Society

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Iran and oil are still on the agenda

For all the talk about Greece and France and the Eurozone, it’s telling just how much our politicians are focusing on Iran. Indeed, some of the most concrete political settlements of the past few days have concerned that turbulent state. On Friday, the US Congress approved a Bill which included the blunt reminder that, ‘It shall be the policy of the United States to take all necessary measures, including military action if required, to prevent Iran from threatening the United States, its allies or Iran’s neighbours with a nuclear weapon.’ And the G8 subsequently put out a statement about oil reserves that clearly had Iran in mind. ‘Looking ahead to

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 21 May 2012

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson says Cameron’s Fruit Ninja obsession is real, explains why reason doesn’t apply to the eurozone and flies in to Gatwick to find a chaotic disgrace. James Forsyth reports on the strains on the Cameron-Hilton relationship and says the coalition partners need to co-operate on growth. Peter Hoskin remarks on the weird hold President Hollande has on UK politics. Allister Heath presents the 2020 Tax Commission’s report. Martin Bright gives his thoughts on the nature of the Lobby. And Rod Liddle recommends staying away from Dubai, and describes what standing up to the banks really looks like.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Lockerbie Affair is Not Over

The death of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for their part in the Lockerbie Bombing, is a matter of some relief. It marks the end of one part of an affair from which few of the protagonists graduate with credit. As this is Lockerbie, however, you can expect the conspiracy fires to burn for some time yet.  As far as Megrahi’s release is concerned I continue to believe cock-up rather more probable than conspiracy. Alex Salmond was stretching his case to breaking point yesterday when he pointed out that Megrahi had at least died of the prostate cancer with which he had been diagnosed. See, he really was

Sunday

Allister Heath

In place of tinkering: the 2020 Tax Commission

The report which Fraser mentioned last week, from the 2020 Tax Commission, has just been published – you can download the summary here and full report here. Allister Heath, chairman of the commission and a contributing editor of The Spectator, says more here:- It is time for Britain to make a vital choice. Our economy is stagnant, crippled by excessively high public spending, high levels of leverage, a mismanaged and inefficient public sector, an extraordinarily complex and punitive tax system and a public mood that has become increasingly anti-capitalist. There are two options. We can either decide to tweak the status quo – try and keep a lid on public spending, reform bits of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Gatwick competes in the disgrace Olympics

Heathrow Airport’s passport control already offers a notorious welcome to Britain, but Gatwick is now offering hot competition. Gatwick Express, the rail artery connecting the airport to London, installed new ticket gates at the airport a few months ago ending the old system where you could buy a ticket on the train. But they failed to install enough ticket machines to cope with the summer demand, leading to absolute bedlam which I’ve just witnessed. The staff are mortified, and can only apologise to the Greeks and Spanish visitors who arrive here appalled at the kind of scenes that would disgrace any country – far less the fourth richest in the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Standing up to banks

For all their cosmetic bluster about bonuses, our national politicians have never really stood up to the banks: it takes a bloody minded local politician to do that — and win. So some sort of award is surely due to Nader Fekri, the mayor of Calderdale. He attempted to withdraw cash from a NatWest ATM in Hebden Bridge and the machine swallowed his card. When this happens to me I usually just start crying: I know it will take the bank weeks to send out a new one (or “five working days” as they put it) and then another few weeks for the PIN to arrive. Nader was made of

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Perfect

Pop Larkin from The Darling Buds of May won himself a place in the Oxford English Dictionary by saying things like: ‘Perfick wevver! You kids all right at the back there?’ So it was some surprise to find a couple of television advertisements mispronouncing perfect in quite a different way. They say the second syllable as though it were spelled fecked, as in the stressed syllable of effect. Perfect has a long and complicated history, and was never pronounced with the ‘c’ at all in the Middle Ages. The old pronunciation is preserved in the surname Parfitt (an occupational name, for an apprentice who was trained or perfect in his

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Carry on screaming

The Bread Street Kitchen is a big restaurant near the Mansion House, brought to you by Gordon Ramsay’s big rage; he is the man who, at one point or another, has owned 13 Michelin stars, millions of TV viewers and a turkey called ­Nigella, which he may or may not have murdered and made into a turkey burger. In fact, he had a shed of celebrity turkeys: there was also a Gary (Rhodes), a Jamie (Oliver), a Delia (Smith) and, most unkindly, an Ainsley (Harriott). At this point someone should really have called Chefs’ Anonymous. The Bread Street Kitchen opened nine months ago, which gives us time to see if

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 19 May 2012

Q. As chairman of the parish council, I am required, along with a local member of the aristocracy, to judge the best red, white and blue outfit and the best hat at the forthcoming village Diamond Jubilee celebration. The potential diplomatic pitfalls are legion. I have thought of saying that I have, during the occasion, been texting pictures to our MP (who happens to be the Prime Minister) and claiming the selection was his. However, I fear that this deception may result in me ending up in front of some inquiry or other. Can you suggest a better way to negotiate this — as far as I am concerned —

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Parenting is a moral issue

When the government announced its new £5 million parenting project last week I thought I should offer to help. I have four children, after all, so know a thing or two about the subject. I sent a message via Twitter to the owner of the Parent Gym, one of the ­organisations involved in the scheme. ‘I’d be happy to donate all my Spectator columns on parenting,’ I said. ‘You could reproduce them as an example of what not to do.’ It was a joke, obviously. Middle-class dads trade anecdotes in the park on Saturday mornings about what crap parents they are, but the fact that they’re in the park with

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 19 May 2012

When I was about to start a weekend colour supplement for the Independent in 1988, I got a note from the poet James Fenton containing a list of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ about what to put in it. The one that has stuck in my mind was to include no articles about Tuscany. This was very good advice, but far from easy to act upon. Those parts of the media concerned with ‘lifestyle’ were then obsessed with Tuscany, having recently invented the ghastly word ‘Chiantishire’ to embrace the idea that the area between Florence and Siena had become a sort of English upper-class preserve. This was strange, because the British were

Melissa Kite

Real life | 19 May 2012

The foal is out of hospital and back home. To recap: the foal cost £600 and her first veterinary bill, sustained when she threw herself on top of a fence post, cost £768. That’s fine. I know horse owning makes no sense. I’m coming to the conclusion that life in general makes no sense. What I’m slightly less sanguine about is the fact that no sooner had we put little Darcy in her stable and shut the door than one of the others started limping. Gracie, the skewbald sports pony, came out of her box lame for no apparent reason, though when we examined her it seemed more than likely

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 19 May 2012

Listening to the BBC news and current affairs programmes, you’d think that Britain is a socialist republic. Which is odd because my entire extended family, on both my mother’s side (smallholders) and on my father’s (urban lower-middle class), is without exception monarchist conservative. From time to time there are rumours that somebody or other has cast their vote for the LibDems, or is thinking about doing so, but we laugh and put this down to an excess of sublimated sexuality rather than political conviction. We have a short branch of the family which is staunch Hitlerite Nazi, but no party’s manifesto, certainly not the BNP’s, ever comes anywhere close to

Taki

High life | 19 May 2012

Miami Beach I thought it a good time to visit, neither spring break debauchery nor fashionista pretence time. So I signed up yet again for the judo championships, trained very hard and flew down with four buddies hoping to stay in a family hotel near the water, a bit like Bogie stopping at a place in Key Largo and running into Johnny Rocco, a crime tsar grown old and bitter and played by Edward G. Robinson. In that wonderful golden oldie, Claire Trevor played Rocco’s alcoholic mistress and portrayed the hooker as a sympathetic victim. (She also won the Academy Award for that role.) Well, I’ve got news for you.

The Spectator

Letters | 19 May 2012

Staying home for marriage Sir: ‘Find me a person who stopped voting Conservative last week because of David Cameron’s vague, half-arsed, lacklustre stance on gay marriage. Go on. I dare you… I’ll settle for just one of them instead…Anyone?’ (Hugo Rifkind, 12 May). Well, there’s me for a start: for the first time ever (I have voted at every election since I was old enough, and I am now over 70) I spoiled my ballot paper for this reason; and I’m not the only one who thinks that the preservation of marriage as normally understood (one man and one woman) is of fundamental importance to our society. The Coalition for

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: The wrong ancient gods

The Royal Mint has just released some gold coins to celebrate the London Olympics. John Bergdahl, who designed them, explained the source of his ‘inspiration’ as ‘the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece, where the first athletes pledged their allegiance to the gods of Olympia.’ Really? That ‘gods of Olympia’ will have set the alarm bells ringing for most readers, because there were no ‘gods of Olympia’. There were gods of Mt Olympus, but it is unwise to stage events like chariot races on mountains, and Olympus was 140 miles from the place where the Games were actually held every four years for nearly 1,000 years from 776 bc, i.e.

The Spectator

Barometer | 19 May 2012

Breaking bad A Ming vase sold for £550,000, having had a hole drilled in it to turn it into a table lamp. Without the hole it would have been worth four times as much. Owners of antiques work hard to keep them safe from thieves, but they are themselves often the problem. — Last year the owner of a £14,000 Japanese porcelain vase reduced its value to £2,000 by chipping it while he packed it for BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. — Last November the owner of a Qing vase took £200,000 off its value after she decided to chisel off the rim to even it up a bit. — Last week

Conrad Black

Diary – 19 May 2012

It is unusual in Canada to have had the same address for 60 years, and for an urban house to have ten acres around it (testimony to my father’s foresight), and these facts made it especially painful not to set eyes on my home for five years while I struggled in the American Gulag. It has been an affecting return, with many kindnesses and very few echoes of the appalling defamations that announced the beginning of my travails (and have ended in generous libel settlements in my favour). Given the correlation of forces between the US government and me, it is ending as well as it could, and the remaining

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 May 2012

Home The Bank of England decided against more quantitative easing, after creating £325 billion in three years. Steve Hilton, the Downing Street director of strategy, left proposals for cuts of £25 billion from welfare spending as he headed off for an academic post in California. Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary said that business leaders were whingeing, and ‘large businesses are sitting on a pretty large pile of cash’. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said: ‘There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.’ Unemployment fell by 45,000 to 2.63 million. Thousands of civil servants are to be asked to work from home during the period of the Olympic Games, from 21 July

The Spectator

Old news

There is one crumb of comfort that Fleet Street can extract from the phone-hacking scandal: its own foibles still create a vastly bigger splash than do those of newer media. This week Facebook investors harangued the company’s chief executive for wearing a hoodie in meetings and Yahoo’s chief executive resigned after a shareholder questioned his claim to hold a computer science degree. But they hardly caused a ripple compared with the news that former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, her husband and five others are to be charged with perverting the course of ­justice. The hacking inquiry has become like The Mousetrap: a show that never closes. Unlike The