Society

Thursday

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The myth of self-denial

It’s a cheap joke, but it cheers me up. When Starbucks started that habit of asking your name and writing it on your cup, I began giving my name as ‘Chantelle’, ‘Monique’, ‘Desirée’ or ‘Pixie’. Then, when I’d collected four or five of these empty cups, I would leave them all lying around in the car to stop my wife getting too complacent. In the same way, I always use a false name when I book an executive car. It amuses me to see a black Mercedes S-Class parked somewhere prominent with a big white card in the passenger window with ‘Monbiot’ written on it. On any subject involving consumption,

Lucy Vickery

Last words

In Competition No. 2765 you were invited to fill in the gap in ‘The Last —— on Earth’, and to submit a short story of that title. The challenge produced an excellent entry. I very much enjoyed J. Seery’s engaging opening: ‘The events at the Cheltenham supermarket at the end of the 24th century inducing the accelerated evolution of the foot are too well known to need  description, initiating, as they did, the decline and disappearance of shoemaking and mending and their artefacts.’ And I was sorry not to have room for Noel Petty’s poignant and plausibly titled ‘The Last Landline on Earth’ or John Samson’s entertaining wordplay. Commendations all

Liz Anderson

Millionaires’ playground

‘If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.’ Well, Mark Twain, I waited a couple of days and I liked the weather a lot: bright blue skies, warm sun and a cooling breeze off the Atlantic during a September weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. Two days is not long to explore the delights of the town, so here’s my advice for a -whistle-stop tour. Walk up and down the streets, past the variously coloured clapboard houses (some old — dating from the 17th century — some new) that would make Farrow & Ball devotees swoon in admiration. Pause for a while at Trinity Church,

Stuart Reid

City that never pales

Ooh, sir! Do you? At your age, sir? Well, yes. Revolting though it may seem, I still love New York. Every time I go there — as I did earlier this month — I fear I am not going to like it, but every time I fall in love all over again. I think it was Evelyn Waugh who said that when we are young we are Americans, but when we grow up we become Frenchmen. There is some truth in that. Although I cannot claim to have grown up, I do find as I hurtle towards my seventies that I have more in common with cheese-eating surrender monkeys than

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Proof that the UK is open for business: a Chinese takeaway for GCHQ

You might think it redundant to say that the world’s biggest manufacturer of telecoms equipment is a name to watch. But Huawei — which isn’t quite pronounced ‘Who are we?’ but perhaps ought to be — really does deserve scrutiny. This beacon of Chinese enterprise overtook its main rival, Ericsson of Sweden, in the first half of this year with more than $16 billion of sales. It has just announced an expansion of its UK activities, which include a research facility in Ipswich and a ‘cyber-security evaluation centre’ in Banbury, promising to create 700 jobs and winning applause from David Cameron. It is a supplier of equipment to 45 of

Mark Palmer

Holidays from hell

Everyone thinks travel writing is a doddle. You soak up the sun for a couple of weeks and when you get home the words pour forth, dazzling the reader with wish-I-was-there images. Then you sit back and wait for the cheque to drop through the letterbox while planning your next safari or walk in the rainforest or flop on an Indian ocean beach, encouraged by bubbly travel PRs who tell you that the ‘views are breathtaking’, the food ‘to die for’ and the whole experience ‘the stuff of dreams’. But there’s the problem. The vocabulary sucks. No form of writing is so riddled with clichés or lends itself so easily

Andrew Smith

Banking like it’s 1999

Ten years ago next week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange hit its lowest point ever, as the dotcom crash shuddered to an excruciating conclusion. With Facebook shares now approaching half their May offer price and debate raging over the role of banks in society, this is a good time to ask what we learnt from that enigmatic earlier shock — the answer being not enough. Even by the standard of bubble-induced collapses, the dotcom crash was thorough. The Nasdaq Composite index, which had peaked in March 2000 at over 5,000 points and halved by that year’s end, hit a low of 1,114 in October 2002. By then, almost nothing was

Dominic Lawson

Japan Notebook

Some time around the middle of the last decade, Japan’s population began to shrink. The disappearing act has continued unabated: at the present rate of decline, this remarkable mono-cultural race will have all but become extinct within a hundred years. Worth a visit then, while stocks last: so I gratefully accepted an invitation from the business association known as Keidanren (like the CBI, only with influence). An early-morning meeting with Mr Takahisa Takahara provides a perfect snapshot of the consequences of population implosion. The business he runs, Uni‑Charm, is Japan’s biggest supplier of nappies; but now, said Mr Takahara, his firm sells more of the things to the incontinent elderly

Jonathan Fenby

Très difficile

François Hollande is nothing if not a traditionalist. French governments of the left usually come to office promising to reject austerity and pursue a holy grail of growth, only to hit the buffers of economic reality on election. In 1936, the Popular Front sought to overturn the orthodoxy of its predecessors after the Great Slump and in 1981 François Mitterrand pledged to escape from Giscard d’Estaing’s rigorous policies in reaction to the first oil shock. After being appointed as the country’s latest finance minister this summer, Pierre Moscovici duly declared that ‘austerity’ was a word he did not like. But austerity is, nonetheless, what the new president has been forced

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A teenage girl, a maths teacher and a righteous tabloid fury

I seriously contemplated being a teacher once upon a time, when I was lot younger. It seemed to me an agreeable doss, and one didn’t have to be too bright or too ambitious, or possess any great quantity of knowledge. I sometimes wondered what sort of teacher I’d prefer to be; one of those ingratiating young men who plays meaningful pop songs on his guitar to the class and affects an air of faux rebelliousness, the kind of teacher whom as schoolchildren we all despised, or the other kind — sarcastic, stentorian and occasionally brutal, the kind we all feared. It was one or the other; there is no middle

John R. MacArthur

The friends Rushdie forgot

One hundred pages into his absorbing new memoir, written entirely in the third person, Salman Rushdie declares that ‘Friendship had always been of great importance to him,’ since so much of his life had been spent separated, physically and emotionally, from his own family. ‘Friends,’ writes Rushdie, ‘were the family one chose.’ The conceit of third person remove can be annoying, but I understand why the author chose it for Joseph Anton, the title of the book and Rushdie’s assumed name during his long period in hiding after the Ayatollah -Khomeini sentenced him to death. As author of the allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s unhappy tale required telling

Caroline Shenton

Spin city

‘That terrible place known as Westminster’: many readers might well agree with this, the first mention of our political capital in a charter dated 735 AD. However, as Robert Shepherd, journalist and political biographer, explains in his new book, all is not what it seems. The charter is a fake, cooked up by a 12th-century abbot of Westminster to get one over on those pesky monks at rival St Albans. Westminster, Shepherd asserts, was from the first a city of spin and has remained so ever since (and ‘terrible’ meant awe-inspiringly sacred, not awful, by the way). The boundaries of Shepherd’s ‘historic’ Westminster are tightly drawn. They stretch only as

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A hero for our time?

They were in the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London on Valentine’s Day 1989 for Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service — all of London’s literary elite, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Antonia Fraser and the rest. Outside the cathedral the journalists and snappers had gathered, but they were not there for Chatwin. Halfway through the service Rushdie felt a tap on his arm. From the pew behind, the American novelist Paul Theroux whispered: ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman.’ Earlier that day the religious leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa demanding that the world’s Muslims had a duty to murder the author of The Satanic Verses;

Michael Paraskos

An everyday story of country folk

It is not a criticism of Philip Almond that The Lancashire Witches, published to mark the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, is a depressing read. On the contrary, Almond has produced a fine and lively study of the events in 1612 when eight women and two men were tried for witchcraft. What is depressing is how ordinary those involved seem to be. This is not a story of gothic horror or bizarre group psychosis. It is a tale of people being caught out for doing relatively ordinary things. The Pendle witches were not members of some pagan or Wiccan cult, or even genuine devil-worshippers. As Almond makes clear,

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Weakness of the Case for a Romney Comeback – Spectator Blogs

Bob Wright correctly observes that we should soon be treated to a barrage of Romney Combeack stories chiefly because the press needs a new story to tell and this is one of the few even semi-plausible tales remaining. It may even be necessary to concoct a Romney comeback even without there being any actual evidence for a Mitt Recovery. (Conservative fans of Scoop will recognise this as the Wendell Jakes Gambit*). Be that as it may, you need only read the most optimistic pieces of pro-Romney straw-clutching now appearing in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic to appreciate how improbable Romney’s resurrection is. I mean, can’t they

Steerpike Steerpike

Kelvin MacKenzie unleashes his lawyers on South Yorkshire Police

Lawyers acting for Kelvin MacKenzie have written to South Yorkshire Police seeking an apology for the circumstances that have led to his ‘personal vilification for decades’. Writing in tomorrow’s Spectator, the former Sun editor speaks out for the first time in detail about his fateful decision to print the now infamous ‘THE TRUTH’ headline in the red-top the day after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. The terms of the apology are to be debated, but MacKenzie tells of police patrols being increased around his house and the physical danger he faces in the city of Liverpool. Kelvin admits that he was wrong, ‘but the people who have got away scot-free are

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Keep up the good work, Simon Hughes

As a rider to my earlier blog I wish to put in the following as evidence. It became plain to me some years ago that people who have absolutely no political point tend to revert disproportionately to grandiose claims regarding their opponents (both real and imaginary). It gives them a passing sensation of importance which helps them through their daily routine of futility. For a brief moment they feel there might be a point to it all – and themselves. We recently saw Nick Clegg seek to conceal his extreme want of meaning by branding those who disagree with him as ‘bigots’. Thus Nick transforms himself in his own eyes

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The one thing worse than universal benefits? Means-testing them.

There’s nothing, but nothing, easier than for politicians to sound off about universal benefits, and sure enough, Nick Clegg was complaining on the World at One today about the iniquity of, as he says, paying for Alan Sugar’s bus pass. He was being asked about the sustainability of universal benefits and perks following Don Foster, one of his MPs, grumbling about it being absurd that someone like him is entitled to a winter fuel allowance. Mr Clegg went on to make clear that as part of the coalition deal for this parliament there wouldn’t actually be any fiddling with things like the fuel payment for oldies, but after that, these

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Schools Do Furnish A Nation – Spectator Blogs

Also elsewhere today, I’ve a piece for the Scotsman arguing that Andrew Adonis was the third-most important person in the Blair-Brown governments and that, by god, Scotland could do with some of his reforming zeal too. Most sensible people in England agree academies have been a success (though there’s still a long way to go); unfortunately most people in Scotland seem to think there’s precious little need for reform. This complacency is unwarranted. Adonis has written a memoir – Education, Education, Education: Reforming England’s Schools – that should be read by every MP and MSP. It’s probably the most important political book of the year. I know suggesting Scotland might

Alex Massie Alex Massie

This Scotland Small? Why, Yes, Actually It Is – Spectator Blogs

Saturday’s Rally for Independence in Edinburgh was such a non-event that, as best I can discover, Getty Images doesn’t even have any pictures of the march. Hence the tat illustrating this post. But, in a way, that’s the point. A march that even on the most generous estimate attracted no more than 10,000 people is a flop. This is so even if those who were present enjoyed themselves and thought it a braw occasion. They’re not the whole audience for this kind of caper. I write about this at Think Scotland today: Watching foorage of Saturday’s march for independence in Edinburgh I found myself contemplating Hugh MacDiarmid’s waspish assertion that