Society

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

How a fountain pen and a chiropractor restored my lost youth

God, it’s a bore getting older: all those things you used to be able to do but can’t any more and will never be able to do again. Grow hair, for example (except in all the wrong places); recover quickly from hangovers; vault fences; climb high up trees without getting vertigo; be looked at with anything more than indifference or disgust by attractive young females; and so on. But it’s not all bad. Sometimes you can buck the trend. A few months ago, my friend David Hearsey — who flew Halifax bombers in the war — emailed to tell me that he’d recently taken up flying again. How amazingly impressive

Andrew Watts

The new Establishment

The Establishment Club reopens in Soho this week, and it is easy to see why. Peter Cook started the original club in 1961, when there was an unpopular Conservative government, led by a cabal of Old Etonians, presiding over a recession; and the Establishment Club’s Soho premises were at the centre of the satire boom that mocked the Tories and led to their losing the 1964 election. Aside from the satire on the stage, Private Eye briefly had its offices in the club; upstairs there was the studio where Lewis Morley took the photograph of Christine Keeler naked astride a chair which illustrates every article about the Profumo affair. This

John Julius-Norwich

The stranger on the train

What a pleasure it was to be reminded in a ‘Life and Letters’ column by Allan Massie (28 July) of Desmond MacCarthy. He was an old friend of my parents’ and, in the immediate postwar years, a fairly frequent visitor to their house in Chantilly, outside Paris. One Friday afternoon — it must I think have been 1950 or 1951 — we were sitting opposite each other as the train rattled through Normandy. I was at that time reading Russian at Oxford and was struggling through War and Peace in the original. Not surprisingly, the book caught Desmond’s eye. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he murmured in that wonderful velvety

Tuesday

Shiraz Maher

We need to hear more from Tony Blair on Syria

Conventional wisdom suggests that Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime will crumble from within if given enough time. That’s the reasoning which has, in part at least, prevented Western governments from intervening in the conflict so far. Tony Blair challenged proponents of that view yesterday. ‘People say inevitably he will go. I don’t think it is inevitable, actually, unless we are prepared to make clear our support and solidarity for those people who are struggling against what is a very, very brutal repression now,’ he told Radio 4’s Today programme. Although Blair isn’t necessarily advocating military intervention, he does think we should be exploring military options more thoroughly. This is the conundrum

Jamie Thunder

The government will not snoop on your every move

Nick Cohen (‘Nowhere to hide’, 15 September) raises some interesting points about the double-edged nature of the internet. I agree with this sentiment, although not for the same reasons. Yes, the World Wide Web has brought about massive benefits, allowing people to communicate and connect in ways never before imagined. However it also has a down side. And this is that it affords criminals and those who wish to do us harm the same new ways to communicate and connect. It is this that concerns me, rather than Mr Cohen’s claim that it will allow, through our Communications Data Bill, the government to monitor your every move. This argument is

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Mitt Romney attacks ‘victim’ Obama voters

A secret recording of Mitt Romney talking to donors has been released by Mother Jones, a left-wing American magazine, and even to his wellwishers (myself included) it sounds dreadful. He declares that 47 per cent of Americans are ‘dependent’ on government and regard themselves as ‘victims’. ‘There are 47 per cent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement.

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

‘Denuded’ Work and Pensions committee sheds little light on Universal Credit

The Work and Pensions Select Committee was much denuded this evening, chair Anne Begg told the guests: its membership had either been promoted in the reshuffle or had personal crises to attend to. In the end Begg was joined by Andrew Bingham, Stephen Lloyd, Teresa Pearce and Glenda Jackson to interrogate Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud about the implementation of universal credit. Their questions seemed rather denuded, too: not of detail, for these MPs do truly know their stuff when it comes to welfare reform, but of a sense of the bigger picture. During the hearing, which lasted nearly three hours, the Work and Pensions Secretary and his Welfare

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Mitt Romney’s campaign begins to leak; in 2012 post-mortems don’t even require a corpse – Spectator Blogs

One of the truths about campaign reporting is that results determine everything. That is, winners are treated as superstars, losers as dimwits. Winning campaigns are always focused, disciplined, well-organised, in-control, cool; losing campaigns are invariably dysfunctional, confused, prone to internecine warfare and staffed by borderline psychopaths. That’s how the insta-historians in the press and blogosphere score these events. If Hillary Clinton had defeated Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary her campaign staff would have been treated more kindly (even Mark Penn!) while the Obama campaign would have been written-up as, at best, a heroic, noble effort in the face of impossible odds. More probably, he’d have been castigated for

Jonathan Jones

Increased support for more spending, but also for benefit cuts

‘Support for an increase in public spending rises.’ That’s the headline generated by the latest British Social Attitudes survey results, out today. They show that the proportion of the population saying that the government should ‘increase taxes and spend more’ rose from 31 per cent in 2010 to 36 per cent in 2011 — the first such rise since 2002. Meanwhile, the proportion backing tax and spending cuts fell from 9 per cent to 6 per cent. Notably, the survey doesn’t give the option of reducing taxes and spending more (ruling out, for example, Ed Balls’ proposed combination of a VAT cut and increased infrastructure spending), nor of increasing taxes

Steerpike Steerpike

The Duchess of Cambridge’s dignity

Mr Steerpike is no Middleton fan, but it has to be said that the Duchess of Cambridge has maintained her composure remarkably well in the wake of topless photos of her appearing in the foreign press. Keeping her chin up while continuing the royal couple’s tour of the South Pacific, she even managed to keep smiling when greeted with open arms by a topless women in the Solomon Islands. This would have been prime gaffe territory for Prince Phillip, but there wasn’t even a hint of an a joke despite the unfortunate timing. For shame!

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

September Wine Club

An offer from Corney & Barrow, with their amazing range of wines and wonderfully efficient service, is always welcome. Corney & Barrow specialise in some of the finest wines available to humanity (© Withnail and I) — think Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Pétrus — but here I have made a selection of medium-priced bottles which demonstrate the company’s ability to sniff out excellent wines at agreeable prices. Adam Brett-Smith has again knocked 5 per cent off list prices, as well as offering his celebrated Indulgence, by which you get an extra £6 per case reduction if you buy three or more cases, or just two cases inside the M25. To

Friday

Martin Bright

Israel is losing the battle in Britain

The simplest way to react to the madder pronouncements of the trade union movement is to dismiss it as so much infantile ‘group think’. Solidarity can be very selective and Israeli trade unionists are apparently discounted simply for being Israeli. The latest decision of the TUC to send a delegation to Gaza under the auspices of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is not the daftest. But the idea that it would give delegates anything approaching balance is absurd. My Bright on Politics column for the Jewish Chronicle this week was addressed to the Jewish community but the Israel/Palestine conflict has a wider resonance: ‘Supporters of Israel are losing the battle of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Wanted: superhuman central banker

The race to replace Sir Mervyn King started today when an advert searching for the next Bank of England governor appeared in the Economist. It wasn’t a particularly exciting start to the race: William Hill has named Paul Tucker the favourite to succeed Sir Mervyn. He is currently 7/4 to get the job. Tucker is the deputy governor of the Bank currently, and based on his job title alone, the odds would hardly be surprising. But remember that this is the man who made a meal of his appearance before the Treasury Select Committee in July, uttering the strange phrase that ‘we thought it was a malfunctioning market, not a

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 September 2012

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the autumn statement would be on 5 December, and commentators said he would confront the dwindling chance of meeting debt targets set for 2015. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, said the government would set up a ‘business bank’ to lend to companies. The Commons Public Accounts Committee said a £1.4 billion Regional Growth Fund set up in April last year had created only 2,442 jobs. Delegates to the Trades Union Congress voted to support co-ordinated strikes against a public sector pay freeze. Tories from the right of the party started a group called Conservative Voice. The nation took a keen interest

Sebastian Faulks

Diary – 13 September 2012

My postbag is mostly things like: ‘I once played tennis against you in the Provence in 1981. My daughter is now bicycling through Spain to raise money and I wondered… .’ So picture my surprise to get one that instead began like this:  ‘In your novel Engleby, the hero mentions a gig by Procol Harum he attended at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park, in 1972.’ The next line that was the killer: ‘I was playing keyboards in the band that night… .’ And so began an intriguing pen pal friendship. Chris Copping, who played Hammond organ on several mighty albums with Robin Trower’s seething guitar and Gary Brooker’s voice and piano,

Taki

High life | 13 September 2012

Gstaad It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of 20 years ago, and it made last year’s London summer fires look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge fund manager’s when told a good corner table is unavailable. They came early and there were lots of them. Squat and dark, tall and wide, their fists at the ready, their firebombs hanging like war medals off their badly cut coats. They had pickaxes aplenty, but few brains to accompany them. They screamed abuse, their foul-smelling breath escaping like radiation from a nuke,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 September 2012

Back in July I booked a cottage in its own wood for the last week of the school summer holidays. I was fondly thinking of my boy and his partner’s five kids, aged between one and nine, and what larks they would have running free in Nature. I was, I suppose, romantically casting them as the innocent characters in books such as Five Children and It and Swallows and Amazons, and bestowing on them the same idealised kind of camp-making, fire-lighting opportunities as I enjoyed at their age. Let me introduce them in descending order of age. The eldest three’s father, my boy’s partner’s ex, is a mild and gentle

Melissa Kite

Real life | 13 September 2012

Being blonde and female, I should have known better than to take my Fiat to a main dealer to get it serviced. It’s not that I’m stupid, per se. It’s just that main dealers have an invisible automatic scanning system so that, when a blonde woman walks through the door, an alarm goes off inside the service centre, a red light starts flashing, a till ringing sound reverberates throughout the workshop, and greasy mechanics stand ready with their spanners and clipboards bearing long checklists of mechanical failings. I always swear I will never do it again, but like most women I’m a stickler for doing things by the book. So

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 13 September 2012

There are moments when I suddenly realise how old I am, and one was during the closing ceremony of the Paralympics last Sunday. The pride that had gradually swelled within me during this long patriotic summer was extinguished at a stroke by the performance of the rock band Coldplay. Coldplay may be one of the most successful and popular bands in the world, and its leader may be married to Gwyneth Paltrow, but its grim music filled me with despondency and bewilderment. It seems to have been the underlying aim of all four Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, from Danny Boyle’s onwards, to redefine Britishness for the world, and it may

Robin Oakley

Quality will out

Ronald Reagan once told his staff that they were always to wake him if there was an emergency ‘even if I am in a Cabinet meeting at the time’. All of us, Mrs Oakley included, have our definition of an emergency and the other night she shook me awake at 4 a.m. to confront one. I was led to the bathroom where, safely entrapped under a glass, was a spider. He was admittedly a beady-eyed, muscular and long-legged spider but there was no way he could have escaped that glass before morning. Nevertheless, such was Mrs Oakley’s agitation that he had to be defenestrated at that instant. I duly earned