Society

Saturday

Antony Jay

Diary – 28 April 2012

No great April Fool’s Day spoof this year. The best ever was in Panorama on 1 April 1957. I was mildly connected with it — I was on the Panorama production team that devised it, though I did not think of it or produce it. It was a film of the spaghetti harvest in Italy. The team cooked pounds and pounds of spaghetti and draped it over the branches of trees in an Italian orchard, then filmed peasant girls with ladders collecting it in armfuls. Among the many people taken in by it (there was very little real spaghetti around in the 1950s, it was all in tins) was the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 April 2012

Home The British economy went back into recession, shrinking by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2012, following a contraction of 0.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2011. Government debt rose by £117 million over last year’s figure, to £1,022.5 billion, equivalent to 66 per cent of GDP. George Osborne, the Chancellor, lent the International Monetary Fund another $15 billion to help it bail out countries in the eurozone. In the Commons, Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, had earlier characterised Mr Osborne’s Budget as an ‘omnishambles’. Nadine Dorries, a backbench Conservative MP, called David Cameron and Mr Osborne ‘two posh boys who don’t know

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Equality against conscience and the Big Society

It was pretty well apparent at the outset that the Equality Act 2010 – the so-called Socialism in a Single Clause law – spelt trouble and now it is the Catholic Church that may run foul of Harriet Harman’s pet project. The Catholic Education Service in England and Wales has written to Catholic secondary schools to get them to encourage pupils and staff to sign the online petition against the Government’s gay marriage proposals. Today, on BBC Radio 4, the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, Andrew Copson warned that the Church may be breaking two laws: the one that prohibits partisan political activity in school, the other, more

David Blackburn

IDS turns up the volume on welfare cuts

Iain Duncan Smith is quietly spoken. His interview with today’s Times (£) is a case in point. The political elite are ‘distanced’ from the people, he says. The Leveson inquiry is there to ‘clean the house’. The job of government is to govern well, not be loved. The ‘omnishambles’ will pass because David Cameron has ‘the capability to pull himself and us all through’. But, amid these placid notes, is a subito fortissimo. The welfare secretary sets himself against George Osborne’s wish that a further £10 billion in welfare cuts be found by 2016. He says: ‘This is my discussion with him… My view is that it’s not [all going

Ian Osborne

Election night with the Sarkozys

Election night in Paris is a very different affair from our own, rather sober ritual, for which the nation looks to a reassuring David Dimbleby. To begin with, the night is over when the exit polls are published the moment the polls close at 8p.m. All the major candidates compete to address the live television audiences immediately, and before any actual results have been certified. ••• Meanwhile, the news networks appear not to have discovered the Skycopter™, so the journey from candidates’ residences to victory parties (or otherwise) is a bizarre ritual where young overexcited reporters perched on the back of motorbikes chase the motorcades, defying death with late-night chases,

John Arlidge

Cuba Notebook

Like all odd places, Cuba attracts odd people. When I first started visiting in 1993, straggle-bearded men boarded the Soviet-built Air Cubana jet from Stansted. Where to go first, comrade, they wondered? The tractor factory at Cienfuegos or the collective tobacco farm in Trinidad? Like the Cubana flights, the fellow-travellers have long departed. Still, it’s reassuring to find Cuba still attracts oddballs. Sitting next to me on the Virgin flight from Gatwick are two middle-aged Glaswegians. He’s a trainspotter, she’s a twitcher. They ignore the food, booze and movies and fill orange notebooks with lists of the diesel locomotives and warblers they want to tick off. They’re so engrossed, they don’t leave their

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Britain is in drought, and my shoes squelch on the way to work

 ‘Sir,’ read a letter in the Daily Telegraph last week. ‘Is this the wettest drought since records began?’ High five, David Stevens of Poole, Dorset. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Drought? A lack of water? The sodding stuff is falling from the sky. All day, every day. Drought? Are you sodding kidding me? OK, no more sodding  I shall try to restrain myself. But it’s not easy. You know me. I’m a rationalist. I pride myself on not being the sort of person who steps outside in December, shivers, and thinks ‘global warming must be a myth!’ Or, indeed, who basks in an unusually warm February and decides

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: If the governorship is open to all comers from abroad, my money’s on Dr Bollard

If we are happy to venerate a Palestinian patron saint — it occurred to me, as I composed these thoughts on St George’s Day — then we can’t really object to a foreign governor of the Bank of England. The idea may offend the self-esteem of indigenous bankers, but that’s the way the betting has moved since last week’s revelation in the Financial Times that ‘an informal approach by a member of the Bank of England’s Court’ had been made to Bank of Canada governor and former Goldman Sachs executive Mark Carney as a potential candidate to succeed Sir Mervyn King next June. Carney, whose name was also in the

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Olympian

In Competition No. 2744 you were invited to provide a poetic preview of the Olympic Games. The impending onslaught was viewed with a mix of dread and indifference. When pessimism and cynicism descend on the entry there are always a smattering of Pollyannas but on this occasion they were fewer than usual. Alan Millard’s evocation of wall-to-wall British triumph under cloudless skies was nicely punctured in his closing couplet: ‘A small print warning: Previews may at times prove inexact./ What’s here is pure conjecture and should not be seen as fact.’ Others who narrowly missed out on a place on the podium were Frank Osen, Adrian Fry and D.A. Prince.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Not-so-basic instinct

As someone who has a panic attack when the Sky box fails to work, I am fascinated by people who stay calm in a major crisis. Hence I love listening to cockpit voice recordings on YouTube. Among the best are Apollo XIII and ‘US Airways Flight 1549’ — the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’. With both engines of an Airbus A320 knocked out by a birdstrike, captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III is offered an emergency landing at Teterboro. He pauses for a second. Then: ‘We can’t do it…. We’re going to be in the Hudson.’ At this point, it is worth noting a few facts about the pilot. He was 57

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Bottles by the Tay

A fanatical fisherman died. On arrival in the next world, he found himself on a river. A ghillie was proffering him a 16ft Hardy. ‘This is the life,’ thought the fisherman. ‘Or, rather, the afterlife.’ Within seconds, he made a perfect cast into enticing water: just the sort of pool which would seduce big fish into lingering. Within a few more seconds, his line was racing, the reel screeching, the rod dipping. Five minutes later, a fresh gleaming 30-pounder was on the bank. With arrogant jaws and an angry, imperious eye, this was no mere salmon. He had caught a lord of the river. ‘O death, where is thy sting?’

Tilly Ware

Travel Special – Dorset: The glories of the West

Tilly Ware explains why she’s still in love with the landscape of her childhood – and you should be, too My husband, three sons and I march single file along the grassy ridge, spotlit by the last of the low winter sun, the holly and hazel trees below already beginning to blacken. High up and alone on Eggardon hillfort in West Dorset, we have left the half-dozen other visitors steaming up their windscreens at the roadside viewpoint and slalomed up and down four sets of ramparts until we stand right on the outermost rim. There’s a good chance of spotting attacking Romans: my sons have their stick-daggers poised. But I’m

Jeremy Clarke

Travel Special – Devon: Bleak beauty

I overheard the following inter-cubicle exchange in a mixed changing room recently. ‘So where do you live?’ ‘We live on Dartmoor.’ ‘Dartmoor! How lovely!’ ‘Well, yes, it is amazing. But we’ve had quite enough of it now and we’re moving back down to the coast. In the two years we’ve lived up there, we’ve had enough rain and fog to last us a lifetime.’ I smiled as I stuck my right leg through the wrong hole of my swimming shorts. Very wet, Dartmoor is. In fact sodden might be a better word. It rains for days on end. The 365sq mile plateau is the first port of call for rain

Tremayne Carew-Pole

Travel Special – Cornwall: From Pasties to parmigiano

Back in the 1970s, pasties were what Cornwall was all about. I spent my childhood sitting in a howling gale on a Cornish beach eating a soggy pasty behind a striped wind break, retrieving Auntie K’s straw hat every few minutes when it flew like a drunken Frisbee towards the sea. The weather might not have changed much in the last 40 years, but the food and culture has. Cornwall, has morphed from a county of caravans and pies into a British Babylon. The renaissance happened in the 1990s when culture started to arrive in Cornwall. The Tate kicked it off — a glittering gallery reflecting the surf of St

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 28 April 2012

Laikipia, Kenya Darkness was closing in and one of the sheep was lost. A search party formed. On my Kenya farm big cats, African wild dogs and hyenas abound. Livestock left out overnight are almost sure to be devoured by morning. I’ve had a blind cow grazing in the safety of the garden croquet lawn pounced upon by eight lions and turned to a pool of gore between the peg and the hoops. From dusk to dawn we protect our cattle and sheep in a boma, or night enclosure. The lions go upwind and pee to spook cattle into a stampede from a thorn boma, but ours are made from

Byron Rogers

Out of sight, out of mind

Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi, long-distance interwar runners, are two of the most extraordinary British athletes. They are also the most forgotten. This is because the distances they favoured were too long to be accommodated by any athletics event: to them a marathon would have been a mere warm-up jog, their distances were 100 miles, and, in one case, a run across the whole of the United States, when they completed 40 miles a day for 80 consecutive days. Mark Whitaker has thus set out to write a poignant account of unrecognised achievement. The only thing is, in the process he has written the most bizarre and bleakly humorous book

Friday

The Spectator

From the archives: Chernobyl, as seen from Minsk

It was this week in 1986 that the Soviet Union admitted there was a nuclear accident in Chernobyl. We’ve dug out this fascinating account by Samuel Phipps, who caught in Minsk when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded.  A sudden evacuee, Samuel Phipps, The Spectator, 10 May 1986 Minsk ‘You’ll be national heroes when you get back to England,’ said one of our Russian friends in Minsk, as we sat outside the hostel, waiting in the evening sunshine for our fates to be determined. Sure enough, pictures on Friday lunchtime television showed a relieved mother pouring champagne over her relieved Sloane Ranger daughter at Heathrow. In the studio afterwards, the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

They Don’t Do Paying Their Way

It’s Friday afternoon and even Rangers fans might have to laugh at this: There have been numerous [football computer] games throughout the history of the genre which have fallen by the wayside: Sierra’s Ultimate Soccer Manager, Elite’s Complete Onside Soccer and… Ally McCoist’s Director of Football. Released in 2001, the game allows you to manage some of the less glamorous sides of the game, including the expansion of your stadium, negotiating contracts and finding sponsorship. If you ever wanted to be part of the decision making process on the number of car parking spaces by your stadium, you genuinely can in this simulation. However, given the current state of Rangers,

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s diary looks clean

Downing Street was seething last night about allegations that there had been meetings between David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch that it had not declared. They know that any sense that they are trying to cover up just how close Cameron was to the Murdochs and News International would be extremely damaging in the current circumstances. There is enough pain to come for Cameron from Leveson without being acccussed of a cover up too. But the revised evidence submitted by News International does support Downing Street’s version of events. The meetings at issue are only described as ‘possible’ and ‘probable’ and — given that Number 10 has constructed what it is

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Did Balls cause the recession?

We take a close interest in Ed Balls and his use of figures here at Coffee House, and it seems that this interest is reciprocated. The Shadow Chancellor has just been on Daily Politics where he revealed himself as a regular reader. He was confronted with some of the facts about spending and the deficit — and whether there have been ‘deep, harsh cuts,’ as he has falsely claimed. When Andrew Neil presented him with the numbers from our earlier blog, he replied that this was cash terms. He’s right, but adjust for inflation and core government spending (that is, stripping out debt and dole) is down just 0.8 per