Society

Saturday

Columba

Crossword 2071: 14-7

Each of twenty-four clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter; the extras spell five words identifying an event, which could result in 14 7. Another possible result is given by the lights symmetrically opposite to 14 7. Definitions of the components of these results are supplied by four other unclued lights. Across 1     Politician in story, tense, in disgrace (8) 6     Stand and stop tremulous effect (6) 10     Ascribe acid trip to incorrect drug (12) 13     Eminence parvenu shattered (7) 16     Court right in sight (4) 17     Chinese team avoiding issues (8) 21   

Clarissa Tan

Everybody duck! It’s macho Merv

Just as Mervyn King, as Isabel flags in her blog, is being dragged into the Libor scandal, comes a truly remarkable article from the FT headlined ‘The bank that roared’. This bank, in case you are wondering, refers to the Bank of England. The FT says the central bank – led by the good ol’ Governor – is ‘back in charge’ and showing that ‘it means business’. The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, which in past years had been taking a more ‘laissez-faire’ approach to bank funding and lending, is firmly in the saddle once again. The BoE has a ‘new attitude’ and is now ‘more muscular’. By way of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Friedman’s genius

Milton Friedman would have been 100 later this month, and there is likely to be much commemoration – much of it nostalgia for an era where the right had a clear idea about how to get out of the mess the left had left. I always believed that Friedman’s ability to articulate – his gift for aphorisms and jokes – was his greatest single talent. The arguments for the basics of human liberty are made all the time, but no one has quite made them with as much force and effectiveness as Friedman. His 1970s series Free to Choose remains, in my view, the most powerful TV documentary ever filmed

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Political verse

In Competition No. 2754 you were invited to submit an example from the Selected Poems of a contemporary politician. Politician-poets have met with varying degrees of success. While Jimmy Carter’s efforts prompted literary heavyweight Harold Bloom to pronounce him ‘in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States’, the youthful dabblings of Barack Obama have been judged more kindly. Closer to home, Dominique de Villepin has published several well received collections of poetry. So how did your chosen victims fare? Step forward, Dennis Skinner, George Galloway, Nicolas Sarkozy and Tony Blair. Brian Murdoch as Alex Salmond channelling William McGonagall takes £35. The rest get £30. T’will be in

Emily Rhodes

Gone with the corsets

Painful, barbaric and Victorian are the words I think of when someone says corset, and yet these torturous contraptions are enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Rigby & Peller, Marks & Spencer and eBay all report a huge increase in demand — corset sales on eBay, for instance, have risen nearly 200% over recent months. It seems that more and more women are willing to sacrifice comfort for a corset’s sculpted silhouette, with its tiny waist and rather larger upper region. Ladies, before you lace yourself in, think back to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Near the beginning of this enormous novel, Scarlett, bent on seducing Ashley Wilkes, decides

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The beauty of the Tour de France

Amid the weeping in SW19 last weekend, Andy Murray essayed what was a clunky if well-meaning compliment to his opponent’s longevity. ‘Not bad for a 30-year-old,’ he said. Shortly after, Roger Federer opined that he thought Murray might indeed win a Grand Slam one day. Probably deserved it, too. Unspoken seemed to be the thought, ‘Listen sonny, I might be 30 but I’ve got 17 of these buggers. Don’t talk to me about how old I am.’ Moral: never ever make jokes about people’s age, no matter how friendly you’re trying to be. No one can understand the joy of being Roger Federer better than Federer himself. The great are

Andrew Gilligan

A matter of taste

With the moment of truth nearly upon us, the great danger of the London Olympics is not, I think, that they’ll be a failure, just an anticlimax. They won’t be disastrous, just a bit naff. Brits will win medals. The Tube will probably cope. But from the smallest things upwards, the London Games give the overwhelming impression of being run by people with no taste, no imagination, and no idea how to have fun.  I still remember Beijing 2008. I was lucky enough to go. The Bird’s Nest stadium stood there, more random and more beautiful than any mere camera lens could show, its outer tendrils waving in white against

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Never mind the banks, look at what pharma giants have been mis-selling

The biggest mis-selling scandal to break this month was not the one which involved banks forcing small business borrowers to buy expensive interest-rate hedging contracts, under threat of not lending to them at all if they refused. The FSA hasn’t got to the bottom of that one yet: in terms of identifiable victims it could be at least as damaging to the reputation of the banks as the Libor scam. But it is dwarfed by goings-on in the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, which has been fined $3 billion by the US Department of Justice for a set of offences that deserved much bigger headlines than they got in a week which

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Sorry, but landscapes are better without barriers

From the moment I arrived in Bakewell, Derbyshire, as a carpet-bagger politician nearly a quarter of a century ago, I knew I’d never leave. The attractions of the county and its sweet green hills and dales only grew. And in the end, though I had meant the Peaks to be just rungs on my ladder to the peaks of politics, politics turned out to be just a rung on my ladder to the Peaks. Here I stayed and here, I hope, I always will. So what comes next is difficult to write: so difficult that I’ve never written it before. But here goes… I don’t like dry-stone walls. There. I’ve

Michael Tanner

Marriage minefield

There are two places in Le Nozze di Figaro where the music undergoes a brief but potent change, which indicates how much deeper the undercurrents are than the busy actions we are witnessing. If either of these is short-changed or mismanaged, the whole work is rendered less moving and serious than it really is. The first and less conspicuous is in the finale to Act II, when the Count is trying to trap Figaro about the letter of assignation. The Count says he can tell from Figaro’s face that he is lying, and Figaro replies that in that case his face is the liar. The music to which he sings

Alexander Fiskeharrison

A good run

I have just finished running — with a thousand like-minded souls from around the world — down a half-mile of medieval city streets while being pursued by a half-dozen half-ton wild Spanish fighting bulls. They were accompanied by an equal number of three-quarter-ton galloping oxen, but we didn’t worry about them: they know the course as well as anyone and keep the bulls in a herd. This is good, because when fighting bulls are on their own they become the beast of solitary splendour and ferocity you may see in bullrings across Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico and much of Latin America. However, every second week in July, during the festival

Michael Henderson

What Federer isn’t

This summer, like so many others in the past decade, belongs to Roger Federer. By reclaiming the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, after giving Andy Murray a set start, the peerless Swiss revealed what true greatness looks like in sporting togs. Seven times a Wimbledon champion, 17 times a winner of Grand Slam events: his record compels not so much admiration as awe, and it will surprise nobody if, next month, he retains the Olympic title he won four years ago. He is, by general assent, the greatest of all tennis players, standing a cubit taller than Rod Laver, the Australian champion of the Sixties, who was at centre court

Niall Ferguson

Friedman’s century

Milton Friedman would have been 100 later this month. As well as being one of the great economists, if not the greatest economist, of the 20th century, he was also what the Americans call a public intellectual. He was a regular on PBS, the American equivalent of the BBC, writing and presenting Free To Choose, a ten-part series that aired in the late 1970s. He also wrote a column for Newsweek for an astonishing 18 years. Among today’s public intellectuals, it is extremely fashionable today to say that the financial crisis has proved Friedman wrong. You can read that on an almost weekly basis in the New York Times or the Guardian: that

James Delingpole James Delingpole

If Big Oil won’t stand up for free markets, who will

At the Spectator party this year I met a girl I hadn’t seen since Oxford. We exchanged pleasantries. She was looking good and she’d done really well for herself, which made me very happy for her. But then she mentioned that before her latest plum posting she’d been working in the ‘private sector’ for Shell. I said: ‘I hardly call Shell the private sector.’ And the conversation went downhill from there. When I was a child I used to love Shell. We’d never fill our tank anywhere else, if we could help it, because the Shell garages used to give you these brilliant collectable medallions — such as their 1969

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Censorship Olympics

The guards would not let me walk round the Olympic park. ‘We’re in lockdown because of a security alert,’ one explained. The rain fell. The overbearing policing intimidated. ‘London is going to host the Paralympics and the paramilitary Olympics,’ I muttered with unpatriotic grumpiness, as I retreated to the bright lights and piped music of Stratford’s new Westfield centre, only to find another lockdown in progress. David Cameron said the Olympics should be a ‘showcase of national enterprise and innovation’. As far as the enterprising shopkeepers and restaurant managers at Westfield were concerned, the games might as well not be happening. There were no adverts inviting people to enjoy Olympic

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Invented racial ugliness

I wasn’t especially impressed by Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP (nor, frankly, by the way Romney was booed, though that’s a different matter) but at least I wasn’t driven demented by it. The same, alas, cannot be said for poor Michael Tomasky who sees something rotten lurking in the dark heart of Romney’s, er, standard stump speech: Oh please. This is guff. Guff on stilts, in fact. It’s true that being booed by the NAACP won’t hurt Romney with the wilder, nastier corners of the Republican base. Nevertheless, to presume Romney set this speech up so as to perform and benefit from this kind of trick shot is to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Mitt is not so daft as to pick Condi

If you think it’s a coincidence that Matt Drudge has put his siren on to blast the ‘news’ that Condoleezza Rice is the ‘front-runner’ to be Mitt Romney’s running-mate just as Romney’s campaign fends off fresh questions about his record at Bain Capital then, my friends, you’re charmingly naive. This isn’t a serious proposition. It’s just a smokescreen. Romney may be many things but he’s not wholly daft. He’s not going to pick a pro-choice woman who is also, probably, in favour of gay marriage. Nor, alas, does Condi bring a record of achievement to the ticket. As Daniel Larison observes, in typically withering style: Quite. Rice may have a

Gordon Hector

If we don’t cough up for social care, we’ll be broke

The Office for Budget Responsibility put out its annual Fiscal Sustainabilty report yesterday. It’s got three graphs which are a wee bit scary. Here’s the first graph, showing what proportion of taxes paid and state services used comes from which age group: Speaks for itself, really. We rely heavily on the middle-aged for taxes, and spend heavily on early and later years. Look in particular at the pink lines – that’s health and long term care. Now look at graph number two: Spot where the growth is. Note the percentages are the average increases each and every year, for the next 50 years. Put the two graphs together and you

Douglas Murray

Britain does not need more mass immigration

Jonathan has already mentioned yesterday’s Fiscal Sustainability Report from the Office of Budgetary Responsibility. He appears to welcome mass migration both now and as an inevitable part of our future. Perhaps I could put a dissenting view? Migration itself can be a good thing. But mass migration (in the numbers it has happened in recent years in Britain and many other Western countries) is a bad thing. It strains our welfare systems, encourages people to ghetto-ise rather than assimilate and creates not so much a multi-racial society as a country made up of different mono-cultural centres. It causes a breakdown in trust both between and among communities, and erodes the

Thursday

Steerpike Steerpike

Legally blonde

A touch of glamour at the High Court this morning as N-Dubz singer turned X-Factor judge Tulisa won an apology from her ex-boyfriend for leaking a rather intimate tape of the pair. Revealing a newly dyed blonde mop for her day, presumably in homage to Legally Blonde, she told the waiting pack that her leaky ex had messed with the wrong girl. ‘I’m just really happy that the truth is out. It’s a fresh start for me today after this, and it’s my birthday, and now, of course, I’m off to Ibiza.’ Of course. A happy ending you might say.