James Forsyth James Forsyth

When will we able to have a mature conversation about the health service?

Nigel Lawson described the NHS as the closest thing to a national religion that this country has. The NHS is certainly like a national religion to the extent that it is pretty much impossible to have a rational debate about it. There is often a choice posited between the NHS and no healthcare at all. One can see this mindset in today’s Guardian article on the news that the Thatcher government in 1982 held Cabinet discussions about fundamental rethinking the size and shape of the state. Here is the section on the health service: ‘But the earlier version’s most controversial privatisation proposal concerned the health service: “It is therefore worth

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Gove to Treasury: let schools borrow!

For all the good intention of Michael Gove’s school reforms, there have been only a few dozen new schools so far. When I interviewed him for The Spectator earlier this month, I asked if there was much point to all this if the successful schools could not expand (and, ergo, add capacity to the system). Crucially, Academies cannot borrow because the Treasury doesn’t allow it – a relic from the Gordon Brown control freak days. How much of an impediment is this? I didn’t run his answer in the magazine version of the interview as this is a fairly technical point. But as Brown knew, it’s on seemingly dull issues

John Dodd

A badger killer confesses

I killed a badger the other day. I was driving at 40 at 6 a.m. on my way to hospital. I had been told I was first on their operations list. Two black lines divided by a white one dived at me from the dark and went under my left front wheel — bump! — and then almost instantly under the rear one — bump! I glanced in the rearview mirror. Something badger-shaped lay still at the roadside. I thought about stopping, but by then I was into the roundabout leading onto the motorway. I thought of the badger, then the surgical team waiting for me. I drove on from

Tim Stanley

Blood oath

The final instalment of the Twilight saga, Breaking Dawn: Part 2, premiered in Los Angeles last month, and the streets were thronged with its core audience of teenage girls and middle-aged gay men. But as the handsome cast strode up the red carpet, they were greeted by more than just hormonal screams. A group of religious conservatives showed up with placards and loud voices. The head of security rushed over to confront them, assuming they were there to protest against the film’s mix of ‘satanic’ vampires and dark eroticism. But he was wrong. The demonstrators had come to cheer the stars and promote the movie. It turns out that some

Tristram Hunt

This old House

‘If the Palace were not a listed building of the highest heritage value, its owners would probably be advised to demolish and rebuild.’ Heartlessly, this concludes the latest official report into the restoration of the Houses of Parliament. Four thousand miles away in New Delhi, it’s the same story. The Central Public Works Department has declared the constitutional masterpiece of Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker equally unfit for habitation. ‘We badly need a new parliament building,’ complains government minister Jairam Ramesh. ‘This one simply isn’t functional and is outdated.’ In the oldest parliament democracy and in the largest, the challenge is the same: what on earth to do with our

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Neither catharsis not cataclysm, but a year of mobile money and digital books

In a recent Spectator panel debate titled ‘Review 2012, Preview 2013’, Matthew Parris startled an expectant audience by observing that in his view nothing very interesting had happened in the past 12 months, and not much excitement lies in wait for next year. Prediction, we know, is a mug’s game — those ancient Mayans who said the world was going to end last week must be feeling more sheepish than a flock of Treasury growth forecasters. Even predicting ‘not much excitement’ is to risk being horribly wrong if our banks turn out to be as under-capitalised as the doomsters suggest, and it all kicks off again like September 2008. But

Owen Matthews

Who killed Newsweek?

So farewell then, Newsweek magazine, which published its last print issue this week. After 79 years — 15 of them as my employer — the venerable old rag is to disappear into an uncertain, web-only future. Many newspapers and magazines have folded as advertising shrinks and readers go online but Newsweek is perhaps the first of the titans to fall. Its demise is all the more resonant because it was one side of one of the great twin peaks of the press: Time and Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Times and the Daily Telegraph. In its heyday Newsweek was an essential part of America’s national

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m proud to come out as an Eton parent

I was just traipsing across the fields towards Common Lane, there to collect Boy en route to his St Andrews’ Day F-Blockers’ exhibition match of the Wall Game, when I was accosted by a splendid, Spectator-reading type who’d parked his car next to mine. ‘Are you James Delingpole?’ he asked. I admitted that I was. We got talking. There was only one possible reason for my being there, as he and I both knew. ‘Do you think I should finally out myself?’ I said. ‘I mean I’ve been living the lie for what seems like an age. And it’s so unlike me to keep secrets from my readers. Let’s face

Michael Jacobs

Andalucia: A culinary odyssey

On my most recent visit to Seville — the Andalusian city of proverbial fiestas and sunshine — the rain poured for days without stopping. The streets were almost deserted by lunchtime, with tourists taking refuge in the dozens of colourfully tiled tapas bars clustering under the shadow of the cathedral’s soaring bell tower, the Giralda. One day a local friend of mine took me to a newly opened place right in the heart of this district, yet hidden away on a side street, coldly modern in its design, clearly unappealing to tourists, and still barely known to anybody else. It was called Arenero, and there was just one other couple

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Gay marriage the easy way

‘The next time we want to import a horse to Russia,’ wrote Laura Brady, Second Secretary in our Moscow embassy, ‘it will be a doddle.’ I quote her story in an anthology of diplomatic writing, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, that the BBC’s Andrew Bryson and I have collected for the new book. Miss Brady was giving the Foreign Office an account of her efforts to collect a horse from Moscow’s station. The horse was a present to the Prime Minister, John Major, from the President of Turkmenistan, who had despatched the fierce Akhal-Teke warhorse by train accompanied by a wagon-load of melons to pay the Russian Railways. The point Brady

Rachel Howard

Aegean Greece: Eternal bliss

There’s nothing like a financial crisis to bring out the worst in people. Witness the shocking rise of Golden Dawn, a bunch of Nazi thugs masquerading as a nationalist party, currently rampaging through the streets of Athens. Ironically, another unfortunate side effect of Greece’s colossal debt mountain has been a drop in the number of German tourists, deterred by angry locals burning effigies of Chancellor Merkel in SS gear. This is bad news for Greece’s tourism industry, as Germans traditionally top the visitor table; but it’s good news for British philhellenes, who won’t have to fight Fritz for the best sun-bed next summer. The brutal austerity measures imposed by Greece’s

Peter Jones

Holidays with the ancients

For most Romans, there were no such things as ‘summer holidays’. Holidays were for the rich, who went to their Cape Cod equivalent: the bay of Naples, leaving the stench, filth and disease of malarial Rome for the tideless, sheltered bay (‘bay’ derives from the local resort Baiae), cool sea breezes, healthy spas and agreeable villas. They certainly did not tour islands and coastlines by gulet, as I do every year with the sublime Westminster Classic Tours, full of Spectator readers keen to see and know everything, and hear what the ancients thought about it too. Cruises of any sort are, in fact, a 19th-century invention. True, Archimedes (as in

Clarissa Tan

“This coming year, I want to live”

What do New Year resolutions mean? Nothing, I have discovered, unless you resolve your old year’s first. In September I was diagnosed with colon cancer and since then, I’ve had time to think about time. It seems as though my past years have collapsed, one after another, one into the other, until I can see my experiences both all at once and as a long train of hours. Everything I’ve been has brought me to where I am now. I must look backwards to move forwards. I am not dying, yet I think much more about mortality. According to certain Eastern traditions, at the moment of death there occurs an

Sophia Martelli

Marseilles: Tough love

Arriving at Marseilles’s Gare St Charles in the early hours of a balmy October night, the first marvel of the city that is pointed out to me — both proudly and affectionately — is a large, well-fed rat that pours itself into a nook in the stone wall of the station. ‘Welcome to Marseilles,’ says Oliver, my laconic host, pushing his bicycle along the street to avoid running into a trio of high-cheekboned Maghrebian hip-hop devotees. As they saunter past, deltoids rippling, bouncing fluidly and elegantly on their toes to some innate city beat, Oliver adds, ‘Also known as North North Africa.’ With a population of 850,000 (1.6 million within