Society

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 January 2013

‘The rain is ever falling, drip, drip, drip, by day and night… The weather is so very bad, down in Lincolnshire, that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again.’ That is Dickens in the 1850s (Bleak House). It is a similar story here in Sussex as the year 2013 comes in. I usually have no objection to ‘bad’ weather, but the worst of this is that the land is so saturated that man, motorised vehicle and mounted beast is effectively banned from the fields, as if there were an outbreak of foot-and-mouth. So perhaps I am sitting and brooding too much; but it does seem to

Peter Jones

Seneca on the Church of England

Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, may have to confront this year the possible break-up of the world-wide Anglican communion. Perhaps the splendid letter from Seneca the Younger (AD 1-65), sketching a pagan take on religious feeling, will suggest a way ahead. After discussing the divine spirit ‘which guards us and watches us in the evil and the good we do’, he turns to nature: ‘Imagine you come across a dense wood of exceptionally tall, ancient trees that shut out all sight of the sky with thick screens of overlaying branches. Its loftiness, its seclusion and your wonderment at finding so deep and unbroken a gloom out in the

The Spectator

Over the cliff

There is something about the dying embers of a year which causes the world to concentrate on entirely the wrong story. In the last days of 1999 many were fixated on the so-called ‘millennium bug’ rather than on the real computing crisis: the absurd over-valuations of internet companies which was soon to lead to stock market armageddon. In a similar way the end of 2012 was dominated by dire predictions of what would happen if the US were to fall over the ‘fiscal cliff’. In the event, the fiscal cliff has turned out to be a lightly graded slope. This week the US Congress approved a compromise agreement of some

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 January 2013

Home On the eve of a speech by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, on the EU, Andrew Duff MEP, the leader of the Union of European Federalists, suggested that Britain could be offered second-class ‘associate member’ status in the EU. ‘If the British cannot support the trend towards more integration in Europe,’ Jacques Delors, the former president of the EU Commission said in an interview with a German paper, ‘we can nevertheless remain friends, but on a different basis.’ Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, said in an interview with the Guardian: ‘If every member state were able to cherry-pick those parts of existing policies that they

Lavatch

2094: A little down

Definitions in ten clues are a letter down; missing letters, in clue order, spell out the creator of one unclued light (three words) which defines the other seven (including one hyphened). Elsewhere, ignore one accent.   Across   1          Chap started to mine free ores, developing alloy (14, hyphened) 10       From Austria, backless seat (4, two words) 12       Overact in a mad caper? (10) 13       Lingerie had fastener (4) 15       Abandoned barn’s for returning Chinese (6) 18       Use acres for waste (4) 21       Whence iron discipline? (7) 22       US general rejected Liberal President as fishy (7, hyphened) 24       Good feeling from book that is clear and touching (8, hyphened)

Lavatch

Solution to 2092: Attend

Answers to clues in italics are pie (13), as (15), unled (22) and heel (27).  In each case it is necessary to PUT IN AN APPEARANCE (32 10) to create the grid entry.  Definitions of thematic entries are 3, 16, 40 and 12. First prize Belinda Bridgen, London NW8 Runners-up A.L. James, Winchester, Hants; P.J.W. Gregson, Amersham, Bucks

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tory message in 2015: Vote Cameron for PM

One thing is already apparent about the Tories’ 2015 campaign, it will be even more dependent on David Cameron than the 2010 one was. Why, because as Anthony Wells points out again today, Cameron polls ahead of his party. There’ll be those who criticise this decision. They’ll point out that the big billboard posters of him in 2010 backfired badly. Others will wonder what more juice can be squeezed out of Cameron, given that by the next election he’ll have been leading the party for nigh-on ten years. But to the Tory leadership, the Cameron lead on the best Prime Minister question is one of their trump cards. It is

Shiraz Maher

What can the Pakistani government do about drones?

The dilemma over drones continues today with the announcement that a leading Taliban figure, Mullah Nazir, was killed earlier this morning. Public opinion in Pakistan is deeply hostile to such attacks even when militants are killed because of the perceived cost to civilians. Scores have been incorrectly identified as hostile jihadists and targeted as a result. Pakistan’s government has long adopted a dual-hatted approach. Officially it protests all drone strikes while privately sanctioning them. That now appears to be changing and the Foreign Ministry is now more committed than ever to stopping drones in Pakistan. Part of the pressure is explained by upcoming elections, with drones becoming a key electoral

J.M. Shaw

Greening’s challenge

At first glance, it looked like very good news when David Cameron appointed Justine Greening as Secretary of State for International Development in his September 2012 reshuffle. Greening is an experienced accountant, an alumna of Price Waterhouse Cooper, GlaxoSmithKline and Centrica, with zero tolerance for waste. She already proved herself an advocate of fiscal retrenchment in her first government post, as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, setting out the government’s case with clarity and zest. ‘There was a time when the Labour party had something relevant to say on the economy,’ she declared to the House of Commons. ‘That time has now passed.’ So when she told last year’s Tory

Bruce Anderson

Waters of life

Even though they efface the landscape, the snows of midwinter make the deeper symbolism more apparent. The psychic differences between the Northern and the Southern Kingdoms, which long predate Alex Salmond, are most explicit in this season. When I was a child, Christmas Day was not a bank holiday in Scotland. It was celebrated, but only as a trial match for the major event: Hogmanay. No one has satisfactorily explained its etymology, but the word is so appropriate. It has a moral onomatopeia. Christmas: despite the best efforts of commerce, it has not lost contact with its origins as the greatest festival of all. Wassailing, merry gentlemen — merry everyone

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Life’s secret menus

Supposedly the coffee chain Starbucks will sell you a smaller, 8oz cappuccino even though this size and its price is never published on their menu boards — you just have to ask for a ‘short’. Handy to know. In any case, I never liked using the word ‘grande’. Two syllables seems pretentious; using one makes you sound like a music-hall Yorkshireman. The cultish West Coast burger chain In-N-Out has created a minor art form from this kind of secret menu. In-N-Out’s official menu is tiny, but an extensive samizdat menu has circulated among aficionados for years solely by word of mouth, like the poetry of Homer. Go to an In-N-Out

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Ex-editor sets banking agenda – and £100 says he’ll win the climate debate too

The sun shines warmly in south-west France, and rabbit bouillabaisse is the pièce de résistance of a New Year lunch at which Nigel Lawson is a fellow guest. The former chancellor and Spectator editor divides his time between his home in the Gers, the Global Warming Policy Foundation which he chairs, and the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards on which he has been sitting alongside the new Archbishop, Justin Welby — who he calls ‘my new friend, an excellent man’. We agree that the argument on banking reform is moving Lawson’s way. As banks continue to rack up huge fines — £2.5 billion between RBS and UBS for Libor-rigging and

Clive Hambler

Wind farms vs wildlife

Wind turbines only last for ‘half as long as previously thought’, according to a new study. But even in their short lifespans, those turbines can do a lot of damage. Wind farms are devastating populations of rare birds and bats across the world, driving some to the point of extinction. Most environmentalists just don’t want to know. Because they’re so desperate to believe in renewable energy, they’re in a state of denial. But the evidence suggests that, this century at least, renewables pose a far greater threat to wildlife than climate change. I’m a lecturer in biological and human sciences at Oxford university. I trained as a zoologist, I’ve worked

Leah McLaren

Newborn Notebook

Looking back, it’s baffling that someone like me — a lover of pleasure and loather of pain, a woman who pops Nurofen like breath mints and cannot sit on the sofa without six cushions wedged in at strategic angles for maximum telly-watching comfort — would have deluded myself into believing I was going to give birth gracefully in a state of natural bliss. Regular readers of this magazine may recall I’d decided on a home birth. In preparation for the big event I lined up two community midwives, scented candles, a self-hypnosis CD, a full-bodied Barolo and a birthing pool, which by 40 weeks, Rob could unpack and inflate in

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Not-so-special relationship

‘Three things of my own are about to burst on the world,’ Dean Acheson wrote to his friend Lady Pamela Berry, the London hostess and wife of Michael Berry, later Lord Hartwell, owner of the Daily Telegraph. They were ‘a leader in the December issue of Foreign Affairs… a speech at West Point… and a piece about my childhood in the Connecticut valley.’ It was characteristic of Acheson’s self-regard that he should have thought the first and last of these would ‘burst’ anywhere, but he was more right about the second than he can have known. Just over fifty years ago, on 5 December 1962, two days after his letter

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

If the mice have to face my wife, they’ll have only themselves to blame

I was in bed by one o clock on New Year’s Day. We did the countdown thing, for the kids, and then hung around for a while looking tired; it was only later, when my wife and I were upstairs in bed, that the real fun began. A long and corrosive argument about the mice, probably the 15th we’ve had on this subject since we moved in back in August. We could both hear the mice downstairs, whooping it up, holding some sort of shindig of their own; the relentless skittering across the stone floor tiles or the parquet wood blocks in the living room. I was tempted, at one

Lucy Vickery

Past regrets

In Competition No. 2778 you were invited to express your regret, in verse, for New Year’s resolutions not kept. The challenge produced an entertaining outpouring of contrition. I enjoyed John MacRitchie’s twist on the Frank Sinatra classic: ‘I’ve packed my case too full,/ Made dreadful curries, in a Thai way,/ Each year, my diets flop,/ Who cares what I weigh?’ Commendations, and commiserations, to unlucky losers Juliet Walker, Tim Raikes, Mae Scanlan, Douglas G. Brown, Jayne Osborn and G.W. Tapper. The winners, below, get £25 each. Top prize goes to Brian Allgar, who pockets the extra fiver. Happy New Year!   I swore I’d give up sex and saturnalia; That

Michael Holroyd

Controversial confessions

Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst who has worked in the United States and Britain. Over his career he has been ‘sitting with patients for thousands of hours,’ he writes. Occasionally he has used his notes and observations for addresses at clinical seminars or for contributions to psycho-analytical journals. But this is the first time he has consulted his files in order to publish a book for the general reader. ‘This book is about change,’ he tells us. Naturally his troubled patients are seeking change, though they sometimes shield themselves from his professional intrusiveness. There is the risk, too, of change being for the worse — for the consultant as well

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Sorry atheists, organised religion works

‘I’m spiritual, not religious’ is something people say to make themselves sound interesting. It doesn’t work. What is intriguing, though, is that, according to this new survey, those who see themselves as spiritual but don’t follow conventional religion are far more likely to be mentally ill. Now, before you trolly atheists out there in webland start typing ‘What a lot of crap. … anyone who believes in God is nuts. LMFAO!!’, read me out. Yes, we might have a case of chicken-and-egg here — the chicken being mental illness and the egg being the thirst for existential understanding. Or vice-versa.  But the survey might also go to prove the value