Society

Saturday

12 May 2012

Status Anxiety: Must there be a Roxy Mark III?

Hamster-gate continues. Last Saturday, Caroline and I went out to dinner, leaving the children playing with Roxy in the company of a babysitter. I told them to put her back in her cage before they went to bed, making sure that all doors, etc. were securely fastened. In order to make sure they complied, I stressed that the consequence of her escaping would be certain death — just as I had before we lost Roxy Mark I. When we came home at midnight, I checked the cage just to make sure the children had followed my instructions and, to my horror, discovered that the lid to Roxy’s sleeping compartment hadn’t

Robin Oakley

Twelve for the Flat | 12 May 2012

The fittest horse wins the Guineas, the luckiest horse wins the Derby and the best horse wins the St Leger, goes the old saying. But not since Nijinsky in 1970 has any horse won all three. Many of those best qualified, like Mill Reef, have not attempted the feat. Since Nijinsky failed to win the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe after running in the St Leger many top horses have swerved Britain’s least glamorous Classic for fear of prejudicing their chances in Paris. But the owners of Camelot, impressive winner of last weekend’s 2,000 Guineas for Aidan O’Brien and now favourite for the Derby, are thinking of bidding for the

Melissa Kite

Real life | 12 May 2012

We were hoping the new filly might jump, but we were not expecting her to get started straight away. Ideally, we would have preferred her not to tackle the five foot post and rail fence of her paddock. It had all been going so smoothly. Famous last words with horses. We brought the foal home and settled her into a stable next to the boyfriend’s huge grey thoroughbred. The two of them greeted each other over the wall, big old Longman reaching over with ease to offer her a paternal snuffle and Darcy straining upwards on tiptoe to touch noses. The next day we put Darcy in the outdoor school

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 12 May 2012

The day after her 96th birthday, and three days before she died, my next-door neighbour told me she wanted Jimmy killed and put in her coffin with her. She knew then she hadn’t long to go. The only thing I could do for her, she said, was put fresh milk in Jimmy’s saucer, making sure that the milk was fresh. She was very anxious about this. She’d hate Jimmy to be offered milk that had gone off. I was jubilant. Her wanting Jimmy put down was the best news I’d heard for ages. I’d have offered to do it myself with my bare hands if there was even half a

Taki

High life | 12 May 2012

New York So, Sarko and Bruni are out, Hollande is in and I’m off to the Actor’s Studio to brush up on my acting lessons. (Stanley Kowalski is reborn. Stella!) I wonder whether DSK is thinking: ‘There but for an African maid go I.’ My friend Edward Jay Epstein has written a quickie book about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s little problem of last year here in the Bagel, one in which Epstein reiterates the disgraced ex-IMF chief’s suspicions that he was set up by his political enemies. Epstein does not agree, he simply states Dominique’s case. Personally, I was delighted when the frog was busted, and it wasn’t simple schadenfreude either. (I

The Spectator

Letters | 12 May 2012

Pollygarchy Sir: It was with a rising sense of disbelief that I read Polly Toynbee’s review of Ferdinand Mount’s The New Few (Books, 5 May). There’s an oligarchy in this country all right, but what Ms Toynbee fails to realise is that she is a member. For every overpaid plutocrat, there are any number of privileged people like herself who find lucrative employment ‘representing the disadvantaged’. They remind me of nothing so much as the old squirearchy, who used to visit their cottagers to do good works. I would not like to suggest that it is actually in the interest of the socialist elite to keep the masses in their

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Aesop on Alex Salmond

In Aesop’s fable, mother frog threatened to explode by puffing herself up to a size big enough to take on the ox that had accidentally trodden on one of her young. It’s all so Alec Salmond, puffing himself up to save tiny but heroic Scotland (5 million) and its plucky welfare dependents from being crushed by its tyrannical neighbour (52 million). In a Politeia pamphlet, Lord Fraser has proposed that it would be better for Scotland to become something like a Roman ‘client kingdom’. Such kingdoms were monarchies or their equivalent, on the edge of the Roman Empire, serving mutual interests. Rome would protect the monarch’s position against local rivals, and

Brian Sewell

Diary – 12 May 2012

Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean afterthought by a rotten architect — I know to be very steep even for a man fully fit in wind and limb. Beyond the serried tower blocks there are more steps, more generous to the lame in every dimension, and down — though they will be up on the way back and there are a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 May 2012

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, declared that he would ‘focus on what matters’ after the Conservatives’ poor showing in the local elections brought accusations that pursuit by the coalition of such aims as gay marriage and reform of the House of Lords was alienating voters. On the eve of the Queen’s Speech he appeared at a tractor factory in Essex with Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, who had done disastrously in the local elections. ‘I’m really sad,’ Mr Clegg had said of the results. Labour had gained an extra 823 wards, the Conservatives lost 405 and the Liberal-Democrat party 330, leaving it

The Spectator

Fewer laws, more action

This government has run out of good ideas; that was what the Queen’s speech told us this week. When the coalition was formed, it united behind a genuinely bold agenda: school reform, welfare reform, health reform and deficit elimination. Where has the boldness gone? The coalition’s courage has vanished, as has its sense of purpose and the ability of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to agree on anything sensible. So for the next year, our MPs will be kept busy, not pushing on with important changes, but debating intractable problems like House of Lords reform and long-term care for the elderly. If there’s not much to be said for what

James Forsyth

Will Greece run out of German sympathy?

As Greece heads for another election, there’s increasing speculation that the anti-bailout parties will do even better next time. Talking to people in Brussels, there’s an expectation that if this does happen German patience could snap and they might start pushing for Greece’s ejection from the euro. The argument goes that Merkel, who faces her own elections next year, can’t afford to let the Greeks change the terms of their bailout deal. There is, though, one particular reason to be sceptical about whether Berlin would ever actually put Athens in a position where it would have to leave the euro. If Greece did go back to the drachma, the markets

Simon Marcus

Minority report

As a member of the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, I believe that we failed to address the deeper causes of last summer’s violence Will the riots happen again? That was the question many people asked after last summer. As one of the appointees to the government’s Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, set up in the wake of the riots, I think I know. But a number of my conclusions differed from those of my fellow panellists, and some of the politicians who set us up. We spent six months travelling around the country speaking to people about what happened. Those who spoke to us cited many issues, including poverty,

Melanie McDonagh

The right to squeak

It’s probably tendentious to say that the feminine voice is a feminist issue, but let me say it anyway. I have, I may say, a voice that spans the vocal spectrum from soft to strident — oh all right, shrill, but I never quite appreciate what a problem it is until I do the odd bit of radio. Really, I should stick to print. Last year, I took part in a fun Radio 4 programme that sought to replicate a newspaper leader conference in a BBC radio studio. In theory, the editorial line on this particular programme is decided by the strength of argument. But it was only when the

Martin Gayford

Jerusalem Notebook

Jerusalem is a wonderful city for hat-spotting. There are the black fedoras and other varieties worn by Hassidic and ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews, sometimes magnificent in height and breadth, and there is also an almost infinite gradation of birettas, hoods and bonnets and headgear defying easy definition worn by Christian clergy of various denominations. We had an ecclesiastical fashion show one afternoon while lingering in an alley leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Unexpectedly, along came the King of Jordan’s cousin Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad on an official visit, proceeded by a dragoman who banged the ground with a staff and rather roughly pushed us out of the way,

John Osullivan

Boarding the sinking ship

How Obama drove central and eastern Europe towards the eurozone – at the worst possible time On 1 January last year, while the euro was staggering drunkenly across the exchanges, the Baltic republic of Estonia joined the single currency. It was like watching a sturdy little lifeboat ferrying new passengers determinedly towards the Titanic after the ship had struck the iceberg. What could they possibly mean by it? ‘For Estonia, the choice is to be inside the club, among the decision makers, or stay outside of the club,’ the Estonian prime minister told reporters. ‘We prefer to act as club members.’ Not just any old EU or euro club either,

Louise Mensch

Beastie girl

My husband Peter manages rock bands, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio last month. I went with him to the ceremony. Other bands I’d known and loved as a teenager were being inducted, too, among them Guns N’ Roses and the Beastie Boys. Two of the three-man rap band — Ad-Rock (Adam Horowitz) and Mike D (Michael Diamond) — were there to accept their awards. But they wouldn’t go on stage without Adam Yauch. That day, Yauch had entered hospital for the last time. When he died, the international media overflowed with grief. Yauch made television news

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Set text

In Competition No. 2746 you were invited to submit a sonnet using the following rhymes: pig, bat, cat, wig, jig, hat, rat, fig; lie, red, sob, die, bed, rob. This is a rerun of a brute of a competition that was set back in the 1950s, and the daft rhymes are those given as an illustration of the verse form by the Concise Oxford Dictionary of that time. The final rhyme proved especially bothersome, frequently scuppering otherwise excellent entries. Nonsense verse was the obvious way to go but a fair few forged ingenious alternative routes. It was a large entry and the standard was high. Well deserved commendations go to

Rory Sutherland

More Canada!

The more elderly among The Spectator’s readership, who still secretly mourn the loss of Nyasaland and the Aden protectorate, may be pleased to hear that a small step was taken last month towards reversing the Empire’s inexorable decline. More surprising still, the idea behind this expansion comes from an American economist and the flag raised will be not the red ensign but the maple leaf. But it’s a start. The original proposal (mentioned here three years ago) is to create ‘charter cities’ in the developing world where the institutions, infrastructure and government are not those of the surrounding nation but are imported wholesale from somewhere else. City-states whose success supports

Bruce Anderson

A malt revolution

There was a wonderful old girl called Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The daughter of the good Roosevelt president, Theodore, she was a formidable Washington political hostess until her nineties. The older she grew, the more fearless she became. By the end, she combined the plain speaking of her Dutch forebears with a wit and sharpness which would have delighted, and intimidated, any salon, anywhere, ever. She also solved one of the greater minor mysteries of the 20th century. If any two human beings were fated to become staunch friends, it ought to have been Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. To win the second world war, Churchill had to get on with

Anthony Cummins

The courage of their convictions

HHhH is a prize-winning French novel about a writer writing a novel about the plot to kill the Gestapo boss Reinhard Heydrich. A lot of people reckon it’s a big deal — Martin Amis, Mario Vargas Llosa, me — so naturally there’s a backlash afoot. In a fit of territorial pissing disguised as an interview, Michael Burleigh revealed that Laurent Binet ‘does not even read German’ (which HHhH admits on page 28) and professed surprise that his research failed to take in a Heydrich biography published (as Burleigh didn’t say) almost two years after HHhH first came out. I suppose part of the problem is that Binet asks for trouble