Society

Tuesday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The racism of the respectable

To be a racist in Britain, you do not need to cover yourself in tattoos and join a neo-Nazi party. You can wear well-made shirts, open at the neck, appreciate fine wines and vote Left at election time. Odd though it may seem to older readers, the Crown Prosecution Service now regards itself as a liberal organ of the state. This week it is making a great play of its success in deterring violence against women. Its lawyers brought 91,000 domestic violence prosecutions last year and secured 67,000 convictions. As I have mentioned in this space before, many criminologists believe that the willingness, not just of prosecutors and the police

Monday

Matthew Sinclair

The Treasury sides with the consumer over climate policy

Tim Yeo is now posing as a friend of the consumer. Launching the latest report from the Energy and Climate Change Committee this morning, he attacked the Treasury for ‘refusing to back new contracts to deliver investment in nuclear, wind, wave and carbon capture and storage’. The report argues that could ‘impose unnecessary costs on consumers’. The basic logic of his claim is this: investments are more expensive when they are riskier. Investors expect to be compensated for the risks being taken with their money. If the Government offers guarantees that reduce the amount of risk energy companies run by investing in expensive sources of energy like offshore wind, then those firms

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Spain and Italy present a bigger terror for the Eurozone

MPs have been amusing themselves with a rather grim game in which they guess what event will lead to Parliament being recalled in August. Over the last few days, the Euro crisis has become the definite favourite. The yield on Spanish bonds is now over 7.55 per cent – a rate that is unaffordable in anything other than the shortest of terms – the IMF is indicating it will cut off future aid to Greece, and Italy’s regional debts are about to pull back into the eye of the storm. Now, this crisis has so far being marked by a willingness by the Eurozone to do just enough to stave off the trouble for

Steerpike Steerpike

Warne caught for one

With the South Africans slaughtering England at the Oval this weekend, Mr Steerpike was more intrigued by the goings-on off the pitch. Catching up with a super-skinny and immaculately preened Shane Warne, it would seem that the former Aussie spin-king is still very paranoid about being photographed smoking in public. Every time a small child came up demanding a photo, Warne risked setting fire to his tight Armani number by hiding his cigarette behind his back. Still, it’s an improvement on the ‘altercation’ he had in 2000 with some Kiwi lads who snapped him smoking whilst being sponsored by a nicotine patch company. No smashed cameras this time. Ed Miliband

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The lady Harriet

Will we soon see Harriet Harman shopping in Iceland while wearing a shell-suit and sporting, just above the cleft of her buttocks, the tattoo of a leaping dolphin? The fragrant one has been assuring journalists of her bona fide blue collar credentials. Well, actually, in fairness, that’s not quite what she said. She merely insisted that she was ‘not as posh as Samantha Cameron’ and not ‘landed gentry’. Harriet was very expensively educated and is the niece of the 7th Earl of Longford — so gentry, then, if not quite landed. But I suppose from Harriet’s vantage point this makes her sort of normal, even if from the vantage point

Sunday

Douglas Murray

An ideological hatred

Two events this week have highlighted, from very different places, an identical problem. In Bulgaria on Wednesday a bomb was detonated on a tour bus carrying Israelis. Six people were killed and many more badly injured. On Friday a couple from Oldham, Mohammed Sadiq Khan and Shasta Khan, were sent to prison for attempting to put together an explosive device and planning to attack Jewish targets in Manchester. What links these two events across a continent? The answer is ideology. It is an ideology which deliberately targets Jews as Jews. In the West many people continue to try to pretend that it is not about Jews at all, but about

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A shared hobby

It’s always nice when a married couple are able to share a hobby – even if it is, in the case of Shasta and Mohammed Khan, trying to blow up Jewish people. These two imbeciles, from Oldham, have now been convicted of planning terrorist attacks which they intended to effect with hairdressing chemicals and chapatti flour. Apparently they would drive to Manchester and look at synagogues, seething with rage. “We must kill of them,” Mo told his loving wife on one of these strange trysts. Previously they had been less than radical, preferring to stay at home and watch Coronation Street and Emmerdale on their widescreen HD infidel television. I

Saturday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 21 July 2012

I came up and out of the underground station into the busy Brixton Road. It was 9 o’clock on a humid, overcast summer evening. As well as being a bustling place of departure and arrival, the precinct in front of the station seemed also to be a preferred place for the locals to meet and sit and socialise. I was looking for an Eritrean restaurant called Adulis. Here I was to meet a woman I’d met two days ago on a dating website. This new dating website is proving amazingly fruitful, which surprises me not least because it was the first time I’ve been truthful on one. So far we’d

Toby Young Toby Young

Thousand-pound tomatoes

I always thought it was something that happened to other men as they got older, but not me. I was different. Owing to my extraordinary machismo and strength of character, I would not experience this ‘life change’ until I was at least 75 — and at that point I would just take a pill to restore my virility. But it’s no good. Turns out we all suffer from this affliction in middle age, no matter how determined we are to keep our peckers up. I have succumbed. I’ve taken up gardening. OK, ‘gardening’ is the wrong word. It conjures up images of elderly women in floppy hats, stooping over their

Taki

High life | 21 July 2012

Gstaad  Mountains in summer are of an astral beauty, the snowy, far away, shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks with such men, as it does with mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about a certain peak in Tibet, and claimed that the God of Death dwelled on that particular mountain. One could say that about many places. Only last week more than 11 people lost their lives on Mont Blanc, and the numbers will reach close to 100 by the time the summer’s over. The ancient Greeks thought the heart of the world was Mount Olympus. (Hades, of course, was the you know what of the world.)

The Spectator

Competitive advantage

Scambusters is the name of a government initiative to prevent householders falling victim to rogue traders who use high-pressure sales techniques to flog lousy and vastly overpriced goods and services. It would be more convincing if the government did not so frequently allow itself to be ripped off. At his appearance before the home affairs select committee this week, G4S chief executive Nick Buckles had the air of a cowboy plumber standing amid a bathroom full of leaking pipes, and demanding, in spite of the havoc he has caused, that his bill be paid in full. To astonished MPs he agreed that the reputation of his company was in ‘tatters’,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 July 2012

Q. This autumn I will be studying in Paris. A friend from Italy will also be studying there and she wants us to share a flat. She is amazing and I worship her but, the problem is that I need to be alone first thing in the morning — and she wants to talk. The truth, ridiculous or not, is that if I can’t have my mental privacy at this time, I am much less productive. Although she knows how I feel, whenever we have stayed the night under the same roof, the moment I put a foot out of bed she somehow knows and comes into my room talking.

Virginia Ironside

Diary – 21 July 2012

A few years back, Julian Maclaren-Ross was a forgotten writer. Today his wonderful books, such as Of Love and Hunger, are back in print, and on Monday, along with his biographer Paul Willetts, I took part in a centenary celebration of his life, with film of the man himself and of many of his contemporaries, most of them now dead: Alan Ross, Joan Wyndham, John Heath-Stubbs. J.M-R., a renowned Fitzrovian bore, was, as a friend of his put it, ‘better on the page than on the pavement’. True of so many writers one knows. ••• One perk of taking my one-woman show round the country, if you can call it

Melissa Kite

Real life | 21 July 2012

Luckily, I got The Ridiculous over and done with when I discharged myself from my local hospital in south London.  Now it was time for The Sublime. ‘Good evening, madam, and welcome to the Princess Grace. If you would please take a seat for a few moments, someone will show you to your room.’ It really was a few moments, too. A cheerful porter grabbed hold of my bags and swept me into a lift taking us two floors up to a pristine room overlooking St Marylebone church. When I say pristine, I mean pristine. Never mind eating your dinner off the floor. You could have eaten your dinner out

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 July 2012

Home The Armed Forces were called upon to supply 3,500 men to look after security for the Olympic Games after GS4, a security company, failed to recruit enough staff. Nick Buckles, its chief executive, agreed before a Commons committee that it had been a ‘humiliating shambles’ but said that the company would keep its £57 million management fee. The UK Border Agency had laid off 1,000 more workers than it intended, the National Audit Office found. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, appearing at a rail depot in Smethwick with Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said that he was ‘even more committed’ to the coalition, and announced new rail schemes

The Spectator

Letters | 21 July 2012

Beyond a boundary Sir: This is the first time that I have been really annoyed by an article in your magazine. Your leader ‘The Tories are back’ (14 July) concludes by stating that the redrawing of constituency boundaries is a piece of blatant gerrymandering. But the present boundaries are grossly unfair to the Conservatives. When Tony Blair and Labour won the 2005 election the party gained 35.3 per cent of the vote and won 356 seats. When David Cameron and the Tories gained 36.1 per cent of the vote in 2010 they won only 307 seats — hence the coalition. The present constituencies do not provide a fair and level

Dot Wordsworth

Loud and clear

On the matter of a referendum (not, of course for British people), the Prime Minister said recently that he hoped the Falkland islanders ‘will speak loudly and clearly and that Argentina will listen’. This seems to me an example of hypercorrect speech, parallel to the tendency of people whose social insecurity overwhelms their grammar to say: ‘It was given to my husband and I’. Not all adverbs end in –ly. Loud and clear is a well known phrase, made more popular in the 20th century by the wireless response to the enquiry ‘Do you read me?’ But loud as an adverb has a history of more than 1,000 years, fortunately

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 21 July 2012

‘Olympism’ is, according to the 2011 Olympic charter, ‘a philosophy of life which places sport at the service of humankind… exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind… Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.’ The great Greek doctor Galen, who knew a bit about athletes, took a slightly different view. He wrote: ‘All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed

Raymond Keene

No. 227

Black to play. This position is a variation from Commons-Gheorghiu, Lone Pine 1975. Black is two pawns down but has the chance for a tactical coup. Can you see it?  Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 24 July 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 f6 (1 … Bxd5 2 Re8+ Bg8 3 f7) Last week’s winner Derek Shakespeare, Hants

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 21 July 2012

Some bridge tournaments take everything you’ve got and then some. The emotional output is as extreme as the most demanding, turbulent relationship and you stagger home needing urgent hospital care. Then there are some that are great bridge but not life or death. And then there is Biarritz. A cracking holiday with a bit of bridge attached. The most fun is the teams event which is split into two sections — Main and Handicap — which gives everyone a chance of success. Extra points are given to non-professional players and this year the Handicap was won by my friend Jonathan Harris’s team. Jonathan played with Steve Capal and his wife