Society

Saturday

2 Jun 2012

Real life | 2 June 2012

Perhaps I should be flattered. There was I thinking I was getting old and frumpy. But it turns out the reason I waited for so long in the ambulance before they took me to hospital was that they thought I was on drugs. The boyfriend has just revealed this. He didn’t want to tell me earlier as I had enough on my mind, what with being left in agony on a trolley for 12 hours, then abandoned on a ward for a further seven hours before a supremely uninterested doctor managed to diagnose two cysts the size of golf balls.: Apparently, right after the paramedics accused me of misusing the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 2 June 2012

Our Scottish visitors, man and wife, came bearing lavish gifts: a beribboned fruit cake in a Union Jack cake tin; a bottle of Bollinger; a bottle of Bailie Nicol Jarvie old Scotch Whisky (their favourite tipple); a bottle of nubile white Burgundy; four ‘Katie Morag’ children’s books; The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, which made them both laugh in bed; a heavy, 19in high relief sculpture of Eos, Titan goddess of the dawn (she of the rosy fingers); a circular plaster plaque featuring a bust, in relief, of their jaw-droppingly beautiful middle daughter Sophie, clad in a toga, her head informally decorated with thistles, olives and olive leaves. And for

Taki

High life | 2 June 2012

On board S/Y Bushido However you cut it, Greek demagogues are bluffing that the faceless suits of Brussels will give in to the blackmail and fold their hand. Greeks are gamblers to start with, and some are even very good poker players. The tragedy is that the very same criminals who ruined the country to begin with are about to be re-elected on 17 June. The criminals, led by Antonis Samaras, have 27 per cent, the left-wing bluffer and con man Tsipras 25 per cent. Talk about Scylla and Charybdis! A couple of weeks ago I wrote that this Tsipras chappie who came in second and is running neck-and-neck with

David Blackburn

Mubarak sentenced

Jubilation has erupted outside a court in Cairo, where former President Hosni Mubarak has been sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the killing of 850 anti-government protesters during last year’s revolution. This has been a long process. When Mubarak was indicted, he was wheeled into a cage on a hospital bed, which raised questions about the state of his health and the fairness of the trial. The prosecution has been pushing for the deposed dictator to receive the death sentence, but that has been resisted. Mubarak was found guilty of conspiring in killing, but not guilty of corruption. It remains to be seen how this development will affect

Fraser Nelson

The end of an era | 2 June 2012

We baristas at Coffee House tend not to write about each other, but today I’d like to make an exception and say a little about Pete Hoskin, who is going freelance after four years running this blog. Regular CoffeeHousers will know about his rare combination of insight, humour and his gentle writing style which only adds to the force of his comment. But writing is only the most visible part of his job. His job for the last few years has been Coffee House editor – which not only means protecting the blog’s character and sense of fun, but working on the copy filed to him. As someone who has

Steerpike

Will Jordan trigger Kent’s free schools revolution?

I have learnt that Toby Young, also of this parish, has been briefing his fellow Sun on Sunday columnist Jordan, aka Katie Price. Young is one of Michael Gove’s biggest free school champions and I hear that keeping readers abreast of developments with his own West London Free School has paid off — Jordan is to set up a free school for blind and disabled children in Kent. Toby informed me of the obvious benefits this development: ‘She’ll make a much more appealing spokesperson for the free schools movement than me!’ Mr Steerpike couldn’t possibly comment. But will we be seeing other Sun columnist joining the education revolution? The Jeremy

James Forsyth

The pressure heaps on Merkel

This morning there’s an odd disconnect between the joyful Jubilee coverage in the papers and the grim economic news inside them. The Eurozone crisis appears to be once again reaching one of those moments when there’s an expectation that something will have to give. The Germans are coming under even more pressure than before to sign up to Euro-bonds and to allow the bailout fund to recaptialise ailing banks; the Spanish are particularly keen on the later point as it is their only way of avoiding an IMF programme. One British government source complains that ‘the Germans are working on a five to ten year timetable, but if they are

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Jubilee lines

In Competition No. 2749 you were invited to submit a poem, written by a poet laureate from the past, to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Thirteen out of the 19 former laureates featured in the entry. Unsurprisingly, the most popular were Betjeman and Tennyson, with Wordsworth and Hughes coming a close second. Alfred Austin and Colley Cibber, poorly rated and oft-mocked, spawned a handful of strong submissions. I liked George Simmers’s twist on Southey’s ‘After Blenheim’; equally impressive were Ann Alexander, Brian Murdoch and W.J. Webster, all of whom captured well the voice of Ted Hughes. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. The bonus fiver goes to Mary Holtby

Roger Alton

Gold standard

Heavens, we do like a moan. Sure the traffic will be hell; the commercialism mind-numbing; the Zil lanes a pain; and the presence of the egregious will.i.am, a man so irritating he makes Stephen Fry seem likable, lugging the Olympic torch is preposterous. Usain Bolt will probably miss the final because he’s been stopped and searched driving through Brixton in a rented Beamer, and the starter pistols will doubtless set off a health and safety alert. The miserabilists will have a field day or 15 but for the rest of us the Olympics will knock our blocks off. You don’t have to buy into all the waffle surrounding the Games

Rory Sutherland

Pushing the envelope

What’s so good about email? Well, it’s quick and easy for you to write an email, you can copy in lots of people, it’s immediate and it’s free. And the worst thing about email? Well, it’s very quick and easy for other people to send you an email, or to copy you in on an email, and their bloody senseless email arrives immediately. And for bloody free. This is one problem. Almost all the advantages of email accrue to the sender. The effort, obligation and responsibility all fall to the recipient. In that sense email creates what economists call ‘negative externalities’, rather like industrial pollution or aircraft noise. In several

Bruce Anderson

A taste of heaven

I have drunk the Hallelujah Chorus. It was in Cambridge, circa 1970. I was walking back to College, past the 1950s extension to the University Arms hotel, a work of striking ugliness, even by the standards of postwar Cambridge architecture. Like Handel, I felt the heavens open, but not to see the face of God: merely the successor to Noah’s Flood. I fled into the hotel. It was divine providence. Waiting for the heavens to close, I nursed a pint of pasteurised gas. This was in the days before Camra, the campaign for real ale. Over the past 40 years, the culture wars have gone badly for conservatism. But there

James Forsyth

After the celebrations, a summer of discontent

The next few days will see David Cameron doing what he does best: looking the part. Whether it is the Jubilee celebrations or the Olympic torch relay, Cameron can be relied upon to know — or look as if he knows — what is expected of him as Prime Minister. Cameron’s natural ease is his greatest asset. It is why Downing Street aides are convinced that this summer’s events will help restore his reputation. Combine this with the anticipated national feel-good factor and it is easy to see why so many expect that the Jubilee and the Games will ease the government to calmer waters. Despite the lightness with which

Robert Hardman

The main event

The tickets have all been handed out fairly and efficiently. No one has grumbled about crashing websites or foreign tour operators snaffling the best seats. There are no snatch squads of lawyers and police ready to pounce on inappropriate signs and seal off London’s A-roads for a few VIPs. Yet the overall crowd figure will stretch into the millions, with billions more watching around the world. The promotional value is incalculable. And the cost of this global event? The taxpayer is being charged £1 million for administration bills plus whatever it costs to police the public. At worst, the entire thing might cost, say, half a beach volleyball arena. Having

Joan Collins

The Queen and I

Well it’s all too terribly, terribly exciting: 60 glorious years on the throne of England and almost more than that in my consciousness. I first became aware of the then Princess Elizabeth when I was a young evacuee in Ilfracombe. In my parents’ sudden mad rush from London to escape the Blitz, unnecessary things like toys were left behind. I made do by playing with conkers and skipping on an old frayed rope but it was all rather boring until the woman next door produced a treasure — an old cutting-out book from the 1937 coronation of King George VI. Inside were two pretty cardboard figures of the young princesses,

Sinclair McKay

The Silver age

I was ten years old during the Silver Jubilee in 1977. That perfect, daft summer formed and cemented my view of the country I live in, and still makes me feel a wave of unconditional affection every time I think back to it. Social historians seem almost contractually obliged to present England during that time as a tatty, shambolic, declining realm, a dreary windswept concrete shopping precinct where everything was brown and orange. But that is not what we ten-year-olds saw. We saw the vivid bright green of Slime (a fashionable novelty toy then) and the mellow purple of our Chopper bikes and the thrilling scarlet from our LED digital

Rod Liddle

Anti-Semitism is an evil that still requires examination

Can you explain, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews? It’s an interesting question. My late mum was a bit anti-Semitic, and I always found her mild animus incomprehensible and indeed weird, as did my father. It surfaced during the Yom Kippur War, when I was 13: my dad and I were urging on the Israelis — in a slightly detached way, as if it were, say, Leeds playing Chelsea in a football match and through default one found oneself supporting the lesser of two evils, i.e. Chelsea. Mum was cheering on the Arabs because, she admitted, she wasn’t ‘keen on’ Jews. We were both surprised, my Dad and

Peter Oborne

Libya notebook

The battle had the busy, obsessive yet irrelevant air of a point-to-point. It was a social event, held outdoors, a good place to see and be seen. The jeunesse dorée of the western Libyan town of Zuwara were out in force. People had come from miles around. Rather than tweed suits and barbours they were wearing battlefield fatigues and clung to machine-guns and rocket-launchers. As artillery rounds and bullets whistled overhead, the Zuwarans made informed comments, ducking when the shooting got too close. Half a mile ahead, street fighting had already claimed some 20 lives and inflicted 300 casualties. Welcome to post-revolutionary Libya. ••• We slept overnight in the Dolphin Hotel on the

Melissa Kite

Paving paradise

The gamekeeper at the Surrey farm where I keep my horses has been banned from his local pub for looking too scruffy. Like the two farm workers in Berkshire who made headlines when they were turfed out of their local a few weeks ago, the gamekeeper has been left in no doubt that his muddy face no longer fits. Apparently, customers complained about his ancient shooting jacket, mud-splattered wellies and cloth cap. These customers are not from the country, you see. They are townies who bought their dream house in prime commuter-belt countryside and now frequent the newly renovated gastropub in Armani jeans and Ralph Lauren sweaters. The landlord is

Clarissa Tan

Queen of the world

A Jubilee for the Commonwealth – and beyond Recently I took a flight to my native Malaysia to celebrate my mum’s 79th birthday. I knew that, since I am currently living in London, a birthday present that screamed BRITAIN was in order — a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ notepaper set wrapped in tartan and placed in a Harrods shopping bag, say, or silver tea caddies in the shape of double-decker buses. At one of the tourist shops in Heathrow, my eyes fell on a shelf of bone china Diamond Jubilee plates all emblazoned in gold, many with HRH Elizabeth II’s visage beaming from the centre. I bought one. On

Rory Sutherland

Divided we stand

Many Native American tribes would consult a shaman before embarking on a hunting expedition. In one tribe, a shaman would take a caribou bone, carve on it images of the kind of prey the tribe were keen to find (buffalo, deer, trailer-park video-poker addicts) and then place it on a fire. At some point the heat of the fire would cause the bone to split. The hunting party would then set out unquestioningly in the direction of the line of the crack. This is of course a completely insane practice; the kind of irrational, superstitious nonsense that would have Richard Dawkins foaming at the mouth. Except it isn’t. In fact,