Society

Monday

The Reverend Michael Coren

We must be honest about honour killings

White guilt has terrible consequences. This was made profoundly clear in Canada during the three month trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed. They were convicted a week ago of the first-degree murder of Zainab (19), Sahar (17) and Geeti Shafia (13), and 50-year-old Rona Amir. The three teens were Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009. The killers had chosen a canal in Kingston — a university town half-way between Toronto and Montreal — because they assumed that the local police would be less sophisticated

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Terry shouldn’t be captain, but that should be Capello’s decision to make

The England manager Fabio Capello is both right and wrong about John Terry. Right because it was stupid and, as Terry Venables says, ‘knee-jerk’ of the Football Association to remove the captaincy from the rat-faced little scrote. That’s up to the manager, a man disinclined to give a clamorous press what it wants. Wrong, because Terry should not be captain in the first place, nor indeed on the field of play. These days, Eric Pickles would be a more mobile and nuanced centre half for the national side than Mr Terry. Capello was also wrong to have reinstated Terry as captain after succumbing to FA and media pressure to remove

Daniel Korski

Putin’s end

This weekend, thousands of people defied the cold and the control in Moscow to show their dislike for Vladimir Putin and what Russia has become under his leadership: corrupt, energy-reliant, centralised, and uncompetitive. It is now a country that must win externally because it can’t help but lose internally. ‘Post-BRIC’, as a new report has it. My guess is that Putin will ‘win’ the presidential election, and will ensure that a sufficient number of counter-protests make it look as if he has more support than he actually has. That’s exactly the kind of ‘virtual politics’ that Moscow excels at and which Ukraine expert Andrew Wilson has described so well in

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Don’t let’s be beastly to the bankers

The Twitter hashtag #BankerOutrage was launched by Radio Four yesterday summing up a very popular mood. It’s not unusual for bankers to be hated after crashes. After the South Sea Bubble burst in 1721, there were calls in the Lords for the bankers involved to be dumped in sacks filled with serpents and dropped in the Thames. But that was the immediate aftermath: what’s odd now is the timing. As we say in the leading article of this week’s Spectator, Hester had a bonus twice the size last year — and no one seemed to care. Now, it’s suddenly a crisis and Fred the Shred’s knighthood is a matter of

Jonathan Jones

Public opinion is split on Gove’s reforms

It seems most of the public agrees with the need to improve our schools. A YouGov poll out this morning shows that 53 per cent think education standards have deteriorated over the past 10 years, while only 12 per cent think they’ve got better. 48 per cent think exams are too easy; just 28 per cent say they’re ‘about right’ and a mere 3 per cent think they’re too hard. And when it comes to discipline, the consensus of inadequacy is especially strong: 83 per cent say schools are ‘not strict enough’, while 0 per cent say they’re ‘too strict’. You don’t see 0 per cent in response to questions

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 4 February 2012

A woman’s work Sir: I enjoyed Andrew M. Brown’s article on the rise of the ‘Dalis’ (28 January). As the working wife of a man who earns more than I do, I drew comfort from the fact that more and more women are becoming the main breadwinners. At the same time, it is irritating to think of all those useless men sitting about dreaming while their wives slave away from home. Perhaps we will all eventually reach the same conclusion as our more militant sisters — we don’t really need men at all. Florence Hayden-Smith Hampshire Sir: How typical to find that, at a time when women’s magazines endlessly discuss

Dot Wordsworth

Arms race

On Start the Week, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty spoke of an arms race in Home Office policy. She wasn’t talking about tasers or automatic weapons for policemen. Her phrase was metaphorical. Now I find that this metaphor is habitual to her. She used it when giving evidence in 2008 to the committee considering the Counter-Terrorism Bill. It quite annoyed Tony McNulty, who had not then resigned as a minister nor yet apologised to Parliament about his expenses claims. In discussing detention without trial, he told her: ‘You made a very negative characterisation of the shift from 14 to 28 days. You described it as an arms race.’ She replied: ‘In

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 4 February 2012

Q. We have a friend in her late sixties who has been a widow for ten years. Over that period of time we have asked her to many social occasions at our home. She has never asked us to her house. It’s reached a stage where we are starting to feel that maybe we shouldn’t ask her again. Do you have any ideas as to how we could resolve this problem? – P.H., Wiltshire A. Yes, but first let’s look at the likely reasons for her failure to reciprocate. One: you have a large, beautiful house, whereas she has a small grotty one and wrongly assumes you would not want

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 4 February 2012

I write this having just returned from the BBC, where I spent a hairy six-and-a-half minutes sticking up for Fred the Shred on Newsnight. Or, rather, attacking the Forfeiture Committee’s decision to strip him of his knighthood. My antagonist was Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer and currently the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Referee: Jeremy Paxman. Hutton’s view, like Ed Miliband’s, is that this is a victory for ‘moral capitalism’. What that boils down to, as far as I can tell, is bankers forgoing their bonuses and, in some cases, being stripped of their honours. To me, it feels more like political opportunism. Not a decision based on

Robin Oakley

The turf: Carpe diem

He didn’t quite tap the side of his nose but, looking around and dropping his voice, one of the best-connected racecourse informants I know greeted me at Cheltenham on Saturday with the news: ‘Alan King has got the sniffles in his yard.’ Striking a line through all the inmates of King’s Barbury Castle Stables on my racecard, I paused only to put a circle round Baby Mix, Paddy Brennan’s mount for Tom George in the first. ‘Paddy says this is the best novice he’s ever sat on,’ my informant had also confided. Unfortunately, nobody had told Baby Mix, one of the ante-post favourites for the Triumph Hurdle at the Cheltenham

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 February 2012

‘She’s a strange one, isn’t she?’ said Long John the spaniel trainer as he put Cydney through her paces. We were in the enclosure in the field behind his house, where he had decided to train Cydney behind ten-foot-high fencing because the last time we went for a lesson we had a bit of a disaster in the pheasant wood. On that occasion, he asked whether she was alright off the lead and I summed up her current state of obedience by saying, ‘Yes, most of the time, she just goes a bit funny at the end of a walk,’ when really I should have said, ‘No, absolutely not, she’s

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 February 2012

Exeter airport. Check in. I’m booked on a domestic flight to Glasgow International and I’m travelling with hand luggage only. It’s a small, cheap rucksack. It contains a phone charger, a toothbrush, a plastic bottle of Head and Shoulders, a copy of the Sun, two tubs of Devonshire clotted cream, a pound of Devon cheese and three books. The books are: a paperback biography of Robert Burns; a 1903 cloth-bound collection of Schopenhauer’s essays; and a Norton edition paperback anthology of English poetry. The Burns biography and the Schopenhauer are gifts for my hosts in Paisley, one of whom is a Schopenhauer devotee. The poetry anthology is for me to

Taki

High life | 4 February 2012

Gstaad OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St Moritz the Russian crooks are laying a Stalingrad-like siege to the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. So what else is new? Gstaad covered with snow, that’s what’s new. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seekers such as George Soros posed and postured about being against income inequality. What phonies these bums are, just as bad as the Occupy protestors but with two or three private jets and large ugly stinkpot yachts. (Unlike Taki, who has a large but beautiful sailing boat.) Growth for the sake of growth is a capitalist mantra, and bubbles will

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Call that a spectacle?

The Grand Olympic Opening Ceremony will apparently inform us ‘who we are, who we were and who we wish to be’ — just in case we had forgotten — and you will have to pay to sit in a stadium to watch it. Romans did not go in for this sort of claptrap, let alone restrict attendance to officials and a few paying customers. When they celebrated, it was for everyone. The Roman triumph featured a massive procession through the streets led by the victorious general’s army, with booty, captives and paintings and three-dimensional models of Great Moments on display. There would be street parties, shows and handouts. For Pompey’s

The Spectator

Barometer | 4 February 2012

Bonus culture Some have called for an end to a ‘bonus culture’ in banks and big firms. But bonus culture has been around a long time… — Around the year ad 70, Roman legionnaires received bonuses of 25 denarii to supplement their salaries of 225 denarii. — Bonuses were recorded by 14th-century Florentine banks, with one employee of the Peruzzi Company receiving 40 lire to supplement a salary of five times that sum. — In 1965 India passed the Payment of Bonus Act, which entitled employees to a bonus of 8.33 per cent of their salary, and at least 100 rupees, providing they worked for more than 30 days in

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 February 2012

The present Queen succeeded to the throne 60 years ago this coming Tuesday. Her father, King George VI, had died at Sandringham in the night. Pursuing a ‘Where were you when…?’ line of inquiry, I asked my father what he remembered. An undergraduate at Trinity, he was walking down Sydney Street, Cambridge, when he saw the news hoarding ‘the king is dead’. Oddly enough, he told me, his own father (also at Trinity) walked down Sydney Street on 23 January 1901, and into the Cambridge Union. There he found that a telegram — then the fastest means of news — had just been posted, announcing the death of Queen Victoria

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 4 February 2012

Try as I might, I can’t pretend even to myself that the Cambridge Union debate against Katie Price was anything but a total victory for tits and telly, and an utter defeat for me. What was I thinking? But still. Last week I found myself at the Cambridge Union in a tight red dress, proposing the motion ‘This House believes the only Limit to Female Success is Female Ambition’ to an overflowing chamber. I thought I made some jolly good points. And Miss Price, in sparkly leggings and six-inch heels, was winningly unsure of herself, and actually delivered a four-minute speech in proposition rather than opposition of the motion. But

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 February 2012

Home Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was stripped of his knighthood by the Forfeiture Committee, which said he had ‘brought the honours system into disrepute’. Stephen Hester, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, turned down a £963,000 shares-only bonus payment in the face of ‘enormous political pressure’. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that the government was borrowing £2.9 billion less this year than expected and that there might be room for tax cuts in the budget next month. A man in Bournemouth found blue spheres of jelly an inch across on his lawn after a hailstorm. ••• David Norris

The Spectator

Bank withdrawals

When George Osborne became Chancellor, he took charge of a very large zombie bank with a medium-sized government attached to it. The Royal Bank of Scotland was nationalised in 2008 with assets of £2.2 trillion, almost four times state annual spending. The difference between RBS being run well or run badly could be counted in billions. The man who would make that difference was Stephen Hester, a top-flight banker who in a moment of madness had accepted the contract from Alistair Darling’s Treasury and got to work. He would not have known how his new ­masters would turn on him, demanding that he refuse his bonus of nearly £1 million.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The race to Lambeth Palace

Rowan Williams’s would-be successors have begun jostling for position. One stands out Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with godliness and the distinct suspicion that old beardie has had more than enough and may wish to shuffle off to a warm university sinecure some time soon. The more cynical among you might not give a monkey’s and, indeed, suggest that jockeying for position to inherit Rowan’s mantle is akin to jockeying within the Romanov family to inherit Nicholas II’s mantle in about 1915. As with most artefacts of western civilisation — manufacturing, education, the armed forces,