Society

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Richard Branson forces government into a great train U-turn

Sir Richard Branson is not a man who takes kindly to failing to get his own way. That was why few people were surprised by the Virgin boss’ furious response to the government’s decision to award the West Coast Mainline to his rivals First Group. It wasn’t fair, he protested, and thousands of people seemed to agree, signing a petition criticising the decision. This morning it transpires that Branson’s frenzied campaign against the contract actually led to the discovery of an enormous mistake at the heart of the bidding process. Civil servants checking their sums before a court case questioning the decision realise that they had in fact got those

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Grounds for optimism

Before the summer, the occupants of Downing Street were being worn down by coalition, battered by bad news and demoralised by dire economic data. One No.  10 source says: ‘We were all so depressed we wanted to slit our wrists. But now we’ve got our confidence back.’ This is just as well, for the electoral mountain they have to climb is now considerably steeper. With the boundary review went one of the central planks of the Tory plan for a majority, and Ed Miliband’s conference speech suggested that there’s more political life in him than many had appreciated. But the Cameroons have justified reasons for optimism. First, the coalition is functioning

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Dave’s going down

By now, it will be clear even to David Cameron that he is on course to lose the next general election. The British electoral system always was rigged against the Conservatives, and his hopes for changing that were dashed by Nick Clegg before the summer holidays, when he scuppered Tory plans for boundary reform. All parties are returning to a new reality: the economic recovery has evaporated, and with it the Tories’ chances of winning next time. An unprepared Labour Party is cruising towards power, under a leader who has just held a surprisingly successful party conference. Every bookmaker now agrees: Cameron is heading for a crash. The Tory party

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Up in the air

Like the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 18th-century Anglo-Spanish relations, Heathrow is becoming something of a totem in the fight for the soul of the Conservative party. Whether you prefer your new runways to the east or west of London positions you on the other great issue of the day: who should be leader. If you’re an MP with a constituency anywhere near west London, you’ll probably be in the Cameron camp, shifting uncomfortably in your brogues, wondering how best to perform the Yeo flip and support a third runway at Heathrow. The alternative is of course the Boris camp, whose members think the PM’s plan pathetic. Brave, confident countries

Christopher Howse

Catalonia Notebook

We sang a hymn called ‘Poble en Marxa’ at the beginning of Mass in the working-class parish of Sant Blai. ‘Marxa’ was not a reference to the bearded prophet of revolution; it’s just the Catalan way of spelling marcha. People on the march. There was a lot of it about. In Barcelona, a million (the Catalans say two million) had marched to demand independence from an economically incompetent Madrid. In broke Madrid there were ten demonstrations in one day, with teachers and firemen being bused in to hold up banners and shout and blow whistles. The anarcho-syndicalists made a particularly brave showing. But that was all on the television. Here

Ben Reed

Was Lennon really a genius?

It was 50 years ago today… well, this week, that the Beatles released their first hit single, ‘Love Me Do’, on 5 October 1962. Within 12 months, John Lennon and the other three Beatles were household names throughout the world, and in the years since then Lennon’s reputation has expanded with each new wave of listeners. He even has an airport (Liverpool John Lennon Airport: ‘Above us only sky’). Have we now placed him among the greatest English composers and musicians of all time — say, Dunstable, Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, Handel, Elgar and Britten? Will history’s verdict be that Lennon truly deserves to rub shoulders with these geniuses, or was

Tom Hollander

Strangers on a train

If I subtracted from my life all the time spent either thinking about sex, or engaging in behaviour calculated to achieve it (by which I mean most of my social life and career choices); or dealing with the consequences of having achieved it (by which I mean all of my romantic life), well, I don’t know how much of my life I’d actually have left. Childhood. The useful bit. Fifteen years ago, in August, I boarded a train in New Orleans bound for New York.The journey time was 29 hours. What to do? Write postcards? Read a book? Try to have sex with someone? It was a sultry afternoon: Spanish

S Guru

Tweet revenge

First rule of Twitter: if you don’t use it, you can’t understand it. Nor should you try to: it is a kind of digital crack cocaine for a tiny minority addicted to gossip. In the old days, political gossip had to be exchanged in bars, corridors and (famously) urinals of the Commons. Twitter delivers these fixes straight to the addicts’ mobile telephones. The good news is that anyone can open a Twitter account under an assumed name, and have a little fun with our elected representatives — if you know, or can guess, how their minds work. Last year, I had a go, and became, for a while, a Westminster

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why didn’t the full Savile story emerge sooner?

Every so often a story appears in the newspapers which, while it might seem on the surface sensational and arresting, actually leaves you feeling somewhat less than astonished, all things considered. There have been at least two of these stories recently. The first, in the Daily Telegraph, alleged that Scotland Yard was investigating suspiciously large sums of cash apparently paid into the bank account of the Labour MP for Leicester East, Keith Vaz. I bet that very few people who have ever heard the words ‘Keith’ and ‘Vaz’ used in a conjoined sense will have smacked their foreheads upon reading this story and muttered to themselves: ‘Gaw, Keith Vaz, hey

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Team work

That seems to be that then, the final episode of the best sporting year since, well, 1977 at least. That was another jubilee year, but Ginny taking tea with the Queen, Red Rum at the National, Liverpool winning the European Cup and England the Ashes is still no match for 2012. This is a year to get all Max Boyce about: I was there, that sort of thing. You don’t have to be literal about it, you simply had to be alive and own a television. The edge of your seat was the only place to be. And now we can bask in a warm European glow in the wake

Lucy Vickery

Taking fright

In Competition No. 2766 you were invited to submit a poem about a phobia. John Samson’s account of what strikes me as a perfectly reasonable fear of Ikea flatpacks stood out in what was another cracking entry. Bill Greenwell, Brian Allgar, Josephine Boyle and W.J. Webster also shone. The prizewinners are printed below and rewarded with £25 each; Alan Millard takes the bonus fiver. I have no need to dig or dive or delve Into the root or cause of my malaise, The legacy of London 2012 Will mar forever my remaining days; I fear those hostile promptings: ‘Let’s rejoice And follow in the footsteps of the best! Embrace some

Tim Price

Return-free risk

Voltaire said it best: ‘Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.’ Investors seeking certainty — safety, in other words — are in for a shock: there is no longer any such thing. How did we get into such a terrific mess? Rather than rehash the causes of the financial crisis and the current depression, there is a two-word answer: central banks. There was once a more innocent age when central banks performed a sole function: they acted as lenders of last resort to the banking system. To avert a banking panic, central banks would lend to solvent institutions, backed by solid collateral, in times of need. Note

Alex Brummer

Danger in the mines

The London Stock Exchange recently unveiled a glossy new guide to best practice in corporate governance for companies quoted on its platforms. This must be regarded as a timely exercise, given the increasing domination of the FTSE100 by natural resources groups with operations in the most exotic corners of the world. In its desire to be the world’s IPO capital, the City through the ages has offered a haven to overseas miners. There has been a tendency, however, to overlook their governance, environmental and social failings. In general, mining firms based in the great Anglo-Saxon democracies of the United States, Canada and Australia offer their workers a decent wage and

Jonathan Davis

Profit among the ruins

The place to look for investment bargains, said the fund manager Sir John Templeton, is not where the news is good, but where it is really bad. Today that means looking for advantage amid the volatility and extreme valuations which the crisis in the embattled eurozone has brought in its wake. The strikes and riots that are spreading across southern Europe are exactly the kind of scary scenario in which investors with ice-cold blood in their veins, as one admirer once described Templeton, have historically been able to profit. Since June, the broad European stock market index has risen by 11 per cent, reversing the losses of the previous three

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Public-interest piety is the real threat to a free press

For me the only useful fact to emerge from the otherwise immensely tedious Leveson inquiry was this: that messages on the phone of Milly Dowler were not erased by News of the World journalists. Of course, it would have been a much, much better story if they had been. Eavesdropping on the phone messages of a murdered schoolgirl may be creepy and unpleasant but it is essentially a victimless crime. Actively interfering with those messages, on the other hand, might have had serious consequences. Perhaps false hope might have been given to Milly’s distraught parents. Perhaps the police inquiry might have been jeopardised. We can only speculate, though, on those

Jane Ridley

No stone left unturned

Dickens, the inspiration and source for this book, was addicted to walking the London streets at night. A man who felt uneasy in the countryside without a pavement beneath his feet, he was said to know the mean streets of London better than any cabbie. His skill was to write about the city in his own time, describing the world of the London poor as if they had never been seen before. Dickens realised that to understand London, you need to know how to read the street. That is the idea behind Judith Flanders’s new book. Like Dickens, Londoners walked everywhere. In 1866 an estimated three-quarters of a million pedestrians

Martha Read

Bricks and mortals

Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is widely considered to be a masterpiece of modern architecture, yet the woman for whom it was built complained of the ‘alienation’ she felt in it, and described her architect as ‘simply colder and more cruel than anybody I have ever known’. Though much visited, it is unlived in, and its minimalist form seems better left untainted by any signs of life or individuality. In contrast, a contemporary low-cost housing scheme in Chile by the architectural firm Elemental included future residents in the design process from the start. The resulting project provides basic accommodation, but leaves half the houses unbuilt: the gaps between each

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Sunny Day in Brooklyn and the American Dream – Spectator Blogs

From Peggy Noonan’s blog which, unusually for a political columnist, is almost always lovely and generous and warmly-acute: “Man needs less to be instructed than reminded,” Dr. Johnson said, but it wasn’t really a reminder I got yesterday, it was a sort of revivifier. I was at the big annual street fair in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Big turnout, beautiful day, many thousands of people clogging Third Avenue from the 60s through the 80s, what looked like more than a hundred booths. The people filling the avenue were an incredible mix—young and old, infants and grandmas, all colors and nationalities, families, kids in groups, all kinds of garb—young Arab women in

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 – Labour conference special

Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour conference this afternoon was undoubtably his best speech yet and has revitalised the Labour cause.The Spectator team have gathered this evening in Manchester for a special podcast to discuss both Miliband’s speech and the Labour conference overall: The View from 22 – 2 October 2012. Length 13:24 Download audio file (MP3) Subscribe with iTunes Subscribe with RSS Listen now: We’ve also spoken to some other media figures for their reaction to the Labour leader’s speech: Peter Kellner – President of YouGov listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s speech – Peter Kellner’s view’ on Audioboo

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Eric Hobsbawm and the Fatal Appeal of Revolution – Spectator Blogs

Tony Judt’s verdict on Eric Hobsbawm seems fair: “If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century.” That if is a hefty qualification, of course, for some of the reasons Nick Cohen makes admirably clear. Any appraisal of Hobsbawm’s life and work that fails to account for his unrepentant communism is a dishonest enterprise. But so too is any verdict obsessed with Hobsbawm’s communism to the exclusion of all else. (See, for example, Michael Burleigh’s piece in the Telegraph.) It seems obvious to me that it is possible – unusual perhaps but certainly possible – to