Society

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Using the Olympics to turn a corner

I suspect there’s a certain relief in Downing Street today. First, the opening ceremony passed off pretty well; no one is talking about G4S this morning. Second, Standard and Poor’s has reiterated Britain’s AAA credit rating despite the negative GDP figures this week. The government is hoping that the Olympics will help it turn the corner from the negative economic news of recent months. Over the next week or so, we’re going to see what one minister described to me as ‘the government’s industrial strategy’ in action. The Global Investment Conference at Lancaster House is meant to showcase the benefits of investing in Britain for specific sectors. The aim is

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Among the centurions

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, as Joni Mitchell used to whiffle way back when. And on cricket, as on so much else, the flaxen-haired loopster of Laurel Canyon was right. My friend Fiona took her three boys to the cricket at the Oval last Thursday and a fine time was had by all. Plus they saw an English batsman score a century, which is always a treat, though it was in this case a very false dawn. In decades to come, though, Fiona’s lads will be able to go all rheumy-eyed and describe how they saw England’s finest batsman score a ton against the Springboks, just

Lucy Vickery

Scandicrime

In Competition No. 2756 you were invited to submit your contribution to the booming genre of Scandinavian crime fiction. Guidance is at hand courtesy of Barry Forshaw, author of Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, who has compiled a list of ten tips on how to write a masterpiece of Nordic noir. First and foremost, he says, know your landscape: ‘make sure you evoke your locale with maximum atmosphere, be it the endless forests and big skies of Sweden, Finland’s lakes…’ Other Scandi staples, such as torture, mutilation, alienation and conspicuously Nordic knitwear, featured strongly in an entry that by and large nailed the genre

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 28 July 2012

Kenya coast A loud crash woke us in the middle of our first night at the beach house. ‘Robbers must be trying to break in,’ said Claire, kneeing me in the back. ‘Go and see.’ I was groggy. It had been a 12-hour drive from the Rift Valley to the coast, with several near collisions involving Congo-bound juggernauts. The children had rioted in the back of the car. I tiptoed into the dressing-room, from where the explosive noise had come. Our clothes were in a heap on the floor. The wardrobe had imploded. On closer inspection I saw that in the year since we had last been here termites had

Allan Massie

Life and letters | 28 July 2012

With few exceptions, literary journalists moulder in the grave and are soon forgotten. They may get some sort of posthumous life if they are made the subject of other books. John Gross rescued a few from oblivion in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Otherwise it is usually only those who were also poets, novelists or social commentators such as Matthew Arnold, who are not soon forgotten. When I was young, the Sunday papers were dominated by Connolly, Mortimer, Toynbee, Nicolson and Davenport. I delighted in them all, and equally in V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman. All of course were excoriated by F. R. Leavis

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Co-op joins the premier league and the banker-bashers are watching

Hail to the Co-operative Bank, which has snapped up the 632 branches that Lloyds was under orders from Brussels to shed by next year. The price looks like a buy-one-get-one-free sofa sale: £350 million down with £400 million to pay over 15 years ‘if targets are met’, against Lloyds’ initial expectation of £1.5 billion-plus. That’s hardly a joy for taxpayers who own 40 per cent of Lloyds, but it triples the size of the Co-op branch network — a boost to banking biodiversity that must surely be positive for the high-street economy. One good thing about the Co-op is that it is based in Manchester, far from the taint and

Stanley Johnson

Peloponnese: Return ticket

I first visited the Peloponnese in the spring of 1959, at the beginning of my gap year. I was 18. Having been accepted for university as a classicist, I decided I might as well combine business and pleasure by visiting the great sites of the Mycenaean era before going on to my studies. It was mind-blowing. Olympia, Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae! I went from place to place with the Oxford edition of Homer’s Odyssey weighing down my rucksack, and  each day brought a new revelation.  But I had to leave out the great Palace of Nestor near Pylos on that first peregrination through the Peloponnese. The buses didn’t seem to go

David Chazan

Eating British in Paris

‘On va manger anglais ce soir?’ — ‘Shall we eat English tonight?’ — is not the sort of thing you’d expect to hear a Frenchman say, especially a chef. But my friend was quite clear on the phone. ‘Le restaurant, c’est anglais, comme toi.’ My initial disbelief gave way to suspicion. I remembered that he once led us to a Franco-Italian-Japanese hole-in-the-wall whose signature dish was spaghetti with sea urchins and fermented soya, on the grounds that it was ‘different’. It was.  ‘I’m not in the mood for fish and chips,’ I told my pal. ‘How about Chinese?’ He sighed. ‘It’s not that kind of English restaurant — it’s good.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Thrills and spills

The singer of the ‘Lumberjack Song’, vendor of the Dead Parrot and leader of the Spanish Inquisition has written another novel. It is Michael Palin’s second, called The Truth. On the cover, a sticker certifies that this is the authentic text ‘as read on BBC Radio 4’, and on the back is a portrait of the national treasure gently smiling, as so often seen on BBC television. It is rather tiresome when publishers exploit electronic achievements to sell written works of fiction; but it would be unfair to penalise Palin for his celebrated niceness. His novel deserves to be judged on its own. The Truth is a very good story,

Taki

Athens: Love among the ruins

A very long time ago, still in my teens, I knew a beautiful Athenian girl whose eyes were green and her hair golden blonde, and she was madly in love with a friend of mine. He loved her just as passionately but then he went away to school in Switzerland, and you can guess the rest. It sounds a bit opportunistic, even shabby, but I stood by her, listening to her laments late at night, and then, one evening under a moonlit Acropolis, we kissed. She told me she felt guilty for having done it, but on we went, the moon, the ruins, the Attic breezes all helping me along.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Is there anywhere as perfect as a good prep school

Every speech day at Boy’s prep school for the last five summers I’ve watched the Year Eight leavers and their parents troop off to the dining room for their final farewell lunch with the headmaster and staff. This year it was our turn and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. In fact, I was so cut up I had to nip off for an uncharacteristic daytime fag round the back of the dustbins with the only master (‘Why do you call them “masters”? They’re called “teachers”, Dad!’) I knew smoked. ‘This is it,’ I thought miserably to myself. ‘The last time I’ll ever come to Papplewick. Probably the last time

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

An eye-opening day with a busy GP

I have just spent a day in a GP’s surgery. I was not detaining her with any complicated medical complaint of my own. I was shadowing her as a journalist. Some weeks ago I wrote a column for the Times whose headline (though not my choice) brutally summarised my argument: that general practitioners were becoming glorified receptionists for the specialist medical services offered by the NHS; that patients should be able to save time and money by going straight to a specialist if they were sure of their problem; and that GPs, though hard-working, were often busy with counselling that a less expensively trained and less well paid nurse practitioner

Stephen Pollard

Dead Jews don’t make news

I’ve a question. You’ll see in a moment why I’m tempted to call it a Trivial Pursuit question. Can you tell me when the worst suicide bombing in Europe since the 7/7 murders took place? I doubt you’d believe me if I said it was last week. I can hear your response: ‘What suicide bombing? What murders?’ Last week, six people died and nearly 30 were injured when a suicide bomber, widely thought to be acting on ­Iranian orders, set off a device on a bus taking a group of tourists from their charter flight to their hotel. But if you got your news from the British media — the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Mad Frogs and Englishmen

The English like nothing better than the idea that the French hate us. Bradley Wiggins, an Englishman, wins the Tour de France, and we are full of in-votre-face triumphalism. British journalists search the French media for sour grapes. How the frogs must be fuming! Beaten by a rosbif on their own turf! Yet if the French were all so bitter about Wiggins, why did thousands of them line the Champs-Elysées on Sunday to cheer him home? Far from being grouchy, France seemed eager to hail Wiggins as the likeable and quirky champion that he is. It’s true that some French papers complained about the boringness of this year’s Tour. But

Leah McLaren

Natural born cheaters

Daisy was my first midwife at the London hospital where, upon finding out I was pregnant, I’d planned to have a ­straightforward, perfectly average birth with lots of euphoria-inducing drugs and expert medical attention. That, of course, was before I knew anything about the NHS and its methods. My 12-week appointment was arranged through my GP. After sitting close to three hours in a waiting room filled with sweaty pregnant women who looked as if they might kill each other for a sandwich, I was shown into an office by a large 60-something woman in a blue smock holding a clipboard with my notes on it. She wore a name

Alasdair Palmer

Mad money

Daniel Kahneman is a very modest man — amazingly so for someone who has won the Nobel prize in economics. When I met him in the lobby of a London hotel, he never used his very great intelligence in the way that some very distinguished economists do, to bully or to intimidate. ‘But then I am not an economist,’ he says with a mischievous smile. ‘I am a psychologist.’ Prof. Kahneman smiles a great deal. His eyes sparkle behind his large spectacles. His cheeriness is infectious, but it is also disconcerting, given that he is not optimistic about humankind. He thinks, for instance, that it will be ‘miraculous’ if we

Friday

Sebastian Payne

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Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Unqualified teachers haven’t ‘irreparably damaged’ the private sector: why do state schools deserve anything different?

The furore surrounding the news – which James broke on Coffee House this afternoon – that academies will now be able to employ teachers who are not qualified was so brilliantly predictable that we could have written the unions’ press releases for them. Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers slammed it as a ‘clear dereliction of duty’ and a ‘cost-cutting measure that will cause irreparable damage to children’s education’. Blower and her union colleagues are not clear why education will be so badly damaged by this, though. Top schools in the private sector regularly employ staff who have gone through no formal training at all. But parents have to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

All will and no way for the eurozone crisis

Mario Draghi’s announcement yesterday that the ECB would ‘do whatever it takes’ to preserve the euro certainly cheered markets up – but only for a while. Interest rates for Spanish 10-year bonds dropped below the danger threshold of 7 per cent and the euro gained two cents against the dollar. But the more eagle-eyed spotted that this only returned the state of play to where it was on Friday. Draghi’s words were designed as a hint to traders that the ECB was open to emergency support for Spanish and Italian bond markets. But Reuters is now reporting that Spanish economy minister Luis de Guindos suggested in a meeting with German

Jonathan Jones

A tale of two economies

While our economy was contracting by 0.7 per cent, America’s was growing by 0.4 per cent, according to the first estimate just released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. But, as the graph below shows, those 2012 Q2 figures just represent a continuation of the divergent economic paths the two countries have been on since 2010. In America: steady if unspectacular growth. In the UK: stagnation followed by a second recession. P.S. The Americans report GDP figures as ‘annualised growth rates’ — that is, the percentage GDP would grow by if it grew for a whole year at the same rate as it did in the quarter — which