Society

Saturday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

In a restaurant this perfect-seeming,there has to be something fishy

‘God, you are going to love this place — it is absolutely perfect!’ I report back after my recce. ‘It’s completely ramshackle, kind of a beach-hut arrangement, almost. They don’t speak a word of English. It’s in this gorgeous position bang next to the sea. And they’re open for lunch tomorrow.’ ‘Sounds brilliant,’ says the Fawn. ‘Oh it really is. I think this is going to be it. The one. You know, one of those throwbacks to the days of Elizabeth David, like they just don’t make any more.’ ‘Great!’ So we arrive the next day, the four of us, and it is indeed as I described: the dining terrace

Harry Mount

A sporting life

If you wanted a little more excitement in this year’s Olympic marathon, you could do worse than imitate the race in 1908 — the first time the Games were held in ­London. Competitors, running from Windsor Castle to Shepherd’s Bush in the boiling heat,  were given hot and cold Oxo, rice pudding and milk, but no water. Still, there was free eau de cologne and champagne — that’s what did for the South African leading at the halfway mark. He suffered stomach cramps after a glass of champagne, surrendering the lead to a plucky little Italian confectioner, Dorando Pietri. Just short of the finishing line, Pietri collapsed. In the most

Ksenija Pavlovic

I was never a rebel

It’s a hot and crowded afternoon in Manhattan. Martin Amis is in the New York Public Library, relaxing on a small purple sofa. He’s tired, but he takes the time to answer a few questions about his new novel Lionel Asbo about poetry, porn and modern Britain.  Spectator: You grew up in 1960s Britain with all that rebellious rock ’n’ roll culture, but your father, Kingsley Amis, was part of the establishment and knighted to boot. How did you reconcile those worlds? Amis: I was never a rebel. I mean not in my life, in my writing a bit, perhaps. My father was a communist when he was young. And

R. Emmett

Drop the dead donkey

In 1992, I wrote a book called The Conservative Crack-Up, and my liberal adversaries were joyous. Which is not to say they read the book. American liberals never read a book by a conservative, not even an essay, not even a letter to the editor. What gave wings to their spirits was that 1992 was an election year, and they thought I had somehow provided them with ammunition. They neglected to note that some years before I had written another book, The Liberal Crack-Up, in which I had said that the future for liberals looked even gloomier. At the risk of bragging — of all the virtues, humility is the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Ukraine’s prejudices – and ours

‘The more Ukrainians that play in the national league, the more examples for the young generation — let them learn from Shevchenko or Blokhin and not some Zumba-Bumba they took off a tree, gave him two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.’  — Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin, 2006 There you are, you see, Dr King — other people have dreams, too. Oleg Blokhin’s dream is a different sort of dream to the famous one you had. A less palatable dream, maybe. Oleg, 59, is the coach of the Ukraine national football team, and Ukraine is a joint host of the current Euro 2012 football tournament, along with

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The train to nowhere

The fact that you cannot perform a U-turn in a train is one of the limitations of that form of transport. When the line ahead is blocked, locomotives form long queues, unable to go anywhere until the problem is solved. It is scarcely any easier performing a U-turn with a high-speed rail project, especially after you have spent several million pounds compensating people who live in blighted properties along its route, and several years promoting it as central to your vision for a modern Britain. But it is a U-turn which it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is now resigned to making. To the outside world, ministers are

Friday

Sebastian Payne

The ideological quandary over Gove’s curriculum reform

Primary school children studying subordinate clauses and foreign languages? What an outlandish but suddenly very real idea. Michael Gove announced earlier this week a curriculum reshuffle to restore rigour and aptitude to primary education. But why is liberalising Gove instigating a top-down approach, prescribing what teachers teach?   It’s not the first time that Gove’s policies have become contradictory. Earlier this year, Tristram Hunt MP wrote a magazine article about the Tory divide over forcing secondary schools to teach British history while also increasing their freedom.   The Times’ Alice Thompson (£) provides an answer for these dilemmas in her column this week. She wrote: ‘Some schools have given up

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The best and worst of Britain

There are at least two things at which the British are very good: being jobsworths and complaining about jobsworths. Today’s example of this feature of British life comes courtesy of Martha Payne and Argyll & Bute Council. Martha, as you may know if you’ve read the papers today, listened to the radio, or been on Twitter, is the nine year-old lassie from Lochgilphead who had, until today, published a blog — Never Seconds — cataloguing her school lunches. A suitably esoteric subject for the internet and an unlikely sensation but there you have it. Her blog, boosted by support from the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nick Nairn, reached two

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How not to create jobs

The Keynes vs Hayek debate is at its sharpest on the issue of employment. Can government create jobs (as Balls says)? Or does large public sector employment simply displace economic activity that would happen elsewhere (as Osborne says)? A fascinating study has been released today by the Spatial Economics Research Centre at the LSE showing the damage done by public sector employment to the real economy. Drawing on a huge amount of local-level data over an eight-year period, it’s a serious piece of research that is worth looking into and deserves to impact our economic debate. 1. First, what is seen. In the short term, hiring someone to work for

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

A more ambitious approach to fighting poverty

‘You attack poverty by knowing what you do changes the lives of those people.’ In that phrase on this morning’s Today programme, Iain Duncan Smith summed up the difference between his approach to combating poverty and Gordon Brown’s. As Fraser has put it, Brown saw poverty as ‘a statistical game… his great spreadsheet puzzler’. The aim of the game? To reduce the number of people living in households below the ‘poverty line’ — set at 60 per cent of median income. The easiest way to achieve this is to move people from just below the line to just above it by giving them a bit of extra cash (in the

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The battle over complementarity of the sexes is already lost

Today is the last day of the Government’s consultation about its gay marriage proposals. But as an editorial in the Telegraph points out, this is a more limited exercise than it sounds…you’re not being asked whether it’s a good idea for gay people to marry so much as how you think the Government should implement its proposals. Consultation, not. But since the opportunity is there, I’m all for sounding off about whether gay people should marry in the first place, as the Church of England has done, with uncharacteristic robustness, in its official response to the proposals. I can’t myself, see why marriage, as a status and a concept and

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 – is HS2 the rail to nowhere?

Is High Speed 2 headed for the sidings? In our cover feature this week, Ross Clark examines why the ambitious infrastructure project — designed to boost Northern cities — has all but disappeared from the government’s agenda. Despite the chancellor’s ‘boyish enthusiasm for fast trains’, the project has lacked the essential support from private business. Now, more pressing issues have taken charge.   In our View from 22 podcast this week, Ross explains why the Tories were once so enthusiastic about the High Speed link to the North: ‘It was a way for the Tories to say — as part of their decontamination  of the Tory brand — look, we’re

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s difficult morning

David Cameron’s morning at the Leveson Inquiry has not been a pleasant experience for him. In the opening hour or so, Cameron was calm and statesmanlike. But as the inquiry moved onto his connections to News International and how Andy Coulson was hired, the prime minister was pushed onto the back foot. One could see why some in Number 10 refer to the inquiry as ‘the monster we have created’. The headline for tomorrow’s papers is, at the moment, coming from a text sent to him by Rebekah Brooks. The clinging text read, ‘But seriously I do understand the issue with the Times. Let’s discuss over country supper soon. On

Tuesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

On the road to disestablishment

There’s an inevitability about the Times’s big splash (£) this morning: Gay Marriage Plan Could Divorce Church From State. The Church of England’s historic role as ‘religious registrar’ for the State would have to be severed, we are told, if government plans to legalise gay marriage go ahead. That would not, apparently, mean ‘total dis-establishment … but it would be a significant step in that direction.’ The CofE, for all its liberalism, says it will not support a legal attempt to redefine ‘the objective distinctiveness of men and women.’   So that — if this report is to be believed — is that. Unless the government relents or the Anglican

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne’s pointed musings

George Osborne’s musings today on how Greece might have to leave the Eurozone before the Germans will act in order to save the single currency makes public the British government’s current thinking on the future of the Eurozone. In remarks the frankness of which have taken other parts of government by surprise, Osborne told The Times’s CEO summit: ‘I ultimately don’t know whether Greece needs to leave the Euro in order for the eurozone to do the things necessary to make their currency survive… I just don’t know whether the German government requires Greek exit to explain to their public why they need to do certain things like a banking

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Wintour give up her wardrobe?

Steerpike’s transatlantic cousins at the New York Post’s Page Six are stirring up the rumours (again) that Vogue editor Anna Wintour is set to become Obama’s Ambassador to the Court of St James.  Coincidentally, the fashion supremo has been pulling her weight for Obama’s fundraising. Though vaguely denying the appointment, she is not exactly doing to much to quell the speculation — apparently she’s very happy in her current job. Patrick Wintour, Anna’a little brother and the Political Editor of the Guardian, tells me he does not ‘think she wants to give up the wardrobe allowance yet.’

Douglas Murray

Another reason to part ways with Strasbourg

Even for people on the same side of an argument, opinion is often wildly divided. Among those of us who believe government should support civil marriage equality, this morning’s papers (£), and specifically Church of England fears that the religious will be ‘forced’ to carry out same-sex weddings, re-opens a fundamental division of opinion.   The coalition’s proposals rightly only relate to civil marriage equality (that the state should make civil marriage between same-sex couples equal to civil marriage between opposite-sex couples). It has always seemed obvious to me that if the government pushes ahead with same-sex civil marriage then it should do so only if it can ensure that

David Blackburn

The language of left and right

Stephan Shakespeare has a fascinating article on Con Home today, comparing which words voters associate with the terms ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’. The results aren’t too surprising: the language of the left is, generally, softer than the language of the right. Shakespeare’s article is entitled ‘Fairness versus selfish’, which gives you an idea of how voters perceive the dichotomy. The upshot is that many voters still believe that the right is intrinsically ‘nasty’; ergo, the modernisation project has not gone far enough. This research, and the conclusions drawn from it, reminds me of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind (indeed, Shakespeare references an article by Haidt). The Spectator interviewed Haidt two

Monday

David Blackburn

Helping troubled families

Earlier today, the government, in the form of Eric Pickles, announced that it was launching new incentives to encourage local councils to improve the lives of 120,000 families, identified as ‘troubled families’ by the Social Exclusion Task Force in 2007. Those incentives are: A). £3,900 for each family whose children attain 85 per cent attendance at school. B). £4,000 for each adult in a troubled family who holds down a job for three months. The measures have been welcomed by the Local Government Association, which does not praise this government all that often. The cynic will say that the LGA is merely welcoming more money for its associates. While that it is

David Blackburn

Dissenters against Osborne

George Osborne has much to ponder this morning. First, there is the small matter of his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry later today (assuming that someone can check Gordon Brown’s loquacity), which will prove diverting for those who remain gripped by those proceedings. Then there is the larger matter of the £80bn Spanish bank bailout. Osborne has welcomed the rescue, arguing that the Eurozone must survive and thrive if Britain is to prosper. His analysis is that the crisis on the continent is impeding domestic recovery. Fraser argued yesterday that this is a half-truth which verges on being a conceit. A number of Conservative backbenchers share Fraser’s scepticism and they