Society

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

The Fleet Street fox hunt

One of London’s worst kept secrets has finally been revealed in an explosion of PR and TV appearances for Susie Boniface, the hack behind the Fleet Street Fox mask. Whilst anonymous, the former Sunday Mirror journalist managed to bring the unlikely bedfellows of Nadine Dorries and Jemima Khan together into an angry pact of hatred toward the acerbic blogger. Now that Foxy’s long awaited book is out, a new guessing game has begun: who are the charmingly-named characters based upon? The true identities of ‘TwatFace’, ‘Fatty’ and ‘Princess Flashy Knickers’ should be cringing in newsrooms across Fleet Street, as their cigarette paper thin disguises unravel. Snappy ‘Tania Banks’, a rival

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Look out Liverpool

Now here’s something to warm the heart. A bunch of medics from Liverpool have set up an organisation called ‘Street Doctors’, where they go out and teach gang members how to staunch and sew up stab wounds. The obvious downside to this pioneering initiative is that we will probably, as a consequence, be left with more living gang members than would otherwise have been the case. They do not seem to have thought about that. Unless they also plan to teach them the most efficacious places to stab someone, perhaps with a cut-out-and-keep diagrammatical aid. Hopefully the NHS will intervene and instead of sewing up stab victims, the gang members

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obituary of the Week: Jungleyes Love – Spectator Blogs

I’ve been on Jura on a Wedding Planning Immersion Course* these past few days so, apart from noting that the Pope is retiring (upon which I have no opinion), I’ve not been paying little attention to the outside world. Some things have crept through, however. Among them this splendid obituary in today’s Telegraph. The intro is arresting and in the best tradition of Telegraph obituaries: Jungleyes Love, who has died aged 56, was an Old Harrovian hippie who traded in runic jewellery, dinosaur eggs and fossilised animal excrement, which he sold from his shop on the tourist trail to Kew Gardens in south-west London. Well, you want to know more,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Planning Minister: Govt must be tough on new migrants to protect housing from more pressure

MPs’ concerns about how many Bulgarian and Romanian migrants might come to this country when transitional controls are lifted aren’t going away any time soon, by the looks of things. There were six questions on the order paper from Conservative MPs about the matter at Home Office questions yesterday, for starters. But I’ve also spoken to a minister who is uneasy about the impact that the end of the controls will have on his own sector. Planning Minister Nick Boles told me: ‘Put it this way, we should have been more worried than we were about the pressure on housing and other public services from the last set of entrant

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Briefing: What is the government doing to inheritance tax?

The Death Tax has risen again. The government estimates that its proposals for social care funding will cost the Treasury £1 billion a year. That will be met through a combination of not compensating government departments for the higher National Insurance contributions they will have to pay under the new single-tier state pension and freezing the level at which inheritance tax kicks in at £325,000 until 2019 – the source of the ‘death tax’ accusations today. Freezing the inheritance tax threshold The inheritance tax threshold (or ‘nil-rate band’) is the amount of an estate that is not taxed. It rose in both cash- and real-terms throughout the Labour years, but

Stephen Mcpartland

Tax avoidance needs to stop – and companies themselves must lead the way

Tax avoidance on an industrial scale in a country where almost half of children are malnourished and their families live on less than $2 a day? When I read the results of a 12-month investigation by ActionAid into Associated British Food, one of the biggest companies in Britain, it took my breath away to discover that $13 million a year was being transferred out of Zambia into tax havens. The tax avoidance ensured a maximum return for shareholders. But will those shareholders sleep soundly in the knowledge that Associated British Foods removed almost 19 times the amount the British taxpayer donates in aid money to this developing country? The time

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Barwell wins bill battle against mental health discrimination

Gavin Barwell’s bill to end discrimination against those suffering from mental illnesses received its third reading in the House of Lords this afternoon, which means it is just a small hop, skip and jump from becoming an Act of Parliament. The legislation will end automatic blocks on those receiving regular treatment for any mental health disorder from sitting on a jury and from continuing to work as a company director, as well as repealing the section of the Mental Health Act 1983 which automatically removes an MP from their seat if they have been sectioned for more than six months. That Barwell managed to gain the support of not just

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

A New York pontiff? Why I’m betting on Cardinal Timothy Dolan to be the new pope

It’s got to be an African, hasn’t it? That’s what editors, including my esteemed boss, are saying across the country in response to Pope Benedict’s shock resignation. And Fraser’s right: a black conservative figure would make sense. It would perfectly represent the face of Catholicism in a globalised world. But there are good reasons to think that, far from being someone from the evangelically charged developing nations, the next Pontiff might be an American. Under Benedict, the power of America in the Holy See has increased dramatically. Vatican insiders even talk about the ‘American moment’ in Rome. Or as John Allen, the world’s best Vatican correspondent put it recently, ‘even

Christian Guy

Social care reforms: clever politics, bad government

Judge a Government on its priorities.  And then its priorities within priorities.  Amidst the clamour for rapid and credible deficit reduction, the dawning reality that green shoots won’t sprout unaided, Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform and Michael Gove’s education revolution, social care did make the hastily compiled Coalition to-do list. But a Government’s Parliamentary programme is a game of two halves, and within weeks of Andrew Dilnot’s radical report in 2011, it became clear that any such reform would be a second half priority. Today, after months of cross-party Whitehall wrangling and internal Coalition debate, the Health Secretary proudly unveils the Government’s offer.  A new cap on the total social

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Social care reforms: the good and bad news

Jeremy Hunt is unveiling the government’s long-awaited reforms to the funding of social care today. This is the next announcement in the government’s mid-term review series, and while it addresses a serious issue, it’s probably the biggest disappointment to date, and not just because it doesn’t match the ambition of the reforms proposed by Andrew Dilnot. The good news is that no-one will have to pay more than £75,000 for the costs of their social care: that is the personal help, washing, and clothing, but not the cost of accommodation or food. The government says this upper limit means insurance companies will now be able to offer policies which cover

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The metro left turns on Julian ‘L. Ron Hubbard’ Assange

Ah, at last the scales have fallen from Jemima Khan’s lovely fluttery little doe eyes. Having forked out £20,000 towards Julian Assange’s bail, the pouting metro-lefty socialite has come to the conclusion that the bloke is a bit of a rum chap, all things considered. She has even compared him to the barking charlatan who founded Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard and described Assange as demanding from his followers ‘blinkered, cultish, devotion.’ Well, sure – we tried to tell you that at the time, poppet. But you’re still not getting your money back. I wonder if the Ecuadoreans are sick of Assange yet, sitting in the basement of their embassy, referring

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Where’s the outrage?

There’s normally no shortage of outrage in our politics. In Britain today, we specialise in working ourselves into a bate. This is what makes the lack of outrage at what happened at Mid Staffs all the more peculiar. If the government had received a report detailing such appalling behaviour in any institution other than an NHS hospital and responded so meekly, there would have been a series of angry front pages denouncing Whitehall complacency. The government is considering changing the law of the land because of what happened at the care home Winterbourne View, which was appalling but nowhere near as serious as what happened at Mid Staffs. But when

Friday

Time’s up for the NHS monopoly

Is it time we faced up to the fact that the NHS itself is the reason for the continuous stream of scandals? It’s not just the Mid Staffs Foundation Trust, or the ‘Nicholson Challenge’ or ‘the reforms’, or ‘the culture’. The NHS suffers from systemic faults. Above all, the regular flow of defects and failures is what you would expect from a command-and-control regime that has a monopoly. It’s not as though making this claim is new. The last Labour Government recognized the structural flaws in the NHS nearly a decade ago. The NHS Improvement Plan of 2004 specifically denounced monopoly: There would be ‘contestability … so that patients and

Thursday

Peter Jones

Stoicism at the doctor’s

It has been proposed that, to deal with certain sorts of emotional problems for which we go to the doctor, we should be given an improving book to read. Quite right too, the Stoic would reply. ‘Stoicism’ derives from the Greek stoa, the portico in Athens where from 300 BC its inventor Zeno (a Cypriot) taught it. Its main principle is caught in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ with its ‘motion and a spirit that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things’. The argument was based on the idea that (i) in a sense the universe was God, and God was the universe, (ii) the divine element

The Spectator

Letters | 7 February 2013

Respect the RSPCA Sir: You ask whether the RSPCA has ‘gone feral’ (‘The RSPCA’s secret war’, 2 February)? The answer is ‘no’. Since its founding, the society has promoted kindness to and respect for animals. We have done so through education, good science and campaigns to change the law to protect animals from cruelty. But laws only count if they are effectively enforced. Some of your readers may assert that the police should do this work. On many occasions they do so, often working closely with our trained inspectorate. However, operational realities and pressure on police resources mean that human welfare tends to rank higher than that of animals. Should

Taki

High life | 7 February 2013

Gstaad  Sir Roger Moore told the Sunday Telegraph that he enjoys the slow pace of life in Switzerland. As do I. One cannot have too much of a snowy peak under a blue sky, any more than one can have too much of Schubert. Looking out from my bedroom window, all I can see are pine forests, rock cliffs and snow, not a bad scene for the winter blues. Yes, Nature has been degraded, with chalets being built ever higher in the mountains, but old N can take it. After a heavy snowfall everything is still, greed takes a back seat, and the only sounds one hears are those of

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 7 February 2013

I’ve been to Mali. Oh, yes. We went overland from the east, 23 of us in the back of a Bedford truck, via the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. And even after that succession of astonishing countries, Mali stood out as having a unique flavour of its own. The first intimation that we ain’t seen nothing yet came at the border. Border crossings were usually surprising or infuriating, one way or another. At the one between Niger and Mali, the Malian authorities surprised us by stipulating an extraordinary condition of entry. This was that we must take on board our truck a representative of the Mali tourist board who would

Melissa Kite

Real life | 7 February 2013

Throwing oneself at the feet of the transport secretary at a posh lunch is not a dignified thing to do. I realise that. But since my parents found out that the HS2 rail link is going past the end of their garden — though just a few metres far enough to mean they won’t get compensation — I have not been feeling very dignified. And before some Lib Dem blogger reports me to the Standards Commissioner for lobbying, I didn’t lobby. I begged. On my knees. There’s a difference. Poor Patrick McLoughlin didn’t know where to put himself. There he was, having a perfectly nice time at the Savoy, when

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 7 February 2013

This is a big week for gays on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time you read this, the House of Commons will have voted to permit gay marriage, despite an angry revolt by a large number of Tory MPs; and in Texas the Boy Scouts of America may also have voted (less certainly) to lift its ban on ‘open or avowed’ homosexuals joining the youth movement. In both cases, the reforms are being presented as reflecting popular enthusiasm for ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ and tolerance of diversity (little evidence though there may be of this) while at the same time showing tolerance of people lacking such enlightenment. So in

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 7 February 2013

Max, my adorable son-in-law, knew early on he was not cut out for a life of academia. Nevertheless he fearlessly sat an A-level, after which, exhausted, he went on holiday. On the day the results were due, he phoned his doting mother and asked her to open the letter when it came and tell him the good news. ‘Max,’ she said excitedly, ‘You’ve got a U! What does it mean?’ ‘U means Unbelievable, Mum,’ he told her, whereupon she almost burst with pride! In the recent TGR’s Auction Pairs, the very academic Barry Myers came a strong third playing with Turkey’s Mustafa Cem Tokay, whom he met an hour before