Society

Thursday

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2085: Buffer zones

The unclued lights, (one of two words), individually or as three pairs, are of a kind. Collins Dictionary confirms the spelling at 29A. Across 2 Poet seriously starting to think in French (7) 10 see 42A (3) 12 Wood work in exam (5) 14 Medley from little boy and little girl (7) 15 Tenor changing uniform with Oscar (6) 17 Exhaust with massage (4, two words) 18 US mine-owner is a shark (8) 22 It’s hit around to enjoy oneself on course (8, two words) 23 Reserve university sportsman is very pale (7, hyphened) 25 What’s left of the bortsch? (3) 27 Letter from Listener in German is sent back

Steerpike Steerpike

Breakfast of champions

Peter York, the ageing Sloane Ranger and style guru, ditched his popped collar and brogues this morning and took to the stage in a Gaddafi-style dictator’s outfit to present the Editorial Intelligence Commentariat the Year Awards. A wistful David Davis proclaimed that he would have ‘loved to be able get away with wearing that’. The metropolitan liberal elite gathered at 7.30am to heap praise upon itself and toast departed friends like Marie Colvin and Christopher Hitchens. Luckily, there was champagne, tiny bacon sandwiches and poached quails eggs to ease the horrendously early start. Winners included sketch writer Ann Treneman, Conservative Home’s Tim Montgomerie and a near clean sweep for the Times’

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Coffee House scoops top award

Coffee House was this morning named Best Online Comment Site at the Editorial Intelligence awards. We fought off stiff competition from three excellent rivals: the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, the New Statesman’s ever-improving blog and the Sunday Times’s own unmissable site. Our Coffee House editor Isabel Hardman collected the gong, but there was no speech. Which is just as well because there is a very long list of people to thank. Chief amongst them is Pete Hoskin, who edited Coffee House until the summer of this year (he’s now writing for Conservative Home). David Blackburn has also worked tirelessly, keeping the coffee flowing over the summer before Isabel joined. Our online editor, Sebastian Payne, has

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Obama in free fall, an EU referendum promise, Andrew Mitchell and Tory strategies

Has Barack Obama rediscovered his magic powers just in time to take him back to the White House? In this week’s magazine cover, Harold Evans writes that the 2012 election has been disastrous for the Democratic Party but incumbent president has may have woken up just in time. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, two Spectator writers discuss whether Obama is on track to win the approaching election. Contributing Editor Douglas Murray thinks he will, albeit reluctantly: ‘Most people go on sense of some kind. My sense is that Obama will probably just scrape back in but my hope is that he doesn’t. Apart from anything else — I think that so

Roger Alton Roger Alton

All hail the Heineken Cup

Ah, what joys, the first weekend of the mighty Heineken Cup. How many sporting events are so closely identified with their sponsor that you can’t imagine them being called anything else? Heineken has backed this since the first European competition in 1995, which is when rugby went professional. You can’t imagine rugby without beer, though you have to in France, where they ban alcohol advertising at sporting events, so it’s called the H Cup over the Channel. Mark you, you can’t drink proper beer at the Stade de France anyway, just 0% rubbish. Or so it tastes. Heineken is a Dutch lager, not a beer from a country noted for

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 18 October 2012

Mogadishu I return to Mogadishu to find it’s calm – only a few assassinations, hit-and-run attacks, IEDs or suicide bombs — and at last most Somalis seem ready for peace. I’ve covered events here for 21 years and love imagining an end to war in this delightful city. I also know that it’s during times of calm, when you drop your guard — forgetting that there’s one rule for Somalis and another for foreigners — you end up dead. Mogadishu is a town I know so well I could find my way around it blindfolded. Sadly, since the early 1990s I haven’t been able to wander about on my own.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Everyone agrees it’s time to get rid of the word ‘insulting’ from the Public Order Act

  ‘(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he: (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting.’ —Section 5, Public Order Act 1986 Do you ever growl at dogs? It’s something I’ve been known to do while out and about. I like dogs in general, but some breeds are given to facial expressions which annoy me. Labradors, for example, always seem to me complacent and self-righteous, especially the yellow ones. I sometimes growl at them in order to disturb their evident self-satisfaction, or yap quietly to see how

Tim Montgomerie

Which way is right: Tories should seek truth, not comfort

The below is a response to a piece by Spectator columnist Matthew Parris ‘If you look for truth,’ counselled C.S. Lewis, ‘you may find comfort in the end.’ If, however, you look for comfort ‘you will not get either comfort or truth’. A patriotic politician should reflect on Lewis’s wisdom. In good times almost anyone can succeed in politics but in tough times voters expect more. Voters don’t look to elect politicians, but statesmen, and they can usually smell the difference between the two. Statesmen don’t begin every day wondering how they can win power; they begin by thinking about how they can serve their country. They ask themselves about the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Which way is right: the centre holds

Few put a political argument better than Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, and his latest column in the Times is no exception. Policies portrayed as priorities of the Tory right, he said, are also shared by the majority of the public. Some 70 per cent of Britons want a referendum on Europe and 80 per cent support a tougher approach to crime. He reprised Sir Keith Joseph’s argument about the ‘common ground’ which politicians ought to share with the public. You really can be Eurosceptic and cherish the NHS. It’s possible to favour less immigration and a more generous state pension. Montgomerie’s thesis is that a wise Conservative party

Theodore Dalrymple

Visiting rites

The slowest and most expensive museum refurbishment in world history must be that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is taking longer and costing more than it took and cost to build it in the first place. Let us hope that the result will be magnificent, with all the interactive features that any modern child could desire. For those who cannot wait for the re-opening, however, there is always the branch Rijksmuseum at Schipol Airport. This was an inspired idea, a tranquil space in the middle of the busy airport where the Rijksmuseum displays a changing selection of minor works from the Golden Age. At Schipol recently with a few

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Can you trust a Christian?

For some time we have known about the tension between George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith over welfare reform. The Chancellor wanted more welfare cuts, and the Work and Pensions Secretary resisted: real reform, he said, would cost money. So far, so understandable. But a new biography of the Chancellor by Janan Ganesh reveals another element behind the struggle. Ganesh writes that Osborne ‘questioned the analytical rigour of the Christian Conservatives who hovered behind the project’. A Treasury source is quoted making it clearer still: ‘He thinks the people pushing this are such total advocates and evangelicals that they blind themselves to any downsides.’ To put it another way, the

Clarissa Tan

I am not my cancer

In the evenings the kidneys came. The helicopter, a bright yellow, would land on the grey cement disc, its blades chopping slower, slower, slow — stop. People in blue scurried from an opening in the building and ran towards the aircraft, hauling from it boxes and bags. These containers held hearts, lungs, livers. The organs were brought into the body of the main building then dispatched in all directions. I could see all this from the high window of my room in Siena. I also saw spectacular Tuscan sunsets, and if it weren’t for the chunky, rounded plastic furniture in the room and the drips in my arms, I would

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Treating Islam with special reverence is cultural suicide and just plain wrong

My brilliant niece Freya was talking to my brother the other day about the religious education curriculum at her predominately white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city. She happened to mention ‘Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him.’ ‘Eh?’ said my brother. ‘It’s what we’re taught at school. After we mention “Mohammed” we have to say “Peace be upon him”.’ Now I know what you’re thinking: that Freya must surely have got the wrong end of the stick. ‘If this were a madrassa in Bradford, well maybe,’ you’ll be thinking. ‘But at a white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city? No way. Things aren’t that bad.

Giannandrea Poesio

Twin peaks

According to an old ballet commonplace, no one can beat the Russians when it comes to Swan Lake. Biased and historically inaccurate as this may be, the generalisation has a grain of truth. Russian ballerinas have always looked at ease with the popular classic. It matters little that it was created for an Italian star and partly choreographed by a French ballet master; Swan Lake is as Russian as vodka and comes magically to life when left in the hands — and legs — of Russian interpreters. Which is what happened last week with the international superstar Natalia Osipova’s debut with the Royal Ballet. Osipova’s rise to fame started only

Lucy Vickery

Matchmaking

In Competition No. 2768 you were invited to  supply the profile for an online dating site of a Shakespearean character. Adrian Fry’s Lady Macbeth — ‘I’m a driven, passionate woman with NSOH’ — just missed out, as did Derek Morgan and Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead. The winners take £20 each, Noel Petty pockets the extra fiver. My name is Sir Andrew Aguecheek, knight of the realm, and I am your fellow for all manner of masks, frolics and follies. Indeed, such droleries are my profession, which my title to three thousand ducats annual enables me to indulge. As to my figure, I am tall, with long flaxen hair, and have been reputed

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Memories of the Black Monday crash and how soon we forgot about it

Twenty-five years ago this week, I became managing director of BZW (predecessor of Barclays Capital) in Hong Kong. The office was unstable after a summer of firings, and I had been dispatched from Tokyo to steady the ship. On Friday afternoon, a man called Reggie from Warburgs shouted ‘Heard the news from home?’ across the lobby: the ‘great hurricane’ was battering BZW’s Thames-side headquarters and reducing its trading desks to a chaos of sodden paper and broken glass. On Monday markets crashed everywhere and I flew overnight to London to find panic turning to stoic resignation as our firm, barely a year old, sustained losses of £70 million. The bonus-fuelled

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

The Olympic effect on jobs

It seems today’s good jobs figures — employment at a record high and the unemployment rate back below 8 per cent — are at least partly thanks to the Olympic Games. While the UK added 212,000 net jobs in June-August, London alone added 101,000 — accounting for 47 per cent of the total rise. And — as Citi’s Michael Saunders observes  — the six boroughs that hosted the Games (Hackney, Newham, Barking and Dagenham, Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich) have seen their proportion of residents claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance fall by an average of 0.48 percentage points, compared to 0.25 points for the other 27 London boroughs and 0.1 points for

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Credit where credit’s due for Unite’s payday lender challenge

Coffee House isn’t always the greatest friend of the trade unions, but one union made a striking announcement today which demonstrated the good that these bodies can do in society. Unite plans to set up a nationwide network of credit unions to try to divert struggling families away from legal loan sharks. Credit unions make small loans to members using deposits, and are a safe alternative to payday lenders such as Wonga, which charges a staggering 4,214 per cent APR on its loans. The Guardian quotes Unite’s director of executive policy Steve Turner: ‘We are in discussions to try to establish a UK-wide credit union that will give access to

Steerpike Steerpike

Tight-lipped Lynton

The Steerpike column will appear in tomorrow’s new issue of the Spectator magazine. Here is a taste of what is inside: Is George Osborne about to be replaced as the Tories’ re-election chief? Lynton Crosby, the  Australian spin-meister who helped steer Boris to two mayoral victories in London, has recently moved to the capital from his native Oz. Our paths crossed, at the launch party for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new flick, and I asked him bluntly if he’d been approached to become Dave’s new head of strategy. ‘Business is good,’ he smiled obliquely. Fair enough. So we chatted about Boris’s long-term plans regarding Number 10. ‘I’m not sure I like the

Shiraz Maher

Why Prince Charles’ letters should not be published

Much is being made of Dominic Grieve’s decision to ban publication of Prince Charles’ correspondence with ministers. Republic, a group which campaigns for the abolition of the monarchy, has been pressing for their release through freedom of information requests over the last seven years. Having successfully convinced three judges of the public interest in seeing the Prince of Wales’ letters, Grieve has taken the unusual step of vetoing their decision. Almost two years ago the CIA tipped off their counterparts in MI5 and MI6 that al-Qaeda was planning a ‘Mumbai style’ terrorist attack in the UK. Crucially, however, they refused to share all the details they might otherwise have offered