Society

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

GCSE row will rumble on

‘If concerns are expressed, we look into them. We’ve done that.’ When Glenys Stacey appeared on Sky News this evening after Ofqual finally published its initial report into the gradings of the GCSE English exams, she had an air of finality about her. What the chief executive of the regulator was trying to suggest, as she discussed the report’s findings with the presenter, was that this was the end of the row. Even though Ofqual’s report said the problem with last week’s GCSE results was not that the papers taken in June had been marked too harshly, but that those sat in January were marked too generously, this is not the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

American Exceptionalism: The Baloney and the Glory – Spectator Blogs

I’m writing a column about Mitt Romney for tomorrow’s Scotsman so more on him later. Suffice it to say that I thought his speech less impressive than it had to be but that, by the end of the evening, I was more impressed with and by Mitt the Man than I’ve been previously. This was because of the Mormons. Magic underpants and Missouri and all the rest of it be damned, Mitt should talk about his religion more. He may be reluctant to do so and that speaks well of him but this is an election and Mormonism is about the only thing discovered thus far that transforms Romney from

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Mitt Romney’s CEO application

The Republican base is mad as hell with Barack Obama; Mitt Romney is just disappointed. ‘You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.” he said in his acceptance speech last night. “I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed. But his promises gave way to disappointment and division. This isn’t something we have to accept.” It was as if he wished to sound almost like a disillusioned Obama voter. Romney is not an electrifying speaker. Even his wife worked the podium better. When a speech gets into

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Rubio: Obama’s a great guy, but a bad president.

Marco Rubio, who was almost picked as Mitt Romney’s running mate, demonstrated an important part of the Republican strategy last night: to steer clear of any personal attacks of Barack Obama and actually praise the president as a man. In his speech introducing Romney, the Florida senator had this to say:- “Our problem with President Obama isn’t that he’s a bad person. By all accounts, he, too, is a good husband, and a good father and – thanks to lots of practice – a pretty good golfer. Our problem is not that he’s a bad person. Our problem is that he’s a bad president. The Republicans don’t want to come

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Clint Eastwood: Dada Maestro and Republican Superstar – Spectator Blogs

To hell with Mitt Romney. He can wait. The star of last night’s Republican extravaganza in the god-forsaken city of Tampa was Clint Eastwood. With the help of an empty chair he gave one of the finest performances of his career. It was magnificent [sic] and certainly worth more than Million Dollar Baby. It’s only ten or so minutes so I recommend you watch it in all its awful glory. As I said on Twitter it was like watching the father of the bride make a speech at a wedding at which he dislikes the groom and does not recognise his daughter. It’s all a little sad really.

Thursday

Tim Wigmore

McCain sounds his age, not like an elder statesman

John McCain cut rather a sad sight last night as he addressed the Republican National Convention on his 76th birthday. Four years ago, he would have envisaged spending the convention stepping up his campaign for a second presidential term. Now, he was reduced to a speech that attracted only polite interest from delegates, who were far more enthused by the offerings from Rand Paul and Paul Ryan. Few people are consigned to history more rapidly than nominees who lost a presidential election: none since Nixon, with his almost unique powers of resilience, have later campaigned seriously to reclaim the nomination. At times it felt as though the only applause McCain

Matt Cavanagh

Net migration starts to fall – but the real questions remain unanswered

The latest immigration figures published by the ONS today, for the calendar year 2011, show net migration falling for the first time under the coalition – but nowhere near fast enough to give ministers confidence that they will hit their target by 2015. The ONS estimates that immigration last year fell by 25,000, and emigration rose by 11,000, resulting in a drop in net migration of 36,000 – from 252,000 to 216,000. This is in line with my earlier prediction, though the ONS warn that the fall is not statistically significant, and the target of 100,000 still looks a long way away. It is worth noting that despite ministers’ rhetoric,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Olympic effect won’t be so golden for politicians

The Olympics and Paralympics have been a superb spectacle this summer, but will they help the economy? No one in the Treasury thinks so – if anything, they fear the games will hurt the figures and pretty soon we’ll be hearing about the ‘Olympic Effect’ damaging Q3 growth figures. George Osborne is already being mocked for his habit of blaming downturns on snow, holidays etc so I suspect the Chancellor will not mention it. But when first class returns from London to New York were half the price they normally are, you have the feeling not much business is being done. Today, the first economic indicator has come suggesting an Olympic

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The quiet cult of Andrew Strauss

‘I’m fascinated by politics. But I’m not that enthralled by any of the parties.’ Those are the words of Andrew Strauss, who resigned the England cricket captaincy earlier today, in an interview with the Spectator last year. The interview was conducted by the former England cricketer Ed Smith, who remarked that ‘Strauss is not talked about with hushed awe’. Where the great Mike Brearley has entered mythology, Smith noted, Strauss has been merely marked ‘effective’. Now we must talk of Strauss the cricketer in the past tense; and Smith’s judgment merits revisiting. True, Strauss did not inspire awe. He was not a tactician, either in the modern or traditional mould. He was not a macho

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Drop in workless households suggests welfare reform could be starting to work

Could we be starting to see the first fruits of the coalition’s welfare reforms? The Office for National Statistics reported today that the number of workless households has fallen for the second year running. It found that just under 18 per cent of households have no adults in work, a fall of 0.8 percentage points from last year. Between April and June 2012 there were 3.7 million households in the UK where no-one was working, down 153,000. Garyling and his colleague in the Work and Pensions department Iain Duncan Smith will also be buoyed by the news that the number of households where no adult has ever worked also fell by 26,000

Ryan Bourne

Would a wealth tax work?

Roll up, roll up! The biannual Lib Dem half-baked tax policy circus is in town! Last time, the so-called ‘mansion tax’ show never lived up to its billing, as ringleader Clegg tried juggling too many ideas. We had the mansion tax, tycoon tax, new stamp duty bands and the more noble income tax threshold rise to watch. Now, it seems, the spectacle is back – with the big beasts of the Liberal Democrats prowling the airwaves to push for a new wealth tax to ensure the rich ‘pay their fair share’. Unlike the mansion tax, this policy suggestion would not, we are told, be a permanent feature – but rather

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Giles Coren’s Twitter Eulogy

The saying goes that the only silver lining at the end of a political career is the chance to read your own obituary without actually dying. For Giles Coren, the speculation that he had ‘quit Twitter’ was the twenty first century equivalent. It was not all good news though. After a characteristically bad tempered exchange with a rival critic, Coren’s account promptly disappeared for twenty-four hours. The obvious speculation that he had stormed off in one of his signature rages quickly brewed. His last words seemed to be: ‘F**k off Marina. It’s hurtful and bitchy and pompous. When I want career advice from you I’ll f**king ask for it.’ Not bad

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Chris Grayling’s new unpaid work experience scheme

Buoyed by his department’s recent success in squashing allegations of ‘slave labour’, Chris Grayling launched a new back-to-work scheme for unemployed young people in London today. The joint pilot with the Mayor of London will put 6,000 18-24 year-olds with little or no work experience into placements with charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises in the community which last three months. If they refuse to take part, then they will not receive their benefits. Grayling is well aware that this sort of scheme will be controversial, because it could mean young people lose their benefits if they refuse to comply. In an article in the Evening Standard, the employment minister

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rape is rape and abortion is abortion. Except when they’re not. – Spectator Blogs

Way back in my debating days at Trinity College, Dublin we knew you could guarantee large crowds and impressively  – that is, pleasingly – bad-tempered debates twice a year. These were the annual debates on Northern Ireland and abortion. And they really were annual fixtures during which, for years on end, the same arguments were deployed with the same passion and no-one’s views were ever changed by anything they heard. In those days it was usually pretty clear who the bad guys were too. In the case of abortion it was anyone speaking as a representative of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child or, more generally, anyone

Saturday

The Spectator

The worst result

This week, the GCSE results envelope landed on doormats across the country. The results ought, on any rational basis, to shame the nation. Never mind how well or badly pupils may have done individually, taken as a whole the results point to a chillingly predictable trend for anyone in a comprehensive school. A pupil can look at their postcode, and see where it ranks in the government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation. If they live in a relatively prosperous area, they can be expected to have done fairly well. If they live on a sink estate, the odds are that they will have done badly. Parents have long known about this

Christopher Booker

Diary – 25 August 2012

When in 2009 I published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster it provoked contrasting responses from two members of the royal family. Prince Charles, protesting that he was ‘bemused’ by my views on climate change, struck me off his Christmas card list, where I had been for 25 years since we became environmental allies back in the 1980s. I was, however, startled and delighted to have a long, thoughtful and sympathetic letter about the book from Prince Philip, whom I had met only once, and which, inter alia, led me to be far from surprised when he last year made headlines for having dismissed wind turbines as ‘absolutely

Taki

High life | 25 August 2012

With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars, and turned even sillier during the German occupation and following their liberation by Eisenhower and co. Humiliated by Prussia in 1871, saved by America in 1917, done in for good by Germany in 1940, there were two more débâcles in store, Indochina and Algeria, but I’m jumping ahead. I’ve just finished two books on Paris during the occupation and the liberation, one by Alan Riding

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 25 August 2012

Then she rented us a luxury apartment at Penzance in Cornwall for a week. Sightseeing was not high on our agenda. Bring cable ties, she’d said. I’ve been a naughty girl. She went down by train; I drove. I drove due west for three hours through a rainstorm of tropical intensity. My new phone’s blue light winked text messages from her all the way down. One said: ‘Lost my musth. It’s completely gone. Menopause?’ The apartment was called Stanhope Forbes, in homage to the leading light of the Victorian era Newlyn artists’ colony. Stanhope Forbes’s paintings of bustling late-Victorian fish quay scenes, with lovely girls in virginal pinafores, decorated the

Toby Young Toby Young

Oh for the Prince Maurice

Around the middle of last year, I was approached by the writer Tim Lott to see if I’d like to be a judge in the annual literary competition he organises. On the face of it, the prospect wasn’t very appealing. It’s a romantic fiction prize and who wants to read dozens of chick lit novels, particularly as there’s no fee? But Le Prince Maurice Prize does have one thing going for it. The prizegiving takes place at the Prince Maurice Hotel in Mauritius and the judges get to spend a week there — all expenses paid. ‘Can I bring my wife and four children?’ I asked. ‘Er, no. ’Fraid not,’

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 25 August 2012

Q. My wife is known to run a very well-organised house. As a consequence, weekend guests often arrive without the right kit, assuming they can go and raid our boot room and borrow something belonging to one of our (seven) children rather than weighing themselves down with heavy boots and coats et cetera for their journey. My wife does not mind them doing this, but I do — it is the presumption that I mind. What do you suggest, Mary? — Name and address withheld A. Retrain the miscreants by mislaying the key to the boot room and instead offering them ‘pop-up’ raincoats fashioned from heavy duty garden refuse sacks