Society

Saturday

Brian Sewell

Diary – 12 May 2012

Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean afterthought by a rotten architect — I know to be very steep even for a man fully fit in wind and limb. Beyond the serried tower blocks there are more steps, more generous to the lame in every dimension, and down — though they will be up on the way back and there are a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 May 2012

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, declared that he would ‘focus on what matters’ after the Conservatives’ poor showing in the local elections brought accusations that pursuit by the coalition of such aims as gay marriage and reform of the House of Lords was alienating voters. On the eve of the Queen’s Speech he appeared at a tractor factory in Essex with Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, who had done disastrously in the local elections. ‘I’m really sad,’ Mr Clegg had said of the results. Labour had gained an extra 823 wards, the Conservatives lost 405 and the Liberal-Democrat party 330, leaving it

The Spectator

Fewer laws, more action

This government has run out of good ideas; that was what the Queen’s speech told us this week. When the coalition was formed, it united behind a genuinely bold agenda: school reform, welfare reform, health reform and deficit elimination. Where has the boldness gone? The coalition’s courage has vanished, as has its sense of purpose and the ability of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to agree on anything sensible. So for the next year, our MPs will be kept busy, not pushing on with important changes, but debating intractable problems like House of Lords reform and long-term care for the elderly. If there’s not much to be said for what

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will Greece run out of German sympathy?

As Greece heads for another election, there’s increasing speculation that the anti-bailout parties will do even better next time. Talking to people in Brussels, there’s an expectation that if this does happen German patience could snap and they might start pushing for Greece’s ejection from the euro. The argument goes that Merkel, who faces her own elections next year, can’t afford to let the Greeks change the terms of their bailout deal. There is, though, one particular reason to be sceptical about whether Berlin would ever actually put Athens in a position where it would have to leave the euro. If Greece did go back to the drachma, the markets

Simon Marcus

Minority report

As a member of the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, I believe that we failed to address the deeper causes of last summer’s violence Will the riots happen again? That was the question many people asked after last summer. As one of the appointees to the government’s Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, set up in the wake of the riots, I think I know. But a number of my conclusions differed from those of my fellow panellists, and some of the politicians who set us up. We spent six months travelling around the country speaking to people about what happened. Those who spoke to us cited many issues, including poverty,

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The right to squeak

It’s probably tendentious to say that the feminine voice is a feminist issue, but let me say it anyway. I have, I may say, a voice that spans the vocal spectrum from soft to strident — oh all right, shrill, but I never quite appreciate what a problem it is until I do the odd bit of radio. Really, I should stick to print. Last year, I took part in a fun Radio 4 programme that sought to replicate a newspaper leader conference in a BBC radio studio. In theory, the editorial line on this particular programme is decided by the strength of argument. But it was only when the

Martin Gayford

Jerusalem Notebook

Jerusalem is a wonderful city for hat-spotting. There are the black fedoras and other varieties worn  by Hassidic and ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews, sometimes magnificent in height and breadth, and there is also an almost infinite gradation of birettas, hoods and bonnets and headgear defying easy definition worn by Christian clergy of various denominations. We had an ecclesiastical fashion show one afternoon while lingering in an alley leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Unexpectedly, along came the King of Jordan’s cousin Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad on an official visit, proceeded by a dragoman who banged the ground with a staff and rather roughly pushed us out of the way,

John Osullivan

Boarding the sinking ship

How Obama drove central and eastern Europe towards the eurozone – at the worst possible time On 1 January last year, while the euro was staggering drunkenly across the exchanges, the Baltic republic of Estonia joined the single currency. It was like watching a sturdy little lifeboat ferrying new passengers determinedly towards the Titanic after the ship had struck the iceberg. What could they possibly mean by it? ‘For Estonia, the choice is to be inside the club, among the decision makers, or stay outside of the club,’ the Estonian prime minister told reporters. ‘We prefer to act as club members.’ Not just any old EU or euro club either,

Louise Mensch

Beastie girl

My husband Peter manages rock bands, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio last month. I went with him to the ceremony. Other bands I’d known and loved as a teenager were being inducted, too, among them Guns N’ Roses and the Beastie Boys. Two of the three-man rap band — Ad-Rock (Adam Horowitz) and Mike D (Michael Diamond) — were there to accept their awards. But they wouldn’t go on stage without Adam Yauch. That day, Yauch had entered hospital for the last time. When he died, the international media overflowed with grief. Yauch made television news

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Set text

In Competition No. 2746 you were invited to submit a sonnet using the following rhymes: pig, bat, cat, wig, jig, hat, rat, fig; lie, red, sob, die, bed, rob. This is a rerun of a brute of a competition that was set back in the 1950s, and the daft rhymes are those given as an illustration of the verse form by the Concise Oxford Dictionary of that time. The final rhyme proved especially bothersome, frequently scuppering otherwise excellent entries. Nonsense verse was the obvious way to go but a fair few forged ingenious alternative routes. It was a large entry and the standard was high. Well deserved commendations go to

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

More Canada!

The more elderly among The Spectator’s readership, who still secretly mourn the loss of Nyasaland and the Aden protectorate, may be pleased to hear that a small step was taken last month towards reversing the Empire’s inexorable decline. More surprising still, the idea behind this expansion comes from an American economist and the flag raised will be not the red ensign but the maple leaf. But it’s a start. The original proposal (mentioned here three years ago) is to create ‘charter cities’ in the developing world where the institutions, infrastructure and government are not those of the surrounding nation but are imported wholesale from somewhere else. City-states whose success supports

Bruce Anderson

A malt revolution

There was a wonderful old girl called Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The daughter of the good Roosevelt president, Theodore, she was a formidable Washington political hostess until her nineties. The older she grew, the more fearless she became. By the end, she combined the plain speaking of her Dutch forebears with a wit and sharpness which would have delighted, and intimidated, any salon, anywhere, ever. She also solved one of the greater minor mysteries of the 20th century. If any two human beings were fated to become staunch friends, it ought to have been Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. To win the second world war, Churchill had to get on with

Anthony Cummins

The courage of their convictions

HHhH is a prize-winning French novel about a writer writing a novel about the plot to kill the Gestapo boss Reinhard Heydrich. A lot of people reckon it’s a big deal — Martin Amis, Mario Vargas Llosa, me — so naturally there’s a backlash afoot. In a fit of territorial pissing disguised as an interview, Michael Burleigh revealed that Laurent Binet ‘does not even read German’ (which HHhH admits on page 28) and professed surprise that his research failed to take in a Heydrich biography published (as Burleigh didn’t say) almost two years after HHhH first came out. I suppose part of the problem is that Binet asks for trouble

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Coulson easily handles his Leveson test

Andy Coulson’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry was a reminder of why he rose so quickly. He never said more than he had to and never let his ego interfere with his judgment. It is a testament to his skill that we essentially learnt nothing new from his evidence this afternoon. But it should be remembered that Coulson wasn’t on that bad a wicket today. The Leveson Inquiry isn’t going to overlap with the criminal investigations going on and so there wasn’t much time spent on hacking or on payments to the police. Instead, the questions focused on his relations with politicians and Cameron and Osborne in particular. Helped by

Martin Bright

Rochdale is a lesson to all of us

The coverage of the appalling Rochdale grooming case has been, for the most part, well-informed and responsible. In the Times today David Aaronovitch takes on the cultural issue directly (£) and should be saluted for so doing. ‘So here are the bald facts about this specific kind of abuse. Men, many middle-aged and most of previous good character, and largely from one community, have been committing a particular series of sexual crimes almost entirely against young girls. Why? Almost certainly because of their attitudes towards women and sex.’ But he saves his most important point for the end of his article when he says: ‘we ought to be mad as

Douglas Murray

Let’s talk about this

What a strange place Britain has become. You sometimes need some time away to realise quite how strange. Take yesterday’s main story: the latest paedophile rape-gang case from the north of England. The judge in the trial told the men, during sentencing, that they had selected their victims ‘because they were not part of your community or religion’. But that is the sort of fact which causes the most terrible contortions in modern Britain. The perpetrators were all Muslim men of Pakistani origin and the victims all underage, white girls. We know exactly how we should think, how loud would be our proclamations and our desire to analyse the ‘root-causes’

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama’s Evolution

Yesterday, Barack Obama came out of the closet and acknowledged what we’d all suspected for a long, long time: he supports extending the civil recognition of marriage to same-sex couples. As you might expect, this has been hailed as a bold and risky and courageous move even though, as the chart above demonstrates, Obama is following public opinion, not leading it. His own position, he says, has “evolved” and he’s been mocked for putting the matter in those terms even though, as the chart shows again, the US population as a whole has “evolved” in pretty much the same way. Of course, it’s probable that Obama has long-supported gay-marriage but

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Cardinal Brady Should Resign

Last night, I finally watched last week’s BBC This World documentary investigating the latest stage of the child abuse scandal that is destroying the Catholic Church in Ireland and, like Jenny McCartney, suspect it is time for Cardinal Sean Brady, Primate of All-Ireland, to resign his post. I don’t suppose Cardinal Brady is a bad man, nor should one suppose that his resignation would draw some manner f line under the whole, sorry, rotten, scandalous affair. But it would be more than just a gesture too. William Oddie, writing in the Catholic Herald, plainly would prefer Brady to remain in office but accepts he “almost certainly” must “bow before the

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Weak, Weak, Weak: Cameron’s Brooks Affair Will Haunt Him.

The public is not, I suspect, nearly as bothered by or interested in the Leveson Inquiry as some editors think. Nevertheless it is not just a Guardianesque enthusiasm. And even if voters dn’t much care for it, Leveson inevitably colours how the professional press views the government. With Andy Coulsen giving evidence tomorrow and Rebekah Brooks appearing on Friday you could argue that this was a bad week to try and have a government relaunch. Worse still, it looks as though the Prime Minister is going to be humiliated. This is not good. Then again, nor is this: David Cameron privately sent Rebekah Brooks a message of support as his