Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 6 December 2012

The North in need Sir: Neil O’Brien’s article on the North-South divide is welcome (‘The great divide’, 1 December). As a Geordie who spent much of his working life in the West Midlands before being immersed in the Westminster bubble for the last decade, London increasingly feels like a separate country. The wealth, the economic activity and the jobs are something that many communities only an hour and a half away on the train can only dream about. Many of the heavily industrialised towns and cities never recovered from the recession of the early 1980s. We have generational unemployment and significant pockets lacking any aspiration. There is a lack of

Taki

High life | 6 December 2012

Why do so many respectable newspapers and magazines go weak at the knees the moment an unreadable autobiography of some illiterate rock star is published? I guess no hack, however literate, can resist dropped names, or perhaps it is simple hero worship, tout court, as they say in French. I’ve never read a single one, just the reviews of some, and they leave me absolutely cold. So they took a lot of dope and slept with lotsa groupies, and then trashed the hotel suite. Big deal. Seen and done that and it’s no longer fun. But give me something well written about someone I met, however briefly, when I was

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 6 December 2012

When I rang for an appointment, the receptionist said, ‘Can you be here within the hour?’ I arrived with ten minutes to spare and presented myself before her. ‘Have you been here before, Mr Clarke?’ she said. ‘I have, yes,’ I said. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, studying her computer screen with interest. She wrote a six-figure number at the top of an appointments card in black Biro and pushed it across the counter. On this visit and on any subsequent visit, she said, I would always be referred to by this number instead of by my name. I took a seat in the waiting area. In the past I’ve always

Melissa Kite

Real life | 6 December 2012

The renovations were too much for me. I had to get the builder boyfriend back. But before you call me weak, manipulating, cheap, pathetic, or (if you’re into American self-help books) co-dependent, just hear me out. I defy anyone to go through what I went through with a consignment of ill-fitting MDF and not make a panic-stricken phone call to an ex-boyfriend who happens to be a building contractor. And it’s not as if I rekindled the relationship entirely in order to get my house halfway back to habitable. I missed him. I missed his funny south London builder ways. I missed his deafeningly loud laugh, his tousled, blond,  dust-filled

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 6 December 2012

I was sad to read that Larry Hagman had died. As J.R. Ewing, the conniving Texas oilman in Dallas, he may have been ‘an overstuffed Iago in a Stetson hat’, but he was curiously lovable in a way that no Iago ever is. This could be because he was rather lovable in real life and this niceness may have seeped through into the evil television character to temper its hatefulness. Unusually for a Hollywood star, he remained happily married to the same woman for 50 years; and even more unusually, he did so despite being at various times a very heavy drinker, smoker and drug-taker. It was an odd combination

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 6 December 2012

A few years ago I used to play Rubber Bridge from time to time with an elderly gentleman called Leo Halpern. Leo was unfailingly polite, good-humoured and kind. He was also very, very slow. One day, when he was playing a laydown 3NT he thought for ages and one of the other players finally said: ‘Leo, what on earth are you thinking about?’ He looked rather surprised and answered, ‘I’m not thinking about anything, but the slower I play the less money I lose!’ Rubber Bridge is about getting as many games into a session as possible for most people, and while occasional long tanks are not a problem, too

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 6 December 2012

Q. I disagree with your advice to A.B. (8 September) about enlisting a restaurant management’s support to go on smoking his cigar despite the displeasure of the nearby patrons. We can assume that they booked in the garden because they liked the fresh air. The etiquette for any cigar smoker has always been to ask the people around him if they would mind before he lights up. —J. McC., Geneva A. This protocol will often backfire, as so many people do mind. However, cigar rooms and lounges are becoming de rigueur in top hotels. The Lanesborough and Bulgari boast the facility, as will the new Wellesley Hotel in Knightsbridge, which

Toby Young Toby Young

The tyranny of the Twitterati

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville identified ‘the tyranny of the majority’ as the main shortcoming of democratic societies. His fear was that the principle of majority rule could cross over from the political arena to the realm of ideas. After all, if being able to command the most votes is the main source of political authority, what’s to stop it becoming the main source of intellectual authority? Tocqueville wasn’t worried about people being oppressed physically in democratic societies. Rather, it was their independence of mind that was at risk — and this ‘mild despotism’ was, in some ways, even more pernicious than the overt despotism of European monarchies.

Dot Wordsworth

Principle

‘Have you read it then?’ asked my husband on the afternoon Lord Justice Leveson’s report was published. Of course I had not, and he only asked to annoy. But, then, nor could that strange Mr Miliband have read all 2,000 pages when he urged the world: ‘We should put our trust in Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations.’ He sounded like the sort of person who ticks the little box saying ‘I agree to the terms and conditions’ only to regret it when the flight is cancelled. Anyway, I am not going to discuss the Leveson report. What did catch my ear, though, were some words of David Cameron in his Commons

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Diary – 6 December 2012

Finding an outfit for a wedding is a doddle compared with finding one for an investiture and I wonder how sensible it was to buy my hat first. I love hats. My mother was a dressmaker and designer and she also made hats and wore them with style and aplomb, in the days when women never went hatless, even just to go shopping. When I was a child she embarrassed me beyond endurance when turning up at school events in one of her rakish creations. I remember the Christmas play and a small black felt number worn jauntily on one side of her head. It had protruding bright turquoise feathers

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 6 December 2012

You will have read in every news outlet that the baby whom the Duchess of Cambridge is bearing will be third in line to the throne if she is a girl, because of a new law which equalises the succession of the firstborn between males and females. This is untrue — first because, as the child of the heir to the heir, she will be third in line to the throne under existing law (unless a brother comes along), and secondly because this new law does not exist. All that has happened is that the Commonwealth prime ministers of the 16 countries of which our Queen is Queen agreed in

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 December 2012

Home In his Autumn Statement, held nearer the winter solstice, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, confronted the need to extend austerity measures for reducing the deficit to 2018. The economy would shrink by 0.1 per cent in 2012. He cut corporation tax to 21 per cent from 2014, cancelled January’s fuel tax rise and promised consultation on tax incentives for shale-gas exploitation. All but four Whitehall departments would be asked to save an extra 1 per cent next year and a further 2 per cent the year after, with the hoped-for £5 billion going to schools and roads. Battersea should get its own Underground connection. Mr Osborne sketched

Columba

2092: Attend

Clues in italics are definitions only. In each of their answers, it is necessary to 32 10 (a four-word phrase) to create the word to be entered in the grid. Each of these entries (one of which is hyphened) is defined by an unclued light.   Across 1 Lies not specified by one entering expenses (8) 6 Centre of spiritual power provided by coach, keeping constant (6) 11 Policeman certainly about to seal chamber (5) 13 Welcome luxury 14 Mantles necessary to help alliance (6) 17 Spoil label beside lily (8) 21 Weak augur prepared to accept greeting in name of God (8) 23 Examine worried legator (7) 25 Labourer

Columba

2089: backward and forward

The unclued lights (16D/21? 16D/16A/23/38/24/11/14?) form a quotation by SHYLOCK in The Merchant of Venice. A number of references to the play and its opposition between Jews and Christians were included in the clues. First prize Hilda Ball, Belfast Runners-up Philip Hawkins, Matlock, Derbyshire; Michael Debenham, Shrewsbury

Jonathan Jones

The Autumn Statement in 7 graphs

1. Growth evaporating. The Office for Budget Responsibility once again downgraded its growth forecasts for 2012-13 and, for the first time, also did so for 2014-16. Despite that, the OBR is still slightly more optimistic than the average independent forecaster: 2. A seven year slump. On the OBR forecasts, it will now take until the end of 2014 to get back to where we were before the crash. In the 1930s, it took ‘just’ four years to recover: 3. Slower deficit reduction. The weaker economic outlook means the government will be borrowing more than expected. When George Osborne delivered his first Budget in 2010, the OBR predicted he’d get the

Jonathan Jones

A budget for the squeezed middle

Ed Miliband may have coined the term, but it seems George Osborne has the squeezed middle on his mind too. The overall effect of yesterday’s budget* was to take from the rich, take from the poor and give to the middle. The IFS has crunched the numbers and produced the latest in its series of decile charts: The bottom half of households lose out mainly due to the Chancellor’s decision to increase most working-age benefits by only 1 per cent a year for the next three years, and hence cutting them in real terms. The rich, meanwhile, have been hit mainly by the cut in the tax-free allowance for pension

Shiraz Maher

What can the international community do to stop Assad using chemical weapons?

Bashar al-Assad is busy writing his suicide note, ordering military officials to prepare the country’s chemical weapons for use. That’s the assessment of Pentagon officials overnight who have detected a flurry of activity at two facilities where these weapons are known to be stored – in al-Safir, on the outskirts of Aleppo; and Furqlus, about 30 miles from the already destroyed city of Homs. The precursor chemicals for Sarin nerve gas, an extremely lethal toxin, have now been loaded into bombs that can be delivered by Syrian aircraft. Sarin was deployed most notoriously by Saddam Hussein who used it to crush a Kurdish uprising in 1988 during the Halabja massacre.

Steerpike Steerpike

Alan Rusbridger’s swan song

Look out for Steerpike in this week’s Spectator — here is a taster of what Alan Rusbridger has been up to: Rending of raiment and gnashing of teeth at the Guardian. I’m told that the paper’s veteran editor, Alan Rusbridger, is tipped to take over at the Royal Opera House once the BBC’s director-general designate, Tony Hall, relinquishes control. Quite a wrench for Rusbridger, who has stewarded the profit-averse newspaper since 1995. Last year alone he amassed losses of £44 million, so he’ll be relieved to know that the Opera House comes with an annual subsidy of £28 million from the Arts Council. Rusbridger was coy when Steerpike asked him about making a move