Society

Saturday

Robin Oakley

The turf: Risk assessment

After the 2011 Grand National, I sided with the reformers who wanted changes to the use of the whip by jockeys. If racing is to survive we need bums on seats and have to be responsive to public opinion. In the continuing furore after this year’s National, I find myself in a different camp because most of the noise is coming from those who know nothing and would never go racing anyway. The one thing we racing lovers were praying for in this year’s contest was an incident-free race with every horse coming home safe. That we were denied. Not only did According to Pete have to be put down

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 April 2012

My love affair with the iPad lasted only a few days before it all went horribly wrong. This is tragic, because I overcame several major planks of my obsessive compulsive disorder and conquered some of my most rampant technological demons in order to walk into that Vodafone shop and say the words: ‘Can I have one of those iPad thingys, please?’ ‘iPad 2, or iPad 3?’ said the red-shirted assistant. Oh, the horror. I didn’t know there was more than one model available at any given time. I had blithely assumed that 3 usurped 2. If it was a choice, lord only knew which one I wanted. I stood there

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 28 April 2012

About once every six months I drive to a house to pick up a box of six sealed tubs of aloe vera juice. These tubs are not, I hasten to add, for your do or die low life correspondent. No doubt I have lost enough credibility already with last week’s cake forks. If I confessed to trying to prolong my low life by taking top spec aloe vera juice, it would probably and rightly be the end. For this is what the advertising pamphlets of this pyramid selling company brand hints at. Without actually coming out and wildly promising it, the subtle impression created by the PR firm responsible for

Taki

High life | 28 April 2012

The first friend I made at Lawrenceville School was called Reuben Batista, eldest son of the Cuban strongman. He was older and in a ‘Circle house’, whereas I was in lower school. Being foreigners gave us something in common, the rest of the school being mostly Wasps with a few Catholics thrown in for good measure. By the time I met Reuben in 1949 his father Fulgencio had been in power off and on for a couple of decades. Havana was a paradise if one was rich, liked easy women, rum drinks and flashy nightclubs and casinos. The ruling class was predominately white and of Spanish extraction, the poor underclass

Dot Wordsworth

Omnishambles

I want to add a footnote to the obstetric history of last week’s newborn word omnishambles. But before I forget, I noticed an advertisement on the side of a bus recently which asked: ‘Fed up with buffering?’ I did, by chance, know what the bus meant: buffering is the juddering standstill that internet video can come to. The buffer is, I think, a bit of memory dedicated to sucking up data before displaying it for you. The dictionaries have not caught up with this word yet, but it may prove short-lived, if the problem is resolved. Now, omnishambles. It’s always a little suspicious (like having ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ tattooed on

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 28 April 2012

Q. Any more tips on how a lonely bachelor can improve his social life? Your recent advice that I should send out a round-robin email saying ‘I’ve had the all-clear’ backfired. I did get loads of calls but many of them were from people who assumed I had been suffering from an STD. — E.W., London A. Nevertheless, the response has proved my theory that, as a single, good-looking and solvent man, you are bound to be in demand and that as such people will welcome having an excuse to ring you up. Try another method of giving them one which was recently used, inadvertently, by another bachelor, who said

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Staffroom whispers

As a relative newcomer to the field of education, I’ve only just discovered the online forums of the Times Educational Supplement. Forget the TES, which is to the educational establishment what the Church Times is to the Church of England. The forums are the place to go. It’s like being a fly on the wall in the staffroom of a large inner-city comprehensive after the headteacher has departed. Above stairs, the writers are focused on highfalutin things like policy and research, but below stairs the posters are more concerned with day-to-day matters. I suspect that quite a few of them are English teachers because one of their favourite themes is

The Spectator

Letters | 28 April 2012

Time-honoured paradox Sir: Tristram Hunt’s argument (‘Gove’s Paradox’, 21 April) seems convincing. At first glance, economic liberalism does appear at odds with social conservatism. However, one cannot exist without the other, as Thomas Hobbes realised over 300 years ago. Without a social contract based upon shared values and common interests, anarchy would ensue, making it impossible to trade freely and conduct economic affairs. Nothing suppresses freedom as much as chaos, fear and poverty. Social conservatism and economic liberalism are therefore, and paradoxically, two sides of the same coin. Hunt conveniently ignores Labour’s more profound, irreconcilable contradiction borne out of its revolutionary zeal. It advocates social liberalism to such an extent

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Plato on Breivik

The trial of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik might have met with Plato’s approval — for the time being. In his last work Laws, Plato provided a detailed description of the vision that would inform Magnesia, his unchanging, perfect utopia, covering everything from size, population, occupations and education to religion, laws and government. In his discussion of the justice system, Plato laid down the principles that lie behind almost every humane theory and practice of punishment. Plato takes for granted the Socratic doctrine that every unjust man is, in fact, unjust against his will, on the grounds that he has welcomed evil into his soul, the most precious part

The Spectator

Barometer | 28 April 2012

Marathon mortalities A 30-year-old hairdresser collapsed and died in the final mile of the London marathon, echoing the alleged fate of the world’s original marathon runner, Pheidippides, who according to legend ran 26 miles to Athens to announce victory in the Battle of Marathon in 490 bc before collapsing and dying. — A paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 1996 studied two US marathons over a period of 30 years and found that of 215,413 runners, three had died suddenly during the race, at distances between 15 and 24 miles, and one had died immediately afterwards. None had any previous signs of heart disease.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 April 2012

Like everyone, especially his old friends and colleagues, I can think of unkind things to say about Boris Johnson. He is a lazy workaholic — too busy doing things to do them thoroughly. He can be exasperating. But as the mayoral election campaign reaches its climax, I must dispute the central current criticism of Boris — that he does not really stand for anything. He may not have yards of clear policies, but his essential message is important and genuine. He believes in freedom, and has a strong preference for letting people get on with their lives without official molestation. He is equally genuine in seeing his voters as Londoners,

Antony Jay

Diary – 28 April 2012

No great April Fool’s Day spoof this year. The best ever was in Panorama on 1 April 1957. I was mildly connected with it — I was on the Panorama production team that devised it, though I did not think of it or produce it. It was a film of the spaghetti harvest in Italy. The team cooked pounds and pounds of spaghetti and draped it over the branches of trees in an Italian orchard, then filmed peasant girls with ladders collecting it in armfuls. Among the many people taken in by it (there was very little real spaghetti around in the 1950s, it was all in tins) was the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 April 2012

Home The British economy went back into recession, shrinking by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2012, following a contraction of 0.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2011. Government debt rose by £117 million over last year’s figure, to £1,022.5 billion, equivalent to 66 per cent of GDP. George Osborne, the Chancellor, lent the International Monetary Fund another $15 billion to help it bail out countries in the eurozone. In the Commons, Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, had earlier characterised Mr Osborne’s Budget as an ‘omnishambles’. Nadine Dorries, a backbench Conservative MP, called David Cameron and Mr Osborne ‘two posh boys who don’t know

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Equality against conscience and the Big Society

It was pretty well apparent at the outset that the Equality Act 2010 – the so-called Socialism in a Single Clause law – spelt trouble and now it is the Catholic Church that may run foul of Harriet Harman’s pet project. The Catholic Education Service in England and Wales has written to Catholic secondary schools to get them to encourage pupils and staff to sign the online petition against the Government’s gay marriage proposals. Today, on BBC Radio 4, the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, Andrew Copson warned that the Church may be breaking two laws: the one that prohibits partisan political activity in school, the other, more

David Blackburn

IDS turns up the volume on welfare cuts

Iain Duncan Smith is quietly spoken. His interview with today’s Times (£) is a case in point. The political elite are ‘distanced’ from the people, he says. The Leveson inquiry is there to ‘clean the house’. The job of government is to govern well, not be loved. The ‘omnishambles’ will pass because David Cameron has ‘the capability to pull himself and us all through’. But, amid these placid notes, is a subito fortissimo. The welfare secretary sets himself against George Osborne’s wish that a further £10 billion in welfare cuts be found by 2016. He says: ‘This is my discussion with him… My view is that it’s not [all going

Ian Osborne

Election night with the Sarkozys

Election night in Paris is a very different affair from our own, rather sober ritual, for which the nation looks to a reassuring David Dimbleby. To begin with, the night is over when the exit polls are published the moment the polls close at 8p.m. All the major candidates compete to address the live television audiences immediately, and before any actual results have been certified. ••• Meanwhile, the news networks appear not to have discovered the Skycopter™, so the journey from candidates’ residences to victory parties (or otherwise) is a bizarre ritual where young overexcited reporters perched on the back of motorbikes chase the motorcades, defying death with late-night chases,

John Arlidge

Cuba Notebook

Like all odd places, Cuba attracts odd people. When I first started visiting in 1993, straggle-bearded men boarded the Soviet-built Air Cubana jet from Stansted. Where to go first, comrade, they wondered? The tractor factory at Cienfuegos or the collective tobacco farm in Trinidad? Like the Cubana flights, the fellow-travellers have long departed. Still, it’s reassuring to find Cuba still attracts oddballs. Sitting next to me on the Virgin flight from Gatwick are two middle-aged Glaswegians. He’s a trainspotter, she’s a twitcher. They ignore the food, booze and movies and fill orange notebooks with lists of the diesel locomotives and warblers they want to tick off. They’re so engrossed, they don’t leave their

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Britain is in drought, and my shoes squelch on the way to work

 ‘Sir,’ read a letter in the Daily Telegraph last week. ‘Is this the wettest drought since records began?’ High five, David Stevens of Poole, Dorset. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Drought? A lack of water? The sodding stuff is falling from the sky. All day, every day. Drought? Are you sodding kidding me? OK, no more sodding  I shall try to restrain myself. But it’s not easy. You know me. I’m a rationalist. I pride myself on not being the sort of person who steps outside in December, shivers, and thinks ‘global warming must be a myth!’ Or, indeed, who basks in an unusually warm February and decides

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: If the governorship is open to all comers from abroad, my money’s on Dr Bollard

If we are happy to venerate a Palestinian patron saint — it occurred to me, as I composed these thoughts on St George’s Day — then we can’t really object to a foreign governor of the Bank of England. The idea may offend the self-esteem of indigenous bankers, but that’s the way the betting has moved since last week’s revelation in the Financial Times that ‘an informal approach by a member of the Bank of England’s Court’ had been made to Bank of Canada governor and former Goldman Sachs executive Mark Carney as a potential candidate to succeed Sir Mervyn King next June. Carney, whose name was also in the

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Olympian

In Competition No. 2744 you were invited to provide a poetic preview of the Olympic Games. The impending onslaught was viewed with a mix of dread and indifference. When pessimism and cynicism descend on the entry there are always a smattering of Pollyannas but on this occasion they were fewer than usual. Alan Millard’s evocation of wall-to-wall British triumph under cloudless skies was nicely punctured in his closing couplet: ‘A small print warning: Previews may at times prove inexact./ What’s here is pure conjecture and should not be seen as fact.’ Others who narrowly missed out on a place on the podium were Frank Osen, Adrian Fry and D.A. Prince.