Society

Saturday

Taki

High life | 4 August 2012

Thucydides carefully structured his Peloponnesian war history as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. ‘It is a general law of nature to rule whatever one can,’ say the Athenians blandly to the denizens of Melos before slaughtering them. (The tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, had refused to join an alliance with Athens in 416 BC, so the civilised Athenians punished innocent civilians by killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery.) Athens was a direct democracy, whereas Sparta was a militaristic oligarchy, yet it was Athens that abused her power once the great Pericles had died of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 August 2012

Have you been following Mitt Romney’s ‘gaffes’? In Britain, he said that there were some concerns about security before the Olympics. In Israel, he said that the ‘economic vitality’ of Israel compared favourably with its neighbours and attributed this in part to ‘the power of culture’. He said that Iran should be confronted, not appeased. In Poland, he met Lech Walesa and praised those who stood out against the ‘all-powerful state’. One of his aides said something moderately rude to reporters who were trying to goad his boss. To the unprejudiced mind, all of this sounds wholly unremarkable, even vaguely positive, but we are talking not about the unprejudiced mind

The Spectator

Doping the economy

An outsider viewing the Olympic opening ceremony could easily have gained the impression that Britain was in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A week on Sunday we are promised an equally spectacular closing ceremony. For the moment, the cost of staging the Olympics — £9.3 billion for the games, including £80 ­million for the opening and closing ceremonies alone — has been laid aside in a rush of public enthusiasm. The biggest source of discontent this week has been the rows of empty seats reserved for the IOC’s politburo and their associates. After any big party, of course, there is the risk of a big hangover. The Olympics will be

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 August 2012

I was on my back on the operating table for my long-awaited minor op. Three lesions had to come off under local anaesthetic: two on my chest, one on my shoulder. A Dr Mukopadhyay wielded the scalpel. This slight, shy, otherwordly man surprised me at the outset by diffidently placing a comforting, perhaps healing, perhaps textbook hand on my shoulder and leaving it there until I ducked my shoulder away in embarrassment. Once he’d begun cutting, Dr Mukopadhyay kept at it for over an hour with all the care and concentrated attention of a master watchmaker. When he voiced an instruction, he did so softly and humbly. As Dr Mukopadhyay

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 August 2012

One second the spaniel was sitting in the window seat, looking out of the third-floor attic window at the dogs playing in the garden below. The next second she was gone. Time slows down when things like this happen. I remember looking and her being there, and I remember looking back and wondering where she was. And I remember hearing the yelp as she landed 30 foot down. In truth, the space between me looking and her not being there and the sound of the yelp can only have been half a second but it felt like a lifetime. After the yelp, time speeded back up again but I wanted

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 August 2012

Home After an opening ceremony going on into the early hours, directed by Danny Boyle and watched at one point by 26.9 million viewers in Britain, the Olympic Games in the Lea valley settled down to its sporting business, with only marginal complaints about empty seats, food queues, over-protective branding and the loss of the keys to Wembley stadium. The locks were changed. Two hundred and four copper petals attached to steel tubes had risen into the air without a hitch to form an Olympic cauldron of flame, to the designs of Thomas Heatherwick. The Queen had co-operated in making a jokey film sequence with Daniel Craig in the character

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 4 August 2012

Q. A friend of mine put five Coldplay tickets up for sale on Facebook. They were £80 each and I assumed they must be very good seats. I sent her the money. When they arrived I was surprised to see that they had originally been only £45 each. I made a wry comment to this effect but she expressed no guilt; she just said, ‘I rather hoped a close friend would not buy them — it is a bit of a side business for me.’ Mary, what is your view about this behaviour? — L.O., London W14 A. It was no surprise that your friend should wish to profiteer: her

The Spectator

Letters | 4 August 2012

Midwife crisis Sir: All Leah McLaren has to do is wait and see if she still wants a hospital birth after antenatal care from her home-birth midwife (‘Bullied by the NHS’, 28 July). Our helpline is deluged with calls from women who, having experienced a first birth in hospital, have booked a home birth for the second. Towards the end of pregnancy, they are told that the community midwives are fully booked, or they are given a spurious or exaggerated medical reason for going in. I hope she is with a team of midwives who are able to support her eventual choice. Jean Robinson President, Association for Improvements in the

Dot Wordsworth

Olympic family

The people who occasionally drive in the empty Olympic lanes and are entitled to sit in the seats left empty at Olympic events are called the Olympic family. It seems to me unwise to have attached such a name to this already creepy notion. Even the UK Border Agency has special procedures for an ‘Olympic or Paralympic Games family member visitor’. Since the world is addicted to gangster films, everyone knows that Mafia gangs call themselves ‘the family’. In The Luciano Story (1954), ‘The inside facts on the greatest criminal conspiracy in history and the mastermind behind it – Lucky Luciano’, Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten explained that ‘to Mafiosi,

Raymond Keene

No. 229

White to play. This position is from Keene-Anon, Simultaneous Display, Brighton College, 1995. What is White’s best chance to play for a win in this endgame? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 7 August or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Bc8+ Last week’s winner R.F. Tindall, Great Shelford, Cambs

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 4 August 2012

No one could have been more of an Olympic moaner than me. The past two-year countdown has left me seething with rage and resentment as we were asked totally to change our lives and basically stay home so that the dignitaries could whisk through London. Then came Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony and it seems the whole world was charmed, me included. So home I am staying and reading bridge! This technique was described by Terence Reese — an Olympian if ever there was one — over 50 years ago. Today’s hand was played by David Herman at Rubber Bridge and will serve as an example, but the technique can be

Robin Oakley

Money worries

OK, OK, so taking part is what matters. But it is medals the viewers want out of the Olympics, lots of them, and for once there is the expectation there will be plenty, perhaps nearly 50, from our cyclists, swimmers, sailors, athletes and the rest. Since the Atlanta Games of 1996, when Britain returned, to the nation’s horror, with just one gold medal (courtesy of Redgrave and Pinsent) and finished 36th in the medals table behind such major sporting nations as Belgium, Algeria and Kazakhstan, expectations have been transformed. It has happened — thank you, John Major’s government — because the National Lottery has produced funding and UK Sport has

Columba

2071

LETHAL BITES (14 7) and BLITHE TALES (36 33) are possible results of the STORMING (19) of THE BASTILLE (an event commemorated on 14/7).  Definitions of the components of the results are 23, 31, 11 and 8. First prize P. Langdale, London N10 Runners-up Alan Donovan, Croydon; John Light, Addlestone, Surrey

Columba

2074: Capital punishment

Six unclued lights are synonymous with one unclued light which, according to a quotation in ODQ, is 38 43 (five words).  The key light is integral to the name of the quotation’s author, which must be highlighted. Across 1     Boats, bad in parts, seem abandoned (14, two words) 9     Joke about current revelry (4) 11     Tories in error bash broadcast (9) 14     Cheats once or twice around end, losing marks (6) 16     See poem turning true (5) 17     Gets away from contemptible people, not united (5) 20     Baronet in love, ill-mannered, thrust forward (7) 24     Prayers from bishop and me in garden

Shiraz Maher

What the government should do to tackle honour violence and forced marriages

It has taken the police nine years to secure convictions for murder against the parents of 17 year old Shafilea Ahmed. Murdered by her parents in an honour killing, they spun a web of lies to conceal the true circumstances of her death for years. A wall of silence surrounded the case until 2007 when police finally made a breakthrough, and charged the parents. Cases like Shafilea’s occasionally capture the public attention and then recede from popular consciousness, but what can authorities do to end honour based violence and forced marriages? There was a distinct lack of political will under the last Labour government to tackle this problem. Most acutely, the problem of honour related crime affects families of

David Crane

Against all odds

For more than 40 years now Clive Brittain has enjoyed a unique position in British racing. There are plenty of other trainers who could match his record in top races, but has there ever been anyone in the history of the sport who has tilted at so many unlikely windmills and so consistently hit them? Vedvyas at 33/1 for his first-ever winner, Julio Mariner at 28s for his first classic, Rajeem at 50s for the 2006 Falmouth and, most ludicrous of all, that old slow-boat of Lady Beaverbrook’s, Terimon, who slouched along at the back of Nashwan’s Derby before plugging on into a distant second at the absurd starting price

Lucy Vickery

Oh! What a horrible morning!

In Competition No. 2757 you were invited to introduce a note of unwelcome reality into a song from a musical. Thanks to Brian Allgar for suggesting this corker of a competition, which attracted a large entry. You might have taken as your model ‘Pore Jud is Daid’ from Oklahoma!, which, as Josephine Boyle points out, is not without gritty realism: ‘He looks like he’s asleep, It’s a shame that he won’t keep. But it’s summer and we’re running out of ice.’ Frank Upton, W.J. Webster, Paul Evans and Alexander Faris just missed out on joining the winners, printed below, who are rewarded with £25 each. Alan Millard pockets the bonus

Bruce Anderson

Vintage law

History is duty as well as pleasure. We ought to chronicle our own times, so that posterity will know what manner of men we were. The other night, that thought struck me in the context of John Smith. When it comes to his politics, the task can safely be left to historians; there will be plenty of material. But some crucial records are in danger of effacement. I am referring to the John Smith legal archive. John used to delight his friends with stories drawn from his career as a lawyer. There were, apparently, about 35 of them, and it is time that they were collected, before old men forget.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Like the Olympic medals table, GDP figures tell only part of the story

A ‘triple dip’ sounds like a move that might defeat a drug-pumped Olympic gymnast, but it’s what some City pundits now expect the UK economy to perform. After a 0.7 per cent drop in GDP between April and June — the third consecutive quarter of the double-dip recession — a ‘technical bounce’ should make the rest of the year look relatively healthy. But continuing chaos in the eurozone combined with a stalled US recovery, a slowdown in China and whatever happens next in the vicinity of Iran and Syria could make everything go pear-shaped again in 2013. And that’s really as much detail as you need on this topic, because

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Old habits make sense

‘Develop your eccentricities while you are young,’ said David Ogilvy. ‘That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going gaga.’ I am 46. And I am happily beginning to discover that a lot of habits I once thought ‘geriatric’ are in fact common sense. I haven’t yet started wearing beige or buying shoes that close with Velcro, but I’m tempted. And last week I gave in to one urge and went around the house compulsively labelling things. I haven’t reached the point where my remote controls and radios have little torn shreds of sticky paper attached to them with hand-drawn arrows labelling buttons ‘video’, ‘Radio 4’ and ‘off’.