Society

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Short story

In Competition No. 2752 you were invited to submit a short story ending with the phrase: ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration.’ Dr Livingstone’s pronouncement, written in 1873 a few days before his wretched death, is putting it mildly. His final days had been plagued by pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, piles, rotting teeth, leeches, hostile African tribesmen and a large blood clot in his gut. Several competitors wove Livingstone in, but the postbag was impressively wide-ranging: crime rubbed shoulders with horror and sci-fi, and there was even a smattering of erotica — very much the genre du jour. Commendations to Lance Levens and Frank Osen, £25 each to the

Michael Henderson

Notes from Salzburg

Gratefully we cast our bread upon the blue-green waters of the Salzach to give thanks to this festival city. Across the river the famous castle stands fortress over the old town. On the terrace of the Cafe Bazar one hears the tongues of France, Italy and Spain as well as Austria, because this is old Europe. Not ‘European’ as defined by the EU, European as in the Arnoldian sense, handing on from one generation to another the best that has been thought, or said, or done. There is a European way of living, and it is easy to find it here. ••• No city of comparable size (150,000 souls) enjoys

Alexander Chancellor

Long Life

When the man from the Cabinet Office telephoned, he was anxious to find out why I hadn’t replied to a letter asking if I would find it ‘agreeable’ to be appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. I told him I hadn’t got the letter, which he said had been posted to me c/o Guardian for which I used to write a column. (The letter, in an envelope labelled ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, ‘urgent’, ‘strictly private’, and stuff like that, was eventually forwarded to me, but a month after it had been sent, already opened and resealed with Sellotape.)  In response to my puzzlement, the civil servant

Aidan Hartley

Wild life

Laikipia My new pride and joy is a pedigree Boran bull named Woragus 317. We know him as Ollie. Sired by the famous 956 Segera from the legendary Gianni line, he was bred on Mark and Nicky Myatt-Taylor’s stud in Tanzania’s distant southern highlands. I recklessly bought him on the strength of a photograph, bidding by email at a recent Boran Cattle Breeders’ Society of Kenya auction. I was in the bush in South Sudan when I heard I had won — and then it sank in that Ollie has cost me the price of a Volkswagen, or a family holiday to Bali. The Boran is ‘God’s gift to cattlemen’,

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Paris en famille

Paris for lovers, tick. Paris for gastronomes, tick. Paris for the fashion-conscious, obviously. But children? Funnily enough, I find it one of the most child-friendly cities we go to. The proprietors of grand boutiques and restaurants who cold-shoulder grown-ups are all smiles when it comes to children. Propping up a bar with my two on the Rue St Honoré on a damp Sunday evening, the young man sitting next to us with his girlfriend chatted with my five-year-old daughter, treated her and the brother to an orange juice, presented her with €10 to buy a croissant and was rather hurt when I gave it back. Not many people dish out

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Let’s blame the Premier League

One of my main preoccupations during Sunday night’s football was the size of Roy Hodgson’s watch. An immense timepiece, it sat on the managerial wrist with the quiet assurance of Big Ben. So weighty was it that you wondered whether Hodgson would have the strength to raise his arm to signal a substitution (in the end he did, though presumably was so exhausted he forgot to replace the hapless Rooney). The watch turns out was a Hublot special edition for Euro 2012, worth umpteen grand. Good for Roy. This is England’s level, and we have been there for some time: moderately skilled, very hard to beat. England are the equivalent

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The great NatWest computer cock-up is merely a symptom of a deeper failure

The great NatWest-RBS computer cock-up has upstaged my personal campaign to expose the lamentable standards of service offered by high-street banks. I was relieved not to find 12 million emails in my inbox from all those whose wages have not been paid or whose house purchases have been held up, and now have to chase compensation through the same dysfunctional maze that was at fault in the first place. RBS chief Stephen Hester’s lame attempt to compare the continuing chaos to a stack of planes waiting to land safely after a spot of bother in the airport, inadvertently conjuring up the mayhem of Die Hard 2, was the last straw.

Owen Matthews

Istanbul: Going Deeper

You’ve done the sights: the Hagia Sofia and the great imperial mosques, the Topkapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar, the Bosporus cruise and Basilica Cistern. With the tourist boxes ticked and the past squared away, it’s time to start exploring the real, living city. You may have had enough of museums, but Orhan Pamuk’s new Museum of Innocence in the Bohemian neighbourhood of Cihangir is worth a visit, if only for the abiding oddness of the concept as much as anything in the exhibits. The museum and Pamuk’s eponymous novel were conceived at the same time, and as Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning author wrote the book about love and obsession set

Peter Wood

All the rage | 30 June 2012

New York The western world seems not just unhappy, but intoxicated with anger. It is the kind of anger that feeds on itself. Offence is not just taken but relished, and multiplied as in a hall of mirrors. I have a name for this kind of anger. A few years ago, in a book about how Americans had learned to brush aside their old ethic of self-control and plunge into the delights of sneering and rage, I christened it the ‘new anger’. It was as if the snarling John McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1981 had become the embodiment of national ideals. Of course, it wasn’t entirely new. The emotionally flamboyant

James Delingpole James Delingpole

An idle question, a deadly bite and 60 years of memories

We’re just saying our farewells to the Post Office Hotel in Chillagoe, in the outback of Far North Queensland, and I’m telling Dorothy ­Lawler, the hotel’s 70-year-old part-time cook, that the coleslaw she made with the steaks we had the other night was the crunchiest and most delicious I’d ever eaten. (It’s a great place, Chillagoe. Go there!) Dorothy says she’s off tomorrow to visit her 103-year-old mother for Mother’s Day. ‘Wow, that’s amazing. How many great-grandchildren does she have?’ I ask. Dorothy tries working it out by counting the number of brothers and sisters she has and what became of them: ‘…and there was Alan. He died of snakebite.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Paying for PFI

There is nothing as dangerous, they say, as the zeal of the newly converted. So it was when Labour under Tony Blair suddenly discovered capitalism. What had been a small-scale pragmatic policy under John Major’s government, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), was taken up with huge gusto in order to see the rebuilding of hundreds of schools and hospitals. Gordon Brown loved it too, because, although less wedded to private enterprise, he spotted a way of fiddling his borrowing figures: by shifting billions of pounds of new investment off the government’s books. We ended up with a deficit of £160 billion anyway. But on top of that, the real cost

Douglas Murray

At home with the Stalins

We all know what a city does when a local boy or girl has done good. But what do you do when the local boy turns out to have done very bad indeed? This is the dilemma facing the Georgian authorities in the city of Gori, not far from the boundary line of South Ossetia. For as well as being the first target of Russian forces during Vladimir Putin’s 2008 invasion, Gori is best known for giving birth to Joseph Stalin. It is now two years since the large statue of its most famous son was taken down from in front of Gori’s town hall. But there remains a dilemma

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Chavs and toffs together

We live in thoroughly PC times, when tweeting rotten things about a black footballer can land you in jail and opposing gay marriage can see you branded a bigot. But there are still two groups of people it’s OK to hate: chavs and toffs. The tracksuit-wearing poor and the tweed-covered rich. The blinged-up yoof who haunt urban bus stops and the Burberry-sporting poshos who get blotto in Chelsea. These two sections of society are being buried beneath a mountain of media abuse. Perhaps it’s time for a chav/toff alliance to fight back against the haters? The respectable and the right-on, who make up the vast bulk of the media and

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

A blackmail plot. A smear. Or was it both.

Like many of the best thrillers the Heath Caper affair involves sex, spies and blackmail, and an array of possible resolutions that are all eminently plausible yet cannot all be true. Or can they? I have something of a personal window into the worlds this story touches. It is an old story, that has just resurfaced — with a new twist — in a radio documentary and Sunday Times article by the BBC’s security correspondent, Gordon Corera. The allegation at its centre was first published in a 1970s book by Josef Frolik, a defector from the Czech secret service. Frolik claimed that his spy colleagues had, years earlier, prepared a

Friday

Martin Bright

Why this government is not down with the kids

Hardly a day goes by without more bad news on youth unemployment. The latest figures on NEETs (a horrible de-humanising term for school leavers who are not in education, employment or training) show that the numbers rose between 2010 and 2011 to over eight per cent. The release of these statistics coincided with new polling which showed a near-complete collapse of support for the government among young people. Does this government hate young people? Probably not. Does it belatedly realise it has a massive problem with youth unemployment? Yes it does. The Youth Contract was introduced by Nick Clegg because he and those around him recognised that the Work Programme

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Lawson: I would not have U-turned

I’m presenting Radio Four’s Week in Westminster tomorrow at 11am and discuss George Osborne’s U-turn with former chancellors Alistair Darling and Nigel Lawson (the latter pictured above when editor of The Spectator). I put to them that it is unwise for a chancellor to perform a U-turn because it undermines his credibility – a very precious commodity in such turbulent times. Darling said that the great risk is that Osborne doesn’t look like he’s in control. Lawson replied:   ‘That is my concern; that it might be thought that the main thrust of policy is no longer secure. And once the financial markets – let alone anyone else – think

Steerpike Steerpike

Now you can own a piece of phone-hacking history

Forget the hacks and starlets, the politicians and media moguls, the defining image of the Leveson Inquiry will always be phone-hacking lawyer Mark Lewis’ terrible orange overcoat. The Zara number got inquiry wags and watchers talking and now I hear the coat is about to take a starring role of its very own. Lewis, who suffers from MS, tells me that he will be auctioning the coat for a charity associated with the disease. Form an orderly queue.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Is it time to let Scotland go?

Lloyd Evans rounds up the highlights of this week’s Spectator debate on the future of the union. The motion was ‘It’s time to let Scotland go’. Margo Macdonald, MSP, opened on a friendly note and declared that she had no plans to fall out with anyone. She wants to preserve Scotland’s ‘social union’ with England. But her country can no longer ‘shackle itself to the shell of a declining empire’. Nor should Scotland send ‘broad-kilted laddies’ to fight wars in foreign lands, ‘using armoured vehicles that are more dangerous to our servicemen than to the enemy.’ England, she claimed, uses Scotland to maintain its ‘magic seat’ on the Security Council.

Richard Marsh

The PFI bailout machine has run out of juice

Although it is nearly 20 years ago, I can still recall being lobbied by the representatives of a private consortium who had nascent plans to redevelop a hospital in south London using the then fabulous new idea we called the private finance initiative.  Before you jump to too many delirious conclusions, the meeting took place in my office, not in an expensive restaurant, and it was the only one I ever had with the group. I may have splashed out on a plate of civil service issue custard creams. At the time I was the special adviser to the then Secretary of State for Health, Virginia Bottomley, and the main

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Beckham’s Olympic mission ends in omission

I’ve always rather taken the George Best line on David Beckham’s footballing abilities:  ‘He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle and he doesn’t score many goals. Apart from that he’s all right.’ But you have to say nonetheless – Beckham’s a thoroughly likeable and decent bloke and I wish, after all the work he’s put in, he’d been awarded a place in the British Olympic © football team. The England coach Stuart Pearce seems to be under the profoundly mistaken illusion that anyone in the country gives a monkey’s about our Olympic football team. We’ve had enough of the hubris of football,